[gioele]

> I'm happy enough to pay the small fee to have access to a huge music library across all devices.

As long as it lasts.

I want my music collection to be accessible also when Spotify will go out of business, sued into oblivion or acquired and shut down.

[cageface]

Doesn't have to be one or the other. Pay Spotify $10/month to discover new music and then go buy lossless copies of the albums you really care about. Most records I could live without but those few special ones I have backed up in S3 in FLAC.

[aes256]

Notwithstanding something exceptionally rare, why the need to back up FLACs on S3?

I back up my music collection locally, and I have double-redundancy of sorts (it's backed up to a RAID 5 array on a file server, so in theory it could withstand the failure of the original drive and one of the back up drives), but if worst comes to worst I could just acquire everything again.

With a couple of exceptions they're just lossless copies of widely available music recordings...

[justincormack]

Are you suggesting backing them up on pirate music sites?

[aes256]

Not advocating copyright infringement, nor was I suggesting that in particular.

That would be a viable back up strategy, though. Have a rare copy of a recording? Make it widely available, then if your copy is destroyed, the odds of you being able to acquire an identical copy again are much improved.

[UnoriginalGuy]

Why would they be sued? Last I heard Spotify was very much running a legal business.

[Ygg2]

Just because they are running a legal business now, doesn't mean they will run a legal business in future. Either they can change, or more likely laws will change, rendering them a vulnerable target for suing.

Plus, I'm sure they are breaking some ridiculous patent somewhere anyway.