[psychometry]

Isn't anyone interested in owning their music anymore? Have we all become such casual consumers of music that the concept of building a permanent library of music they like is unnecessary?

I will never understand the appeal of subscription music services.

[DanielStraight]

Casual consumers? Before Spotify, I basically only listened to music in my car, and then I just stuck the top 40 station on and dealt with the crap. Now, in 3 years on Spotify, I've listened to more than 10k distinct songs on 2.5k albums from 2k artists. I've gone from US top 40 to music from all around the world. In the last month, I have listened to artists from the US, Germany, Western Sahara, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, Belgium, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Turkey, Norway, India and China. I've listened to new releases and music from artists who have been dead for 60 years. I've curated numerous playlists for myself and others, and have become known as someone with broad and unusual tastes. I am constantly seeking out new and interesting music. Basically, I've become obsessed.

Spotify has enabled a degree of discovery and curation that is simply not possible for anyone without access to an insanely good record store and/or really, really deep pockets. I cannot imagine any reason to ever go back. If Spotify ever goes under or removes an artists I really like, I can always buy it then. But until then, I will happily pay my $10/month and keep using Spotify as my sole source of music. Frankly, I think Spotify is the cheapest thing I have ever spent money on when compared to the value it provides.

Even if I could afford to own all my Spotify music, I would have to be responsible for backing it up and moving it between devices or into the cloud. So I would get less value for 10-100x more money. And this figure isn't even counting the value of the discovery service that Spotify provides. If I meet someone from halfway across the world, I can ask for musical recommendations, and then listen to them in my car on the way home.

Honestly, I don't understand how you can seriously explore music without Spotify.

[psychometry]

Music blogs, last.fm, live music, automated recommendations from wherever you buy music, etc. Discovering new music has never been an issue for people who don't use Spotify.

[DanielStraight]

Except how do you decide whether it's worth spending the money to buy it when you can't listen to it fully until you buy it?

[jasonkester]

But here's the thing. Back in the 80s and early 90s, I amassed a very large music collection on cassette. Some of it copied from friends, lots of it picked up from used record shops, and some even paid full price for. Some of the finest butt rock heavy metal ever produced was in that collection.

Then I bought a CD player and started building the collection again. Not surprisingly, the new collection contained different stuff. Not much at all overlapped with the old collection. When I moved, I didn't bother bringing the tapes (or the records that preceded them).

Now I have a pretty good collection of music on .mp3. Some of it is ripped from those old CDs, but a lot less than you'd think. Those CDs are in storage, somewhere, I think. Every once in a while I find a stack of them and do a kind of "yeah, hey, It's the motherf'ing D.R.E... Those were good times." before putting them back.

So I think the idea with subscription services is that they handle the case where your tastes change. If I were the king of guy that really wanted to keep blasting the same Judas Priest album that marked music's perfection back in 1987 today, I could see the point of hoarding music.

But then I'd probably need to go find another black Trans Am (yes, with T-tops & screaming eagle on the hood, just like the Bandit had) to blast it from.

Times change though, and people move on. For a guy with $10 a month in his pocket and the ability to put pragmatism ahead of sentimentality, streaming music services actually do make a lot of sense.

[tonyblundell]

To buy the amount of music I listen to on Spotify would cost hundreds of pounds each month, so I prefer to subscribe for £10. I can still buy the obscure/local/unsigned music I want to listen to that isn't available on there.

To me the idea of owning music is tied to the need for physical media, which we don't have any more. We don't worry about owning TV shows for example because they weren't traditionally broadcast that way.

[DanielStraight]

Indeed. I've listened to music from over 2500 different albums on Spotify (thank you, Last.fm). Back in the days of $15 albums and no way to buy individual songs this would have cost me $37,500. With $1 track purchases, things get a little more reasonable. I've listened to around 10000 distinct tracks, so now I'm only spending 80 years worth of Spotify premium for the music I've consumed in 2-3 years on Spotify.

Of course, this ignores the fact that there's no way I could have discovered all the music I listen to without Spotify. Even if I knew of all the artists I listen to on Spotify, I could never possibly have found all their music in physical form. And if I had to purchase all the music I listened to separately, I never would have been willing to explore so much.

[veidr]

I totally hear you; I have around a half terabyte of albums (and complete discographies for my favorite artists), and I physically control the devices that actually store the bits, because that's how I like it.

But still, I fuck around with streaming services (the ones that work here in Japan, anyway) as a way to explore newer music -- the best of which ultimately ends up in my permanent collection.

You can do both.

[swombat]

You're not alone. My blood congeals at the idea that access to the music I love is somehow restricted by a third party with a different agenda to mine. I have zero interest in a third party streaming service. Now, if I could install my very own self-hosted Spotify-alike, stick all my music on there, and stream it to my devices with a smooth wireless connection that works even when I'm in tunnels, then you've got me as a streaming music customer.

[steelcm]

I'm the complete opposite. I'm a bit of a tinkerer, so my hardware and OS are transient (flash a new build every 3 months). Instead of migrating data, my habits have instead slowly evolved to using SAAS. Don't get me wrong, I have a NAS drive somewhere with a load of music/movies on, but I just don't touch it anymore. It's easier to open up a browser and sign-in to grooveshark or google play.

[stephenc_c_]

You can do that with Subsonic: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

[err4nt]

skip Subsonic and migrate to Plex. I do have a paid subscription because I love the software so much, but here's why it's so great:

The media server can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so I have it set up on my web server. You can then use a client on Windows, Mac, iOS, or the web browser to stream music, photos, and movies. You can also share your library with other Plex users, so if you have libraries that are always online, consuming media from iOS for you and your friends can feel very much like your own private Netflix (and Rdio/grooveshark)

It truly is the smoothest way to stream your own media, I've tried them all.

http://plex.tv

[swombat]

How's the caching on the iPhone? Can I stick a bunch of FLACs and others on Plex, then open them with the (paid) Plex Pass subscription client, then cache them on there, and play them wherever?

[mikewhy]

Big fan of Plex but haven't used the music features yet. How reliable is the metadata fetching? Or do you just point it to an iTunes library file?

[samolang]

Both Amazon and Google let you import your existing libraries and stream them.

[jimmyhmiller]

I'm a prime member, have been for a while. I just tried to import my library, it said I had 250 songs I could import for free. It then asked me if I'd like to pay $25 to upgrade so I can import any number of songs. I was able to upload all my songs to google for free.

[samolang]

Dang. Didn't realize that Amazon charged you past a certain number of songs. I have my whole library uploaded to Google as well. I usually use spotify, but it comes in handy sometimes (like when I want to listen to the Beatles).

[psychometry]

What is the point of uploading music I own to a cloud service so I can stream it later, wasting my precious mobile data? My phone has gigabytes of storage and I can transfer thousands of tracks in seconds.

[samolang]

Convenience. I have like 150 gigabytes of music. I can't put all of that on my phone and even if I just put a subset on there I'd have to re-load it every time I get a new phone. What if I want to play the music out of whatever laptop or tablet I happen to be using at the time? Also, I don't have to worry about my hard drive dying. Also, Google lets you save the music to your phone so you don't have to use mobile data.

[theplaz]

The old version of Cloud Drive was pretty much that (except it was hosted on Amazon).

Before Cloud Drive, I used Subsonic, which is self hosted. Though it never really worked all that well.

[baddox]

Well, I don't really "own" my music in a legal sense, although I do own some licenses to music as well as some plastic discs and flash chips that store digital copies of music.

I do have the same intuition that you do that subscription music services are unsatisfying, but I think the line is starting to blur. I use iTunes almost exclusively as my music library, through iTunes Match and my own iTunes purchases. Other than the songs that happen to be cached on my devices, this is not physically any more permanent or "owned" than a subscription service like Spotify. Granted, I can download and backup music from iTunes, but that's an additional step that most people presumably don't do. (I do keep fairly recent backups of my music, and much of my especially cherished music is backed up from CDs, though I refuse to purchase physical media these days.)

[visarga]

I pay deezer 6$/month and can download the tracks on my flash drive or stream. The library is large enough that I never missed a song.

[yellowapple]

Never heard about Deezer before. Sounds like a good deal, but apparently it's not available in the United States, and I really don't feel like fiddling with proxies in order to bypass that.

[dueprocess]

I use Deezer (a music subscription service) and I get serious usage out of it. Sure, I don't own music anymore, but that's because it seems so unnecessary.