Most of the artists that I listen to are on Bandcamp, but if I absolutely need to, I’ll buy their MP3s on Amazon, which still sells MP3s. They do essentially everything right: it’s easy to download music in a variety of formats, you can re-download tracks if you lose them, and you can stream music too. They have a real and sustainable business model. Artists are starting to release their music only to certain services, rather than emphasizing downloads.īut if you’re willing to put in a little work, you can still own your music. Music apps on phones are all focused on streaming. Apple once supported this workflow, but they shifted focus to streaming. Those files are on my phone, as files, and my computers, as files. So instead, I still use MP3s, AACs, and other widely-supported file formats. The scale of information becomes approachable again. Add little notes to the MP3 tags if you want to. You can recognize the first few seconds of a track again. Instead, having a music library means you know what’s there, what song comes after what other song. Cloud services encourage a sort of forgetful connectivity like that of Spotify’s ‘curated collections’ or Gmail’s disappearing concept of an ‘addressbook’. Robinson Meyer captured it extremely well in What the Death of iTunes Says About Our Digital Habits. Streaming also commits us to the infinite, disorganized, sprawling digital footprint of the modern Internet. Those are MP3s - music is what’s on Spotify. Your band’s old demo tracks will never make it onto Spotify and neither will the impromptu recordings your friend sent you in an email a few years ago. Streaming will also encourage us to think of music as only coming from official sources. The pool of music still looks and feels infinite, but random items disappear without warning. Bands and artists will remove their work from the platform, or silently replace songs with updated tracks. When they fail, the folks paying for them will get an email and lose access to their music in some specified ‘sunset’ timeline.īut before we even get to the failure state of streaming services, we’ll notice the chipping-away of ownership expectations. Streaming services like Apple’s, Google’s, and Amazon’s are enormous corporate experiments, intended to succeed or fail within a decade. That means Spotify, but even more it means Spotify competitors. I don’t believe that any technology company in the music industry will survive in the long term. It’ll make a little more sense if I explain those preference up front, so I will. Don’t consider this a recommendation or best-practice: it’s what works, within the bounds of my increasingly-unpopular preferences. It isn’t the most convenient way, or the most popular. This is how I manage my music collection.
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