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Notes -
Quick question: why?
The MP3 format was a game changer for music. My oldest MP3 was encoded in 1998--the year the format was published as an international standard. I am not an audiophile, I don't worry about lossless encoding or accruing complete discographies or whatever, but the ~40GB of digital music I've accumulated in the last 26 years fits comfortably on most any portable device and provides more hours of music, with no repeats, than I can listen to in a week, never mind a day.
I understand that not everyone has been slowly building their personal media libraries since the 20th century, but you can still buy DRM-free MP3s today, depending on the artist and publisher, and you can still buy CDs or even vinyls and encode the audio yourself. Obviously streaming comes with the convenience of you not needing to take that additional step, but once it's done, it's effectively done forever. Take the time to properly tag the files and it's not long before your personal library is miles better than anything Spotify has to offer (unless you listen to Spotify in hopes of discovering new stuff).
I recognize that I am something of a fossil, in Internet years, but it's amazing to me how much culture has shifted in the last two decades, and how much of that seems to be directly connected to media companies asserting greater control over culture-relevant media (e.g. Netflix blackwashing, social media companies doing bad "fact checking"). Just taking the ever-so-slightly affirmative step of disconnecting yourself from other people's libraries and algorithms has grown to be much more liberating than I ever would have guessed, back when I was more interested in the intellectual property questions than I was in the culture war questions.
Yea when I was 17 I discovered new music naturally. Now I’m almost 41 and someone has to tell me ‘ hey look at this it maybe doesn’t completely suck ‘
Pop on Spotify and this in ‘ Female Fronted Stoner Doom Tracks ‘ been my favorite playlist for years. Never would have heard of a dozen 10/10 songs if not for discovering that.
Not to mention genres like City Pop or other random things. I even discovered the worst album of all time (Kult 45 by Otep) this way.
Spotify is fantastic.
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For me it's just much easier to discover new music and sample it through Spotify. Despite the fact I don't really like paying for it or giving data to them.
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I used to have an MD player, those square disk-playing things, where I transferred loads from Napster and the like, and still have most of the minidiscs. The player has long died. You can find stereo components that play these discs but they take space, and the convenience of playing Spotify over our sound bar has won over. The playlists are also available on my mobile and can be bluetoothed into our car speakers. It's quite a marvel technologically for someone who grew up with turntables and 8-tracks and created actual mixtapes (using actual cassette tapes). @aqouta put it well.
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I bought a Fiio X3 about seven years ago, specifically because you can put an SD card into it and have effectively unlimited storage. If you're an audiophile, you can have thousands of FLAC files instead of MP3s. Not only does the audio player still work, its battery life barely seems to have declined at all and I still use it occasionally. (The main reason I don't use it as often as I used to is just because I don't listen to music as much as I used to.)
Depending on your preferred genres, most artists will upload their music to Bandcamp as well as streaming platforms. There's no subscription fee for Bandcamp, you just pay when you want to buy a release from a specific artist. If you buy a release, you can listen to it as often as you like via the Bandcamp app, OR you can download the release in your preferred file format (MP3 at a range of bitrates, FLAC, even WAV if you're feeling nuts) and upload it to your personal audio player.
I've never had a Spotify subscription and never intend to get one, firstly because as previously mentioned I don't listen to music very much anymore, secondly because I loathe SaaS on general principle, and thirdly, because for all the talk of it being a "great way to discover new music", everything I've read about it indicates that its suggestion algorithms work the same way as every other such algorithm: it shows you "new" artists which sound extremely similar to the artists you already like. Just because I like listening to Weezer doesn't mean I want to listen to Weezer knockoffs every day.
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I'm far from a typical music listener - I'd guess I'm in the bottom 20% of the population in terms of enjoyment I get from music - so my perspective is probably heavily skewed, but I feel like the discovery or "lootbox" aspect is part of the appeal of streaming over building offline libraries. The vast majority of the music I listen to is instrumental video game soundtracks, and I do so primarily through YouTube music, where I choose some track I like and then let the algorithm go forward. This allows me to discover fan-made remixes/covers of such tracks, which are often far better than the original tracks (despite tending to have much worse production, which even my completely philistine-level ears can detect). And it's those tracks that I actually want to listen to during my commutes, not the original tracks themselves. Now, I could download these tracks and build my library of them, but the rate at which new official tracks come out from companies like Hoyomix (probably a couple times a month on average, but in clumps) and the fan-made remixes/covers that come out (much more often than that, due to each release causing multiple fans to release their own takes) combined with just how little I actually care about music means that the effort to do so each time just doesn't seem worth it compared to just puling on the YouTube Music slot machine lever.
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This is indeed the point, for me at least. On Spotify I listen to:
Every week Spotify surfaces maybe 5-10 songs I actually like in the first two (which is really not bad IMO). Every now and again I buy something from the third on Bandcamp to support the artist more directly. I'm blissfully unaware of holiday playlists, black playlists, gay playlists, Asian playlists, or any other kind of playlist you can imagine besides the three I just mentioned.
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