No. I am a huge music nerd. It's my life's passion. I need everything. If it is not everything, it's not enough.

In the past, technically savvy music nerds like me had options. LPs and CDs as a distribution format offered true permanence. Vinyl when cared for properly usually outlives the owner. CDs can be ripped and archived with perfect 1:1 accuracy.

These formats don't disappear from my record shelves at the whim of an executive or a change to a silly end user license agreement. They're mine forever, for me to cherish and learn from for as long as I want.

Until the music industry offers this type of solution for the digital music ecosystem, they will not be adequately serving music's most dedicated and passionate patrons.

Bandcamp is the only service that comes close to delivering the proper solution. But they are so uncompromising in their ideals that the 'industry' will not work with them. It's too bad, because they and DistroKid are the only two online music industry services I have ever seen that are genuinely interested in furthering the lives of their users.

Not totally similar but I also think that BeatPort is pretty great, especially if you're a DJ.

> In the past

LPs and CDs still exist.

Forgive my bluntness, but this is a disingenuous comment. LPs and CDs may still exist, but they are obviously not a supported distribution format by the music industry anymore - with the country of Japan being the only glaring exception.

Your examples aren't wrong. Spotify is "good enough" for most people.

"so long as you keep all your discovery of new music within Spotify - because you'll never discover what isn't there."

This is exactly the reason we have arguments about the importance of net neutrality - which your underlying point is arguing directly against. Not sure if that was intentional or not - but the music industry is a really bad measuring stick of success in this area.

To contrast to Spotify - I'm sure Disney would be fine with it if everyone watched what they were hosting on their network exclusively and ignored the content on other platforms.

On a side note: Isn't this basically what Disney Life is already? Did I miss something?

I'm on one hand very much a proponent of net neutrality but I'm also lazy and was hoping competition would result in the best user experience and not silos.

I wasn't trying to make an argument either way on what's good/bad with Spotify (or any service large enough to be used as an only provider) but my feeling of missing out on something is something I try to avoid more than actually missing out on something (if that makes any sense). A kind of loss aversion I suppose. Bryter to have less and not know, than have more and see what you are missing.

Well, in that case, whatever you do, don't use SoulSeek and browse the libraries of others: http://www.slsknet.org/news/

I understand that you like to discover new music. But for me it's the other way around, I like to discover old stuff. Basically, things that I should I've listened at 30 years ago. Moreover, in that old stuff, it's always things that I've missed at that time, so most of the time, it's very niche stuff (old EBM tracks, obscure new wave bands, etc.); if it was not niche, then I wouldn't have missed it. So for me, the current services are not broad enough... Because I'm interested in the 1% that didn't make it... YouTube remains, for me, the best option (because many people upload things without looking at rights issues and because old-and-niche music is not worth protecting)

Torrent sites are also serving this need, but the barriers to entry are high. There's not many (or any) distribution channels for some of this stuff today. If you're looking for some old screamo that was only released in small numbers on vinyl, good luck finding it. That's an extreme example, but really we're talking about preserving art here. Some art has millions of prints, some was one-time performance art. The music industry will only sell you a very small % of what has been created.

FWIW, I have the same issue trying to find new experimental EDM. I find indieshuffle provides a much better selection of more out-there songs, at the cost of having a much less mature interface.