CDs don't send money to musicians either, unless they are self-publishing. But there's still a gap: I can't mix my paid-for (ripped) CDs and paid-for MP3s/AACs with streams in one app. This is the problem of letting the music distributer (Spotify) also control the player app.

Except you can do this with Spotify.

https://support.spotify.com/is/using_spotify/features/listen...

I do this. It works, but there are some shortcomings.

You have to install the Spotify App on your PC. Adding new songs has been incredibly flaky for me (not recognizing that I've put new songs in the folder, Windows 10). The artists and albums don't show up in the "Artists" or "Albums" part of my Spotify library.

For now. Spotify has removed so many useful features from their desktop app over the years, I won't be surprised in the slightest when they remove the ability to listen to local files.

As a long time user on desktop, I haven't really seen much change or loss of features. The mobile app, on the other hand, tends to be flavor of the month. No longer defaulting to my library and instead the discovery home is probably the biggest annoyance

I'm surprised to see this. The integration of your personal library was totally ruined (for me) several years ago when they removed the ability to "unlink" songs. When you add your own files to Spotify, the files are scanned and sometimes matched against files in Spotify's own database. The trouble is that Spotify is pretty bad at identifying files correctly and will misidentify them and "link" them to a track on the service. Once this happens, you have no reasonable recourse.

To be fair, this is a pretty niche problem - tends to only be a problem when dealing with live music. So for example, if I have a concert recording, and make a playlist of those files for use in Spotify, Spotify will almost certainly replace at least one of those files with an album cut from the service. Now I'm left with a playlist of a live show that has had several tracks replaced with the _wrong_ version by Spotify.

The thing that initially drew me to Spotify was the fact that it made it pretty easy to integrate the music offered by the service with my personal library. I've always been disappointed that this feature was broken and left broken because the vast majority of people don't care about managing their own music libraries.

I've been a long time user on desktop as well. I was a fairly heavy user of Spotify plugins (and maybe "apps", but I didn't understand the difference). Plugins, of course, do not exist anymore. Looks like maybe about four years ago: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/No-Apps-plu...

I'm a little salty about them closing off third-party development, but it's cool, they can do what they want with their stuff. I saw the writing on the wall a while ago when they were pushing Facebook integration like crazy -- as they become more and more anti-consumer, I'll simply avail myself of their services less and less until they offer me no value.

> I can't mix my paid-for (ripped) CDs and paid-for MP3s/AACs with streams in one app

It's not an optimal solution, but iTunes can import songs from CDs, and you can add other mp3s to your library, but it doesn't cloud sync across devices.

Another solution is Google Play Music, which can import your iTunes library (and CDs indirectly from iTunes) and does do cloud sync.

iTunes can do that too if you use iCloud Music.

iTunes Match combined with Apple Music gives me everything.

Family sub for $14 month and $25 year for match to keep all my music even dodgy mp3s safe from bitrot is well worth it.

I move dozens of times a year, I no longer have to haul books and cds, I for one welcome my digital overlord.

Apple music includes match

I’m not sure it does, or if it does it doesn’t work very well. I have an apple music subscription. If I enable iCloud Music Library it only adds the songs to my other devices if they’re available on Apple Music.

There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to upload my own MP3s to the service like you can on Google Play Music.

No it doesn’t.

It’s a separate service

iTunes has two options for cloud syncing your library: $10/month Apple Music (which includes downloading or streaming both music you uploaded and the whole Apple Music catalog) and $25/year iTunes Match (which lets you downloading or streaming music you uploaded, but not the whole Apple Music catalog)

I wonder who the target is for itunes match. I always figured people with massive physical libraries aren’t using iTunes to begin with.

There's 2 ways Apple handles music you've ripped. If the music's fingerprint matches that of something they already have in the iTunes Store, your iCloud Music Library will be populated with the iTunes Store version of the song, so you can download that on your other devices. Only the original uploading device retains the original file. This is usually a good thing as the iTunes Store version is frequently better-quality than whatever MP3 or AAC you had ripped.

The second way is if the file's fingerprint doesn't match any song in the iTunes Store catalog, then with iTunes Match, iTunes will actually upload the whole file and your other devices will then stream or download that exact file. There are some limits here; I think there's a limit on the song duration (not sure what it is but I'm pretty sure songs over 1 hour are past the limit), and there's a limit on total number of songs (at launch this was 25k; I think they've raised it higher but I don't know what the current limit is). Whatever the limits are, I do know my father's music collection (all manually ripped from a massive CD collection) is too large for iTunes Match, so he's stuck managing music the way we all used to do before Apple Music and iTunes Match came along.

As far as I'm aware, the Apple Music subscription supports the first mechanism but not the second, and the iTunes Match subscription is needed for the second option. That said, I'm not 100% positive.

Personally these days I just buy albums and individual songs from iTunes. I like to "own" my music. They key is to have a budget and try not to exceed it.

Google Music allows exactly this. You upload all the stuff you own and have ripped yourself. Then, you can listen to that without paying. If you subscribe, you can build playlists and what not that include any song either from your library or their global library. Pretty neat.

I do this with Apple Music.

I'm willing to bet that your musician friends wouldn't be getting much of a payout if Spotify didn't exist either.

The actually popular artists make great money from Spotify.

Apparently almost the entire musician-as-a-middle-class has been wiped out since the internet and streaming got big. Jaron Lanier talks about it fairy often: now, almost everything goes to the top earners.

This is a fair point. The one who is most vocal about Spotify does not make her living (entirely) from her music in the first place. It would be most accurate to say Spotify has had no effect.

> The actually popular artists make great money

Is this so? As I recall, Spotify pays tenths of a U.S. cent per stream. The gross payout for a million streams is a few thousand dollars.

There's a strong argument for "$10/month is amazing for unlimited access to this entire catalog!" But I wonder how many songs or artists I actually listen to. Is it really that much more than I would if I were buying CDs?

I do enjoy the personalized playlists a lot, though.

Personally it's the freedom that I enjoy more. For example I have 400 songs into my Christmas playlist. There's so many duplicate, like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is there 9 times, but it's fun to have the different versions. Sure it would be fine to have 2-3 albums of Christmas, but then I would have to choose and there would be less diversity.

It's also amazing to discover stuff and follow new paths. Sure you could try to buy a random new album during a month, but that would be your whole exploration for that month, I could explore many more albums in a day. Right now I listen to a lot of a cappella group because of a good Pentatonix song I heard a few days ago.

I also enjoy just being able to listen to any CD. When I heard about A star is born, I was curious and I just had to open Google Music to listen to it, without paying more.

Would 12 CD a year would be enough to entertain myself? Yeah I have no doubt, but it wouldn't allow me to discover to having that much freedom.

For me it's much more than "I could buy CDs". A sub to Apple Music for example lets me go on musical journeys.

I listened to the many versions Vivaldi's 4 seasons the other day and enjoyed hearing how different orchestras performed. I have taken a dives into 80s rap/hip hop, or hair bands, or whatever else strikes me.

Those types of exploration were not possible in the days on only buying CDs.

If you wanted to support the artist the answer is buying concert tickets and $40 tshirts. Physical and digital sales/streaming are a drop in the bucket for a music arists income; you really burn the label when you pirate content. Cue RIAA “you wouldnt download a car, think of the artist” propaganda.

This is genre specific, and artist's popularity specific. I listen to a lot of smaller bands whose tours are almost never less than 2-3 hours from me. Plus, I don't really care for concerts anymore.

I'd rather just buy the album.

> $9-10 I can buy 10-12 CDs per year

For that money I can rent a cheap DSL line with which I can download 10-12 terabytes of music for absolutely free and without ads