This is why? Because once every year or two it'll be unavailable for a couple of hours?

Because my access to it shouldn't depend on a third party's uptime. The fact that it's "a couple of hours once a year" doesn't make it any better.

We've been conditioned to just accepting that random outages and corporate decisions can take things away from us, but it is a ridiculous proposition that only benefits the bottom line of the service providers. I understand that the "convenience" angle might be attractive to some, but personally I don't think it's worth the trade-offs.

And this is not just about music, or movies. It applies to all forms of data that we have collectively agreed can just live in the cloud, because the cloud will always be there and we don't have to think about it. Until one morning you find that the cloud is unavailable, and so is all your data.

Physical media is inconvenient in a lot of ways, but to me is still an infinitely better proposition than trusting a bunch of random companies to provide me with access to digital media.

We've all come to accept random outages for so many of services we use. I wish we didn't have to because for some of these services I really don't have a backup. Given how infrequent they happen it's not worth my time to invest in having a ready backup for music streaming, when I'm not at home with my NAS. Other forms of distribution didn't have "outages" like CDs but these days when a cloud service outage happens it's like half the internet goes out. These types of outages are quite impactful.

From another perspective living in the US I'm pretty grateful that the power is super stable because so many things I rely on need power and they almost always work. In India it's common to have rolling blackouts so people are quite adapted to outages daily.

I'm not sure I accept that. A whole lot of CDs I owned at one point got scratched to the point that at least some part of a song couldn't be listened to any more. In some cases, the entire CD stopped being readable. Sometimes, they went beyond scratching to breaking. They could get lost. The players broke. Did loss of listenability due to physical degradation of media happen more or less than Spotify goes out? I have no idea. But CDs in boomboxes definitely did not have 100% uptime.

I have plenty of CDs that are nearly three decades old and still play great. The point is that the onus is on me to maintain my collection and my listening equipment. Well-kept media and well-maintained gear shouldn't break, and if it does then at least the fix is dependent on me.

I don't want to rely on a corporation's uptime and solvency to listen to music.

While this particular scenario is quite rare (this is the first time I've been personally affected since starting my membership in 2013), I understand the parent commenter's sentiment. It was a little jarring to realize that all of my library's (and basically any on-demand) music was completely unavailable and at the mercy of this issue being resolved.

Again, a temporary issue and one that happens quite infrequently, but if you already may have conflicting opinions on whether it's better to own or rent your music, this is certainly a valid point.

edit: mobile typos

I feel like it's really just a sort of existential dread about being reliant on anyone for anything, other than oneself. It's like being afraid that if there's a zombie apocalypse then you won't be able to listen to the same old songs on repeat like a scene out of I am Legend

What's the phrase? You'll own nothing and be happy.

To be more generous, there are also many cases where more obscure music will start evaporating from your playlists. Some of us have serious problems with this kind of UX.

This is why I personally built a home media server. Lapsing licensing agreements, older content, escalating streaming subscription costs, etc all led me to it. The secondary effect of being able to consume the content without depending on anything other than electricity is an additional benefit.

Thats why i decided to keep all my music on myspace. It will stay there forever :) https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss

This is something else I forgot to mention, but it drives me absolutely mental. Music vanishing from my playlists, old TV shows I'm watching are suddenly not available. Paying for that kind of experience strikes me as a horrid proposition.

Exactly, it already happened to me: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups

Why should I have to rely on a corporation's uptime and/or solvency to listen to music?

Or perhaps if you are a Russian person that was cancelled by them. They might like to do it afterwards with you, western citizen.

As I've said before: Spotify / Tidal / YouTube Music is great for discovery, IMO. Just not consumption. I use them for checking out new artists, or albums by artists that I haven't heard before. But once I've passed from the "Huh, that was interesting" stage to "Yeah, I think I'm gonna listen to this album again in the future", it's time to buy it, rip it to MP3/FLAC(if I bought a physical copy), and get it into my media collection backups.

The whole point of music streaming services is to avoid doing this. Maybe it works for you, but that does not sound like a sustainable strategy for someone who listens to 100+ albums a year.

I don't see why. Maybe for those like me who still buy physical CD's and rip them, okay--but let's assume you buy all of your music, just digitally, meaning you purchase MP3 albums in full from Amazon/iTunes/Bandcamp, etc. Most of the work is already done for you, since the services themselves already function as sort of a "cloud backup"; your computer or smartphone fries, you can always sign into the service again from your new device and pull everything down once more. The only remaining piece is to have your own offline backup of all the stuff you purchased, in case Epic were to shut Bandcamp's doors tomorrow. It's even less likely that Amazon or iTunes would go away quickly.

And FWIW, I do personal rips when I have to, but I'm also as lazy as the next guy. Best case scenario is I buy a physical disk from the artist directly on Bandcamp which automatically includes a digital version as well. Next best, Amazon albums that include AutoRip. Finally, physical copies from private storefronts or used markets, and I'll do the rip myself.

I have like 400 favorite songs from wide variety of genres, and I've seen some songs becoming unavailable over time. And I don't know what it was, so I have no way to get it back in any way.

Not a huge loss, but annoying.

I should probably do that as well, but I listen to so much music that it would be really painful to back it up.

I have 1.5TB of music. It's because I have so much that I make sure I've got backups, backups of backups, etc.

Just get some kind of syncing client so that you can just copy the deltas when you're making backups of backups. Offsite/cloud backup couldn't hurt, either.

This is essentially what I've been doing. Spotify is usually decent enough when it comes to recommending new artists based on what I'm listening. When I find an artist whose work I plan on listening on a regular basis, I'll jump to Bandcamp or some other site where I can buy the song or album I'm interested in.

Sadly, the list of such sites seems to be shrinking with every passing year, and I've found many artists I'd like to support by buying their stuff, but they only offer streaming options. I've noticed it happens more frequently with artists that have been scooped up by a major label or one of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly.

exactly, when i'm listening to music for 8 hours a day, discovering new artists and community made playlists is the killer feature. what i'm starting to hate about spotify is the politics behind what music is available. i invest the time into building out playlists just to have half the songs get blacked out a few days later because "money", yet the record label has the album on youtube as f2p.

also, show me how my monthly subscription is divided up while you're at it.

> rip it to MP3/FLAC

Alas that's illegal in the UK

To be fair, piracy was always illegal - it didn't stop it.

In the UK, physical media can be got for pennies from charity shops (our name for “Goodwill”) - It’s not a bad idea to stock up on favourite films, tv or music if you’ve got the space while it’s still possible.

I hear there's currently a sale on The Pirate Bay too.

Yup. I turned on the record player instead. I'm glad I still have a dumb machine I can fall back on when all of the technology fails.

Sadly I don't have a proper record player setup here—only my CD Walkman, but I have plans for something else down the line. But I do have a healthy music library on my main PC.

Tell me about it.

I live in an area impacted by Hurricane Ida. For a long while, we had electricity, but no internet. Having physical media meant I could still watch/listen to things.

You don't own media, you just pay for the right to listen/see it. A subtle but important difference. Just like software with a license granting the right to use that software.

Now of course, technically, Warner can't go after your CD collection, just like Adobe couldn't refuse you to use your boxed copy of Photopshop pre-CC...

> You don't own media, you just pay for the right to listen/see it. A subtle but important difference

Explain please, in what way do I not own the media I bought?

EDIT: responding to your edit:

> Now of course, technically, Warner can't go after your CD collection

and non-technically, what's the "subtle but important" difference here?

You own the physical media but not the data (song) that’s stored on it. That’s literally what copyright is: the right to copy. You don’t buy that right when you buy the CD.

I kind of expected something that's relevant to the comment the GP made about "owning media" in the context of other distribution mechanism going down (ignoring that I indeed have the right to copy discs I own, for limited purposes), not a "did you know that owning music media means what everyone understands owning music media to mean".

You can’t rebroadcast it for a profit, for example.

This is why I have Spotify AND YouTube Music. More consumerism is always the answer! /s