this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Convenience, not needing a dedicated MP3 player, music discovery via algorithms, being able to play stuff you haven't already downloaded (ex: playing music at a gathering with friends is a lot more fun when anyone can just request basically any song imaginable and load it within seconds). These are my personal "excuses" anyway.
I don't and have never paid for Spotify with the idea I was supporting artists in doing so, but I still find it kinda funny that artists not getting paid well is your justification for not paying at all. Like I said I'm under no illusion that any artist I listen to is getting a significant payout from my streaming, and I'm very pro-piracy as well, but I do support artists I like through direct album/ticket/merch sales, or even via Patreon. Some of these artists I probably never would have discovered if it weren't for my addiction to the Discover Weekly playlist Spotify spits out for me. I wish more people would do this though, especially for smaller acts.
Also just an aside, but I feel like toning down the snark might get your point across better.
I mean my thing is like how much music do you need to have "on you" at all times? I've got ~130 mp3s on my phone and that's just under half a gig. So you can have an easy 250 songs (~16 hours worth) for just a gigabyte of local storage. It's pretty easy to download junk and if you really like an artist guess what, you already have all your music locally so when you get a tasty
wavnot a single thing has to change about how you listen to music.250 songs would bore the fuck out of me after a couple days if even it lasts that long.
My current 'main' playlist has over 4K songs on it and they're all from one genre. My liked songs alone has over 1K songs. In the last year, I listened to over 23K different tracks.
Maybe you're okay with just a handful of songs. That's fine, but isn't going to work for everyone.
I think we just have two very different use cases. I've used MP3 players and SD cards on smartphones in the past and for me streaming is such an upgrade.
Dicovering new artists or albums would mean having to cull something else from my collection (or upgrade storage, which isn't really always feasible/practical). Now, it's as simple as right clicking and adding to a playlist. I can jump from Wu-Tang to The Mountain Goats to that one band that's coming into town I might want to check out to fucking Crazy Frog if I feel so inclined. Sometimes I want Jack Johnson, sometimes I want Louis Armstrong, sometimes I want The Who.
I don't think I've listened to any of these artists for any particular amount in the past year or so, so why would I have them downloaded? But after listing them I might just go make a somewhat eclectic Spotify playlist.
Well I'm not like against Spotify and whatever else. I do use YouTube for what you are talking about but like my daily music, the stuff I want to like actually listen to when I feel like listening to music. Hell yeah that stuff is downloaded. I'm not tryna listen to Crazy Frog all the time, only when I'm feeling crazy.
As for storage space, I really just don't think that's a problem nowadays. Course since it's hard as fuck to get a micro SD card in a phone these days you can be stuck with whatever amount the manufacturer gave you but even then 2gb worth of space is 32hours worth of music. That's a entire day and a half of listening to stuff before anything repeats. I honestly just can't imagine the kind of person to cycle through music frequently enough where that's a problem.
I use Apple Music, it fits my workflow better and I can supplement the streaming library with stuff I've got in my local library. Spotify technically allows that too but not as integrated as Apple Music.
For discovery, I don't use streaming algorithms as much, I've been using Rate Your Music for that. Got some great recommendations from its algorithms and its users. The site has been around since 2000 I believe, I'm convinced it will survive whatever the next phase of the internet will be.
250 songs will get stale pretty damned quickly. Back in the day I had a 4GB iPod Nano and iPod adapter in my car and would very quickly start hearing the same songs over and over. You could always swap out to a new playlist but where are you going to find new content/recommendations without putting in a ton of work?
I personally cannot imagine having my whole collection depend on a service like this. I use musical streaming for discovery (on free plans), and the actual collection is all local.
Also I use Yandex Music because its recommendations just work for me. Tried Spotify several times but the algorithm just was consistently not getting it. Not to mention it wanted you to enable DRM and was frustratingly slow compared to other applications I use.
Well, and Spotify doesn't even give you such an option on the other hand. Only desktop and smartphone, probably wouldn't allow one that is perma-offline, and only in the official proprietary app/webapp.