Spotify - anyone heard of it?

honestly when you're competing with apple and google for Everyone That Listens To Music, "people with personal music libraries" is small ball.

xpost that used to be a feature, right?

the idea is to get your ass ON the cloud, not make it easier to stay off it

maybe they could make an artisanal reverb for Todd Glass to use w/ a live drummer at parties

and just to reaffirm, I am a 99th percentile music nerd, I have a music library etc. Obv I'd love a user experience designed for my pleasure. I just also realize that making playlist crazy explorers of obscurities happy is soooooooo low on the priority level of this battle of the gods we're getting into with Beats and Google Play

no way everyone has a music library - even if it's just a folder of accumulated top 40 singles xxxp

probably lots of spotify users have a taylor swift album on their hard drive

accept your insignificance

key difference between a music library and a taylor swift album dumped onto a hard drive is whether they'd care if it were gone in 5 years

key difference in my mind is OOP material unavailable on the cloud

xp not really, I kiss goodbye to my digital library every now and then, ocd is not a necessary part of loving music, yr old mp3 player dies while you weep in the rain

somebody who feels genuinely qualified, teach me on this: is there any credible school of thought to suggest that streaming is going back into the bottle? i.e. what would have to happen for the vast majority of catalogue to disappear from easy and reasonably cheap access in 2035? Because i kinda feel like keeping a copy of whitesnake's slip of the tongue album as an mp3 is unnecessary; that shit is gonna be part and parcel of whatever universal uses to digitally distribute as long as the model remains viable and then it'll transfer to whatever the next model is.

is there any credible school of thought to suggest that streaming is going back into the bottle? i.e. what would have to happen for the vast majority of catalogue to disappear from easy and reasonably cheap access in 2035?

-- forksclovetofu

as a mass, no. but it's credible -- and my guess would be it's getting more credible the way that people are vying for "exclusives" of material that is both imperfectly exclusive and easy to dead forever -- that SOME of the catalogue would disappear from easy or reasonably cheap access, or for that matter any access, in 2035. how much? nobody knows! there's no way to know!

or in other words: whitesnake's slip of the tongue? probably gonna be fine. that album you love that you found on the internet somewhere that hasn't made it to spotify and only printed 500 CDs because everything's digital now? probably want to back it up.

for sure! wouldn't ever argue against safe than sorry with small label, self-published stuff but i think the argument here is that if your "music library" primarily consists of the 30 tapes or CDs for the NICE PRICE and whatever you got for Christmas from your kids, you are gonna be able to have backup of that on the cloud with minimal work.

like i have well over a tb of music (and a half terabyte that was lost, sob) but it's increasingly rare i look for songs on that instead of on spotify, mostly for ease of use issues.

my mp3 collection that predates spotify is like 90% easily findable stuff but everything added since then is stuff not available on spotify (which includes taylor swift albums as well as like every tzadik album, every sublime frequencies album, etc). maybe this puts me in the 1% of music listeners but the first company to crack the code of letting me assimilate w/ super ease my library w/ their library is going to have me as a customer for life. ironically the app that does this best is spotify but from like 15 iterations ago.

in practice the factor that determines how much I listen on spotify vs. on my music library is how much I've spent on music and whether it went toward what I actually want to hear at any given point, but obviously THAT's not a business concern, nor will it change unless some miracle / lottery win / sudden groundswell of reversed reputation happens to me

Lots of issues with local files, especially those with large libraries: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Help-Desktop-Linux-Mac-and/No-Local-Files-being-added-or-shown-in-new-version-1-0-1-1060/td-p/1045337

that's the thing it's not even like i'm asking for new features from spotify. i'm asking for old features + functionality that they used to provide!

All I want to do is listen to my local files of Xaphoon Jones Mixtape Vol 2, in a playlist in the correct order. There is no easy way to do that through spotify anymore. When my local files load (if they load and don't crash the app), I can search them, but there is no way to sort or drag them to a playlist.

why are you even using spotify for something like that, just download winamp (the old version, before it bloated)

he wants to listen to his library on his mobile away from home iirc, using Spotify's interface

"all I want to do is use this copy of Microsoft Word to organize my documents without to pretend to save a doc first to access my file system"

it's a bummer ; i have certainly listened less to albums I really enjoy (Bjork's Vulicura, Chordslayer's Maxo, the Aphex dump) just because they're more difficult to add to and listen to on a secondary player. Loading local stuff to spotify has proved useless.

that part I get -- I've been lucky in that vulnicura is not exactly something you want to listen to walking around running errands

When you listen to stuff on Spotify, the artist gets a bit of money, however small, that they wouldn't get by you listening to something from your library.

is there any credible school of thought to suggest that streaming is going back into the bottle? i.e. what would have to happen for the vast majority of catalogue to disappear from easy and reasonably cheap access in 2035?

as a mass, no. but it's credible -- and my guess would be it's getting more credible the way that people are vying for "exclusives" of material that is both imperfectly exclusive and easy to dead forever -- that SOME of the catalogue would disappear from easy or reasonably cheap access, or for that matter any access, in 2035.

it's not only the issue of exclusives. it's that music rights in general remain incredibly complicated, and it's always possible that any individual song or album or catalog could disappear at any time. and as copyrights revert from labels back to artists, or to artists' estates, over the years, there's no way of knowing what those artists or estates will choose to do, or will be able to do. so if you're really going to want that whitesnake album in 2035, you might want to hold on to your mp3s, just in case.

on the other hand, even if they disappear from the streaming world 20 years hence, i'm sure there'll still be a way to buy a used/bootlegged/3d-printed/teleported copy for one or two cents, assuming the concept of one or two cents still exists.

xp wish i had it there when i needed to fetch a handful of pumice dust and lost dream teeth from the caves of Vatnshellir Cave in Snæfellsnes; had to settle for Rascall Flatts and it just wasn't the same

Outside of listening on my phone, I use Sonos to listen to Spotify most frequently. Sonos has decent local file integration, allowing me to search for a song and either play it from Spotify or my local / network drive but it too has limitations. I can only have 75K local files. I have many times that many and I don't want to create another library for just stuff that isn't available on Spotify. Although, if somebody wrote an AppleScript to match what is on Spotify vs. what's on my HD and create a playlist of the unique files, that would be useful.

the sonos interface needs a lot of work, but the basic idea is great. it does a good job of erasing the distinction between your local library, your spotify library and any other subscription libraries you might have.

Yeah, Sonos needs work but mostly it's great. I don't now of a better system for multiple zones pulling from multiple sources right now. I do wish there wasn't a delay when I played my vinyl through Sonos. Currently when I play a record, I can send to the 3 different zones, but the zones outside the main zone where the turntable is located get out of phase pretty quick.

The other thing about the theoretical whitesnake album is that it might get remastered next month and the remaster is garbage and becomes the only version on streaming. In that case you would be glad to have saved its prior iteration on your hd

xp:

it's not only the issue of exclusives. it's that music rights in general remain incredibly complicated, and it's always possible that any individual song or album or catalog could disappear at any time. and as copyrights revert from labels back to artists, or to artists' estates, over the years, there's no way of knowing what those artists or estates will choose to do, or will be able to do. so if you're really going to want that whitesnake album in 2035, you might want to hold on to your mp3s, just in case.

― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, May 12, 2015 1:18 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this too, otm

that leaves the question of how easy it will be to keep computer files for 20+ years, though. anybody still info from computer disks from 1995 easily on hand?

still have info from...

I do but it's fucking awful

(that said, unless a new audio format emerges, mp3 files are pretty easy to transfer for as long as you're willing to transfer hard drives, it's not like you have to deal with compatibility unless you're in the realm of, like, realaudio)

but that's the thing - we're talking about decades of evolution in computer tech, from an industry that's fond of changing your drives, formats, etc

basically my point is that if you wanna keep that whitensake album handy i might consider hunting down a physical copy rather than transferring that mp3 throughout the decades

forgive the obvious but in simple terms of access to music we're all kind of ignoring the elephant in the room that is torrenting; that's the most likely way to find the hypothetical non-remastered whitesnake album and anything else that disappears into the copyright ether. it's the only pseudo-service that has shown longevity and consistency.
or more to the point, it seems likely that (barring an unknowable gestalt shift) any music that is widely available now will never become unavailable, it's just likely to become commercially / legally unavailable. that may be a "yeah doi" comment for most, but for those of us who remember a time before the internet it matters.

thing about torrenting is that like any form of piracy, it's heavily beholden to what the torrenters and people torrenting actually like. going back to high school desperately trying to find more than one track off (for instance) a sandra record is not my idea of access to music. not to mention the document I keep that keeps growing of things that you simply cannot find online anymore. they're gone, they're over, maybe someone will join the world of the internet or someone, hopefully you, will find a CD in a haystack

the latest entry on that doc, btw, is -- in the kind of irony that gobstops me that it even exists - "god saves the internet," a pro-net neutrality track recorded by kay hanley, michelle lewis and jill sobule

I would love to see that list in some form

private trackers unlock a lot of that stuff kat... but your point is certainly valid: there's lots of stuff out there that is inaccessible for general access or requires crazy hunting to find. But less that there's ever been in any other time in history!

the day I am both financially solvent enough to afford and sociopathic enough to even consider hiring a private investigator to track down a fucking mp3 is the day I need to join a convent or something

as for "less than there's ever been in any other time in history" that's inherently untrackable. I mean, probably it is, but we really have no way of knowing, let alone knowing what it'll be like 20 years from now

Private trackers are generally run by private investigators, it's true.

apologies, I misread, I don't actually torrent anything

that said, from what I know of private link-sharing communities and the like, they are very unlikely to have significant overlap with the sort of music I'd be looking for.