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> Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport. You're correct, but it does at leas
by _bxg1 8y ago
> Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.
You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.
The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.
- paulpauper 8y agobut you need electricity, hence a service
- _bxg1 8y agoAnd the people (via the government) regulate electricity, so that electricity companies don't gain an inordinate amount of power over society. We just don't have that kind of legislation yet for the sudden influx of service-style companies that have popped up in recent years.
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoI don't want to listen to the same collection of songs every day for the rest of my life, though. If services like Spotify fail and go away completely, the solution wouldn't be that I start buying music all of the sudden: It would be that I listen to less music, much like I did before these services came about. If one record company pulls a track, so be it. That track will simply be out of my rotation. If I happen to be listening to popular music and I really want to hear the song, it is probably available other places. If I can't find it, so be it: I'll listen to something else and soon forget about that song. No big deal. In the end, I'm still dependent on the record company making it available in some way or another.