4 ms·

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

wilkystyle 5y ago
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
- engineeringwoke 5y ago
  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
- jwommack 5y ago
  What's the phrase? You'll own nothing and be happy.
bob1029 5y ago
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.
- gatonegro 5y ago
  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.
- rbritton 5y ago
  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.
- dijit 5y ago
  Exactly, it already happened to me: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
- maciekpaprocki 5y ago
  Thats why i decided to keep all my music on myspace. It will stay there forever :) https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss
jjulius 5y ago
Why should I have to rely on a corporation's uptime and/or solvency to listen to music?
vinayan3 5y ago
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.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  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.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    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.
gatonegro 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rodamaral 5y ago
Or perhaps if you are a Russian person that was cancelled by them. They might like to do it afterwards with you, western citizen.

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

engineeringwoke 5y ago
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
jwommack 5y ago
What's the phrase? You'll own nothing and be happy.

bob1029 5y ago

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.

gatonegro 5y ago
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.
rbritton 5y ago
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.
dijit 5y ago
Exactly, it already happened to me: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
maciekpaprocki 5y ago
Thats why i decided to keep all my music on myspace. It will stay there forever :) https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss https://mashable.com/article/myspace-data-loss

jjulius 5y ago

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

vinayan3 5y ago

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.

nonameiguess 5y ago
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.
- jjulius 5y ago
  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.

gatonegro 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

rodamaral 5y ago

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