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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

I buy in stores like Bandcamp which sell FLAC, and then encode in Opus for playback. Also, prospects of your collection evaporating because DRMed service could suddenly close down tomorrow don't sound good. Convenience or not, I prefer to back up what I paid for.

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> DRMed service could suddenly close down tomorrow don't sound good

I'm not worried about that - it's not my collection, it's Spotify's. I'm merely paying for the unlimited consumption of their collection on demand, not to purchase the songs and have them for life.

It'd be a different story if I expected the songs I listen to on Spotify to be available forever, but I don't, and that's not what I'm paying for.

You don't expect to be able to listen to the songs forever? Fair enough; I mean, you can always take another subscription service if Spotify would go out of business.

But I've been there.

When Grooveshark quit -- I was a paying member and had no up-front notice -- I lost my complete library. I've looked into making a back-up before and figured out some technical requirements for that (e.g. I cracked the "encrypted" cached files) but never really got around to it. A list of which songs were in my library and playlists would have been all I needed, but I had no such thing.

Spotify doesn't offer this either. Like with Grooveshark, you can find technical ways of getting around it, but they're not jumping at the opportunity to provide a JSON export that you can import into another music service.

The other side of the coin is that not all music is available. Even now on Spotify, if you enable "show unplayable songs" there are a lot that turn unavailable every month. I don't want to think of which part will not be available at a competitor's.

For all these reasons, I agree with the person you're replying to. But I made the same decision as you -- i.e. I use and pay for Spotify -- because those indie stores just don't have enough music by a long shot to make it worth the trouble. Ideally it would be that way, though.

There is actually a straightforward way to export data from your Spotify account, try this:

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-us...

Tell that to my mother. I'm serious here: it's easy for you and me -- heck, I'd just collect it via DBus, reverse Spotify's local storage or scrape it from the web player. But that takes effort and expertise, something very few people on this planet are both capable of and willing to do, unless it's clear that the service is going out of business soon. Furthermore, hacky exports like this will not be importable on other services either.

So make a service that emails people their saved albums. Send monthly incremental updates. Their backup storage will be their inbox, and restoring the data to a new service will be a couple hours manual clicking and typing.

The hard part is explaining to our mothers that their music app might become unavailable, that they should care about this, and that they should take action to mitigate the effects.

But on the other hand, consumers get locked in all the time, and civilization hasn't collapsed yet.

I'm fine with buying a service for conveniently listening to music by a list of artists I like. If Spotify goes bust, it's not like that music disappears: it will be available on other services (and in theory as traditional records, too).

Only thing is that composing that playlist again would be a major hassle. I have a list of bands and artists, I guess I could spend a weekend going through discography lists by Wikipedia and other sources.

Yeah, it's is highly unlikely there will be no one that you can buy a similar service from in future, if Spotify goes away.

Point is, you'll have to pay again. I prefer to pay once, and then have it in my collection.

Yeah fair enough, I think even if I didn't value their discovery the way I listen to music now it would cost too much to buy it all individually. I would probably just end up having to use youtube to sample things, the way I do with Spotify currently.

Many albums on Bandcamp are available fully (or at least partially), so you can easily sample and discover them. If I like something, I buy it.

Some albums I bought recently:

* https://dbfiechter.bandcamp.com/album/scotland

* https://jonathangeer.bandcamp.com/album/owlboy-ost

* https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/album/neverhood-songs-d...

And you are right. Stuff often ends up on Youtube, which is great for discovery too. And again, if I like something, I'll gladly buy it (as long as it's accessible in DRM-free stores).

If I have a digital collection I'll be paying storage costs on an ongoing basis for backups so it seems like a wash compared to Spotify and similar services.

Storage is cheap today and it will only get cheaper.

Where can you pay a low one-time fee for such a vast amount of mainstream / popular music that you get to keep forever?

Nowhere.

But what you pay for, you can't keep. So you are back to square one. And who said you are supposed to pay scraps for good music?

This is a non-issue to most people though. I don't care if I keep it. I'm renting it and that's fine for me because it's a lot cheaper to rent music than to buy it one album or song at a time. If Spotify kicks the bucket, oh well I'll switch to Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. Music.

Why should I rent digital goods? It's quite nonsensical, because copying doesn't cost anything. I prefer to keep what I paid for.

They aren't saying you should. They're saying most people (incl. themselves) don't care to own the product. They'd rather pay to rent access to Spotify's collection than to be required to buy all the music they wish to listen to.

We need to make at least one assumption: Spotify will have the music you want to listen to when it is released (not always the case - and for myself - it is never the case.)

If you spend more than $120/yr on music it could make financial sense to "rent music" from Spotify with a premium subscription instead. If you aren't particularly attached to music you listened to last year, or five years ago, or a decade ago, then it doesn't make sense to want to own the music to begin with. If there is a particular artist you're attached to, that doesn't prevent you from also purchasing that album. You can also use Spotify to check out a band you just heard about [0]. I don't even use Spotify but recognize why others would instead of purchasing music.

[0] Remember the assumption we made.

> If you aren't particularly attached to music you listened to last year, or five years ago, or a decade ago, then it doesn't make sense to want to own the music to begin with.

I guess so, but it's clearly not my case. I can listen to music in my collection, no matter when it was added. Otherwise it wouldn't end up there :)

Talk about the freedoms you care about as much as you want, but at the end of the day the people who care about those things are such a small minority it has virtually no effect on the greater market.

Yah there's enough of you to support some niche stores, but it's great this works for you, but it doesn't matter for most consumers.

Small or not, Bandcamp noted gradual growth. Enough people care about it to make it work.

I do the same but at the same time I upload to Google Play so I have access to my library wherever I go. Its quality is good enough and it accepts FLAC uploads, which then they convert, so I don't have to encode it again.

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