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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, it's getting harder every day to find DRM-free content. For audio, CDs are getting out of fashion, and piracy channels lack the seeders because everybody is on Spotify.

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Yes. The debate is gone. Young people have a much different view of 'ownership' (I struggled for a better word) than older people. For example, I remember the copyright, file sharing, music piracy arguments and debates from the 90s (Metallica, Napster! Hah) and 00s. But when I talk about this stuff now with people in their early 20s there seems to be less awareness. DRM & 'Stream everything' are the way it is, as if its some kind of inevitability. The concept of actually owning, or possessing, something (even if its a byte stream on a physical hard drive in your house) seems to be disappearing. It's interesting to watch.

I think the most interesting part is the lack of discussion.

That's because 99% of the time the streaming service for music is better than trying to build your own library. It also seems to have a lot less attribution than video stream right now so people don't have to pay attention to where they can stream a specific song, they can use just about any app and get what they are looking for.

> That's because 99% of the time the streaming service for music is better than trying to build your own library.

What good is "better" if songs disappear every now and then?

That's the 1% of the time that it's not better. Using a streaming service doesn't stop you from buying albums or song that you really want to keep around for a long time.

Depends on your tastes. If you only really care about say 100 ish or fewer CD's worth of music then you can easily hit that and save money vs a streaming service. So for someone like me they are a complete waste of money.

Remember, 70 years * 10$ / month ~= 8,400$ for music over a lifetime. By comparison you can easily buy say every piece of music by Bob Marley and your done no need to ever do so again.

Sure, if you really care about music then a service is great.

Even then, your figure of $8400 is very optimistic. Assuming 1% inflation per year people will pay $20 per month in 70 years.

I believe that the parent comment is calculating the cost in 2018 dollars.

One major drawback to me is the recurring cost. My feeling is that building an offline library that you truely own is much cheaper than using some streaming service with monthly recurring costs that inflate over time.

After ten years maybe, I have too much of an eclectic musical taste to get away with that.

Only if you never listen to new music. CDs cost around $10, which is your Spotify sub cost per month. Imagine only listening to one new album every month.

The streaming service is superior for discovery, but inferior for long term use. It's not a good library when an artist can remotely disable a song. I can always add new discoveries from Spotify to my personal archive. I have the best of both worlds.

As someone who used to have a lot of CDs and MP3s and basically got rid of all of them for Spotify, I can cite a number of reasons why I switched:

1. Convenience (I never download or upload anything, and my playlists work and are automatically updated on the devices I care about)

2. Breadth of music (it doesn't have everything I want but it has a surprising amount of breadth in things I'd never care enough to amass deep collections in)

3. Easily accessible playlists from other people (I really appreciate the "This Is <band name>" playlists especially from Spotify)

4. Seeing what my friends are listening to all the time (I get a lot of new music this way)

Yeah, stuff goes away on the service. Yeah, certain less-popular genres are patchy and incompletely represented (and are we ever going to get Tool?). Yeah, the personal library limits are a bummer (although as someone who never uses this feature, I don't care myself). Yeah, the UI is terrible for certain things (classical music is especially bad, and I really hate that single-song repeat gets turned off in so many ways). Yeah, some of their clients are worse than others (why is the PS4 client's sound quality so bad and not changeable?) Yeah, there's no lossless versions of anything (I think).

And yet, for all that, Spotify has transformed my music listening, and I've been listening to a huge array of music for almost 25 years now. I listen to so many more new and interesting artists and songs on Spotify than I ever would have otherwise. I'll never go back, personally.

I have never used Spotify, so a genuine question: would Spotify play the Dark Side of the Moon from start to finish ?

EDIT: Thanks for the answers folks, and yes, playing it out of order, or with interruptions would ruin its sonic beauty.

Yes. I have done this with Spotify on many car trips :)

clarifying edit: This is for the paid version of Spotify. I've never used the free version but I believe that it plays ads in between songs.

If you have Spotify premium then yes. I've had premium for some time now so I don't know if it's changed but without premium shuffle is always toggled. So without premium you could listen to dark side of the moon, but it'd be out of order.

Shuffle? I've never encountered forced shuffle on my free account. Is this some kind of 'the mobile version is worse' thing?

Yup, for some reason you can select individual songs on the desktop client even using a free account. Not the case on mobile.

In a science fiction novel I wrote, the main character has trouble understanding the concept of data that has a physical location; to her, it's something that's just there. While I don't know if the real world will be that extreme, I don't think it's at all impossible. I think over the long term -- and maybe not even all that long -- it's probably inevitable.

It does require some mind-shifts on all sides, including those of content creators/providers, though. I don't know that I need to "own" any of my media in an everything-available-all-the-time world, but that requires, well, everything to be available all the time. If content availability comes and goes like the tide based on contracts and deals that I'm not a party to, it makes me a lot more skeptical of the implicit everything-everywhere promise.

>While I don't know if the real world will be that extreme, I don't think it's at all impossible. I think over the long term -- and maybe not even all that long -- it's probably inevitable.

I think that we're already there. This "cloud" generation seems to think that everything that exists (or at least is worthwhile) just sits on that magical Internet to be streamed to them whenever they want (and pay for it).

> In a science fiction novel I wrote

care to link it?

Sure. The novel is Kismet, which is at the top of this page:

https://coyotetracks.org/for-sale/

And, a direct link to Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Kismet-Watts-Martin-ebook/dp/B01MY02O...

I see it kind of akin to how so few people carry cash on them. Credit cards and streaming are great for the day to day things and make things much easier. It's important to have a backup for the things that you care about. If the power goes out how are you paying for lunch. If your cloud photo site shuts down or has a data failure you just lost those baby pictures.

Yup, it's becoming a sad state to be able to own things and not be dependent upon the whims of others.

I went from buying all my music (physical and digital copies), and sometimes had to remove DRM from the digital copies, to stopping that and just using Spotify.

I'm slowly planning to stop paying for Spotify, but it would be very expensive to buy all the music I listen to. I think this will lead to at least 2 things (that used to be true, for me). 1) I'll listen to more local/new music that I can buy from BandCamp, etc. and 2) I'll have higher value to the music I do listen to, because I'm not as worried about glutting myself on a million new bands through Spotify. I'm okay with these 2 things.

I used to save tracks by recording them through the "analog hole", using the following commandline in Linux:

    parec | sox -t raw -r 44100 -Lb 16 -c 2 -e signed-integer - -t wav raw.wav

It still requires a lot of manual work, such as cutting the tracks, and making sure there are no "skips" (which somehow can happen). Skips could theoretically be removed using a consensus algorithm (using multiple recordings).

I just wish someone would develop a fully automated workflow for converting playlists to audio files.

I'm not familiar with the 'parec' command. Are you able to filter out other audio streams (e.g. Slack alerts or accidentally opening a page with an auto-play video)? I was under the impression that one of the big advantages of Pulse Audio was its ability to separate multiple streams.

Interestingly enough, I had similar scripts about 15 years ago pre-Napster. The earliest mp3 sharing sites tended to push full-albums instead of breaking things up by track. I had a lot of fun using some of the earlier mp3 tools to break up and tag tracks. I still have a lot those mp3s on various HDs, and I know it because my splits weren't perfect for certain tracks that don't have 2 second gaps.

In theory PulseAudio should be able to separate the streams, or at least turn off audio for selected applications. However, this was never really a problem anyway because I usually ran the command at night :)

Yes, audio processing in the early days was fun, though it's easier now because of better tools and especially bigger harddrives and faster CPUs :)

What do you mean? Google and Amazon both sell DRM free music. (Apple might too, I've just been out of that ecosystem for so long that I don't really remember)

iTunes is now drm-free except for streaming

I feel like music is one of the few pieces of media that's very easy to buy DRM free. Movies, TV shows, books, and most other things are heavily encumbered after you "buy" them.

It's a pretty shitty state of affairs, but for ebooks what I've done is purchase an old model kindle and buy ebooks for it. I then crack that DRM using Calibre (easy to do with the old model kindles, you only need to enter the serial number). This has worked to archive all the books I've purchased so far but there may come a time when Amazon will only deliver ebooks to kindles with stronger DRM.

I don't feel bad about doing this because I'm still paying for the books and I'm not distributing the backups I make. I'm not clear on whether personal backups are a legal exception or not, but I don't really care.

I do the same with audiobooks from Audible, though the cracking process is a bit more complicated. I have no moral qualms about ensuring I will always have a copy of something I bought even if I leave the platform I bought it on or that platform goes under.

I buy almost all of my music through Bandcamp these days. The nice thing there is that I can buy digital, vinyls, and sometimes even CDs or cassette tapes.

I just use Usenet. I tend to purchase media, or use a streaming service but I no longer pay attention to copyright. I have legal and non legal options. Whatever is easiest is all I care about. Drm/copyright has tilted so far I simply don't care anymore.

Unless something's changed, you can still buy DRM-free high bitrate tracks from iTunes.

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