Hacker News Reader

Comment by _uucm | Hacker News Reader

> the reality is barely anyone but aging millennials are keeping 20k songs around in mp3 format.

I'm a Zoomer with a decent collection of mp3s[0]. Silicon-Valley types tend to grossly underestimate just how "old-fashioned" the rest of the world is.

[0]:

  [~/Music]$ find . -name "*.mp3" | wc -l
  3157

View on HN

Honestly, I think you inadvertedly prove the OP's point. Given that you used a piped command in the terminal to search your Linux distribution for mp3s, I'd say you're in fact one of the very Silicon-Valley types you mention.

I can't think of anyone in their 20s with whom I interact who don't use Spotify, personally. It's all I see amongst the younger colleagues at work. Of that age group outside of work, everyone's 'year in review' music summaries on social media are spotify-generated, and everyone who sends me 'hey check out this song' links are sending them for Spotify (with a few youtube videos I guess).

I'm sure there are people, don't get me wrong, but Spotify seems so ubiquitous amongst everyone I know who is in their 20s (even at arm's length) that I definitely believe my library of mp3s and player make me a product of my age and the odd one out.

Another anecdata point in your support: my search was for '*.flac' and the number was 3,318.

My wife and I are both 40s+; she has access to that library on her machine, but prefers Spotify for many reasons. Only weirdos want to own their own (music, video, text) libraries, most others would rather have someone else be responsible for the curation of that portion of their mental space.

Why is it such a weirdo thing? I don't want to bleed money every month just to listen to music. Or put up with ads. Owning mp3s is the most straightforward way to achieve that.

Music subscriptions are dramatically cheaper than buying music. Unless you prefer to listen to the same songs for a long time, but that's not representative of most people nowadays.

Owning thousands of mp3s is only really cheaper if you obtained them via pirating. CDs in the 90s and 00s (I haven't seen a CD in a store since then) retailed for $15 and would probably have around 10 songs. A 3000 song library would run you $4500. That's like 40 years of Spotify subscriptions.

Spotify is missing a lot of Hindi and rare tracks. Works if you’re into pop, I guess.

There is enough music on Spotify outside pop to not bother with music that is not on Spotify.

Disagree. No idea if it's there now or not, I haven't checked in years but they had no Alien Sex Fiend, Damned or Jesus and Mary Chain. Oh and no Soft Cell either although that might have been because of a song called Sex Dwarf. This was formative stuff for me and I still listen to it pretty regularly.

Maybe its because you haven't checked in years, because most of those artists you listed are there. I'm not sure about Damned, did you mean The Damned? If so, every artist you claimed as missing is available.

Alien Sex Fiend: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6WVnBgqJfj9Iw9gpBed9fJ?si=zd...

The Jesus and Mary Chain https://open.spotify.com/artist/4rjlerN21ygkIhmUv55irs?si=-y...

The Damned: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6VeL8VhaMjHTPc5uovFl3h?si=q9...

Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/artist/6aq8T2RcspxVOGgMrTzjWc?si=va...

Sex Dwarf - Original by Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/track/7A5qOucdF0zyXo2x7vAoCO?si=nno...

Sex Dwarf - Remastered by Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/track/6TaHShmHB955lxcJ92V0gs?si=cXo...

Sex Dwarf - Original, Deluxe Edition by Soft Cell https://open.spotify.com/track/7bt41cmNUkjCP8CQekIwBO?si=0tl...

Things have indeed progressed. Thanks for going to the trouble.

In my case, it's very few songs I like that are not on Spotify. I remember Neil Young going away and then going back on Spotify . I simply didn't listen to his songs for some time because while I like his art, it wasn't worth the effort to download his songs or subscribe to his expensive higher quality music streaming service.

Absolutely, and I don't pretend to believe that every single recording someone might want to listen to isn't covered by traditional music streaming services. However, it seems to me and many of my immediate peers like most people are pretty well serviced by services like Spotify. Even several of the musicians who comes in to play at a local pizzeria I frequent self publish on Spotify, and I'd probably only end up buying half of their CDs. ;)

While Spotify's breadth is impressive, it's all only as permanent as are licensing deals. I've had a bunch of things disappear from playlists.

I know it's very spotty (pun not intended), it doesn't have some music I like and I wouldn't call my tastes particularly esoteric. However, for enough people in English-speaking countries it has enough even outside of pop that anything that's missing is a long-tail situation.

Spotify and Netflix are the two things where when I say I don't have an account for them I generally expect a weird look.

I've cancelled my netflix account a few times; and I might be about to do it again.

It lost its enormously deep catalog some years ago, where I found oddities like (untitled), and the recent spat of original content has been disappointing.

Moreover, it's lost its appeal as a safe platform for kids' content; given that while I can limit my children's access to certain shows with a passcode, _I cannot hide_ the shows! Only someone without kids would design a catalog with parental locking that cannot filter locked content.

My wife finds the aggrandizing of violence and cruelty found in American television to be distasteful, and I find it boring; and so we often find ourselves looking elsewhere after loading Netflix and finding mostly violent content.

We do enjoy their cooking shows; but we're having better luck with Disney+ and Curiousity Stream for general family entertainment.

>I've cancelled my netflix account a few times; and I might be about to do it again.

At what point is it "cancelling" instead of "renewing your subscription"?

Renewing is automatic and without service interruption; cancelling involves a service interruption. I'll go months at a time without Netflix available in our house because there's nothing desirable to watch on it.

I tried using Spotify, but after every song there was an advertisement. Is everyone actually paying for Spotify? Why would I want to do that when I could just listen to my mp3s for free?

Pretty much everyone I know pays. College students split the family plan so its $2.50/mo. Pretty good considering that would only get you two songs on iTunes.

The ads are only for free users

I'd think mostly for the radio-like experience: new music coming into rotation, deep cuts from classic albums, possibly a DJ, etc.

I used Google Music for this, for a while at least, but gave up on it when it became clear that it was inevitably heading for the Google Graveyard. I'm not sure I want to bother with Spotify, and I transcoded my FLACs to Opus to put on my phone's SD card. Foobar2000 for Android takes care of music playing now.

Music discovery and a curated-by-not-yourself playlists are the two big things in my experience. The aim of the game is for spotify to play you music that you didn't realise you wanted to hear, and even better if it's from an artist you don't know.

I'm old-school. I pay so that I can download a whole album on to my phone and listen to it while I'm out walking and not worry about having a good Internet connection. I also hate ads so I'd pay to not have any.

I also listen to my own music files ripped from CD. For that, the Sansa Clip used to be great until the headphone connection broke.

so you don't have to buy or otherwise acquire the mp3s and then worry about storing them somewhere where you can access them from your phone. unless you have a small library that fits on the phone.

Being in 20s myself, I mostly only use terminal for everything? Why? It's efficient and faster. And of course, I don't use streaming or subscribing services. Not sure why people think only millennial do this. I personally think people just fall for marketing and tech hype too easily.

> Being in 20s myself

Uhh... Sorry to break it to you, but... I... I think that makes you a millennial.

>Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years, with 1981 to 1996 a widely accepted defining range for the generation.

Seems so. The original post saying "anyone in their 20s" confused me. I'm not really familiar with all this generation and millennial talk. But it does annoy me when people shoehorn generations into certain behavioral patterns stripping out their individuality.

"Millenials" is a somewhat vague term. It's been used for everything from the XY-generation from the late 70's/early 80's, to Generation Y, to the people born after the year 2000.

It's usually better to talk about Generations X, XY, Y and Z rather than millenials because of that.

I have to wonder if going through the experience of their favorite music (+book +movie +game etc) disappear on them online due to $(random reason outside their control) enough times will sour them by the time they're in their 30s?

Or will that generation grow with an acceptance that everything is ephemeral subject to the whim of corporate licensing? That seems a bit sad.

There's apparently already an entire generation who hasn't ever used a computer-like device that isn't locked down. I mean all those kids with iPads. They are simply unaware that there could be something better, something more empowering.

Back when oink.me.uk was a thing, I had amassed a (what I considered to be) massive collection of music. Tens of thousands of songs, 500gb hard drive entirely filled with music. It had everything and I downloaded every new thing that looked remotely interesting.

It was wonderful until that hard drive failed. I didn't have a backup (because of course I didn't, that hard drive was expensive and the cloud didn't exist). After that, I never did amass another massive collection of music like that.

So in a sense, yes, I kind of do now treat most media as ephemeral and don't place too much value on maintaining copies of them. There's always interesting music to listen to and books to read and video games to play. Having a physical or digital copy of it hoarded away in a hard disk locally simply isn't that important to me.

If something that matters to me disappears from whatever service I use, I'll just download it after the fact. If I don't care enough to do that, it wasn't that important.

I'm in my (late) 20s and I have a big local collection of music, mp3 and lossless. I still occasionally torrent entire discographies. I pay for exactly zero subscriptions. Many people I know do the same. Some pay for Spotify since it recently became available. Some pay for Apple Music. Some are foolish enough to pay for VK music despite the ability to use ad blockers and modded apps.

In other words, it very much depends on the country.

I tried to head this point off by specifying English-speaking countries (and specifically I meant the anglosphere). I can totally see how spotify is far less of a value proposition outside of that.

> everyone's 'year in review' music summaries on social media are spotify-generated

What about selection bias and people who are not posting 'year in review' music summaries?

This is a fair call-out and I did anticipate it, but I couldn't think of any better examples to quantify what is definitely a feeling that spotify has ubiquity amongst the age bracket I discuss. It's no one thing, but a tonne of small examples that don't come to mind. That's why I ended up using that example even though I knew someone would call out the selection bias (that is real, don't get me wrong).

Using Spotify and having local media is not either/or.

An odd one out here myself (I don't listen to music), but as a young adult I use my 20 dollar mp3 player for most audio needs. Though I also do not own a smartphone, so for a mobile player I am forced to an mp3 player, I would still use the mp3 player if I had a smartphone since the disjoint is quite helpful here. Never used spotify before.

I get the feeling that age discrimination is the new "black & white". "Oh, you are born in this decade, so you must be doing X". Yeah, whatever. I'm doing X because I like to do it. I'm an "ageing millenial" per GPs definition (so with mid-30 I'm old?), yet I'm well aware of TikTok and such.

I'm so sick of it.

Comparing age with racial discrimination can only be done from privilege. Am I wrong assuming you are white?

> Comparing age with racial discrimination can only be done from privilege.

What leads you to this conclusion?

While I agree with you that age discrimination exist at least in mild form, direct comparison with racial discrimination is excessive. In the extreme case, you won’t get shot by a cop for being old while arguably being black increases that probability.

But it’s not only race discrimination at play, there are other possible discriminations also more powerful than age, like gender, income or class.

So you put more weight to a discrimination that affects you the most because you probably don’t belong to other categories, hence the guess that you are a white male.

I am probably over reacting given the HN demographic and also because you did not do it in bad faith but just wanted to point it out.

> ... but just wanted to point it out.

Exactly this. While I get your sentiment, and your assumption is correct, I'd agree to disagree that "one discrimination is worse then another", because (for me) it always boils down to how each individual experiences the discrimination.

One simply cannot state that "your discrimination is not as important as mine".

I'd also agree to disagree as I think we are now clearly in subjectivism vs objectivism territory.

ehhhh that comparison is pretty weak. you get to choose how much you care about being "discriminated" against for your interests. you don't get to choose how racial discrimination impacts you.

I was was writing about age discrimination. And that is something that affects you externally.

"Digital Native" is the dog whistle for that.

For other's like us who like to keep local audio files around, check out 'cmus'. It's my current favourite audio player.

Don't forget about beautiful, messy apps like Airsonic that you host yourself. It's the best solution IMO. You can listen to your whole collection at the quality you want on basically every platform. A fork of pSub is what I use a primary CLI player for it, but the mobile apps are also great. You can cache music locally, so I like to queue up a few albums before I leave the house (not that I do that often nowadays) so I can listen to them while driving without using any precious mobile data.

I'll have to look it up, sounds like a great addition to a homelab.

Thanks!

Looks good!

> cmus — C* Music Player

> Small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.

https://cmus.github.io/

https://github.com/cmus/cmus

..But apparently no longer in active development?

https://github.com/cmus/cmus/issues/856

I actually did read through that thread the other day. If I understood it correctly, it looks like it's in a state of transfer to community development.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com