Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone streams...
If Bandcamp invested in making their app a legitimate alternative to Spotify, we could maybe go back to buying music, though.
If you simply mean BUY music and store it digitally, I've got a 1.5TB external HDD filled with MP3s and FLACs that argues otherwise. Amazon's AutoRip is a nice timesaver, but I still largely prefer to do my own ripping via Exact Audio Copy.
That's a sweeping generalization... I like owning my music and not being in danger of losing it at the whim of a company or a country. The only danger to me right now is my library and its redundancies crashing.
If someone decides not to renew a contract, becomes too expensive for the service, moves to a country the service may not interact with, or decides to move to another service, I won't lose anything.
If I choose to switch services, I won't lose half my library.
I can get own music from obscure places or times services don't service or consider. I bet you most services don't have a lot of African music, no matter the decade. It doesn't even have to be obscure, there are great mixtapes from the 90s and 00s that just aren't on online services.
I know this may be shocking, but... a lot of people still does it.
> Fans have paid artists $619 million using Bandcamp, and $18.3 million in the last 30 days alone.
And that is from Bandcamp alone. There are numerous other genre-specific sites that sell music, as well as Amazon, Google and others.
I can't speak for everyone, but one of the challenges of this relatively open market is managing music bought from different stores. Who wants 5 apps to stream from all these places? Funkwhale is really designed with a more libre/open source/communal spirit, but happens to be excellent at doing this for individuals too.
And Youtube Music isn't much better, and it's only a matter of time before their aggressive opinions on what's good for their consumers diverges from mine.
I'm not willing to let a company dictate which music I can listen to based on licensing agreements with yet another company. I try to buy my music directly from the creator, and keep it safe and sound.
Funkwhale will never be as large as Spotify, and that's fine. There is a niche for what they're offering.
Torrent/soulseek if the song is region-locked, sold in lower quality, or if it takes me more than 5 min to find a legit link.
I listen to a lot of Indian music (film soundtracks), and Google was annoyingly consistent in changing my songs to different language versions because their acoustic fingerprint training models are shit.
That's kind of what I assumed. I'm sure YouTube will make a few changes in the coming year that'll make it worthwhile to deal with the hassle of setting this up and putting up with an alright experience. They're almost there as it is.
My family has a spotify account. In the past we used pandora. I have tried them both but I always immediately come back to playing albums from my own collection.
I'm in my mid 50s, and I grew up listening to album-oriented rock (AOR), and not just a stream of pop hits. I still prefer to listen to albums start to end. When an album ends, I judge my mood and think what album fits it and put that one on. That is something spotify doesn't do for me.
I also tend to find music I like better on there, though that comes down to personal taste I suppose.
I also like not paying Spotify. I resent them for giving people the idea that 10 bucks per month is all you should pay for having access to all the world's music. They're a bad company.
im very close to going back to using a local library again and i think it would actually work pretty good these days with software like syncthing and musicbrainz, docker, cheap and easy to set up VPS's etc etc... that weren't a thing when I started using spotify
You.