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Comment by porcoda | Hacker News Reader

This is why I still buy music I like - either physical media, or DRM-free files I can archive away. It's more expensive and labor intensive to manage, but at least I don't have to worry about my music ever vanishing for one reason or another. Things like Spotify are useful for discovering new stuff, but I sort of like knowing that stuff I like will always be available for me to enjoy regardless of what's going on amongst artists, labels, service providers, etc.

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What you should back up is the playlists, since no matter what you buy, you will never legally own the music. Sometimes it's easier to work around the DRM than other times, but in no case are you supposed to be able to make copies and I find it easier not to try this and keep hundreds of extra gigabytes around when I pay for the service to host this for me already. The music will exist elsewhere as well, from the pirate bay to youtube to other music services to CDs if need be. The playlists are the data they can keep hostage, so I back that up.

When Grooveshark went offline without notice, I was lucky to have some offline songs on Android and some localStorage in the browser (and the skills to retrieve it). I don't want that to happen again, I lost quite a bit of music there, so I back this up now. At first I used a self-made a Spotify API client; later I found another tool to do this with: https://github.com/watsonbox/exportify

Same. Plus this way I’m paying the artists (directly, wherever possible).

Are there good tools which let you manage a catalogue? Either SaaS or self+hosted ?

It is hassle to manage your own files on all your devices.I would rather i had app like Spotify but streaming files owned by me.

Personally I'd use Banshee (or iTunes if you prefer) and a NAS, but a lot of people are using Nextcloud which has plugins for this kind of thing.

Banshee looks interesting! thanks for sharing.

I was hoping for a streaming server(and clients) I suppose!, which maybe also fetches podcasts and also maybe does audiobooks and perhaps manage buying from stores which supports DRM free content downloads.

There's also Rhythmbox and Amarok but I never like them too much. I think Nextcloud may have what you want, I just can't speak to that since I haven't used it myself.

I use iTunes Match for making stuff available in the cloud (eg, so i can access it all from my phone), and locally store it all on a NAS. Pretty easy.

This looks a good fit for people with Apple devices .

Sadly no clients for android. I have a mix of Linux , OSX Android and iOS, I won't be able to use in half of them! but given podcasts and other itunes features i suppose this best out of the box solution out there.

True. When I’m at home, the NAS serves up the music to my Linux systems. Unfortunately, not so useful when I’m on the road - in that case you’re right, I’m stuck with the apple devices. I would love for something like iTunes Match that worked as smoothly for non apple devices. That is probably the one apple service that keeps me locked into their ecosystem, and that bugs me.

I'm always sad when I can't find on Bandcamp a band I just heard on Youtube. I'd just pay them outright, with rather few intermediate layers, and no DRM.

The convenience of an unlimited catalog of DRM'ed digital music far outweighs the rare inconvenience of music vanishing.

It's not going to help much though. People like that will also try bullying sellers into not selling stuff by someone who says or believes something they don't like. Sure, you can still enjoy what you've already got, but good luck getting anything new from your favourite artist.

That makes no sense. Its hard to say how much its going to help - today's fringe trend can easily get "hot". Look at vinyl record consumption, which dipped for decades and then came back with a vengeance. Plus, if even a 10% of a fanbase switches to traditional media, I bet that would have an impact on the artists bottom line. And anyway, it's a good thing to do regardless for all the reasons people have mentioned (I buy physical media myself, mostly on discogs, alibris, and sometimes ebay. sadly there are no record stores in my area anymore).

Likewise. Nextcloud Music and Subtracks. Glorious.

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