Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time.
Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side, which sounds terrible on headphones. It sounds way better on the original mono version.
Spotify is a mediocre experience at best for music nerds, which is probably what the person you're responding to is (has an amp and speakers, vinyl, etc).
Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.
Somewhat agreed, although I suspect that may be more of an Apple/Beatles decision as to what versions to make available. Having 3-4 versions of each song may create more confusion for people. But... it's a shame that many of those versions aren't available (original mono, original stereo, remastered mono, remastered stereo, etc). I do see that Apple Music has some more options (US box set, for example), but even then, those are the US stereo/mono, and the UK mono/stereo mixes are, in some/many cases, different.
Anything I like I can easily access in ALAC on any device from anywhere in the world.
The Spotify forums seem to suggest this is because someone licensed that one song differently and conditions have changed, so I'm no longer entitled to play it.
That seems bonkers to me, but regardless of the reason, the effect is infuriating.
I ditched Spotify a while back and I'm slowly clawing my way back into physical CDs, ripping and encoding (or not even bothering to encode; storing as plain WAV still doesn't take that much space given modern hard drives), and trying to ensure that songs don't vanish out from under me ever again.
True, I have experienced that. I love the apps, but I ended up switching to youtube premium due to that.
Anything that isn't in youtube music as a song, usually is available as a video either uploaded by the artists themselves or as a "not so legal" upload. Not a fan of the apps though.
Is that really the case? Anecdotally I'm earning 50k in EU.
Now it's like our old dreams in name only. It hits all the bullet points, but the functionality is all wrong because companies want to make users the dataset rather than operators in control. And while one of their incentives is user satisfaction, it's competing with engagement, revenue side channels, price discrimination, etc.
Yes, but the OP's point is that it's not really at the "click of a button" because the search appears designed specifically to make it easy to find playlists of songs but not individual songs (likely for royalty reduction reasons).
When I was a kid, I naively imagined when I was in my 50s, as I am now, we'd be much closer to many of the visions of future painted in media from Popular Mechanics magazine to science fiction. Today, I understand and accept why we don't have the proverbial "flying cars", but I am disappointed when stuff we already recently had (and could easily still have) is unavailable for bad reasons. As a technologist, I find this especially frustrating.
For the same money as your glorious 80s stereo, adjusted up, you can still get glorious audio today.
Not as bad as you might suppose.
My wife has a 1983 Panasonic turntable/radio/cassette player that she uses sometimes. We're talking about low build quality, hot pink, designed for the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl who will listen while simultaneously squeeing on a three-way call on a Garfield phone. It's not bad. Neither of us have perfect hearing, and are far from audiophiles.
The key is the right media for the right device.
When she's playing brand new, 180-gram, super-hipster vinyl, her expensive modern gear in the living room is where it sounds best.
But when she's playing a 1983 copy of Girls Just Want To Have Fun, it sounds best on the pink Panasonic. Pretty much any record made before 2000 sounds better on the period-correct turntable, compared with the high-end player, and vice-versa.
She will only listen to cassettes — new or old — on the 1983 machine, even though she has a Panasonic cassette boom box that she bought in Japan in 2019. The old gear just sounds better.
More and more she's been finding music on Apple Music during her lunch hour, then buying the vinyl or cassette to listen to the music at home. Again, she's not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but she finds the sound of analog much more pleasant. To me, it's pretty close, but less "sterile," for lack of a better word.
It’s crazy how bad these are, they manage to ruin a lot of great songs.
You could say the same thing about an all-you-can-eat buffet. You won't end up eating the whole restaurant, and if you do they'll kick you out.
"Basically every song ever recorded" is a red herring to strip you of ownership of your media.
To say nothing of all the playlists I've made that have holes blown in them like swiss cheese because the streaming rights got revoked. What if Spotify turns the way of Netflix?