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Comment by mahogany | Hacker News Reader

> I can access basically every song ever recorded

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).

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Worse is that the missing stuff is constantly shifting. I'll add a whole album (worth of songs) to a playlist, and a few months later one of them is grayed out but the rest still work.

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.

How does this work for you then:

Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.

That's very true but so is Sturgeon's law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Yeah, you're right in that sense. Honestly my post is a little over-dramatic because I'm venting based on these experiences I've had with Spotify. Overall, it does offer a lot and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Poorly. Quantity may be a quality all it's own, but that quality is poor. There is a lot of music that is not on Spotify, while other music is there but only inferior versions.

Youtube does for the rest of us

I’ve found the combination of Apple Music and a nice script to quickly import stuff from bandcamp to navidrome has all my needs met. Music discovery? Talking to people and going to gigs has me covered.

Anything I like I can easily access in ALAC on any device from anywhere in the world.

> Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify

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.

> 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.

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.

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