> I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee.
Any music? Nope. Maybe the popular stuff that plays on the radio.
Any music? Nope. Maybe the popular stuff that plays on the radio.
There is a site [0] that ranks how “mainstream” one’s listening habits are based on their last.fm profile.
Punching in my username, I get ranked as 12% mainstream (i.e., only 12% of last.fm users listen to music more obscure than mine). Keep in mind, this is relative to last.fm users, whose musical tastes are probably more obscure than the general population.
Approximately 95% of my lossless library is on Spotify or Apple Music. So I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job maintaining a comprehensive catalog.
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.
The reason between Apple Music and iTunes Match is that the latter doesn't replace your existing copies with the alternatives it find in its database. AM will gladly do it unless what you have offline is truly unique.
EDIT: `Cloud Status` lists this. TIL
This is not an obscure artist. They have over 1 million subscribers.
Sure, maybe you won’t find that one band from the 90s you loved that played a few shows and only ever recorded anything on tapes that have been obscured over time.
But one of the reasons I use streaming over the radio is because streaming libraries offer 1000x times the diversity of any radio station or chart.