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Comment by fbnlsr | Hacker News Reader

> And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.

Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.

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> The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device,

Well, you'd think so, but I've had albums which I had downloaded disappear if I hadn't listened to them for a while.

So the "download" isn't really stable.

There is a maximum of five offline devices per account which used to be enforced manually (i.e. you had to make a conscious choice of which device to kick out if you wanted to add a new one), but it's now managed automatically on a least-recently-used basis. Maybe this is what you're running into?

> but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing.

Blame the copyright holders aka the Big Four/Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry

Streaming services would gladly stream anything you want to you.

That is still a downside of the system. Even when there is some external force at play. The BigFour/Big Five don't come into your house to take away your CDs.

Who is to blame is irrelevant.

Nah, I'll just blame Spotify.

There are services that let you download to your local storage, whatever you buy from them. Bandcamp is the obvious example, but in the past there was eMusic and even iTunes. Spotify could do it, but they just don't want to. How else are they going to help themselves to your wallet every month?

Sure streaming services want to give me anything I desire...anyhting except allow me to download an audio file that I can keep on my system. Then I wouldn't have to give a crap about whether Spotify still had the rights to it.

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