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Comment by Broken_Hippo | Hacker News Reader

Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?

My own music tastes change over time. I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time, especially if I'm walking places often.

That's the thing with streaming. I'm OK with paying an amount that is less than a CD was 25 years ago just to have a bunch of music at my disposal. A bunch of new-to-me music from various genres and from various places in the world. It isn't like I'm going to purchase physical media any time soon.

Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me.

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> Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?

Probably not, but given that I spent until the end of the CD age to collect music I do have enough to last me for several lifetimes. I'm a bit strange in that I will listen to music over and over again until I have it internalized, and even after that. I don't need something new every day.

I don't need something new every day

Neither do I, but I'm also not going to spend decades - or even years - listening to the same thing week after week. Not to mention that my music tastes are much more varied than they were years ago.

That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect. I can drive people absolutely nuts by listening to the same piece a few hundred times in a row.

Recently: Miriam Stockley, Perfect day (1999, sorry).

> That's fine, not everybody is the same in this respect.

Which is incongruent with:

> the quality has absolutely cratered

You have no measure of music quality and everyone's views on quality are different, e.g. "not everybody is same in this respect".

That's a good song, it has some interesting harmonic similarities to Howard Blakes walking in the air.

Have you tried bandcamp? It's a great way to pay artists directly while having the convenience and discoverability of streaming services.

I, personally, enjoy both.

I like having new music when walking, or as a background when working. For this, the Spotify playlists are great. I wouldn't want to have to sift through hundreds of records, through multiple stores, multiple times a year, then rip those, all to set up a playlist with tracks that I'll listen to maybe a few times. This is music I do enjoy listening, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't have any "deep value" or whatever to me. If it disappeared tomorrow, I really wouldn't care. The "issue for later me" would be to find an equivalent service of "disposable / background music", not to get my hands on the exact same tracks again.

But then, there are many albums, or even standalone tracks or custom playlists, which I would absolutely hate to lose. For those, I'm fine with going through the trouble of buying them and figuring long-term storage.

>I don't listen to the same things I listened to 25 years ago - at least, not often. I want new music from time to time,

It sounds like you want new music all the time. If you don't listen to "old" music often and only listen to new music from time to time, what do you listen to? So technically, 25+ years is considered classic. What is the definition of "new"? 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? What is newer than classic, but not new, modern? Is a song 15 years old modern? To me, good music is timeless. I enjoy stuff from the 1920s, 50s, 60s, 70s, the good stuff from the 80s, all the way through today.

My interpretation of that is not they want recent music but they want novel music.

Pretty much.

My tastes have changed during adulthood - I've very much expanded tastes. Less rap, less grunge, more jazz and alternative metal. I like folks using traditional instruments in modern music (some metal is good for that) and I like folks mixing genres (electroswing, for instance). I try for more recent music (last 10 years or something), but I'll listen to whatever I find interesting. After all, there is a good deal of music that just wasn't available to me 15 to 25 years ago that is easy to find now.

Right there with you. I didn't start listening to hiphop until college. Did a lot of Indie in highschool, that's sorta out now. Electronic music has completely changed for me. I've been loving this new wave of music that'll change genres mid song to just hit the right vibe. It's fun to watch all the stuff that you heard in middle/high school be thrown in a blender and turned into Hyperpop. DnB has been sneaking into all sorts of genres as has chiptune. The availability means things like city pop can shine.

What do I want to listen to today? Japanese garage rock? Phonk? Industrial Hip hop? This was so much harder to do even in the torrenting era. Music has such a low amount of time investment to listen to, why not just try everything if there's no additional cost?

There is one part of me that sorta misses the era when I'd get twenty albums and that was 3 months of music. I'd know them back to front, get excited at the ending notes of one song as I got hyped about the next one. The lack of commitment has made me more like a humming bird flitting from one flower to the next.

I can see the value in the streaming services for this because it's easy and convenient. However, it's also fun to discover new music on your own ("pull" versus "push" for content discovery) by researching genres or musical influences/history (Wikipedia has really well organized tags for this) and then just downloading a few GB via your friendly torrent network. Sure, "piracy", but if the music is over a few decades old then it should be public domain anyways.

>Do you already own all of the music you are going to listen to for your life?

Statistically, yes!

This was covered on a recent episode of 'Search Engine' (rising from the ashes of 'Reply All'): https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/how-am-i-supposed-to-find-new-...

> Is the service forever? Nope, probably not, but that's an issue for later me.

I don’t want to fuck over later me, so I’m still buying music. Probably not saving money, but I also get some music not on streaming services.

What is not on streaming services? From my experience - if it's not on spotify then it's on youtube.

Very little, nowadays, but most stuff from Eric Ravn (metal/rock, somewhat famous for Wuthering Heights) [0] is not even available to buy other than as CDs that you order via HTML form ;) A few years ago, German medieval/folk band Die Streuner also wasn’t available on streaming services. Both have in common, that they have their own label.

[0]: https://nagelfestmusic.com/shop/

I suspect that they aren't getting many sales this way.

Ha, die Streuner were the original inspiration for me to write my own dumb and small music streaming service. Seeing them mentioned here might just give me the motivation to pick that project up again.

Hah, that’s cool :D They are on Spotify, nowadays, though. But yeah, I own all their albums, though it took until last week for me to realize they had a 25th anniversary album in 2019. Without facebook it’s hard keeping up with releases of bands not on Bandcamp.

A lot of stuff is neither on Spotify nor YouTube. One of my musical special interests is a very popular Polish rock band from the 80s and even they don't have their whole discography on Spotify yet, and I had to upload some rarer stuff to the Internet myself. It improved over the years though - just a few years ago you only had a few albums of their discography on Spotify. Now it's just one studio album missing - although most of their live albums aren't there as well and that probably won't change anytime soon; and not even talking about songs that got only released as singles.

Once you go "slightly less popular than one of the top bands in the country", stuff quickly becomes hard to find across the whole Internet, not just Spotify or YouTube, often even when CDs are still available to buy (which isn't a given either).

Streaming services can be compelled to remove your access to content at any point. I don’t like giving that power to anyone when it comes to something I love so deeply.

I treat streaming services like radio without ads. And it's always possible to buy music from sites like bandcamp and own it permanently.

Lots of old music is not there (I love collecting 30-40s jazz, many records are simply not on any streaming service because they were bootlegs/live recordings and weren't officially released)

Bootlegs, DJ sets, leaks, and many, many albums that streaming services don’t/won’t/can’t license e.g. Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos.

And sometimes the record label manages to upload a live album with all the track transitions cut out (the pre-gap bits on the physical CDs – I'm still wondering whether they actually just ripped their own CDs for uploading and somehow mishandled the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps instead of combining them with one of the adjacent tracks?), despite that artist being pretty well-known and one of those albums being somewhat (in)famous for what happens precisely in-between the actual tracks.

Spotify routinely removes access to songs. Half of my "favorites" playlist, going all the way back to 2016, is just gone, off of spotify, and I'm unable to listen to those songs.

I don't, that's why my local collection is still growing.

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