My biggest beef with streaming services—-and I have a few—-is privacy. I know I’m in the minority here, but I just can’t accept someone keeping a record of everything I’ve ever watched, read, or listened to.
I also kinda hate how suggestion algorithms are not customizable at all, and all your actions are input to them.
It adds a mental burden when choosing a song: choosing a song not just affects what I listen now, but what I will get suggested in the future.
A simple switch "don't feed my actions to algorithm" would have solved that, but of course the company doesn't want that. It wants all the data it can get.
Spotify has a private listening mode that does that
(For those whose privacy concerns would prevent them from using Last.fm to keep track of their music listening over time, there is Libre.fm. However, all it is good for is keeping personal records, not socializing with many other listeners.)
With Spotify or Yandex.Music, however, everything is shared, and you can't use a different player.
Gives me the creeps.
Then the internet blew up. I was so excited about all the new communities and tools that it made available to us. I didn’t think about privacy at all since I never had before and now there was all this cool stuff.
I slowly came to understand what was happening and now that I do i can’t go back.
I don’t begrudge any one service from existing, but I think it’s bad if the default way to participate in our culture is through platforms that Hoover up everything you do.