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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I’ve made a conscious decision to not do streaming services. Having all the music is not much different than having no music at all. I don’t even want all of my own music on my phone. Instead, I use a set of smart playlists to give me a changing selection of songs based on ratings, how long it’s been since I last heard a song and how new the music is in my library.

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> Having all the music is not much different than having no music at all.

This is an interesting statement; could you clarify what you mean? Taken at face value it seems like a falsism, but I'm assuming you have an interpretation in mind that would make sense to me.

It’s really just the idea that having a collection of music that I’ve curated through my own tastes means that I can safely do things like just tell my phone to shuffle all songs and I’ll be happy with what plays. Jason Kottke recently posted the kind of hacky thing he put together to be able to get music he likes playing through a web-based player that manages to combine all the various streaming sources where he gets his music and it seemed really sad that he had to do all that work while I can use my phone/itunes¹ in exactly the same way I did 17 years ago.

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1. Yes it’s now just called “Music” but because “Apple Music” (intentionally, I think) confusingly refers to both the streaming service and the app I use to manage my digital music collection and because damnit, I’m the kind of old person from Chicago who still calls it the Sears Tower/Standard Oil Building/Northwestern Station/Comiskey/etc., I’m gonna still call it iTunes.

It's like having a library you built up over the years based on your tastes and the era you grew up in that you can idly look through vs having a search bar to YouTube.

I hear the same argument a lot when it comes to game emulation. People will say you shouldn't put full ROM sets on your device because it makes it harder to decide what to play and to stick to a game. Compare that to browsing the 30 GameCube games you have in a cupboard from 20 years ago. You can kinda recreate that digitally by only putting a select amount of games on your device at a time and trying to spend more time per game. This particularly comes up when discussing emulation on handhelds.

Bringing the conversation back to music, while I do prefer digital, I've got albums in FLAC on my phone and I re-listen to the same 50 or so albums a lot, only occasionally adding/removing from what's on there.

Not op, but to me this resonates because none of it is “mine”, none of it exists in the real world. There’s a huge difference between the music I physically collected (from libraries, friends, Best Buy, Christmas gifts, used cd stores) and uploaded into my iPod and lived with for years vs music I searched on a whim, listened to for a month while it was in my “recents” and then eventually forgot about once it was pushed out by something else.

Paying for a permanent subset of music transfers value to that set in a way that subscribing to everything doesn't.

There are two big offers with streaming services: catalogue and curation (playlists, up next).

On curation, taking one's time to do that oneself is arguably superior. You get to know your music better, tailor the collection to your tastes, discovery and growth is active not passive.

If you're really into a band or genre you'll also run into the limits of Spotify's collection. Artists have missing albums, some artists aren't there at all. It's not as bad as film and TV, where six subs are required to cover a broad range of viewing, but that's the enshittification pathway.

Also, real music people hate the mainstream, man.

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