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Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

> I'm happy enough to pay the small fee to have access to a huge music library across all devices.

As long as it lasts.

I want my music collection to be accessible also when Spotify will go out of business, sued into oblivion or acquired and shut down.

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Doesn't have to be one or the other. Pay Spotify $10/month to discover new music and then go buy lossless copies of the albums you really care about. Most records I could live without but those few special ones I have backed up in S3 in FLAC.

Notwithstanding something exceptionally rare, why the need to back up FLACs on S3?

I back up my music collection locally, and I have double-redundancy of sorts (it's backed up to a RAID 5 array on a file server, so in theory it could withstand the failure of the original drive and one of the back up drives), but if worst comes to worst I could just acquire everything again.

With a couple of exceptions they're just lossless copies of widely available music recordings...

Are you suggesting backing them up on pirate music sites?

Not advocating copyright infringement, nor was I suggesting that in particular.

That would be a viable back up strategy, though. Have a rare copy of a recording? Make it widely available, then if your copy is destroyed, the odds of you being able to acquire an identical copy again are much improved.

Why would they be sued? Last I heard Spotify was very much running a legal business.

Just because they are running a legal business now, doesn't mean they will run a legal business in future. Either they can change, or more likely laws will change, rendering them a vulnerable target for suing.

Plus, I'm sure they are breaking some ridiculous patent somewhere anyway.

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