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Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

The only reasonable way to go is buy/download music DRM-free and store high-quality files on your own HDD. I've been burnt too many times. Youtube taking down files. Grooveshark disappearing. Newgrounds outages. Never again. I like a song, I hunt it down and download it, whatever tools it takes to do so. In general I download everything I like from the internet because it's gonna disappear. When I look at my old bookmarks, like 50% are defunct now.

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This. I used to be a strong proponent of owning music, until rd.io. I loved rd.io, and used it as a sandbox -- If I really enjoyed an album / song / artist, then I would get the files. But, after a few years with rd.io I started to get a bit more cavalier about ensuring that I had a copy of the music.

Fast-forward to the end of last year: rd.io shutdown. I've tried a few other services since, each with its own share of problems (I'm currently on Google Music). Now, anything I like, I download. With hard drive space, and backups, it seems significantly simpler to assume that any song can disappear tomorrow.*

* While a service disappearing is a relatively rare event, content churn has always made missing songs a somewhat frequent event. However, for me, rd.io's shutdown emphasized the general incompatibility between the expectations I have for music, (anything I have listened to in the past, I can listen to in the present) and the realities of what a subscription service can deliver. And so, previous annoyances turned into a line in the sand.

We don't speak of grooveshark disappearing. Never. My playlists :( The next one that'll hurt is if/when soundcloud pivots a bit too far. Funny how the best platform for listening to music online without having to think about it is YT nowadays

Ah I missed the good old days of caching everything locally.

Even if a streaming service was guaranteed not to disappear after a couple of years, licensing agreements and conflicts mean that content can simply disappear from the service after a while.

With the ever lowering price of storage, simply syncing my digitized music library to my computing devices offers the best experience.

If you were enjoying groovesharks services, you're unlikely to be the target audience for paying for stuff.

You are mistaken. I spend a lot of money on music. If I think a composition is deserving of compensation, I will most likely buy the album even if I find a free download link. I didn't use grooveshark much but there were some songs that were extremely hard to find in other places.

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