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Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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