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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

Depends on your musical tastes. A good 25% of the music in my library is not available in any form other than used CDs.

What kind of music?

Not sure about OP but I have all manner of blues and jazz recordings unavailable via streaming. There are also lots of obscure Japanese game and rock recordings that aren't in Apple or Spotify though to Spotify's credit, they have a lot of game content. Streaming is mostly in service of licenses and margins which as a shareholder, that makes sense to me.

People seem to assume that any decent creative output always gets carried forward to the next form of media tech. But there are 78s that didn’t make to LP, much less anything after that.

Another example: Nick and Nora pre code films weren’t on Netflix the last time I looked.

Even local super popular rock bands from 80s don't always have their entire catalog available on streaming services, and solo endeavors of their musicians are often nowhere to be seen there.

There's also an intermediate category where an online/streaming version is available, but it's defective – a number of live Bob Dylan (!) albums from the Bootleg Series are missing the track transitions between the individual tracks. It feels like somebody forgot to include the pregaps when ripping the discs for digital distribution, and it's been like that for years…

A wide range, actually. It's more about the time period and artists than musical style. If it's earlier than the 90s and/or from an artist who wasn't big on the charts, it gets more likely that they're not available except on used CD.

In that sense, the depth and variety of good music that is available has been shrinking for a long while now. The advent of streaming seems to have made it worse.

By contrast, before I got rid of almost all my vinyl, one particular sub-collection that I had was about 200 12" singles from the London club scene in 1981-1985. Almost none of the tracks ever appeared on CD or were ever released digitally.

All of them were available on youtube, even the whitelabel DJ-only releases!

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