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Comment by chadillac | Hacker News Reader

I used to have hard drives full of downloaded music... the Grooveshark pretty much killed that... Spotify offered mobile streaming and offline playback.

I haven't pirated a song in about 5 or 6 years with the exception of a leaked album (Random Access Memories). NetFlix meets a lot of my movie needs, and ironically reignited my movie pirating when they removed "2001: A Space Odyssey".

If you give the consume an easy and convenient means to access your content, most users will consume it via that method. Most people don't "get" torrents, or care to learn how to use them. My Mom still pays $.99/mp3 on iTunes... I can't get her to switch to spotify.

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Why is Spotify better than owning your data? What happens to your music once Spotify dies?

You lose access to it, but since you've only been paying $10 a month, it isn't that big a loss.

Here's a comparison. You could buy a new album off of Amazon or iTunes every month for $10. These would be DRM free copies that you would own.

So for $10 a month you could have 1 album that you own, or you could pay $10 a month and have access to I don't know, 4 million that you are renting?

We could also imagine that after a year Spotify goes out of business. You've spent $120 on Spotify and don't have anything in return. In the same amount of time you would have spent $120 on iTunes or another service and own 12 albums.

There's a convenience factor here and I think it is obvious that especially in the short term (which is what most people are weighing), it just makes sense to use Spotify or another service, even if you don't actually own your music.

Music from Amazon and iTunes is DRM-free these days.

> These would be DRM copies that you would own.

Did you mean "DRM free"?

Yes, mistyped.

I think we need to update the old saying to "If it floats, flies, fucks or has DRM... rent it."

Spotify is music rental, not music purchase. If you spend $120 on Spotify, you get to listen to thousands or tens of thousands of songs over that year. If you buy 10 albums, you get those albums but you didn't get to listen to anything else. One isn't better than the other -- but rental and ownership aren't direct substitutes for each other.

It is an interesting point. I am happy to pay for Amazon / Lovefilm (including discs because their online choice appears to be bad B-movies or horror films) but I had never considered paying a rental for music. I still buy CDs and rip them; inconvenient I know but I like the sleeve notes

Has anyone tried the Google musicy thing? I seem to be stuck on the "owning" the physical disc and music bit still.

I am really enjoying the Google Music service. For me, the strongest feature is the recommendation engine. I've found a lot of new music in a variety of genres that way. I treat it as a music exposure platform. I pay my 8 bucks a month to have access to millions of songs across thousands of artists. The ones I like I buy some albums so I can rip it and have lossless local copies (the one beef I have with Google music is the files are limited to 320bit mp3. It's perfectly acceptable, but I would even pay more for a lossless .flac option) and add the physical disk to my collection. I would definitely recommend the service if you're interested in finding new music and enjoy listening to tunes on your mobile device (where quality isn't really an issue anyway and space is more precious).

Thanks for the Google Music review. I may look into it. As you say, using it on a mobile device means you have space limits, and all the stuff I listen to I have converted to high bitrate MP3 anyway to play on my iPod, so I don't think I'll be too put off the MP3s they stream.

I wonder how much data it'll burn through. At work there is an NT-based proxy and I haven't found a good Android one to work with it, so I will probably burn through my monthly limits on my cheapskate data plan.

Thanks again.

The main difference for me is that I don't need to buy music that only sounds good on first try or for the first 30s anymore. After intense spotify usage I know what music I really need, so I buy it. On the other hand I discover way more than before, my consumption is way up now.

Switch to Rdio or whatever other competitor fills the void

The other day I was in the car with my friend, he had his phone linked to the BT system in the car. I was like "yeah I love this guy, you should check out [a similar artist]." and he replies "yeah, I know of that guy." me "awesome, put on [a song]" to which he replies "Oh, I don't have any of his music on my phone right now...".

"What the hell man, are we in 1999 mode?!"

If Spotify goes away, then I find another provider or start building my library again... in the mean time I literally have ALL of the music... which I'm okay with.

You don't have the storage/backup and organization costs. I don't ever want to "own" a song or movie again. They're all online. I use rdio now, but if it went away I'd use spotify. If that went away I'd use <whatever>. If that went away...I'll listen to the radio.

Movies would be a little harder, but I'm pretty sure iTunes and Netflix aren't going away any time soon.

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