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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

And this is why I maintain my own music collection, in FLAC, stored on a machine I control, in my house, with ZFS and backups and scripts to generate lossy versions of any part of my collection in whatever format I choose.

My phone has plenty of space to store compressed music, my car has a usb port that I can plug a flash card into, and I have a portable wristwatch mp3 player for when I go running.

I can go anywhere I want by car, bus, train, airplane, boat, or foot, and never lose my tunes to bad reception or buggy software because my music is ALWAYS in my physical possession, with backups in a lossless format. I can even connect to my home machine from remote to stream or download if need be.

Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services?

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>Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services?

OTOH, your use case could be called "outlier" and "a throwback".

Most young kids don't care for owning music at all (not talking about the few buying vinyl, or the slightly more buying digital, I'm talking about the huge majority).

They are OK with streaming like Pandora and Spotify, not to mention they're fine with just YouTube most of them time.

I have historically collected and owned my own music. That said, I have really enjoyed streaming music with Rdio, especially on my iPhone.

The only downside I have observed is that songs come into and leave Rdio's library constantly due to licensing. It is not unusual to bring up a playlist and find that a song or two on it is no longer available. (Sadly, there is no mandatory licensing scheme for streaming services like there is for radio.)

That was actually the clincher for me. I want my music to STAY available.

I used to care about owning my music, but over time the money just kept adding up and so did the inconveniences. Want this artist's albums on my phone? Dammit, gotta take time and copy all that over. New music? Welp, there goes my food for the month (I don't like pirating). I made a new playlist on my computer, and I want it on my phone? Dang it, it didn't find the tracks that I copied on there before and so it's useless.

Paying $10 a month for a streaming service (I use Google Music) made a lot more sense to me for than paying $30-$100 a month buying albums.

Not to mention all of the space a large music collection can take up. I've managed to sell about 400 of the 450 CDs I had collected because I just didn't want the cases around anymore. All I was doing anymore was buying the disc, ripping it, and then tossing it on a shelf. I probably had $6k invested by the end. All of my food service and Geek Squad wages gone :)

As a musician, I want to support other musicians (and I know that streaming services are a raw deal for smaller artists, but so were traditional album sales) so I try to go see them on the road (which is where they can actually make money) when they're in Chicago or Madison.

I doubt you were actually consistently paying $30-100 per month on new music. The average consumer spends roughly $60 a year on recorded music.

Now, instead of building 'equity' in a music collection that you own, you'll be renting your music at $10/mo for eternity. Which do you think will end up costing more in the long run?

Worth the convenience imo. It's not like I can get value back from digital music files.

Really, what use would I ever have of these silly walled cloud or streaming services?

Clearly YOU don't. Everyone else in the world who doesn't want to put anything near that amount of effort into it (myself included), does.

I can't be arsed with walled garden music services, or putting that amount of effort into my own collection. So not "everyone" as you claim.

What do you use to discover music?

The radio. I listen once or twice a month to find out what's new.

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