Why would I give Spotify (or whoever) 120 quid a year to listen to stuff I already own?

Why would you only want to listen to what you own?

If you download from Spotify to listen offline it’s exactly the same as having your old iPod

Except the musician, with the exception of Vulfpeck, don’t get paid. Either steal music or buy it, Spotify et al are turd. And Spotify is a stupid name for anything that is not a face wash.

Stream music? I only rip from CD if its an album I want to put on my phone but nearly all my listening at home is done from the source CD or vinyl.

I may look to get a decent DAC that will allow me to put digital files through my hifi – about the only music I listen to from files stored on my computer are live dj mixes and I have a reasonable collection of them. It would be nice to be able to listen to them through my setup.

Besides which, have you heard popular music these days ? It ‘aint worth collecting anyway

That’s your problem, not musics.

I love to own music. CDs, vinyl, minidisks, mp3s. Don’t need no stinkin streaming service. My favourite thing is buying mp3s off bandcamp, sticking the money straight in to artists’ pockets.

Why collect it when you can access anything at any time?

Errm, to save £120 a year? That probably will increase rather than decrease?

My music is my music. I downloaded or burned it.

All you can eat data, smartphone, Bluetooth radio in the car, spotify radio. I’ve discovered so much music that way. happy days.

I get most of my music from Bandcamp these days.

Why would I give Spotify (or whoever) 120 quid a year to listen to stuff I already own?

your doing it wrong.

I give spotify £120 a year to listen to unlimited new tracks, download them to what ever I want, listen, throw away keep, find, discover….

Put it this way we’ve got the same bike, you use it to go to the bottom of the garden, while I’m half way around the world already.

Wordnumb, they do get paid but I agree that the royalty level should be revisited. However it’s the unstoppable future, as Moby said when he heard Thom Yorke’s views on Spotify, ‘he’s like an old man shouting at fast trains’.

If I want simplistic music for car adverts I’ll go to Moby, for wisdom look elsewhere.

When I bought my first Napalm Death cassette I hated it, it was just noise. It sat on the bookshelf, away from the rest of my music, for a couple of weeks until I forced myself to listen to it again – and eventually I heard what was going on, it wasn’t just noise. Had I streamed it I’d have switched to a different track instantly, and probably never would’ve listened to the band again, thus losing out on one of the more valuable music lessons of my life.

I don’t avoid streaming but do avoid relying on it. A lot of my listening is at airports, on the plane and while travelling abroad so no streaming. I have a Nexus so limited storage and smartphones have limited battey, love my well battered iPod classic with long battery life and all my music. I have had all sorts of Apple kit and sold it but the classic is awesome and shame it’s being retired.

Home stuff is 50/50 streamed and stored but wouldn’t like to rely on a connection to have tunes.

Why would you only want to listen to what you own?

your doing it wrong.

No, I understand for trying new stuff. I have used spotify for that. And youtube, and the radio, and so on. But streaming doesn’t cut it for me – I’ve got all my stuff in my pocket whether I’m on a plane or in the middle of nowhere or whatever.
Emsz, to steal your analogy – I wouldn’t want to go half way round the world on a rented bike that could be taken off me anytime.

kiwijohn – Member
Why collect it when you can access anything at any time?

Because you can’t… Not everything and not all the time…

emsz – Member
Will the younger generation regret they didn’t start collecting music one day?

No
I download what I want to a pod, or y’know, make my own

Hate to say this but although you are younger than most on here by a long way – you are not the ypunger generation this really applies to IMHO.

I have just started the streaming thing (Google play on 60 day trial). I am finding the quality isn’t A1, which I guess is compression based or maybe the phones audio circuit or both. The personalised radio has been mixed (this morning full of mainstream pop rubbish) which might be because it’s still learning but the one thing I cannot for the life of me work out is what happens to anything I have downloaded if I subsequently cancel my sub.

At the moment I have downloaded about ten albums to my phone (including some good recommendations from Google) so I can listen in the car. The files aren’t visible as mp3 or similar so I think they are stashed in the app itself.

I really like it but I can’t help wondering if spending a little more money on direct downloads from I tunes or amazon or whatever and owning the mp3 might be better. Could then still use the free version of play to stream from I think.

Aaaagh too complicated / confusing too much choice!

spose for me, the problem is i can spend £10 per month, find a load of decent stuff, (hear it on 6 music say), then stream an album to listen to, flit from album to album, remember old albums and bands from my youth, play them again, fall in love with them again, save them to listen to again, listen to them again, etc etc etc, but then…………you find you need to cut the household budget for some reason, or something better/cheaper comes along and BAM, everythings gone, no trace.

i see the attraction of a band just popping into your head and theres their catalogue just waiting for you to listen to again right now, but for me thats not worth £10 per month. 6 musics free and serves my needs really. and ive got all my music on a hard disk waiting to be played through my squeezebox should i so desire, but i find i never listen to it these days, its all pretty much 6 music.
i started saving all the tracks i like on the bbc playlister, hoping that in some way i could keep all that music to ‘play later’, but thats not working for me either. its all through youtube i think.

havent found exactly what suits me yet, but for now 6 musics the best for me.

Both Spotify and Deezer are a bit flakey to say the least. Spotify suffers from dementia which means that the playlist you synced to your phone isn’t there any more when you’re in the car or on a plane. Deezer used to lose the odd track, but Spotify loses entire playlists. The interfaces to both are a bit pap – they need to get someone from TomTom in to design them an interface that can be used in a car… The desktop version of Spotify is also horribly busy. And there’s no easy way that I know to transfer your music / playlists from one system to another. There’s also the number of times you listen to a track and go “this isn’t quite right”, and realise it’s because it’s the “Number 1 pop hits orchestra” cover band version.

They’re better than carrying a massive wallet of CDs around, but when you’re at home, a lot the time they’re not as good as going and pulling a CD off the shelf. This morning I had a good 15 minutes faffing around as the laptop wanted to restart for updates whilst I wanted to listen to music. Then the laptop restarted, but didn’t unpair from the speaker…

I suspect that if I were a massive geek with the latest iteration of the iThing on a £60 a month phone contract and a £1k laptop and the time and inclination to fiddle with things to keep them happy, some of these issues could probably be avoided.

The “younger generation” are far less likely to afford a house until their middle age (if they’re lucky) so are resigned to renting and inevitably moving more often. Who wants to pack up a couple of bookshelves of CDs (same goes for films, books, etc) into boxes and transport them every year or two? Likewise people are living in smaller places where you need to think more about what you have space for.

It encourages a proliferation of services where you can have you like at your fingertips but avoids the steps of buying it, then selling or giving it away after you’re done with it.

The streaming services mean that those who have wide tastes in music and an appetite for discovering new stuff have never had it so good. No limiting yourself to the couple of new CDs a month that your budget allows, no disappointment of finding that the album you bought on the strength of a radio single is full of filler. If you’re that kind of person then a spotify sub is entirely justifiable. If you sit at home listening to the same 20 albums on vinyl then no, it’s not for you.

Mainly CDs and Radio 3 here.

I did jump on the iPod bandwagon several years ago to be able to listen on the move. So I do have quite a lot of my music collection in iTunes on the mac. I can certainly see the attraction to loading everything up onto a NAS, but if I don’t feel like loading a CD I can always play from iTunes using an Airport Express plugged into the hi-fi.

I have a handful of tracks which I have bought through iTunes (where I just wanted the odd track for instance) but I couldn’t see me paying for a streaming service like Spotify. From what I’ve seen it doesn’t cater for my tastes (and I like sleeve notes too).

I still buy all my music on CD. A download just isn’t the same as far as I’m concerned. I like to have something tangible for my hard-earned.
Reckon I purchase between 6 and 10 albums a month.
Don’t buy many duff ones as you can find samples online of most albums if you think you might be taking a risk and check them out first.

Countryfile doing a feature on the woefull lack of mobile phone coverage in rural areas at the moment.

Spotify’s great for getting to listen to stuff you haven’t got but you’re curious about, or new stuff, and iTunes is great from an accessibility point of view and playlists – but for absolute quality – my CDs and vinyl are way better than plugging my PC into my hi-fi.

Diff services for diff purposes for me. As a music lover it’s great to have the choice (and not have to spend £12 on a CD to find out you don’t like it!)

Don’t forget a lot of premium streaming services you can download the tracks to your phone. I’ll often do that for new albums when planning a road trip, download it and listen in the car without using up data.

Also, if you are on a top end EE phone tariff you most likely get Deezer freee and it’s essentially the same engine as spotify so pretty good.

Why would I give Spotify (or whoever) 120 quid a year to listen to stuff I already own?

I used to spend that on CD’s every 2 months or so. So for me Spotify is actually the ‘cheaper’ option.

i still buy music if the album is particularly good, on vinyl, limited edition etc. but I won’t be going back to full time music buying any time soon.

I did buy one of those USB decks to convert vinyl to digital but boy what a faff. I did 3 albums before giving up – 1x ripping speed, manually dividing the tracks from the full side recording etc. With Spotify I can ‘mobilise’ pretty much any of my vinyl collection in a matter of seconds, and sadly the LP12 and rest of the kit hasn’t been unpacked since we moved nearly 2 years ago. 😥
Also, the music recommendations on this forum are pretty good and got me into stuff I wouldn’t normally dream of listening to.

I’ve never knowingly “streamed” my music. I play it. Whether in the car, in the house or in the rehearsal room. Of course the latter tends to be “the hard way”. You know, with other musicians 😉

I still buy all my music on CD
…
Reckon I purchase between 6 and 10 albums a month.

Good christ, really? That’s a CD every three days.

a) where are you storing them all and,

b) assuming you spend 50% of your waking time listening to music, an album is lasting you 24 hours.

A year’s Spotify subscription would pay for itself inside of a month.

Spotify Premium all the way!

Come on Luddites ditch the sound carriers and just enjoy all the music you want for £9.99 / month

Today I have mostly been listening to Shellac of North America’s Dude Incredible which, I believe, cannot be heard via any legit music streaming service. It’s very good. – Luddite.

I have really crap bandwidth when I’m away with work, and I have no desire to fill a room with physical media like I did in the old house so I’m stuck in the nether world where the 8-9gb of music on my iphone is all I have most of the time (theres about 30gb on the computer to choose from). These means I don’t hear much new music apart from the 4-5 albums I buy on CD or Itunes per year.
Effectively having so much choice has basically turned me off the whole thing.

Streaming via 3G/4G is a horrendous waste of everyones bandwidth designed to “justify” your expensive phone contracts. Get it downloaded before you go out FFS.

I have both, and that is the answer!

I “spotify” for music on the move, from my smart phone, either headphones or bluetoothed to my car. In both cases, the listening environment means the compressed format and poor audio components are less noticeable.

For “Proper” listening, i have my CD collection loss-lessly archived onto a hard drive, that i stream to my seperates system using a high quality DAC with balanced RCA outputs. The step up in quality and sound staging is extremely noticeable, and makes listening to albums so much more real and engaging 😉

The issue is that youngsters today think everything is available to stream. Rubbish. Your all very wrong. There’s lots of stuff you cant stream and I m not paying for the pleasure of streaming. If I own it I ain’t paying for it again. I have many gigs of music on my iPhone of great obscure music, and love it.

The issue is that youngsters today think everything is available to stream

There’s a HELL of a lot more available to stream than there ever was in any record shop I inhabited as a teenager.

_tom_ – Member
I’ll resist streaming for as long as possible or until it becomes consistent enough. I prefer having my “own” digital copy that I can play anywhere without needing a connection. I tend to buy the CD then rip it, then at least I have a hard copy. I don’t get good enough signal in the car to stream everything either.

I value quality as well, streaming music doesn’t tend to be great.

PS everyone should watch this

Good watch, thanks for posting. It sums up the debate quite nicely in the middle – you get a huge amount of variety and choice available via streaming, but the quality isn’t great.

Must agree that not everything is available to stream, theres more than a few times I’ve found albums (Clutch) or even entire bands missing (Crystal Method [shut up!] & AC/DC) from Spotify and that’s just the obvious stuff I can remember.

Currently rocking an ancient iRiver H120 with it’s stock 20gb HDD and questionable battery. Going to upgrade when I get the chance to an SSD and new battery for future proofing.

Good watch, thanks for posting. It sums up the debate quite nicely in the middle – you get a huge amount of variety and choice available via streaming, but the quality isn’t great.

I get more than I own, at better high quality and when I want it. I’m also not tied to “My Music” and will happily stick the radio on and discover something new. I can download streams to my phone and listen to what I want when I want. I’ve never felt lost because I was unable to play a specific track at any moment in time.

In the end choice is great, those who want to stream can and we can get a huge variety and see if we like it before shelling out for an album or we can listen to stuff that we would never buy but hear a couple of times. If you don’t want to stream then thats great for you.

If you don’t want to stream then thats great for you.

Thanks, I know.

In conclusion then, some people stream everything, some people stream sometimes, some people buy/download their music and don’t stream.

Anyone had their mind changed by this thread? (I haven’t)

Like you I love the fact I have my ENTIRE CD collection in my pocket and can go anywhere with it.

I didn’t realise they were finally stopping the Classic.

Only 64GB on the best iPod Touch and a lot more expensive too. 🙁

…there’s no way I’m trusting everything to someone else’s infrastructure…
…As it happens, most of the time I’m listening to 6Music

Erm… 😯 😆

Cougar wrote:

Good christ, really? That’s a CD every three days.

a) where are you storing them all and,

b) assuming you spend 50% of your waking time listening to music, an album is lasting you 24 hours.

A year’s Spotify subscription would pay for itself inside of a month.

I’ve got a load of shelves and drawers full. Finding time to do them all justice is the hard part. (But I do have music playing almost all the time I’m in the house and awake – and I rip new albums to my pc at work, so I can play them there too.)
I tend to keep new albums in CD wallets so they’re easy to grab.

I’ll admit I do have a bit of an addiction – I’ll buy the odd album I don’t like for the sake of completeness. 😳

maxtorque – Member
For “Proper” listening, i have my CD collection loss-lessly archived onto a hard drive, that i stream to my seperates system using a high quality DAC with balanced RCA outputs

What do you use to stream from the hard drive to the DAC?