This newsletter has a paid tier that, in my humble opinion, is awesome. If you subscribe you’ll get my (slightly) longer essays on urbanism and technology, which go out once every two weeks or so. The most recent post was about how Google Maps alters our perception of places and bifurcates cities into “interesting” and “boring” areas.
When I tossed my CD collection, I ripped all the music first. Lately I’ve been buying more digital music despite having an Amazon Music subscription. Eventually this will all go on a NAS with a Plex server for streaming.
"I may have forsaken ownership of any music media in exchange for access to infinitely more of it via streaming, but it’s still nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which that faucet is turned off, even though the internet’s relatively short history offers little evidence that anything is even close to permanent."
Every once in a while I have a moment of panic, wondering "what if?" It's certainly possible that Spotify (or Tidal, or whoever) could vanish, but I'm relatively certain I could rebuild most of my collection- it'd take forever, but it's not impossible. In the meantime, the value proposition you've laid out here is exactly what keeps me on platforms I might not otherwise engage with. I don't have the space--literally or physically-- for the amount of music I currently have on playlists, liked records, etc.
The downside is needing to reconcile that with the idea that they host artists, podcasters, etc. I might not agree with. But we make those same decisions all the time (Twitter, Substack, etc.).
When I tossed my CD collection, I ripped all the music first. Lately I’ve been buying more digital music despite having an Amazon Music subscription. Eventually this will all go on a NAS with a Plex server for streaming.
"I may have forsaken ownership of any music media in exchange for access to infinitely more of it via streaming, but it’s still nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which that faucet is turned off, even though the internet’s relatively short history offers little evidence that anything is even close to permanent."
Every once in a while I have a moment of panic, wondering "what if?" It's certainly possible that Spotify (or Tidal, or whoever) could vanish, but I'm relatively certain I could rebuild most of my collection- it'd take forever, but it's not impossible. In the meantime, the value proposition you've laid out here is exactly what keeps me on platforms I might not otherwise engage with. I don't have the space--literally or physically-- for the amount of music I currently have on playlists, liked records, etc.
The downside is needing to reconcile that with the idea that they host artists, podcasters, etc. I might not agree with. But we make those same decisions all the time (Twitter, Substack, etc.).