Spotify

[thejuice]

Did it ever annoy you that your music collection, that you might have spent 1000s on in your lifetime, was suddenly deemed worthless overnight by the industry, with the founding of Spotify?

edit: changed record to music

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

I got rid of my record collection years ago the quality was not there. quality of sound more important to me them the sound itself I doubt spotify will improve that.

 

[Outdated]

I never had a record collection. I started with audio cassetttes and changed to CDs in the late 80s. I digitised my collection in the early 2000s and got rid of all the discs.

I'm also very sensitive to quality of sound and anything I could find on the net was of very low quality, reduced bit rate for the sake of smaller file sizes. So I ripped all my own copies from CDs at 320 Kbps for the sake of quality. I've got quite a large library on my computer, around 7000 CDs.

I've never used Spotify or any other streaming service for music.

 

[thejuice]

Wish id ripped my cds, as quite a few are scratched

 

[Outdated]

Wish id ripped my cds, as quite a few are scratched

Rip them while you still can. Not sure what program you'd use for that in Windows, in Linux I used Grip. Really good error correction and recovery in it, it tries to read the troublesome parts 128 times over before giving up on them. It's surprising what can be recovered.

A new CD/DVD player is a smart idea too, as they age they get more sensitive to errors on discs.

 

[Rocco]

I don’t feel my music collection has less value since streaming music. A lot of the records and cds I had as a kid and young man now cost the same if not multiples more than then.
The convenience of having hundreds of songs on my phone is fantastic, but unless I am on the go or at work, I strongly prefer physical media like records or cds.

 

[Jumpinbare]

I spend too much time in remote locations with weak or non-existent internet connections, so a streaming music service would be of little use to me. I can listen to my own digital music anywhere, regardless of wireless data quality/availability, so Spotify has not affected the value of my collection in any way whatsoever.

 

[FilterFreq]

I used to buy quite a lot of physical media, tapes, CDs, MP3s and all sorts of stuff prior to the streaming takeover. Honestly, I ended up giving away a ton of it (well, the physical stuff) to others for free and felt wonderful about lightening the load.

I started digitizing my music and listening to MP3s as early as 2005, so I was ready to just pay a monthly fee and listen to everything without having to buy second hand CDs or find alternatives earlier than most. I think the idea of physical media fading out didn't bother me much from the start, so it was an easy transition.

A lot of things depreciate, though. What matters is the value you got out of it, IMO. If you spent $1,000+ on music like a lot of us did, you probably had a great collection to listen to when physical media was nearly all we had. None of that is wasted at all!

 

[Raggamuffin]

I quit Spotify in the first year or so of release. Back before I quit you could buy songs on there. I think they were only 320kb/s MP3.

Soon as that feature went I stopped using it. I have to own my music.

I've spent thousands on digital music and tens of thousands of hours collecting tens of thousands of songs.

Still got a backlog of just over 14,000 songs left to listen to and categorise etc.

I'm now moving my favourite songs across to WAV format. And ripping CDs in FLAC.

Eventually I hope to one day be able to afford a high end sound system.

I use Bandcamp and Juno Download a lot for WAV music files of electronic and underground genres that I favour.

Streaming is pointless in my world.

Ed

 

[Outdated]

There's also the issue that a lot of the music in my collection isn't exactly well known and you won't find it on streaming services like Spotify. If you didn't buy the disc at the time then it's likely you'll never get to hear it.

 

[saturnv]

I ripped all my cds to the lossless FLAC format quite a while ago too. I don't trust any streaming service to continue to exist, so I think it is important to keep my own copies.

I do use the Apple Music streaming service though. It is useful for discovering new music to listen to. It even has a playlist that automatically comes up with stuff I might like. I briefly considered Spotify, but it has an abysmal privacy policy. Apple's basically says they will not share data about with me with anyone, while Spotify is the opposite.