What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies?

[George K]

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/spotify-streaming-music-library/619453/

If your entire collection is on a streaming service, good luck accessing it in 10 or 20 years.

The first time I remember shopping for music was at a Best Buy one day in 2001. I came home with two CDs: the Baha Men’s Who Let the Dogs Out and the pop compilation Now That’s What I Call Music! 5.

Each of those albums cost more than a month of streaming does today, which reflects all that happened to music listening in the intervening 20 years—Napster and LimeWire, iPods and iPhones, Spotify and TikTok. Every decade I’ve been alive, a new format has ascended. Tapes were displaced in the 1990s by CDs, which were displaced in the 2000s by mp3s, which were displaced in the 2010s by streaming. Now, instead of buying music, people rent it.

Just as remarkable as this rate of change is how useless previous iterations of my music library are today—my first iPod is unresponsive, and I have no idea where my poor Baha Men CD is. Losing some of that music has felt like severing lines of communication with versions of my former self, in the sense that hearing even a snippet of an old song can conjure up a first kiss, a first drive, or less articulable memories of inner life.

The music I’ve salvaged from earlier times is now part of my collection on Spotify, which I’ve been using since it launched in the United States, 10 years ago this month. But as I look back on the churn of the past couple of decades, I feel uneasy about the hundreds of playlists I’ve taken the time to compile on the company’s platform: 10 or 20 years from now, will I be able to access the music I care about today, and all the places, people, and times it evokes?

Unfortunately, the experts on media preservation and the music industry whom I consulted told me that I have good reason to fear ongoing instability. “You’re screwed,” said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, after I asked him if I could count on having my music library decades from now.

The reason I’m screwed is that Spotify listeners’ ability to access their collection in the far-out future will be contingent on the company maintaining its software, renewing its agreements with rights holders, and, well, not going out of business when something else inevitably supplants the current paradigm of music listening. (Kahle sees parallel preservation problems with other forms of digital media that exist on corporate platforms, such as ebooks and streaming-only movies.)

[Jolly]

Vinyl is final.

[Loki]

So many concepts to think about.

My first reaction is well I bought records, 8 tracks, cassettes, CD’s, download to iPod and then streaming services so I never really owned the music anyway. Sure I can haul it all up inconveniently on any of those devices but I in fact didn’t.

Other thoughts go to the nature of impermanence, and what is the balance of what part of the past I should be thinking about versus the present and the future.

On that note, back to the present, where I can actually live.

[Doctor Phibes]

There are more ways to access music now than there has ever been in history. Also, the ability to access pretty much any piece of recorded music you can think of is unparalleled. Worrying about whether you actually own it or not seems a bit daft.

[George K]

@doctor-phibes said in What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies?:

Also, the ability to access pretty much any piece of recorded music you can think of is unparallele

And the ability to transfer your preferences from one ecosystem to another is pretty easy too. Playlists are just databases, and moving from service to another is trivial, so when Spotify goes tits-up, you'll still have access by transferring your lists.

I got rid of all my CDs and LPs years ago.

[Doctor Phibes]

The funniest part of the article is the guy is writing as though he's this storied old veteran of the music-buying public, but he bought his first music in 2001.