Streaming regret

I properly tried music streaming a few years back — never fell in love with it. Only after a while I was able to pinpoint my unease: it implies delegating music to a distant corporation’s silo, creating a huge waste of broadband.

I’ve always been in control of curating music so I jumped out of that wagon, going back to having a local music repository.

The moral is always the same: when you fully subscribe to an ecosystem or a third-party entity who takes away full control over your files, you become dependent on a corporation whose core business is money, not your interests. Where the money goes, the business goes, along with — in this case — all your music.

This post is inspired by a quote found on Hacker News months ago. It’s centered around Google Play Music, but the concept extends to all the music streaming players.

I was a Google play music user for the entire life of the service. Lots of playlists, play history, ratings, etcetera. All of that is gone now. I tried multiple different apps to convert my playlists and library to Apple Music and even the official conversion to YouTube music but they all messed up my library and filled up with songs with similar names that are completely different genres and artists. Some music didn’t carry over at all and I have a vague sense that my playlists are not complete but no idea what’s missing. And while I liked the user interface of Google play music, I hate the interface of YouTube music and I’m not a fan of the interface of Apple Music. I lost control over how I play my music. I regret jumping on the streaming music bandwagon a decade ago. OkGoDoIt

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