Time is funny. Time heals wounds. Time brings death.

There’s been lots of discourse online about moving back to the model of owning our own media. To go into further detail, there’s rumors going around that Spotify is bringing ads to premium subscriptions. And while I haven’t been able to find any articles online that talk about these ideas, what I did find were articles that detail that the users who were experiencing ads are actually the result of bugs. In other words, it wasn’t supposed to happen.

I’m likely to believe that this is a bug as well, but unfortunately, I wouldn’t put it past Spotify to implement something similar to what Hulu or Netflix has done. After all, customers have already gone through price hikes with Spotify in addition to all of the other streaming platforms, so a price tier change up is exactly what’s needed to fill the pockets for Daniel Elk (CEO of Spotify at the time of this post.) And because we’ve seen this before, when premium users experience ads, they’re not going to think “Oh that’s weird, I definitely shouldn’t be experiencing this”, they’re going to say “Oh fuck, it’s finally happening.”

I wrote a blog post (my first one on here!) on the topic of bringing back MP3 players and the resurgence of physical media, but as I alluded to, maintaining the players are as much of a headache as it is trying to find ways to put music on it in the first place.

But I’m going to say something that’s going to weigh heavy on anyone thinking about going back to owning our media:

Streaming services made it so convenient that going back would be so, so much worse.

Sure, it’s a giant middle finger to streaming services and I’m all for it, but do you really want to go through the trouble of finding all of your music online and having to keep it in storage somewhere?

Think about it for a second, we either had to buy the physical media and “rip” it to our drives, or download it from a shady site, usually through torrents or P2P networks. That music wasn’t guaranteed to be the actual song (and may occasionally be corrupt), was in lower quality, and could potentially bring malware to your devices.

Or alternatively, we bought it from an online store (like iTunes at the time) for $.99 per song or $8-10 per album. Which were then DRM protected and couldn’t be copied or played anywhere else.

And then going back to the storage part, where are you going to keep all of those files? What happens if you lose them?

As much as I hate to admit it, Spotify has instant access to almost all songs without the need to download anything. It streams to you instantly, is available for offline listening, and is automatically organized and filled with all metadata. You can make playlists with your favorite songs to listen to and share with friends who can listen to all the music you curated. And the algorithm (when it was better) can genuinely introduce you to amazing artists who you would not have found otherwise, except through word of mouth.

It might not be a great experience now, but it was so much worse then.

And how does it look like to integrate local media to your current personal life? For instance, I’m not super keen on the idea of carrying around 2 devices, a phone and an iPod. How do you load that music onto your phone and play it? Spotify and Apple Music apps both let you play local media (even on your phone), but you need to remember to sync it.

Perhaps you’re okay with just listening to it at home, or potentially even a mix of both. Physical and local media at home, and using streaming services when you’re out. That’s kind of how I’m doing it now. But there’s some albums that I love that aren’t available on Spotify or Apple Music for instance. I own both the vinyl and Bandcamp FLAC files for Solar Bears - Advancement, but want to be able to take it with me too.

So when subscriber numbers still hit record numbers despite price hikes, ads for paying members, punishment for password sharing, and a dwindling library, it almost seems like it’s still a better experience than downloading or streaming music and movies from websites that serves you ads every time you click somewhere on the page.

And finally, if I had to pay for every album or song I had saved on Spotify, I don’t think I would be able to afford it. That was a huge reason why I released my music for free or pay-as-you-like back during that era. I wanted more people to be able to download it for free and listen to it, than to be stuck behind a 30 second preview paywall. And I charge now for the albums knowing that a majority of people can stream it on Spotify, Apple Music, or even for free on YouTube and that the cost on BandCamp supports me or the organizations I donate the money to.

The double edged sword also cuts the wielder.

Anyway, I wanted the best of both worlds. Plex was going to be that for me considering it has support for a music library and the Plexamp app so that I can listen to my music away from home, but then Plex announced it was removing remote playback and locking it behind the Plex Pass subscription or Remote Watch pass, while also increasing costs for Plex Pass. That’s unbelievably wild to me, especially considering you host all of your own content.