That is an ongoing concern of mine

Good points.

It's hard to pin this down into any single one argument, because it's honestly a conversation about myriad things at once. It's not just about music sharing, but about the internet and its implications on all of us, and the actual world that we live in morphing into something else entirely because of it.

The spirit of limitless sharing of any media, and the luxury of discovering obscure rabbitholes you never would never have been able to arrive at otherwise, in itself of course is special and amazing.

I guess my real gripe is more about the internet as a lifestyle, and how - if you allow it - it can and absolutely will devalue almost anything you consume through it. Humans have limited bandwidth, and the constant stream of distraction and endless selection that the internet provides can easily render things a lot less meaningful and special. Especially music. Digesting a record is an entirely different experience in pre and post-internet times.

Plus that point you touched on (nicely) - when you had to actually put in the effort to attain something you cared about, it dug deeper you into it, and it ended up having a greater personal significance. You had to make a certain sacrifice, and that made it far more meaningful than simply uh, just clicking on it. Also, Shitty VHS, warbling mix tapes - in an isolated environment, without immediate possibility to download endless other perfect copies, those archaic mediums had something oddly personal about them. Your copy was fucked up and warped, but in one particular way that only you really knew.

Yes, I fully recognize that some of this is just romanticization of days long gone. Nostalgia is always stupid and useless unless you're the one who feels it.

I guess I'm also lamenting how the internet shifted before our eyes from this semi-private haven only people in the know ever really bothered to access (1999), to this wild, uber ugly neo-neighborhood festering with ads incessantly trying to sell you shit anywhere you turn, and endless cookie permission requests forever promising you that UR PRIVACY IS OUR TOP PRIORRITY, and entire communities dedicated to outrage porn, yadda yadda yadda. Somewhere along the line the internet became something I'm really not on board with almost at all, and almost exclusively butt my head into to get what I need and GTFO.

Spotify (and netflix and tons of other stuff, for that matter), justifiably or not, tie into that sort of lifestyle for me; that added irrelevant noise, and over-abundance that takes away focus; a now streamlined ubiquity of distracting, gluttonous approach to being a viewer/listener that places limitless selection over actually fully truly absorbing and plunging into any one thing.

Instead of coming on board with all those supercalifragilisticexpialidocious easy services that take you down their particular curated road, I just enjoy doing my own exploration instead, and basically using the internet like it's 1999 with better download speeds. I'm still here, aren't I?

I do think it really sucks that a streaming service like Netflix will dump, without exaggeration, like thirty "Netflix original" movies and series on its platform every month, throw a trailer up on YouTube for each, and that's it -- things they know might be big will get more of a push, and will show up on the, what would you call it, "front page" when you first sign in, but otherwise that shit just sinks to the bottom of the ocean without any marketing or any chance of it becoming popular and is never heard from again

Everything is treated as disposable and it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy

And on the audience side, the corollary to that is, even if something proves to be an enormous hit, it sticks in the collective consciousness for like a week tops before everybody stops discussing it and moves on to the next piece of content

Art has definitely become devalued

On the nostalgia note, I did find it pretty hard to finally delete my Mashed Potatoes RealAudio files, years after they were rendered unplayable by the collapse of that platform

RealAudio kinda sucked back in its "heyday" too tho didn't it

i do kinda low-key kinda miss "Wimamp skins" tho, even if only as a concept

pretty sure my last skin was a Chocolate Starfish & the Hotdog Flavored Water theme and you know what music just hasn't been quite as good since

i'd make a formal request to Spotify to employ a skin feature of their own but, you know, they've got about a hundred other things to get to before that so i guess i'll just print out the Chocolate Starfish artwork & tape it to my phone & computer screen in the meantime

absolutely. i hate how the netflix paradigm caters towards 'binge watching' as well. i cannot process that much new plot and story and character development for hours on end. that's like cramming for an exam; no idea how people do it.

when shows are on 'standard' TV, one new episode a week, you can actually speculate and anticipate and discuss and overall have more fun than some wankoff 'i watched a whole season in 1 night!'

I binged all three seasons of Avatar in like literally two days and it was a spectacular wankaton.


You guys need to open your minds. "Devalues art" lolololol GET FUCKED>

LOL TRUE TRUE FOOLFA

I can just imagine a couple of Sumerian yokels loosing their shit

OMG OMG reading an ENTIRE PAPYRUS SCROLL it's like taking in ten CUNIFORM CLAY TABLETS AT ONCE



OH NO MY ART IS DEVALUED



AHAHA GET FUCKED!!!

in other news I just learned how to scan qr codes with my mom's phone

brief thread summary

I could have sworn I piped in on this thread back in it's heyday, but guess not.

I have recently caved and pay for the Amazon streaming service. Mainly went with that one because it runs higher stream quality than the other guys do, and the price is right about the same point. But the app freaking sucks, so I might just cave and go for the Apple Music route.

I will always prefer physical media, but my issue is portability. Nothing busts my chops more than wanting to listen to an album, thinking you can, and then you're out somewhere remotely away from cell towers and it starts taking a shit on ya.

I like to ride my bike, and often am out there for hours on end. Today I threw on two albums that I had on my iPhone - both added from my anally retentively organized iTunes library, ripped from CDs in lossless. (I know, bluetooth degrades it, plus on a bike, can you really hear the difference? No, probably not, but might as well have them at max resolution)

Anyways: I decided to toss on the new self-titled My Morning Jacket record. Which is great, by the way. I get to a great downhill section of my ride, the part I had been riding towards for hours: fire up "Complex". It's playing fine, then just decides to go hard stop outta nowhere. I fumble for the headphone remote button, hit play, and it does nothing. Again. It then restarts for some reason. I wasn't in the middle of nowhere or anything... just a few miles out of town.

That's my main beef with it: you depend on it. It works great. Then, like all tech, right when you need/want it the worst, it just doesn't.

CD ripped down to ALAC all damn day for the stuff that you really want to have.

i keep seeing people over and over write these annoying posts like 'oh i wish please would X come to fucking spotify'

like, why do you use a service that treats you like such shit? any reason they have is definitely complete fucking shit

At this point there aren't a ton of options, though. Physical copies of music aren't the go-to anymore. Of course record stores and online shopping exist, but it isn't people's first method now.

Owning movies is still the best comparison. Like when Netflix doesn't have the show or movie you want, you're not really going to go buy the DVD or box set. You'll just sigh and watch something else. This is true even though you can still find DVDs at Walmart, Target, etc which can't be said for CDs.

I buy physical albums and digital downloads to support the artist directly , and I rip cds still. If I'm going to pay money for music, it's going to the artist as much as possible, not the company that lives off of those artists' backs and pays them a pittance.

Spotify is a useful tool that I occasionally use to find new bands. Nothing more.

I also appreciate those rare occasions where I can sit down with an lp and look over the lyrics and art.

because it's not the service, lol. they don't give a shit what's on there provided it's not some goofy "45 minutes of silence to boost our numbers" shit like Vulfpeck or whoever did back in the day. if something's not on Spotify, it's down to either the artist, the label, or some fine print legality. fortunately we are all still very much able to keep a local library of stuff not on streaming right there alongside it

i mean fuck, I still have a handful of CDs in the car for when I just don't feel like fiddling around for Spotify on my phone etc but it's such a supplement to all that, especially considering how most of us were "doing" music in the 2000s

Man, I miss this. The booklet used to be a big part of the, I guess, aesthetic I formed in my head as an impression of an album. Seeing just a tiny cover image on my phone isn't remotely the same.