Spotify

Ah well, where does one even start? :)

eC0$ysTem

And yes I just have to start getting out.

To echo some above posts, what are the realistic alternatives? I say realistic, meaning it can’t be buying used CDs and ripping MP3s because I don’t have a computer or the time to do that now I’m in my 40s with kids. Gone are the days of Soulseek and my big iRiver MP3 player, or the best thing I’ve ever owned, a MiniDisc player.
I’m driving today for 5 hours and want to line up several albums. Bluetooth, no CD player. What am I using if not Spotify or Apple?

Radio 2. I hope you like Mariah Carey

Buying mp3s via Bandcamp and either playing directly from there, or setting up Plex and using plexamp is the solution I’ve settled on.

I do use Bandcamp for smaller stuff. Never heard of Plex.
I can’t stand any music radio

Your options on a car journey are

1. Streaming
   
2. Own your own digital media (bandcamp etc/digitised physical)
   
3. Radio (eg NTS, Fip, KEXP)
   

You can use Plex to stream music you own to your phone (and many other things). The catch is that you have to set up a server. Which can be a computer in your home, but it works best on a NAS.

Just cut your losses and if there's anything you can't get in analogue recordings, buy 3-for-£1 CDs in charity shops.

Yeah, and then I can record them onto C90s and get one of them newfangled Walkman things. Or maybe just learn all the songs and hum themselves to myself as go about my business.

Eh? You do realise that people listen to music from this century as well. 50% of musicians I listen to have never printed anything to CD.

Any decent instructional I can follow? I already store in a NAS.

Then they're just part of the problem and will have some way to go to understand it.

I’m also buying stuff off bandcamp and Amazon music when I can’t find it there. Have pretty much stopped using iTunes for anything apart from playing old playlists on my phone and hopefully migrating those playlists over to plex, once I get it back up and running and the cd collection ripped - which is taking forever, because it’s a boring boring job.
Use my missus Spotify account liking songs, liking playlists and then using that likes list to go download that song whether legally - bandcamp, amazon music etc, or illegally using ripping an mp3 from YouTube.
Having my own library of music independent of Spotify (and their algorithm/licensing issues - songs tend to disappear/be unplayable on there every so often)) feels really important. As a way of discovering songs from new artists, Spotify still does a decent job for me, but I’m doing less searching for new things and more listening to old things currently. #dadlife

2025 is the year of minidisc for me

Sure Oliver, it’s all so easy isn’t it. How did all these indie musicians not think of it?
Just print millions of CD’s

No, record analogue and make analogue records. Forget digital, it's an evolutionary dead end for music. Fortunately, more and more musicians are realising this and there are now many more studios with analogue capabilities again.

I'm not a fan of CDs, but they are still better than 'streaming' services.

@Oliver Schick CD seems like a strange hill to choose. IMO the worst music format.
My children have access to virtually all recorded music through Spotify and Youtube for a monthly family £20. I had a handful of tapes and LPs when I was 14. An LP was £5 and a CD £10.
The good old days.

Edit to add.. the ability to record and distribute music on a home PC is a wonderful thing.

I mean, that's patently ridiculous. Most of my listening now is from youtube and soundcloud because the stuff I listen to can't be found on vinyl and even if it is available it would cost a fucking fortune to buy it and play it.

I have a large vinyl and CD collection in another country, the CDs are ripped so I can listen to them anywhere. Vinyl will probably never get done. I have illicit copies of stuff but anything I find I can can buy I'll buy either legit physical media and rip it or buy digital versions of it (beatport, bandcamp). DJ sets generally don't exist in any form other than tape or digital.

I've got great pleasure from recording a collection of DJ sets to tape and then uploading to youtube and it's clear that a lot of other people have also derived great pleasure from hearing these sets again, based on the comments.

I don't like Spotify but I'm not shitting on all the streaming options.

There is actually a Plex thread on here, though it is mostly people swapping movies.
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/291067/

It’s pretty easy to set up. I think I just followed the guide here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200288586-installation/
Though it was a few years ago.

Then install Plexamp on your phone. You don’t need to install Plexamp I don’t think, but it makes streaming music a lot slicker.

@Oliver Schick CD seems like a strange hill to choose. IMO the worst music format.

I'm certainly not advocating CDs. All I'm saying is they're better than 'streaming'. That doesn't mean they're good. I really only brought it up because I will buy them at 3 for £1.

My children have access to virtually all recorded music through Spotify and Youtube for a monthly family £20. I had a handful of tapes and LPs when I was 14. An LP was £5 and a CD £10.

The mainstream music business has always dramatically overcharged for its products. When I was young, LPs were generally 20 marks and CDs usually 30, so mostly unaffordable to me on pocket money. Obviously, it was far too expensive and restricted access to music even to adults. We home-taped off the radio all the time. I was in the HMV in Oxford Street again the other day and the going rate for LPs with digital signals pressed into them now seems to be £35-40. Er, no. Just exploitative nonsense.

The real issue is (again) analogue vs. digital, with digital being vastly inferior technology for aesthetic purposes, as it strips music of the impact that good analogue recordings have (and there have certainly been many rubbish analogue recordings). Most people don't understand (any more) how much digitisation destroys the sound of music (I mean, you just get von Trapped in digital), although you meet more and more younger people who do.

I well remember all the propaganda about the supposedly superior digital sound that started when I was about 13 and people were ditching their LP collections so the music industry could sell them inferior CDs at higher prices, just like it's now hoping to sell people crap vinyl records all over again at ridiculous prices, because, hey man, it's all about 'vinyl'.

The good old days.

Not me, I have very little nostalgia about anything.

Edit to add.. the ability to record and distribute music on a home PC is a wonderful thing.

Well, sure, but it's crap ersatz. It's just not a good idea to value 'convenience' over quality.

No ones disagreeing with you about the streaming issue. I just find it odd that you think the solution is analogue.

More and more musicians might be going back to physical media, but it’s still a heavier burden to invest in that than digital music.
I still buy my music in digital form in high quality.
I neither have the space or inclination to store 10 tonnes of vinyl or CD’s

@Samuelson this is fantastic. Thank you. To access it all from anywhere at anytime is wild!

No ones disagreeing with you about the streaming issue.

Well, I've got a mild issue with @Oliver Schick parodying hisself by insisting on referring to it as 'streaming'.

So, general consensus seems to be that there's no actual practical alternative to Spotify other than carving your own wax cylinders, which sucks.

Well I dunno how much music he actually listens to on a daily basis so it’s my fault.

Whomever is on this thread is somewhat uneasy about the current structure of music consumption, but I see little point in blaming musicians or making people trawl 3 for 1 CD’s at a shop.

@Oliver Schick I’m sorry but you currently sound like ‘old man shaking fist at sky’. The analogue vs digital debate is flogging a dead horse. 320 or FLAC is just fine. Most people couldn’t tell you the difference. People want to listen to and enjoy music, not debate the nuances of ‘warm sound’ on vinyl. Move on.

How’s that HMV vinyl section since I used to manage it 20 years ago?

This is great info, I haven't been able to stream my own music since Google Music turned into YouTube Music and then wanted to charge me a monthly fee for access to my own files. Isn't progress amazing?

Didn't check the second page earlier. Replying to both posts in one:

No ones disagreeing with you about the streaming issue. I just find it odd that you think the solution is analogue.

Plenty of past discussion here, not very focused, though.

https://www.lfgss.com/comments/15213828/

It's not a 'solution' for all ills, e.g. people who don't really listen to music and only want to play a silly dance beat on their mobile phone still won't care. That's fine, but unfortunately the stampede for convenience usually diminishes quality.

More and more musicians might be going back to physical media, but it’s still a heavier burden to invest in that than digital music.
I still buy my music in digital form in high quality.

See below.

Well I dunno how much music he actually listens to on a daily basis so it’s my fault.

A *lot*. It's also not a purely personal interest.

Whomever is on this thread is somewhat uneasy about the current structure of music consumption, but I see little point in blaming musicians or making people trawl 3 for 1 CD’s at a shop.

@Oliver Schick I’m sorry but you currently sound like ‘old man shaking fist at sky’. The analogue vs digital debate is flogging a dead horse. 320 or FLAC is just fine. Most people couldn’t tell you the difference. People want to listen to and enjoy music, not debate the nuances of ‘warm sound’ on vinyl. Move on.

No, that's just because you don't know the difference I'm talking about. I used not to, either, it had to be shown to me. I don't think I would have noticed on my own. Digitisation cuts off the top and bottom end of the signal and dirties it. A single digital step is enough to ruin a recording process. The so-called 'clean' CD sound is merely stripped of a crucial aesthetic quality. It took me a few goes to hear it, but once you do, you understand. You then also realise that it's not actually a subtle difference, and that no matter what the 'resolution' of a digital file, it is impossible for it to emulate this quality. The upshot is that digital recording is aesthetically impoverished and people have been being short-changed by a naïve futurism in jettisoning a very advanced technology for one that's jolly useful in a number of ways (such as ubiquitous proliferation), but poor in the main core respect.

The 'warm sound on vinyl' stuff is obviously nonsense. It's people fetishising the physical material over the underlying recording quality, e.g. trying to improve the sound of digitised sources by pressing them on vinyl. Vinyl and magnetic tape only happen to be the two main reproduction media we have so far found for analogue sound. There's every possibility that better ones could yet be found, just like shellac was replaced after a couple of decades (still loads of scratched 78s in charity shops), but what's important is the quality of the underlying recording. I'm not sure why the various mentions above didn't make it clear what I think of putting digital files on LPs? Obviously, following the Great Bonfire of the Master Tapes, the mainstream music industry is just a wee bit fuxored when it comes to reissuing many of its greatest hits in a proper format, so let's try to pull the wool over people's eyes and sell them overpriced stuff in poor quality again ...

One of my favourite signs ever was in the previous incarnation of HMV in that same shop: 'Upstairs: Music and Vinyl'. It always makes me laugh to think of it. Sadly, they don't have it any more (probably in part because music and vinyl are now downstairs). To think about 'vinyl' first is a superficial misunderstanding, however nice that packaging or the strawberry-shaped neon ultramarine glittery coloured vinyl wotsit might be.

How’s that HMV vinyl section since I used to manage it 20 years ago?

Have you not been there yet? Most of that new HMV shop seems to be a tat shop. The ground floor is 100% awful. Records are in the basement, and that's where you see the glory of £40 LPs, and I'm sure I could have found much more expensive ones if I'd tried. Compared to the old HMVs, it's tiny, a very small selection, and pretty sad. It also tries to do that 'let's make it look like a small independent record shop, with untidy hand-scrawled signs and errything' thing. I haven't bought anything there yet apart from a drastically reduced copy of Dave Davies' memoir. Not impressed, but I wouldn't know the first thing about running such a business when yes, if people are interested in LPs, it's probably just for 'warm sound on vinyl'.