Like Tears in Rain
Recently, when I get up in the morning with the young lad and go downstairs to do the morning routine, we hang out in the living room, playing with toys and crawling around. And while doing so, I’ll put on some music. Sometimes, since we’re sitting next to the record collection, we’ll listen to whatever catches his little eyes and he pulls off the shelf.
This has given me good reason to notice things in the collection I might not think about often. Is this a sign I should maybe unload some records? Probably, but this is not about that. This is about what you own.
The Golden Age of Streaming
As a music fan, I welcomed streaming with unbridled enthusiasm when Spotify landed in the US. And why wouldn’t you? Vast catalogs of music available instantly, on a whim, without having to shell out a ton of money or resort to piracy. What’s not to love?
Well, putting aside the very real issue of the dramatic shift in how much the actual artists are paid for their work, all of a sudden, access to the music you love is not guaranteed.
Back to the record shelves, there are a number of albums I found are no longer available on Spotify, Apple Music, and the like: Rockets on Wire’s I Am Not Your Home, either Criaturas LP, Deskonocidos’ En La Oscuridad, Foreign Objects’ No Sensation. I could go on. I get why stuff drops off; bands and labels go defunct, and someone needs to care to keep this stuff online.
Thankfully, for some of these, I own the physical copies. For others, like the Rockets on Wire album, it was only ever a digital release; thankfully there’s Bandcamp, where you can purchase actual downloads of albums. But with the shuffling of that site between owners over the past few years, who’s to say how long it’ll be around?
Another fun one I’ve run into, licensing differences between countries. Recently in a Music League round, one member submitted a Front 242 song that’s not available to stream in the US. So sadly, no one got to actually experience their song unless they had access to the remix album it was released on.
The Old Ways Never Die
All of this is to implore you, if you love music, get those downloaded MP3s or FLAC or your format of choice, and at least toss them on an external hard drive you almost never use. Even if you don’t actually listen to your local copies often, have them for if and when one of these services goes belly-up, or the artist gets into a dispute and pulls their catalog, or any number of reasons the content might vanish from the platform.
And I’m not saying piracy is the way! (But not for nothing, Sophie’s Floorboard is still out there fighting the good fight) So many artists offer downloads for purchase. Bandcamp is still a great platform for supporting the musicians you love. If you’re really keeping some old tech around, buying and ripping CDs is a viable option! (bless you)
We definitely do live in a golden age where we have more access to more interesting, different, heretofore unthinkably vast amount of media. But that access is easy to take for granted. So don’t.