@gordoooo_z
I'm not a hardcore vynil fan myself, I'm more of a CD type, but I still thought this would happen. I grew up when all three: vynils, CDs and cassettes, were in use, then MP3s appeared and I knew this will take over and vynils will stay as most aesthetically pleasing. Still prefer the CDs as you don't have to turn them over that often 🤣
Good point though! I think streaming is the worst in this regard, no toxic materials, but transmission needs more power.

@m0xee in the case of streaming, it's the worst because everybody wins esxcept for the artist. For all the democratization of the music industry, in that you can pretty much go it on your own, and find your niche as long as you can whip up a quick website or bandcamp, and handle your socials, the sad fact is that 250,000 streams a month won't necessarily even feed you, let alone keep a roof over your head. Your only hope is live shows, merch, and hopefully bandcamp sales.

@m0xee I do like vinyl, but I grew up on CDs, and once I was getting really into music, well it was mainly a beautifully curated iTunes library. Honestly, I miss my iTunes library more than anything. I have about half of it recovered from an old iPod, and the rest of it (the other 75GB or so) all but died when I dropped my hard drive. The best I could do was recovery the folder structure, which means I do have artists and album names in a text file, but it's going to be a huge...

@m0xee ...undertaking to get it all back. Also I feel shittier about piracy than I did as a teenager with no money, lol. But to be entirely honest, I feel even shittier giving Spotify my money.

Back then, I spent nothing and stole everything, but artists were still making their income on CD sales. Now I've spent the past decade funding the system that killed physical media sales, and that pays artists less per stream every year, because the reality is, it's as profitable a...

@m0xee ...business model as Uber is, which is to say not profitable at all once the VC money stops coming in.

@m0xee apologies for the tangent, lmao

@gordoooo_z Despite having unlimited data plan almost all the time I never got into streaming 🤷
It's not audio quality or the internet connection requirement, I just somehow don't get it. I have a 200 Gb SD card in my phone filled mostly with music and most of the internal storage is used for audio too. This includes my extensive CD collection encoded to FLAC format. That's a lot of music for all possible moods, it never gets old 😁

@m0xee yeah, I definitely get that. For me it kind of happened by accident. My buddy spilled a beer on my computer the last year of high school, and then I was on a shitty laptop for a bit, and then I discovered Grooveshark, which was kind of a stopgap, and then I just got used to it I guess? I can't deny that I'm spoiled by having ommediate access to whatever I want to hear right damn now, but it's not like torrenting an album took more than 20min back then (and now it's more like...

@m0xee ...20 seconds).

My biggest reason for wanting to cancel Spotify (aside from aforementioned moral qualms) is that the more time passes, the more gaps I find in my mental rolodex of every album or song I've ever heard. I used to be so meticulous about tagging, and sorting and organizing, and getting the correct album cover (no reissues, no deluxe editions unless that's what I had), and when I wanted to hear something, I could recall it like 🫰 that!

That was my equivalent of...

@m0xee ...a shelf full of LPs, or a stack of CDs. The thing is, I've grown my "collection" since then way more rapidly than I ever did the old way, but I don't necessarily have it at my fingertips like that, metaphorically speaking, even though I literally do (somewhere in my liked songs).

I don't know that I'll ever collect all of it once I do make the jump, but at least I'll have an exported XML I can refer to, and knowing me, I'll probably build some sort of web app for myself...

@m0xee ...and link it up with some API to make it browseable, for when I do want to start.

Idk, it's a tough proposition, because I have music on at all times when I'm working, which is often well over 12 hrs a day, so there it'll have to be a slow transition.

Aaaaand another tangent. I do that, lol.

@gordoooo_z
> Aaaaand another tangent. I do that, lol.
Don't worry about it! I open the last reply and read all of them in correct order in the original thread.
I'm into longer posts myself, but have to split them into 500 character parts on this instance quite often — they do look like finished and self-sufficient replies most of the time, but in fact are longer ones split apart by skillful cutting and pasting 😁

@m0xee Can't say I go in with quite that much forethough 😁

@gordoooo_z Yes, this! Also — concept albums, I always liked the idea, but streaming kinda killed it. When people were listening to albums on repeat they could get into the whole idea and songs they didn't like on first listen could grow on them — at least that's how it works for me. With streaming people listen only to particular songs/tracks they like without giving everything else and album as a whole a chance.

@m0xee Yeah that never really changed for me. Among my first vinyl purchases were Ziggy Stardust, and Dark Side of the Moon (still got both of the posters from that record on my wall, right behind me), and EL&P's Tarkus (oh man, that crazy percussive B3), so I was all about the album oriented rock thing. Aside from that, I just see the album as an art in itself. Not like the 1 or 2 singles plus 17 tracks of filler they sold us all through the 90's, or not even a collection of...

@m0xee ...genuinely good but otherwise distinct songs. Like the sequence and flow and throughline of a well thought out album.
You know what I'm saying, lol.

@m0xee it's not dead though. I mean, maybe the listeners have changed, but if I think back to the 90's, not really that much. There are always going to be people who just want to hear that song they have stuck in their head, and who am I to tell them they're wrong?
But there's also still great albums coming out in the streaming era, many of which I've spent hours repeating, until I ran out of data and had to start deleting apps to save all my recent favourites 😅

@m0xee Glad those 2GB/$50 days are over. Now I finally have 20GB and I never have to leave the house again 🤷‍♂️

@gordoooo_z I don't like piracy too, but now I'm unable to pay for music so I have to resort to it — well, that mostly means saving albums from BandCamp using youtube-dl. I always preferred physical media until shipping to Russia became more expensive than the CDs themselves, then I started using BC for digital purchases, but now I can't do even that 😩
I'll buy the albums I kept later when I have the opportunity, so in a way I'm just saving traffic for BC now, downloading it instead of streaming

@m0xee I feel you. I didn't feel great about it back in high school, but I was a broke high school student, and the option of "well just don't listen to it, then" didn't really seem like a real option, and still doesn't.

More to your original point: I wish more phones still came with SD slots. I was a Nexus/budget phone guy for a long time, so even though SD slots were still a thing, Google left them out to avoid the license fees, back when they made affordable phones.

@m0xee Then by the time I sold my soul and signed a 2 year contract, well, SD slots were more or less a thing of the past. That being said, I'd rather use my 120GB iPod than my phone any day. Nothing worse than having to wait til a call stops ringing for my song to unpause 😤

@gordoooo_z Oh, yes, I was thinking of switching to a dedicated DAP too. Phones no longer cut it — we have decent storage options, but they are removing the headphone jack now 🤷
It's odd how flagship phones are all about camera nowadays — the thing I could not care less about. On the other hand my cheapo midranger is perfect in this regard — having 256 Gb of internal storage, an SD slot and a wired headphones output. I'll keep using it while it lasts and then I'll see.

@m0xee Thankfully my S10e still has the headphone jack, but those days are numbered. I'm probably going to get my girlfriend's S21FE when she gets her upgrade, which is a super dope phone, but the lack of headphone jack annoys me, just on principle.

I did really fall in love with my Jabra bluetooth buds though, until the left one stopped working, and my dumb ass didn't think to make use ofthe 2 year warranty until 6 months later, exavtly one week after it expired :/

@gordoooo_z
> 2 year warranty until 6 months later, exavtly one week after it expired
I always fall for this! Postponing it for later until it's too late 🤣