Music collections in the era of the cloud

[This post was originally published on my blog in October 2012. I’m re-publishing it here on Medium, unedited, in 2017.]

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about music recently; specifically, what it means to own and use a personal digital music library whilst subscribing to streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, and Deezer. I published some loose thoughts on The Pastry Box a couple of months ago, but in the weeks that followed, I’ve stumbled across some thoughtful pieces on The Bygone Bureau and Pitchfork that have spurred me into writing something a little more refined. Whilst this post slowly evolved in my ‘drafts’ folder, Rob Weychert posted a brilliant analysis of his own listening behaviour during a year’s subscription to Rdio and his views highlight my own belief that the music-streaming services — in their current guises — are not replacements for personal music libraries.

I’ll try to explain why.

Music has been an important part of my life since my teenage years; first as a listener, then as a creator (a hobby I still entertain for a few weeks a year), and then as an insider within the music industry: my first ‘proper’ job was Junior Designer for EMIRecords and after two years with the company I moved to indie label Sanctuary Records, again as an in-house web designer. So I like to think that I’m able to watch the industry develop from a variety of standpoints without too much bias for any one side: listener, creator, publisher.