Speaking of music

by Jon Sullivan - 2021-06-29 - Status

<<<<< previous blog         next blog >>>>>

---

I got my playlist from the 2018 Ireland road trip rebuilt, after the failure of Google Music left all my lists in limbo. And no, I'm not paying Google $10/month to listen to my own music on YouTube.

I had forgotten how awesome the Ireland playlist is. A lot of pipes. a lot of Irish humor, a lot of tapping along to an irresistible beat. A lot of tears remembering listening to it while driving all over County Kerry in search of magic. Here's a link to the playlist in YouTube. That may or may not work, depending on whatever random rules Google is currently using for it.

My current music solution is MediaMonkey. It has limited cloud storage support, but I've always cached all my playlist songs on my phone anyway, so not an issue for me. Forums suggest I could connect to a home media server if I had that, which I don't. It lacks music discovery and buying songs. But as a simple tool to manage and play all my music without chaining myself to a crappy business model, it's great.

I must say...... 2021 just seems way too late to still be fighting "Big Music" just to buy songs and support artists. I get that the model which works best for greedy corporations is to steer everyone to music services, and fuck actually buying songs and supporting artists. One of the things that I liked best about Google Music was how easy it was to buy songs. The fact that they stripped that out of YouTube Music is a main reason I don't pay for it.

I understand that people are just supposed to pay for a service and then listen to all the music they want. But that makes it too easy for us to pretend the artists we love are actually getting paid. And to me that seems evil. If a band puts out music I like, I want them to make more. I want them to get rich from it. I want them to feel like adding wonderful music to the world is a good career decision, rather than their hard work and creativity making some greedy assholes richer than they already are.

So yeah, I actually buy all the music I want to listen to. And when Google decides to fold up YouTube Music and all your playlists and music vanish, I'll still have all mine. Currently I use 7digital as my solution for buying music. Mainly because it's one of the only places to buy music that has enough variety that I can even find the stuff I want.

Backup I'm still working on. I do rotating and redundant backups to disc, but a cloud solution would be much better. Still working on that, as none of the free options have the 3TB+ space I'll need. Google and Microsoft paid options are a non-starter. I don't trust either of them not to discontinue or mutate service and leave me screwed. At $180/year Amazon Drive is a bit pricey. I used to run a home NAS/media server, but decided it was too much bother.

Buy prints

<<<<< previous blog         next blog >>>>>

---