Comment by antihero
24 days ago
Because:
* You don't have any control, if some paperwork fucks up you can lose access (rarer with music but very common with video services)
* They don't have a lot of rare stuff, demos, EPs, singles, dubplates, etc.
* You can't choose which version of an album you want.
* If you run out of money for whatever reason you can't listen to music.
* Offline is unreliable.
* Screw having my taste and discovery defined by an algorithm
* Artists get fuck all money compared to buying stuff off of Bandcamp/buying CDs and ripping them, even if you still pirate a lot of stuff.
* They have questionable ethics as a company.
* No lossless.
* When you curate your own collection you develop in my opinion a deeper relationship with it.
I have to rent my home and most other stuff in life, music is one of the most important things in the world to me. I'm done with renting that.
You forgot disappearing music. Add a song to a playlist, switch countries (or who knows what), it becomes greyed out, or perhaps simply removed. Annoying.
Their tendency to add random music to my playlists is annoying. I think there's some control over it, but I'm too old to follow up on how it works this week.
I'm on the most expensive family plan they have, but would pay more to get those two fixed properly.
I do still buy music on albums and digitally, mostly as a backup exactly for the reasons you mention. But I can't afford to do that for everything I listen to.
Regarding your second paragraph talking about Spotify adding random songs... It's a feature I absolutely hate, but I believe what you might be referring to are "smart suggestions" and/or the "smart shuffle" features. They annoy the hell out of me but can be disabled.
For smart suggestions, I haven't seen them in a while, but there was a toggle for it.
For smart shuffle, just hit the shuffle button again to turn it off.
To add to this - as someone who is traveling a lot, multiple issues with it saying "Ohh you can't play in this country so I will just stop working" are annoying to say the least.
Dumped spotify and couldn't been happier.
Yeah crazy when you offline music on Apple Music and then you have no internet and it won’t play them because it needs internet to (I guess?) check the license still. Absolute joke.