I might be particularly neurotic about the future of my music library because I already lost it once before.
(Kahle sees parallel preservation problems with other forms of digital media that exist on corporate platforms, such as ebooks and streaming-only movies.) The reason I’m screwed is that Spotify listeners’ ability to access their collection in the far-out future will be contingent on the company maintaining its software, renewing its agreements with rights holders, and, well, not going out of business when something else inevitably supplants the current paradigm of music listening. “You’re screwed,” said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, after I asked him if I could count on having my music library decades from now. Unfortunately, the experts on media preservation and the music industry whom I consulted told me that I have good reason to fear ongoing instability. But as I look back on the churn of the past couple of decades, I feel uneasy about the hundreds of playlists I’ve taken the time to compile on the company’s platform: 10 or 20 years from now, will I be able to access the music I care about today, and all the places, people, and times it evokes? The music I’ve salvaged from earlier times is now part of my collection on Spotify, which I’ve been using since it launched in the United States, 10 years ago this month. Read: The aughts seem both cooler and sadder in retrospect Losing some of that music has felt like severing lines of communication with versions of my former self, in the sense that hearing even a snippet of an old song can conjure up a first kiss, a first drive, or less articulable memories of inner life. Just as remarkable as this rate of change is how useless previous iterations of my music library are today-my first iPod is unresponsive, and I have no idea where my poor Baha Men CD is. Now, instead of buying music, people rent it.
Tapes were displaced in the 1990s by CDs, which were displaced in the 2000s by mp3s, which were displaced in the 2010s by streaming. Every decade I’ve been alive, a new format has ascended. I came home with two CDs: the Baha Men’s Who Let the Dogs Out and the pop compilation Now That’s What I Call Music! 5.Įach of those albums cost more than a month of streaming does today, which reflects all that happened to music listening in the intervening 20 years-Napster and LimeWire, iPods and iPhones, Spotify and TikTok. The first time I remember shopping for music was at a Best Buy one day in 2001.
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