Recently I had been noticing a number of artists, often very popular ones, were not having their catalogs available on Napster. I was trying to curate some playlists for my gym time, and I just couldn’t always find what I was looking for.
I then found out and realized that Sony is suing Napster (again, in 2025) which I suspect is a big reason why the artists had gone missing.
I left Spotify back when I realized that Napster was still around, and legit and legal. I also read that Napster had some of the better artist payouts per stream, and I wanted to help out there.
With the artist access issue, and knowing that with streaming, you never OWN anything, you only pay rent for access, I’ve started pivoting back to my music/flac/ogg/mp3 collection. In 2024-2025, I started consolidating it the best I could from multiple sources, getting it all organized, and as presently told, 97GB of music.
Previously before I went to Spotify, I was on Amazon Music and doing what I could to make purchases there as well. Thankfully Amazon Music also allows you to actually download the mp3 files, and move them to an external drive. Yay! Backing up your purchases.
Going forward, I’m probably going to continue to re-rely on Amazon Music when needed, but also things like Bandcamp or direct from music label websites, to make digital purchases (if I don’t also get back into vinyl records).
Any ways that I can acquire audio files that I can also move to a backup.
I am also very likely going to rely on Youtube Premium/Music when needed, as I have already found a lot of tracks from back in my mix CD making days that I never found on Spotify or Napster, so it’s managing to fill holes as well.
Long live backup-able digital and physical media!
Now to just stop “buying” movies/shows on Amazon…yo ho.