We Don't Own Anymore 💲

Back then: buy once, own forever.
Today: buy forever, own never.

Over the past decade or so, I invested a good chunk of my money in a music streaming service. While I do, I'm golden: I own all of the music. All of it!

But then, what if I just stopped paying for it? From one day to the next, I won't just lose my music library, I'll lose all of the music. Easy come, easy go. In the past months, I've considered switching from one evil music streaming service to an—allegedly—less evil music streaming service (I'm still figuring this out). One obvious challenge in this process is how to migrate my music library, which manifests itself in playlists I have created. Funnily enough, not only do I not own the music on the streaming service, I don't even own the playlists.

If you are a music collector from the noughties, you might remember M3U. It's a file format that was associated with MP3, bundling together individual music tracks (and later additional multimedia formats) as playlists. If Spotify was considerate enough, they would allow me to export my playlists to M3U. "Sad to see you go, but here's your music library"—at least the skeleton of it, which I could use with another streaming provider and migrate my music library. Obviously, if we leave this hypothetic world of wishful thinking, the harsh reality is quite different. If I want to migrate the dozens of playlists I have accumulated over the years, I have to subscribe to a music migration service called "TuneMyMusic".

It feels absurd enough that I'm paying a monthly fee in order to be able to listen to music in the first place, but now I have to pay another monthly fee only to move my music library, which happens—hopefully—only once in my lifetime?

As I am considering a move away from iOS, I am consequently thinking about leaving my beloved notes app Bear—as it only runs in the Apple world. But guess what: even if I wanted to leave Bear, it would actually allow me to export all of my notes that I have created over the years; to be exported to Markdown files, which as easily can be imported again into another notes application. Migrating from one notes app to another seems surprisingly simple.

I understand that there is a distinct difference to licensed works of artistry, such as music tracks or movies... but I've paid for it, so why don't I get to own any of it?

After paying you literally hundreds of euros over the years, Spotify, if I left now, I'd actually leave with nothing? Had I invested this money in a physical music library instead, wouldn't I be a richer man today?