A Personal History of My Digital Music!
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
I don’t think you can call this a battle. You can call it indecisiveness, possibly FOMO (Fear of missing out), or you could call it plain laziness. I currently use and have used for several years multiple streaming services. I am a full-fledged paying member of Spotify, Apple Music, SiriusXM, and Pandora.
I love music, and this includes many different genres. I like Pop, Alternative, Classical, Classic Rock, Rock, Hard Rock, some Country, Jazz, and the list goes on. When streaming became a thing, I was first in line. I had a pretty extensive CD collection, but I had already made the jump to mp3’s. We had been ripping compact disks and putting hundreds of songs on writable CDs for quite some time. Then came the MP3 players, and things became a lot simpler. Entire music collections became portable, and the world seemed so much more incredible. With the introduction of streaming services, the skies were the limit. I was now able to listen to anything I wanted at the drop of a hat, and all I had to pay was a monthly stipend. Sign me up; I was all in!
For me, the streaming started when Apple Itunes introduced “Itunes Match.” Apple stated you could import your “ripped” music collection into the library, and they would match it with a high-quality version within their library. You could now listen to your entire library on any device within the Apple ecosystem. I had amassed a massive library at the time and remembered the process to be quite lengthy and incomplete. Those rare live concerts, extra tracks, and foreign releases of CDs proved to be too rare. Was it perfect? No, but it was a start, and I could access my music anywhere.
Pandora and Spotify came into my orbit, and perhaps this is when my FOMO kicked in. Pandora introduced free streaming with Advertising in late 2005, and it wet my taste buds for more. Slowly their library of music began to grow, and I am sure I started to pay for the full version not too much later. Spotify came into the picture in 2011 with the promise of more music and quite a bit of hype. I quickly signed up for this option as well.
Now here we are in 2021, and my music collection consists of SiriusXM, which I have had since the early XM days. SiriusXM now owns Pandora, which I subscribe to also. I never left Apple Itunes, which morphed into Apple Music, and I use it daily. I also use Spotify daily, whether it be Podcasts or News. I know I don’t need all of these, but I have found a way to utilize them all. It is by no means economical, but I can always find something on one service you can’t find on another, and they always seem to redeem themselves. Perhaps I need a push!
Photo by Tanner Boriack on Unsplash
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