Peter Davoust

Yesterday, as you may have noticed, Spotify experienced an outage. Over the course of about an hour, tens of thousands of people reported that they were unable to listen to music at all. Spotify fixed the problem. Life continued.

Events like this draw attention to the fact that you do not own anything you stream. Even if you buy – say – a movie on Amazon’s Prime Video, you are reliant on Amazon’s servers to continue providing that content. It might feel alarmist to say that these streaming services might not be around forever, but many of these companies are struggling (although it’s worth mentioning that Spotify’s stock in particular has risen for most of this year.) Spotify laid off a significant portion of its workforce last year, culminating in a final cut in 2023 of 17% of its workforce. It’s trying to run a business that serves a significant portion of the world on around a 30% profit margin.

These days, when streaming is above and away the most common way to watch movies or listen to music, it’s sometimes hard to remember that we used to own the means of playback for our content. If Universal Music Group had an outage of some kind, that would have no impact on your ability to listen to your CDs or watch your Blu-Ray disks. You know what? You can still live in those times today.

I purchase all my music on either iTunes or a platform called Qobuz. Both offer streaming services, but will happily sell you downloadable files which you can then hoard to your heart’s content*. You have those files forever. No one can take them away from you, whether they have a software glitch, the company goes under, or you decide not to pay for their service anymore. My car stereo even has an SD card reader, so when I turn it on, my music starts playing, just like a CD or a cassette, but with 128gb of storage.

In Canada, a Spotify subscription costs $10.99 per month. Do you listen to more than $10.99 worth of music per month? I think I actually average a little more than that, but it’s worth it to me to own the music, not have to deal with Spotify’s horrible app, and to still have access to ad-free music when I’m having a tight month. Is it harder to listen on your phone? Yes. But there are apps for that.

Buying, downloading, and curating music on your own isn’t for everyone, and I get that. I’m not saying everyone should ditch Spotify and go back to the 90’s and early aughts. All I’m saying is that if you want to, especially after the outage yesterday, it’s still possible. And it’s been working pretty well for me.

*On iTunes, you do have to manually find and convert the m4a files to mp3, which is a pain, but not impossible. Also, I’m not sure how long iTunes will actually stick around.