Owning music is nice. A few decades ago saying that would have sounded like “breathing air is nice”. What else do you do with it? Owning things is going our of fashion quite a bit lately though.

Now music is streamed. Which is great, because you have access to everything at once and it’s horrible, because you have access to everything at once.

Music is still being sold, even if there are now some artists that release only small numbers of physical copies, sell no digital copies and basically bet entirely on streaming. For now that’s more of an exception, but it’s not wise to expect that it will remain this way if people continue to mostly use streaming services for music.

Listening to music mainly on streaming services gives clear signals to artists and especially labels that that’s the market they should invest in. The financial incentives for releasing music¹ are such that all new releases will be guaranteed to be available on streaming services.

Physical copies aren’t going away though

Still physical copies of music don’t seem to be going anywhere for now. In the last years sales for physical copies of music seem to be going up, even more “paradoxically” vinyl sales seem to be on the path to overtaking CD sales.² So at least for now it seems we’re not in danger of losing physical music and ending up in a situation where streaming is the only option.

Physical copies are awesome³. Physical copies are physical, which brings all the downsides of physical things. Times erodes physical things. Physical things can be kind of easily ruined. Physical things require that you re physically close to them to use them. Physical things at some point will end up in a landfill and producing them has environmental impact.

Owning digital music

A lot of artists still sell digital copies under some form. Obviously bandcamp still exists and a lot of artists still sell their music on there. Even the top mainstream artists you can think of sell digital copies of their music.

So getting to own digital copies, which are more eco friendly than physical yet you still own them unlike what you get with streaming services is still doable. But how do you listen to them?

I don’t know a lot of people who maintain a collection of digital music, so I don’t have an idea of how people in general consume digital music that they own. Sadly that likely often leads people to think about winamp⁴. The approach with having a “computer for music” and copying mp3s to your phone is far from the only option.

Middle ground

There’s no shortage of adequate self hosted solutions for this. The first I found and which I was lucky enough to like right away was navidrome. It seems most logical for me to host that at home to keep the transfer of “other people’s intellectual property” to a minimum, even though it’s entirely legally attained.

The end result I got to is I think simple enough and quite easy to use.

• navidrome in docker
• the second attached volume is crucial here, that’s the directory on the host holding the music files
• I rsync the music I get to said folder
• when on a computer I listen to music through the web interface
• from my phone I use subtracks

Piracy?

Piracy is a stupid solution⁵. You can basically listen to any music for free with no effort and completely legally. And that’s a good thing, since it makes sense you might not really want to spend money on music you haven’t heard and don’t know if you’ll like.

Piracy both hurts artists⁶ and skews data on where there are people interested in specific artists. As much as I like to try and rationalize it, piracy is just stupid (вж. ⁵).