I am looking to move on from spotify, what music streaming service pays the artists the best while still having a large library.
I am looking to move on from spotify, what music streaming service pays the artists the best while still having a large library.
I buy all my mysic on iTunes, and have done so for a long time, it makes my music library more focused and I have no worry if loosing access if I can’t pay rent.
You are in for a surprise, you don’t own any of that music just so you know. You “rent it from Apple”
In what way? There’s no DRM. It’s not tied to an apple account. Music I’ve downloaded from iTunes now resides on non-apple kit same as that from Bandcamp, 7digital, etc. Hell some of its even on CDs for when I still had a player in the car, now the car has a USB stick.
To be pedantic, there was DRM on music purchased on iTunes prior to 2009. Was a bit of a ballache converting that back in the day. Could’ve been worse though, I do like to buy most of my music physically so I didn’t have to convert too much of my collection (still a ballache though cos it was still way more files than I wanted to convert).
TIL
Considering I can get the files without DRM from iTunes, I don’t understand what you are talking about.
However, thank you for reminding me that I need to do so.
TIL
Not going to downvote you since I use iTunes for streaming, but when they changed their policy a few years ago about DRM, they fucking deleted about 20 songs I wrote and recorded solo or with my bands. My friends had backups, but man that sucked. So beware, I suppose.
Wait, what? That seems odd. They’ve deleted music videos from my account (which I had the files for, and the videos in question were also pulled from YouTube etc by the band, so I don’t think it’s apple’s fault they were pulled), but I still have all the music I’ve made myself. I do back it up every 2 or 3 months (I would cry for the rest of my life if I lost it, I have nearly 2yrs of continuous music), but I’ve never had to restore it (and this has reinforced why I do back up).
Edit: looked it up, I see the issue now. I don’t use Apple music, and every instance I can find of this happening is associated with ceasing that subscription. But I just use iTunes and the iTunes store. Dunno how this would work for you since it’s your own music (and I dunno if it’d work for music not in the iTunes catalogue, ie stuff from Bandcamp, qobuz, cough cough less than legal methods, etc), but it would appear all you have to do is log in to your account again and re-download the deleted files.
Second edit: just realised I have lost some actual music from my account. The series of live albums that iTunes directly released from the iTunes festivals they ran like 15yrs ago just came to mind. They’re gone from my account. And probably a bunch of others. They were never deleted from my hard drive though.