It’s a new year, I’m sitting here at my desk, thinking of what to write and I’m hit by a terrible thought. What if I lost access to all of my digital music library?
I feel like that moment in Barbie where she starts to think about death suddenly. Is this the Picky Bastard version of that? Losing my carefully curated music library? It’s an exaggeration until it’s not. I’ve written extensively on Picky Bastards over the years about my iTunes/Apple Music library, from playlists to albums that don’t even exist on streaming services, it’s a curated place that has become integral to my music listening life.
What happens when Spotify is no more? When Apple turns the servers off? When we’ve moved onto the next thing, or the service and platform after that. The issues surrounding streaming and its place in the music industry as a way to generate money aren’t going away and are surely just going to get worse and worse. What happens when more of the music we ‘own’ digitally is just removed from us being able to listen to it?
Of course I’m also sat here surrounded by physical music – I’m 90% sure I own more vinyl and CDs than anyone else on the Picky B’s team – and for as long as I have devices that will play them I’ll be listening to the most important collection in my house. But there’s also a huge amount of music that never makes it onto physical formats, what happens when the licences run out? What happens when every song only exists in a sped up version on TikTok?
As each of these questions goes around my head, more ridiculous and unhinged than the last, I wonder if this is just part of becoming an ‘older’ music fan. ‘I remember a day when I could download a song for 79p’ is gonna be my back in my day isn’t it?
We don’t actually ‘own’ anything digital either. It’s more like we are just paying for a licence to be able to access the files for a specific period of time. It’s a genuine fear that there will come a point where you simply can’t re-download those tracks anymore. Where unless I have backups of backups I might never be able to hear certain songs again.
Is there even a way of consuming music after streaming? Maybe it’ll just be beamed into our skulls? Maybe music will just end and Picky B’s will have to pivot to talk about films or something genuinely practical? Maybe I’ve completely lost myself and just need to have a lie down?
Words by Sam Atkins
Picky Bastards 