Rest: Music Player

For the last few years, we’ve been using Apple Music for streaming. It’s great to have access to a gigantic catalog of songs, but it come with its downsides. Kevin Kelly is a big proponent of Access over Ownership. We tend to agree that access to transportation, access to healthcare, access to education and access to entertainment is cheaper and offers more options than trying to build or own it yourself. The major downsides of ‘renting’ your music is that the current payout for artists is pretty bad and if you like something you need to pay for it. The current situation isn’t sustainable. The second issue is censorship/curation. Maybe your favorite track doesn’t exist on any streaming service, or it is a crazy DJ mashup or live recording? Thirdly, you are relying on streaming gatekeepers for your access – if for some EULA reason they decide to cut you off, you loose access to everything and then ownership becomes more important. We used to have loads of CDs and MP3s that we listened…