We Don't Own Anymore

Back then: buy once, own forever. Today: buy forever, own never. Over the past decade or so, I invested a good chunk of my money in a music streaming service. While I do, I'm golden: I own all of the music. All of it! But then, what if I just stopped paying for it? From one day to the next, I won't just lose my music library, I'll lose all of the music. Easy come, easy go. In the past months, I've considered switching from one evil music streaming service to an—allegedly—less evil music streaming service (I'm still figuring this out). One obvious challenge in this process is how to migrate my music library, which manifests itself in playlists I have created. Funnily enough, not only do I not own the music on the streaming service, I don't even own the playlists. If you are a music collector from the noughties, you might remember M3U. It's a file format that was associated with MP3, bundling together individual music tracks (and later additional multimedia formats) as playlists. If…