Cut Me Some Flac

Posted on September 21, 2018

story time:

i was visiting my father, and at his house i misplaced my bluetooth speaker.

my dad asks my step brother if the one next to him is mine (it is not)

my step brother says

of course its not, its a UE Boom and tA hates everything thats normal.

rant

welcome one and all to my quick rant on why i dont use spotify.

i am almost exclusively a flac/mp3 person, at home, while commuting, when im sitting in the corner at a party with my headphones on so i dont have to talk to anyone.

there are a couple of reasons, so lets start out with the crappy one

im a bit of a hipster

its true, i cant deny it, especially because denying it would be something a hipster would do, and im not mainstream enough to be a hipster.

you get a bit of street cred for not using spotify and being different, you get to feel like you’re a bit of a rebel and not playing into the cold soulless hands of Big Tech (tm) but thats not really true either way in this world.

its a little neat though, makes for a good icebreaker at parties and (whether for good or bad) makes people remember you.

the selection isn’t great

if you have an NPC taste in music then spotify is fine. my brother loves it and everything he could ever hope to listen to is represented.

i have odd tastes and quite often there isn’t a song im wanting on there, and i have to resort to youtube or something. with physical files this isn’t a problem.

its playing into a monopoly

almost everyone i know uses spotify except for that poor poor friend who uses apple music. soon enough it’ll be harder and harder to find legal versions of the actual files, and you’ll be forced into using some sort of streaming plan. everything is going that direction nowadays, i wouldn’t be surprised if in ten years we’re sold a minimal boot loader that streams you your operating system (given you remembered to pay this months os bill)

outside of the benefits think of it like a protest.

you’re in control

if the internet went down tomorrow i would still have access to all the music i have listened to. the same cant be said for people who use spotify.

if i want to use my own client i can, no worries at all.

if i don’t have any internet i can still browse my entire collection, or a large chunk of it depending on which computer im at

its just easier.

final thots

im gonna make a great old man who refuses to get with the times, and goes on very long tirades about how big tech are trying to steal our technical autonomy. its true, i can’t deny it

im a tech hipster, forever and always, and you can pry my flacs from my cold, dead hands.