"We Are Not Evil" -- Whatever Happened To ...
Magnatune?
I was doing a search in the Securus Grift Store one Thursday night for music compilations. So, I entered compilation into the search bar and submitted the search. It returned a list of Artists, Albums, and Tracks. On a whim, I tapped to see more artists, and began to scroll...
"Wait, what the hell?" was my response as I tapped on the name to see what would come up.
I was indeed surprised to see a quintet of old albums, circa 2004-2007 listed:
- Romantic Dinner Classical Compilation
- Christmas Music
- Classical
- World Fusion
- New Age and Jazz
I remember liking their music sale model back then. Artists you may have never heard of, producing great music, getting what I hope was a fair share of the money from this new age online music seller during the era of peak music piracy? I didn't have a lot of money, but I sure did make a concerted effort to spend there.
I have vague memories of the Magnatune model collapsing, then coming back in some kind of way, but by then, I had moved on to Amie Street (which became Songza, then was devoured by the mile wide smile of Amazon.com).
It makes me curious:
In this era of "Stream Everything, Possess Nothing", whatever happened to companies like Magnatune?
The bridge between a binder of CDs and a six disc CD changer in the boot of your car and streaming from your YouTube Music/Spotify/Pandora/Deezer/Tidal/... playlist still has a lot of space in my heart.
I find it easier to buy an artist's albums without the encumbrance of "DRM", be it on CD, or a direct download of FLAC, high quality Ogg Vorbis or AAC files, because as long as I have those files (see "backups are your friends!" for details), I can continue to listen to my favorites long after the bit death of another (flash in the pan) streaming service's licensing agreements with a label.
shakes cane at sky
I know I'm not, but sometimes I feel as if I am the only person who wants their music collection stored locally, instead of having to always retrieve it from someone else's computer. I mean, what do you do for music when CloudFlare eats it for a day? Or if AWS has a widespread outage caused by a concerted attack of squirrels on the Internet backbone at an inopportune time? Or Azure pitches a Windows Stop 0×50 and it takes an engineer three hours to chase down the reason?
Listen to PASSPORT.MID on loop because it's all you've got?
... I mean, it is passport.mid, but do you have a good MIDI player with soundfonts that make it sound amazing? :)