What Happens When Your Streaming Service Dies?

An article in the New York Times presents an ugly picture of what might happen if Spotify goes away. But really, it applies to all streaming services. Are you keeping your entire music library on playlists and relying on big business to treat your music library as carefully as you would?

How many of you remember the day Apple eliminated all versions of songs except the one they were calling up for you from their streaming service. My recollection of that day is about the anger that the most ardent collectors shared because the years of compiling different versions of their favorite tracks were suddenly gone. A casual listener didn't really care about quality or versions... but the collectors had versions that were sometimes provided by the artist directly as a gift. Or was a song that was no longer available for download.

It was a devastating loss for these collectors... as tragic as someone losing all their CDs or vinyl in a house fire.... but on an unimaginable scale. Apple's decision to erase all versions but one.

The Atlantic provides a detailed story about what happens when your music service dies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/spotify-streaming-mu...

For another view of how delicate the internet can be, have a look at this article that talks how the internet was affected for 7 hours when Akamai went down. It wasn't from hackers. A quote from the article...

"While services like Akamai allow websites to load faster, function better and run more securely in normal times, they also create a single point of failure, where an outage in one service can create knock-on effects which ripple outward in unpredictable ways, taking hundreds of major services down with them."

https://onezero.medium.com/akamai-went-down-and-it-broke-the-internet-82...

Is our total reliance on the internet a good thing? Let us know what you think.