Fewer Options For Those with Their Own Music (Premium)

In many ways, it was a classic scene of Americana: A group of friends gathered around a fire, celebrating Memorial Day, listening to music, and enjoying each others company. The music pumping through the outdoor speaker was being fed by an iPod touch, itself an anachronism in this smartphone era. But it may as well have been coming from a 1980's boombox: All of the songs it played were stored locally on my friend's PC and synced, old-school, to the device over a cable.

My friend is a huge music fan and has one of the biggest music collection I've ever seen. But he's no fan of streaming music. Regardless, there just isn't a streaming music service on earth that includes all of the songs we heard that night in its catalog.

And that's a problem: While services like Spotify are incredibly popular---and growing rapidly at the expense of digital downloads and physical media---they typically don't do a very good job of letting users mix their own music, perhaps ripped from CD years ago, with their online music collections.

I don't have as much music as my friend. And my own musical tastes aren't particularly eclectic. But then they don't need to be to find gaps in the major services' catalogs. As recently as last year, even hugely successful bands like Def Leppard weren't adequately represented in digital formats. (That was only rectified in January 2018.)

And yet, I have many hundreds of songs in my personal music collection that cannot be found in Spotify, Apple Music, or elsewhere. Which means that the convenience of these services comes with a hidden cost. You can't actually listen to everything you wish to hear. Unless you shop around or do a lot of work.

Worse, our options for mixing and matching personal music collections with cloud music catalogs took a big hit in 2018 when both Microsoft and Amazon removed this capability from their own offerings.

Microsoft's exit from streaming music is perhaps the more problematic: The firm still allows customers to upload their own music collections to OneDrive, but it no longer provides a complementary music subscription service. Worse, music stored in OneDrive is held against your storage allotment. And OneDrive users only get 5 GB of storage space for free now. So you'll need to pay, each year, to store your own collection in the cloud.

Amazon had previously offered a sweetheart deal for those with their own music collections: For $25 per year, Amazon would store up to 250,000 songs for you. But the firm retired its music storage functionality recently. Now, it offers a Spotify-like service called Amazon Music Unlimited that basically only offers access to its cloud-based catalog.

Ah boy.

For the majority on Spotify, there are workarounds for accessing your own music on a device-by-device basis. But the service doesn't provide any cloud-based hosting of customer music. And that makes it tedious to maintain playlists that consist of both personal music and music from Spoti...

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