i would like to, i guess, complicate the "everyone should move away from streaming services and only distribute music using direct file downloads" sentiment that i see given all the time:
- many, many people nowadays, especially gen Z and younger, have very little conception of organizing and managing files on a hard disk (i have taught programming / web design to undergrads and been astounded by how much i have to explain about what a directory is. this is a well-documented problem that universities are finding themselves in). maybe they can do it, but they would never want to.
- a lot of phones and tablets and cheap laptops and other things people use as their primary devices have very little storage and/or have no option to expand storage. and in places where mobile data is dirt cheap, why would you bother having anything but a phone with 64 GB of storage?
- where do you start building your collection? the blogs where you could download mp3s are withered away. you can use sketchy, finicky telegram bots to download .ogg or .flac directly from spotify or tidal. bandcamp is lovely, for as long as it exists, but a lot of what you want to listen to is just not there. for some artists, nowadays, it is not easy to even find a place where you can legally purchase a download of their music!
- how do you sync your collection between your various devices? there are many ways to do this but you gotta set it up manually, yourself. if you are not terribly tech-inclined, getting it to work just the way you want is not a trivial task.
i agree the world would be better if more people did this, but current conditions create so many little barriers and frustrations - the hardware that people have, the software they have, the knowledge, the mobile data speeds, the lack of a communal infrastructure of mp3-sharing - so much friction in the experience that for the vast majority of people, they are never going to even try to get started. current conditions mean that to start making a habit out of this you kind of have to swim against the current and brave unfamiliar territory. I do this, and i love doing it, but i could not recommend it to most of my friends in a way that would convince them it is worth the time investment.
ANECDOTAL ZONE: i have been writing and releasing and sharing and talking about music online for a long time. i used to only distribute music by download. when i did this people would say - that's awesome! i'll listen to it. and they wouldn't. or they would download, listen once, and never again. (once i saw, in 2014, an EP i'd released in 2012, zipped, on the desktop of the pc of a friend. i asked if he ever listened and he said it keeps slipping his mind. never even got to unzipping it. (he liked it a lot when he finally listened though. thanks man)) when i finally bit the bullet and used a distro service and uploaded everything to youtube in, like, 2015 or 16, suddenly everyone listened. and people listened more than once, and bothered sharing it. i'm not thrilled about that.
i am not sure what conclusion to come to from this other than: most people who are not "into music" do not want to or are not able to curate a collection of files on their own machine, and even if they would like it in the abstract they do not want it hard enough to get over the learning curve and the initial friction of switching over. i do not know what to tell people to do instead of that, though.
