"Epic collection, friend"

I wanted to save the new Nightwish album, but I ended up breaking Spotify instead.


I did not know there was a limit to how many albums I could save, nor do I understand why there needs to be one. Spotify is a cloud-based service that I pay for. Saving an album does not equate to me owning an album and taking up some quantity of space on a hard-drive; saving an album on the service is effectively giving the user a bookmarked hyperlink to listen to the album which exists in Spotify's cloud storage. The closest analogue to a saved album on Spotify is a bookmark on a web-browser; imagine if NetScape or your favorite browser set a limit to how many bookmarks you could save. Paying customers should be able to save an infinite amount of albums. This is an arbitrary limit unrelated to any technical limitations.

The limit, apparently, is based on songs, not albums. Specifically, it is a 10,000 song limit, which may seem justifiable if you're one of the Damn Kids who only listens to and saves individual songs, which are usually singles. Those of us who listen to albums, which constitute the way that artists intend for their music to be distributed whether you personally consume them or not, are f***ed.

Let's say that the average album contains 12.5 songs: that would make an 800-album library reach the song limit. If 800 albums seems like a lot, consider that the types of bands people adore so much that they'd want to save their entire discography are the bands who last for an entire career of say, twenty-ish years and 15 albums (usually about 12.5ish canon studio albums, but a hardcore fan might want to save a live album or two for variety's sake). 15 albums consisting of 12.5 albums counts for 187.5 songs, and that would represent the complete discography of a single band with a complete career. 10,000 songs divided by 187.5 songs is 53, meaning that you would only be able to save the complete discographies of 53 bands who have had complete careers.

That is not accounting for outlier artists like Frank Zappa, who released 42 studio albums in his lifetime; that's 527 songs. This is also not accounting for situations where the members of the band also have solo careers which would interest any fan of the proper band. For example, Genesis released 14 studio albums in their 27-year career, but Peter Gabriel has 7 solo albums, Phil Collins has 7, and Steve Hackett has 17; that's 45 albums or 562 songs, and that's only counting the solo careers people care about. Consider that some of the most popular bands of all time (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin) have similar situations regarding extensive solo works and it is very possible for regular people to run into this problem even if they're not into posthumous Frank Zappa archives or obscure Les Claypool experimental collaborations. If you wanted to save the complete discographies of a mere 17 bands with Genesis-esque solo spinoff situations, you would run into the 10,000 song limit. SEVENTEEN BANDS.

The song limit is so arbitrary that you'll hit it whether your 10,000 songs are all three minutes long or twenty minutes long. That puts me in a privileged position as a progressive rock fan, as it is not unusual for prog albums to consist of three songs, each lasting fifteen minutes, but this is absurd for anyone who enjoys music. The premier music streaming service is targeting music-listeners.

Music-listeners.

We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end, listening to noises. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than the recollection of doing it.

We'll punish ourselves listening to Ringo Starr solo albums that others would consider torture because it don't come easy.

We'll spend most, if not all of our free time listening to Freddie Mercury erotically moan over a disco beat just so we can get to the track with David Bowie on guest vocals.

Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the same riffs all day, the same drum fills over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know every little detail such that some have attained such music nirvana that they can literally play Nirvana covers blindfolded.

Do these people have any idea how many records have been scratched, compact discs overheated in car stereo systems, headphones discarded due to impossible entanglements? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?

These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take Napster? We already seeded torrents of our entire libraries. They shoot John Lennon? Music listeners aren't shy about throwing their money at George Harrison, or even Wings. They think calling us Satan-worshipers, suicide-sympathizers, or swashbuckling pirates is going to change us? We've been called worse things by Tipper Gore. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to grindcore lyrics describing the entrails ripped from a virgin's cunt, who enjoy the loudness war Rick Rubin has waged against us for years and take it ask us when our substitute teachers demand we stand up and tell the class what we want to do with our lives. Our obsession with proving we want to rock after being told we can't rock is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with our fathers wanting to watch the news and proving to him that Megadeth music videos ARE, in fact, the news.

Music-listeners are fighters by nature. We love to fight for our rights to party. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challenge us. You're not special, you're a creep and a weirdo; this is just another PMRC hearing.