Once upon a time, music was hard to get in digital form, so when you had it, you hung on to it for dear life, filling your hard drive with dozens of gigs of music. In the age of streaming and cloud music services though, how many of us actually carefully prune and manage our digital music collections? Do you still download and stuff your hard drive with tunes, or do you get your get your fix from the cloud?
I have a hard drive in my home server that’s full of music — something like 60GB-80GB of songs, many of which I haven’t listened to in years. I’m not hurting for lack of drive space, but every time I see that network share, I feel like I should make some new playlists or at least delete songs from artists I don’t like anymore. Even so, I can’t do it, even though I’ve largely made the transition to cloud services like Grooveshark and Spotify when I want something to listen to.
Moving to the cloud has many benefits: you get access to your music anywhere you go, someone else manages it for you, and the odds are you’re discovering more new music by sharing playlists and seeing what your friends are listening to. On the other hand, keeping a local music collection means you always have control over your tunes, you can put them on any device you want, and most importantly, you don’t need internet access to enjoy your music.
What about you? Do you still have a hard drive full of music that you carefully curate, have you moved entirely to the cloud, or are you tempted now there are so many options to do so? Do you delete music you don’t listen to, or is every MP3 an essential part of your collection? Let us know in the comments below.
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