Arguments against cloud services, part one
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There was a time when I used to share stuff that I needed from one machine to another by sending myself an email. Even though my devices were in the same home network, sending an email with the files I needed felt simpler. Maybe even faster. Plus there was the added bonus of keeping a trail of that share in the Sent Email folder.
These days it’s different of course. There’s Google Drive, Google Photos, OneDrive and others, each trying every year to raise the bar in how many free services you get. But let’s take each use case and see if the help you get from a subscription service is really matching the price you pay.
Music
The streaming space is huge, varied and full of features. For 10 USD you get Spotify for a month. For 5 USD you get Deezer for a month. Google Play Music used to be a thing too. But you see, the shut down of Google Play Music makes a very powerful point: no matter how good your streaming service is and no matter how powerful the company behind it is, if they get tired of their service they can simply shut it down. Or they can change the price just enough for you to be uncomfortable.
There is another issue though. In the whole year I paid for Deezer premium, every month the song collection would fluctuate. Some artists would simply disappear (sorry, this artist is not available in your country), others would show up for a month or two and so on. Extra bonus: some artists would decide they don’t want the streaming option anymore just to prove a point. Other artists were simply not in that space at all. So yes, streaming is a viable option and works great but it just cannot compare with you owning your music and organizing it the way you want.
One more thing, a bit irrelevant and whiny but I’ll put it here anyway: being able to edit the mp3 tags yourself means you can have a clear picture of your whole music. Especially when browsing by genre. Shoegaze genre? Really? You can collapse many genre wanna-be situations into common names resulting a much cleaner collection. The thing is you are in control of your music collection. You can organize it the way you want, in…
