iPOD to Spotify

A rocky road through a fantastic landscape.

I own a music collection that has migrated over the years from vinyl LPs to CDs to mp3s, and has more breadth than depth, e.g. 50K songs from 4K artists, with no end in sight. I realized, sadly, that my trusty iTunes library of owned songs and my iPOD were facing the end of the line, and that I needed a source of new music. The major streaming services are nearly identical in capabilities but I settled on Spotify, because of broader device compatibility and since more friends and family were already using it and sharing playlists. Spotify offers upwards of 50 million songs, and a family plan, always useful when the family are hanging out in the kitchen and trading song choices.

It was a daunting task to transition my existing iTunes playlists to Spotify. There’s an automatic conversion feature at the playlist level, but most songs were not directly found in the Spotify library and had to be replaced manually. There were also many rare or custom tracks I had that did not exist in the streaming service. Spotify has a “local files” feature that allows you to point to a folder on your hard drive with your unique mp3s and link them to Spotify playlists, but again, this is more manual work.

I’m a fairly comprehensive collector, that is, my playlist of 1970s hits has 1300 songs which pretty much contains all you can imagine. I found that about 10% of these songs either didn’t exist or did not have Spotify licensed versions that were original. That’s another caveat—Spotify licensing agreements with content providers change continuously, so some of those songs on your playlist will suddenly point to nothing and you’ll have to search for a replacement. This is a distinct bummer for those of us used to owning their music and want all of it on demand, forever. Those of us who, instead, choose Spotify’s own “Chill LoFi Study Beats” as their background music probably won’t care about specific songs.

The mind-blowing extent of the collection, though, is the main deal here. Want a country folk playlist covering the 1920s? No problem. Want an Ornette Coleman retrospective curated by a fellow subscriber? Right here. How about guilty pleasure pop hits from the 1980s? Of course. The best of The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets? A click away. Some omissions are baffling, though, particularly those great retrospective collections the record companies used to do. Where’s Rhino Records’ comprehensive collection Beg, Scream and Shout: The Big ‘Ol Box of 60s Soul? How about Nuggets: Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era? Where’s the incredible Great 78s Project of 200K songs (pre-1950s) from the Internet Archive (which are license-free)? And not including Harry Smith’s essential Anthology of American Folk Music is a glaring omission. Hey—Spotify are the ones saying “50 million songs”, so excuse my urge to geek out and want everything, now.

Sadly, the era of buying a CD for twelve bucks and getting audiophile, lossless versions of music is going away (or is moving towards boutique offerings with prices to match). An entire generation of music lovers is getting acclimated to the severe limitations of 256Kbps mp3s being played on a monophonic Amazon Echo. It’s no accident that the rise in portable, digital music in the 90s was accompanied with recording producers opting for insane levels of compression for a mobile (noisy) environment, giving that distinctive, tin-can-over-string effect. C’est la vie.

My musical adventure is a work in progress. Feel free to contact me with your own experiences and/or questions.