Ads, Price Hikes, and AI Slop: You've Been Served.
We were promised everything. And we certainly got more: More ads, more fees, more AI slop.
The streaming media utopia they sold us—own nothing, access everything—isn't holding up.
Video streaming costs rose nearly 20% last year. While we once paid for unlimited, commercial-free access to movies and TV shows, well, now all the services have ads to accompany our price increases.
And music?
Spotify is being overrun with AI songs, by design, and AI is furiously shoveling them at you to improve profit margins. Albums and artists appear and disappear off the services.
Streaming listeners are losing their relationships with artists:
In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening?
Sliding music into the background is more profitable than serving an engaged audience.
The subscription media model has one fatal flaw: they can change the deal whenever they want. And they do.
Against that backdrop, vinyl records have made a comeback. CD1 sales are also up, led surprisingly by Gen Z, who see CDs as both vintage and practical.
I’ve previously written about my own reconnection with CDs. There is something unique about owning the music, having it on the shelf, and listening with intention rather than just for background accompaniment.
CDs were once space-age technology. Today, CDs play nice with digital: one rip and you've got lossless files. Retro meets modern, kinda like this newsletter.2
So I’m going to re-digitize my CD collection into high-quality FLAC music files, and then two hardware and software projects will bring it all to life.
The software project
My next AI project is to build my own music app to play my files. Will it be my forever go-to? Maybe not. Plexamp seems pretty great for streaming your own music. But I want to go though the learning3 process of using AI to build software top-to-bottom, and to think through decisions in UI and look and feel.
That’s something I’ve never done before, and couldn’t without AI.
Could I possibly get this sucker into Apple’s App Store? Let’s find out together.
The hardware project
I’m building a home network-accessible storage solution (NAS) to stream my music files. The NAS will store and back up the files, and the music will always be accessible through my Mac or iPhone.
I’ll write about the hardware and software setup for this as I walk through it, because you might want to follow along.
For me, these projects are less about nostalgia than my desire to tinker and to have control over what I want to own.
(But yeah, also some nostalgia.)
Retro. Digital. Practical. Portable. What’s not to love?
Ideally.
AKA, the pain.