I Just Deleted All My Music ⇥ npr.org

Bob Boilen, writing for the All Songs Considered blog:

I just deleted over 25,000 songs from my iTunes library. I am going to trust in the cloud, where my library now lives. I’m a bit scared, but I backed everything up, took a deep breath and stepped into the future.

Boilen is using iTunes Match, which is a brave move. I like iTunes Match, and Spotify ¹, Rdio, and all the rest of the cloud music services. But I don’t trust them to deliver my music reliably, or into the future.

I don’t think Apple will remove content from iTunes—it isn’t in their interest to do so. I also think it’s painfully clear to the labels that they need these services in order to stay relevant. But I don’t feel comfortable with handing the keys over just yet because there’s a possibility that they might remove music I listen to on a regular basis. This happened with Spotify, in fact: it used to have a “Radio” feature, which they removed a couple of years ago for unclear reasons (probably a licensing issue).