Unfortunately, the experts on media preservation and the music industry whom I consulted told me that I have good reason to fear ongoing instability. “You’re screwed,” said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, after I asked him if I could count on having my music library decades from now.

The reason I’m screwed is that Spotify listeners’ ability to access their collection in the far-out future will be contingent on the company maintaining its software, renewing its agreements with rights holders, and, well, not going out of business when something else inevitably supplants the current paradigm of music listening. (Kahle sees parallel preservation problems with other forms of digital media that exist on corporate platforms, such as ebooks and streaming-only movies.)

I might be particularly neurotic about the future of my music library because I already lost it once before. About 10 years ago, some 5,000 audio files I had amassed in iTunes disappeared after a hard-drive backup gone wrong—my own personal version of when MySpace acknowledged in 2019 that millions of tracks uploaded during the site’s prime years had been lost after a “server migration project.”