My relationship to music may be incredibly social, but it is also profoundly private and personal. I suspect this is true for a lot of people who care about music, and I think Spotify understands that; I think the saved, offline-available playlists that can accompany a Spotify user anywhere she goes—yet which also disappear the moment she cancels her subscription—are part of the service’s subscriber retention strategy. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se; implicitly holding a few playlists hostage is not the same thing as holding (say) someone’s first born child, or their right kidney, or their cat, and technically speaking there’s nothing to stop a disgruntled user from using her Spotify playlist as an acquisition to-do list before she quits the service.

But there’s a time price to rebuilding a music library, and frequently an economic price as well (as I am presently all too aware, thanks to that hard drive failure). Though I realize my relationship with music is already at the mercy of hardware manufacturers, software developers, and others (to say nothing of vinyl pressers, turntable cartridge makers, electric companies and the power grid and all of that), I’m wary of getting into a position from which I might have to calculate what either my love of music or my sense of right and wrong is worth in currencies of time, money, or frustration. In the end, I’m still clinging to “ownership” because for me, having files on my hard drive does a better job of preserving illusions of freedom and control.