I tried to make this after Google Play Music died, but I never found any success.

Here's my site. You can try it for free: https://inter.tube

It supports almost all of Subsonic (highly recommend play:Sub on iOS). FLAC works. I never re-encode your songs, they are kept byte-for-byte. It doesn't support Last.fm (yet?) but I don't think it would be too hard to add. It respects metadata tags. There are still some glitches, and the web player kind of sucks. You can (batch) edit metadata on the web but it does not change the file, just the web/API interfaces.

To be honest I have mostly lost motivation to work on this, but I was aiming at exactly the pain points the author of this article describes. Send me an email (profile) or tweet/comment if you think it's worth pursuing again.

At the end of the day, a union is merely one of the ropes that workers can tug at to maintain leverage.

Doctors don't use unions. They instead artificially limit supply by erecting massive barriers to enter their workforce. This keeps them in demand. Software contrasts this with an open-door policy. On top of that, all white-collar labor jobs barring software involve serious licensing requirements as further gatekeeping.

Lawyers maintain leverage by making sure the it's Lawyers all the way up. No MBAs, people-persons or bean-counters controlling their profession. This means that the workers control important intangibles like customer relationships & hidden information ...both of which make you irreplaceable. Software instead pushes technical people from the stable-and-monetarily-rewarding positions by making the management-track entirely distinct from the working professional (IC). At the same time we obsess over building tools and systems that make everyone replaceable and automate ourselves away.

Immigration is another form of leverage. Tech being majority immigrants, means that they lose all leverage in what they can ask for when the ultimate guillotine is held over their heads. Do tech workers vote as a block on matters of immigration to improve their leverage ? No.

Work culture & pressure to conform can also be a type of leverage. If someone likes being well groomed, then professions that expect you to spend those 30 minutes getting perfectly ready are not cumbersome, it is leisure. Afterwork drinking ensures a good social life, but also ensures that everyone leaves work together at 5. It excludes, yes. But if you fit into that clique, then the conforming is effortless and the leverage comes for free. Consulting & finance are some examples of such businesses.

Tech isn't the only broken business. Restaurants & game design are broken for similar reasons.

Unions have their place, but a nation-wide tech worker union is a logistical impossibility. All too often, other levers are over-looked. Tech has made its bed : "learn to code. be a college drop out. get PMs to do the boring work and let them be promoted faster. I will let a glorified secretary be my manager. we will never put my community's 'legal' immigration priorities over those of the greater social issues I 'facilitating illegal immigration' my tribe asks me to commit to....and so on. No we have to lie in it.

The Plan

In the beginning, there was a plan, And then came the assumptions, And the assumptions were without form, And the plan without substance,

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers, And they spoke among themselves saying, "It is a crock of shit and it stinks."

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell."

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying, "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, Such that none may abide by it."

And the Managers went unto their Directors saying, "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength."

And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong."

And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor Of the company With very powerful effects."

And the President looked upon the Plan And saw that it was good, And the Plan became Policy.

As for AI and robots and such taking over the space, I will believe it when I see it. People are okay with toy demos and "oo neat" spectacles, but day in and day out, I see humanity as a whole consistently rejecting "data-driven" analysis and the ability of machines today to crunch numbers, produce models, forecast accurately, tell them how to do their job better, faster, stronger. At best I see these tools providing assistance / enhancement but nobody (at least in this generation) will get into a fully self driving car that was programmed by a bot.

As usual, the only 4 skills that truly matter in this world are:

* listening and empathy - being able to actually hear others in a way you can actually help them, and then having the capacity to do so

* critical thinking - being able to produce a real problem, understand a space with lots of ambiguity and subjectivity, overcome cognitive biases, identify and reject misinformation, and generally be logically thorough and adaptive to changes in information.

* creativity - seeking novelty, practicing self-expression, exhibiting curiosity, inventing, innovating, designing, dreaming.

* grit - perseverance in the face of failure, recasting failure as opportunities to enhance the skills above, being resolute in purpose, embracing change and uncertainty and risk.

From those spring our future.

Perhaps ironically these are the traits that will be the hardest behaviors to "emerge" from an AI, although they certainly have capacity to emulate these behaviors.