Storage costs being what they are now, I'm just syncthing'ing my entire mp3 collection to my phone now. According to syncthing it's 27.9GB, and while I'm sure there are people out there with another factor of magnitude more, a 512GB SD micro card, where the value sweet spot appears to currently reside, is ~$38 now. You can stick a lot of music on your phone now. At 256kb/s or so that's roughly half-a-year straight of music [1]; if you really just can't cut your collection down to that, well, I mean, you can nearly get the full year straight for $90 or so now, and I'm sure 2TB will be along shortly. We're not that many exponential doublings away from you being able to store enough music to last your entire life on your phone.
Assuming your phone still takes an SD card, of course. I get the whole "push into the cloud" thing but SD card prices have been consistently running ahead of cloud storage options and bandwidth plans for a while now; it's kind of amusing that it's the high end phones that lack this option. It's nice to be able to slam music, movies, entire seasons of TV on to my phone without it interfering with the main OS space.
In hindsight it is crazy that tiny iPods from the early-mid 00s had 120-160 GB storage, more than what a flagship $1000 iPhone starts with twenty years later. Yes they used HDDs, but for media consumption it didn't really matter. And then when Apple switched to flash storage we took a massive step back to 1/2/4 GB with outrageous premiums for extra capacity.
I remember reading articles at the time running the numbers on what it would cost to legally fill an OG iPod with mp3s at $0.99 a song or $9.99 an album. My memory is fuzzy but I remember it being something like $15,000 to fill an iPod legally with music from iTunes. Many articles concluded that the device was speced for piracy.
I don’t think the storage size was reduced for technical reasons. I suspect a lot of back and forth with the music industry happened to constrain the device to a “practical” size for legally licensed music.
The music industry is 100% invested in streaming music services, so they don't care if Apple offered high-capacity iPhones cheaply.
Rather, it's Apple who has intentionally been keeping storage capacity low for 2 reasons:
1.) Push users to use iCloud storage, which isn't cheap and purposely doesn't even offer storage tiers that match their phone capacities.
2.) It provides incentive for users to upgrade, especially in an era where keeping an iPhone for 3-5 years has become common and new models offer very little from older ones.
I think my parents owned order magnitude 500 cds. Something like 150mb per album in mp3 format gets you to, what, ~75gig?
I doubt they were outliers? Nobody I know filled their players with itunes bought music, almost everyone was importing from physical back catalogues. I will concede that we did subsequently share our collections somewhat though...
Yeah, I spec'd 256kb/s to be conservative and to head off audiophiles screaming about 128kb/s MP3s at the pass, but 128kb/s is quite common, and turns 512GB into a year straight, 24/7, of music. I feel like that for all but basically a pathological pirate who is not listening to everything they're pirating at that point, this really ought to be enough that most people don't need to "subset" their collection for their phone anymore.
At my personal collection of 30GB, I don't need a server anymore, self-hosted or otherwise. I just put copies of it wherever I want it, and it's part of my backup set.
