I know that there’s a closed topic for this where Plex stated their official position against being a file sharing app. That’s not what this suggestion is for.
I often want to share my media with others, who don’t use Plex. As much as I like to try to convert people to use the greatest media playback offering, I know that many people are very happy with what they watch/listen on.
Plex currently has a feature that gives options where you can watch/listen to the same media, outside of your library (for example, streaming services that have it available to play back)
Why not have something similar where I can click the share button, and the recipient can see a landing page that gives an overview of the media (if available) and links out to streaming services offering the content to play back. Then the user can click the link for their desired streaming service. This will allow greeater exposure of the Plex ecosystem to non-users and get them thinking “Hey, this Plex thing seems pretty great, why don’t I use it too?”
My mistake. I omitted that this is specifically for music. I don’t see any share options for music either in app.plex.tv or in plexamp. Is there such an option that I’m somehow missing?
Realistically, this would just be a list of links to the “search” feature of some limited number of various streaming services. Maybe with automatic submission of the search terms.
But even that would require the cooperation of each of these services. (which is not a safe bet)
And this approach will have some drawbacks:
there is no guarantee that you will find a certain piece of music on any service. So you may have to try several.
more specific than Artist and Title will probably not work, as it is not safe to assume that a specific remastering or special edition of a certain album is actually available. So you won’t be able to recommend e.g. an obscure bonus track, or a specific remastered version.
To improve upon the above, considerably more effort is required.
There’d need to be a central place/company/website/database which has not only
a comprehensive database of all artists, their releases, including the various re-relases and sometimes different variations thereof depending on the country where it was released.
keeps track of which streaming service/music shop has what of the above on offer. Because in the world of intellectual property, this can change rapidly and frequently. So constant updates are necessary.
Plex would then need to link/match your particular music to this central repository. Only then it could offer something for music, like it does with movies/series today.
(The central metadata repository for movies/series is what you can see on https://watch.plex.tv and the website which is tracking availability for streaming/buying is justwatch.com)
There are some attempts to achieve 1) by the last.fm’s, allmusic’s, musicbrainz’s of this world.
But as you may already know, these can have woefully patchy coverage, and sometimes glaring mistakes or ambiguousness in their databases.
And I haven’t heard of attempts to cover 2) at all. It would require substantial amounts of effort and capital to build and maintain.
