I have to agree 100% I use to pay for a streaming service. I found that I wasn't constantly looking for and discovering new music. I know what I like, there are millions of songs I had access to with the service, how much of that did I listen to? Right now I have over 50 gb of music in my library. I think that is a significant amount,roughly 8000 songs. I found that the longer I was a streaming customer the less value I got in return. After two years, I had pretty much established what my library was, then every so often I would listen to something I didn't already have. Every time I paid that $10 I thought,that 7-15 more songs, depending if I bought whole album or a la carte songs that I could have had and would always have....forever. Able to put on cd or flash card or hard drive or mp3 player,or Iphone. Streaming.....for me.....especially the longer you pay,just doesn't seem worth it. Maybe its a generational thing.
Good post. And no, not generational, it's the almost eternal debate of rent vs. own. Ask any home renter or car lease about the question. While some can make a passionate case about the merits of renting/leasing, others can make similarly passionate cases against it. We're trying to sell a home right now. Some of our prospective buyers keep using the phrase, "I'm so tired of renting" often accompanied with "...tired of paying someone else's mortgage payment."
Renting works best when it's the only option. It works well in narrow, specific circumstances. It will wane though as one looks back on it against what they could have purchased with the money. It can become aggravating when one increasingly realizes that when they stop paying, they lose access to
their(?) collection.
Music is relatively dirt cheap. Building up a collection of favorites is easier than ever before. Used sources of CDs sell the exact same quality of music as one can find on brand new copies of those same CDs. Get your collection up to even 1000 favorite songs and shuffle can fill your music-listening time with songs you want to hear. If you own them, you don't get your credit card dinged for $10 every month. 10 CDs given as a gift each Christmas over even 5 years adds about 500 songs for free to your collection. There are "free music" promotions running from all kinds of (legal) sources if you just look around. A few iTunes gift cards given as a gift lets you fill in the gaps. Getting to 1000 songs you like for as little as free is quite easy.
But... but... but what about NEW music discovery. That seems to be the biggest argument for streaming over the marketing spin of "it's the future". How did we discover new music before streaming services? Pretty much all those options still exist and still work well. And most of them cost nothing or cost nothing in new monthly fees.
Personally, I think "streaming is the future" because digital is killing the cyclical drive to buy the same music over and over. Once you own digital copies, they will sound as good 10 years from now as they sound now. Generationally, when Junior flies the coop, he might take copies of favorites from Mommy & Daddy's collection with him. That used to create a situation where Junior of his parents would have to buy anew. Now, it's just identical copies. Being able to resell the classics over and over is likely under great pressure, so the marketers are spinning streaming as "the future" as merely another way to monetize it.
As the press to rebuy (over and over) the classic music already in the can winds down, the need for more, brand new GREAT music spikes up. But rather than spend the money to try to bring every great new song to the masses, it's much cheaper to try to spin the concept that renting access to the classic library is "the future" and hoping we swallow what is being served. Spinning this as a gateway to new music is only pretending to ignore free radio, free music streaming sources, the whole music video distribution channel, every kind of television-based discovery method, our social media channels, interactions with friends & family, etc.
