alt Hacker NewsI used to be with you on that ... but getting of my lazy bum to actually pay for Spotify - and looking past all the fair/unfair issues bad/good corporate stuff ...
The ability to browse music is very powerful.
I lost my 1 Soundgarden CD 20 years ago. Now I can listen to all their albums.
You can do the entire Beatles catalogue <- this is a different form of listening.
Discover artists I would never have otherwise heard of.
It has it's downsides, but I dont think CD was 'better'.
We just have an imperfect situation.
And the biggest part of the money you pay the streaming platform goes to neither Soundgarden, nor the remaining Beatles, nor to those artists you discovered but to Taylor Swift[1]. This is in stark contrast to how CD economics worked.
As someone who spent a lot of his youth carefully avoiding big label acts and trying to support small artists, this is what bothers me the most: there is no way to do that anymore if you use streaming.
[1] https://mertbulan.com/2025/08/10/why-paying-for-spotify-most...