alt Hacker News> It is way cheaper long term.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
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> I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
Try before you buy is what piracy is for. I would prefer if there was another venue to try before paying, but the industry hasn't figured this out in the past hundred years, so piracy it is.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
I don't think that logic really holds but its pushed by spotify. People used to listen to a lot of varied music -- and theres a lot of ways to do that still without paying for spotify.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
My CD collection is around 30 years old. Spotify is currently $13/month. $13 times 30 years is $4680. A lot of people could cover most of what they listen to with that much budgeted to buying CDs... and I'd remind people that the relevant price isn't list price but what you actually pay. Fetching a Michael Jackson album out of a bargain bin for $1 is that album for a $1, whatever someone else somewhere else somewhen else might have paid. I also buy my own movies, and there's a lot of "$5 for the entire Lethal Weapon series collection" sorts of purchases in there.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.