I don't want just 24 hours of music, I want a comprehensive sample of my entire music library. In my case it exceeds the 16gb (or whatever it's available after iOS + other apps) easily.
The problem with me is that I want high quality music on my phone (and I listen to it with high quality headphones all the time). Like, nothing except 320 kbps MP3 files and occasional lossless files that randomly find its way to my library. I have an Android smartphone that only supports memory cards up to 32 GB in size. It's a pain. I can't even get 1500 songs properly (keep in mind that the music is not the only thing that I have on the SD card, there's also my book library and some photos).
Streaming them in that quality for two to three hours in per day on average would take a lot of data.
Storage is one of the reasons why I could never get used to using my phone as a music player.
I keep my 50GB+ music collection on a separate device (FiiO X3), which allows me to stick to the lowest storage tier for any phone I'm interested in, and not have to worry about expandable storage (which seems to be on the way out as a trend, unfortunately).
Also, I'm a rather heavy user and my phone tends to only barely last the entire workday and commute before running out (if it lasts at all). Having a separate device for music means I don't need to feel guilty about wasting phone battery when listening to music.
The downside is you end up having to carry 2 devices instead of one, which can honestly be annoying at times, but I'm willing to make that compromise. YMMV of course.
I have an S4, and am planning to upgrade to an S5 when the price drops from the S7 sales. The only reason I use Samsung phones is for removable batteries and expandable storage. I have a 128GB sd card in my phone with 60GB of music and 40GB of movies on it.
I could never fathom using a phone without reasonable storage capacity. 16GB was bad in 2000. In 2016, anything less than 256GB is a joke, and the joke is really no laughing matter anymore. It has not been for at least a half decade in the mobile space.
Me, I'm the type of guy to have 10gb of music, photos and apps, and offload a lot of stuff to my PC and stream increasingly more. I'm okay with 16.
Is 16 a bit silly? Sure, but it's an easy way to pad the margins a bit and there's just plenty of people for whom 16 is just fine, to the extent that the upgrade option is a decent solution.
e.g. my entire office is on iPhones and they use it for mail and some other stuff, 80% of their storage is unused, will be unused forever, and it makes sense not to pad that even more and increase the base price.
I wish the price bump was a bit smaller if you want to increase your 16gb, more in line with their cost price, but... I'm not at all opposed to the notion that a 16gb base model exists.
At least for all them youngins, we all use soundcloud of bandcamp for the most part. Depedent on data? Yes, but with that you get live updates of new songs or reposts from your favorite artists.
I know this is the case for many people but I'm not a big fan of streaming media to my phone. It's expensive, unnecessary (for my use case) and too unreliable to my liking. I sometimes do it but I just don't rely on it.
It might be a YMMV thing. For a lot of edm, soundcloud+bandcamp is more than enough. It's reliable enough for people with good bandwidth (I am lucky enough to be in that group), not to mention the collection is endless and well beyond anything I could fit on my phone...and it's fresher, as in when my favorite DJ/producer has a new song, I see it immediately, like it, comment to tell him/her directly, and so forth. This works well for EDM which doesn't quite follow the traditional "let's sit in a room and write 8 songs and release an album over a couple of months to years" production model. For EDM, where the rate of production is much quicker, streaming + the community makes a large part of the experience, so much so that without those social aspects, you're almost missing out.
Moreover, as many have noticed here, there are only so many minutes in a day, so the actually amount of data you'll download is limited anyway, and the fact that its SC gives you the variety, so I find myself missing very little.
However, for genres where the SC model doesn't work (or at least it isn't present), this doesn't help. When I want to listen to doom metal or psychedelic music, I'm left out and having to resort to what you do. And since I hate poor quality recordings and use flac when I can, my phone runs out of space quickly when I resort to carrying around a music collection.
Streaming them in that quality for two to three hours in per day on average would take a lot of data.