[smoe]

Depends on your listening habits. If you listen to a few albums a lot, buying the albums absolutely makes sense to make sure you'll always have them.

But for example me, I grew up listing to mixtapes and as a child/teenager spent many weekends in front of my sisters programmable 5 disc CD player to record songs from CDs borrowed from friends to cassette tapes. I never got out of this habit. While some albums I prefer to listen as a whole, in general I favor playlists. Streaming is great for this. Also especially YouTube has a lot of live recordings that aren't released otherwise.

I do buy quite a bit of digital and physical records from independent artist but then listen to them on Spotify. Because the streaming platforms tend to have horrible payment models. This I find much worse, than DRM and lack of ownership.

[toastal]

Pretty much on the money. I'm not a 'playlist' kind of person so this doesn't interest me. I've been able to send a full OGG file to a friend as a recommendation though, which didn't involve sending someone to service.