| > It ends up costing me about as much as streaming. Spotify is $10/month. If you're purchasing everything instead, that's only about 1 new album or 10 tracks per month into your collection. The only way the price could be similar is if you're not listening to much new music. That may work from some people, but I don't think it's common. I estimate I listen to a minimum of 50 new tracks per week, which would be hundreds of dollars per month if I was buying everything. I also wouldn't be exposed to nearly as much new music if I had to buy it all. > I'd have a hard time going back to other streaming services after getting used to the convenience of having control over the entire chain. I'm also confused about how dealing with all of these small purchases, manually managing your library, and setting up and maintaining a server for it is more convenient than signing up for Spotify. It's hard to beat something like Spotify for convenience: Create account. Add payment method. Listen to nearly anything. I think you might be dismissing the relative complexity of your setup because it's something you enjoy setting up and maintaining, but it's definitely not as convenient as Spotify (or other music streaming services). |
On average, that is indeed where I'm at, I had thought I did more than that but upon actually checking my purchase history, I found that I didn't really get new tracks too often, instead every few months I come across a new artist (via covers on youtube or from twitter) whose style I really enjoy and end up buying most of their discography in one go (and new tracks don't come out too often). Then I spend a lot of time listening to it all, enjoying picking up things I might've missed before. This is probably also affected by my preferences being a bit niche as a very specific flavor of J-Pop.
For managing the overall structure of my library I use MusicBrainz Picard, the small purchases don't really bother me too much.
You're right in that I do also enjoy setting up and maintaining my configuration. I self-host a bunch of things so the machine is already running anyway.