[addicted]

Does it benefit customers though?

At $13/mo, Spotify Premium costs $156/yr.

On the other hand, the cost of a CD album is $10-$15 new. Used, borrowed it’s even cheaper. So for that amount you can buy 10-15 albums new. Which will be with you forever. And you can now get digital singles for $0.25-$2.

Discovery is still possible or even better through good old fashioned radio or internet radio, which is what both Spotify and Apple are recreating through curated playlists and literally radio for Apple.

And if you want to listen to an individual song, ad supported free options are available across the internet, which labels and artists are thrilled to provide you since it gives you an incentive to buy the album/song and/or pay for a live performance ticket.

I’ve been budgeting about $100/yr for the last few years, and by leveraging sales, etc. my collection means I struggle to spend even $30-$40/yr now, which means that I have $60-$70 which i use to support a variety of smaller artists whose music I may catch live and buy the albums they burned on their PCs for $10.

Obviously this isn’t ideal for all. Those who love to listen to all the newest music all the time would be better off with the streaming services, but I suspect a surprisingly large percentage of people may be better off just buying their music if they have the patience to build their library over a few years, or the money to put down a large upfront investment.

[rgavuliak]

I like the accessibility - I won't have any my collection available on a vacation at the click of a button on a whim.

I like the recommendations - I discovered a lot of new interesting music thanks to Spotify algs in the past 6 months. It's a value add for me. I don't have time to follow releases or to just look up random bands.

[pharmakom]

Your analysis is missing the time/effort cost of sourcing, ripping and syncing CDs to a device. It’s a pain (I do it!) compared to just launching Spotify.

[addicted]

I wrote the comment assuming buying CDs because that’s how I like to do it (I like having a physical device) and because that also gives you the used option which is often cheaper (although my 10-15 calculations are based entirely on new albums).

But if your needs are entirely digital, buying an online album is even easier than finding it on Spotify, and finding that it’s often not available (because the particular artist hasn’t licensed with Spotify) and/or if it’s even slightly not mainstream, Spotify will bury it under the mainstream options it would like to push.