[ghaff]

An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD. I disagreed fairly strongly at the time. But today? Times are quite different of course but widespread streaming music with a near-universal (at least mainstream) catalog suggests that a ton of people are fine with paying $15/month to not bother seeking out content through torrents.

While the situation is obviously messier with video, it's also the case that many of us don't feel a burning need to watch most specific content and are fine with having access to enough stuff we want to watch without hassle.

[giantrobot]

> An analyst I know once argued pretty strongly that Napster became popular not because it was free but because it was more convenient than going to the record store and buying a CD.

Some context for the younger HN audience: a CD used to cost $15-20 new and almost no artist in the US sold singles. If you wanted a song you heard on the radio you needed to go to one or more record stores to find the CD and pay your $15. Rarely did you get to sample anything on the CD at the store. So you'd get home only to realize you essentially paid $15 for one stupid song. Hopefully you liked half the songs on the album so you were maybe paying $3 per song you liked. Ripping that CD to MP3 was also more time invested.

Even over a 28.8k dial-up downloading the same song of Napster would only take about twenty minutes.

As the various online music stores showed, money wasn't the main issue with Napster et al. People were fine paying for music so long as it was convenient. By the early 00s buying CDs was far from convenient for how people actually wanted to listen to music. Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.

[ghaff]

>Music streaming is just the latest convenience since everyone has an Internet connected device in their pocket and their "library" is just every song in the service's catalog.

Yeah, mobile probably played a role as well. Even if you have a few TB of music reasonably cataloged on a USB drive at home, that doesn't do you a huge amount of good when you're somewhere where you only have access to your phone or want to have a listen to some newly-released album.

We're also in a situation where if you know someone with vaguely similar music tastes, they could clone that few TB in less than an hour but I honestly don't know how much even that goes on these days. My sense is that most people aren't interested in spending much time to catalog their media.

[OfSanguineFire]

> Even if you have a few TB of music reasonably cataloged on a USB drive at home

I have been pirating artists’ entire discographies across multiple genres, 200 CD box sets, etc. for 20 years now, but I still have barely scratched 1TB -- and that’s even with my collection consisting entirely of FLACs, some of which are large 96/24 files or 5.1 surround-sound files. Audio alone just doesn’t take up much space. I don’t think obsessive fans are going to get into a “few TB” unless they are collecting for the sake of collecting, not just building their own personal collection to listen to. And a 1TB collection actually does fit now on your phone thanks to Sandisk offering a 1TB SD card.

For films, sure, one is definitely looking at more than “a few TB”. I have a collection of about 600 films, all of which are DVD images or Blu-ray remuxes, and that already amounts to 6TB. With the availability of 4K remuxes that can be up to 100GB each, demands on storage will only grow.