Is that $12/mo truly worth it? I mean, do you find 13+ new songs you genuinely enjoy every month? And would the alternative media be so expensive that you couldn’t build your library using that $12/mo, over a reasonable period of time? I know for me that it’s not worth it, I can buy 3-4 CDs for that $12, even less if I find some good deals, and I’ve had better luck finding new music at the Goodwill than I have with Spotify.
Yes, are you crazy? 12 songs is such a low bar I find at least 12 new artists every month. The music scene is so huge that tiny niches in relative terms can get sustainable followings. I just went to a sold-out show last week where the headliner had 50k monthly listeners.
Did you just decide on your 30th birthday that you aren't allowed to listen to new music anymore? I can't even imagine listening to the same music collection on repeat forever.
Crazy? Maybe, but I also know that within my anecdotal data Spotify prefers to show you popular artists and/or songs you are already familiar with, making finding new niche artists a struggle for me. And most people will stay within what Spotify recommends them, meaning they are, in my experience, barely reaching the 12 new songs/mo minimum. I also have found that yes, most people do decide to stop finding new music as they get older. It’s very common for people to both overstate their desire for new media and to simultaneously slow down their intake of new media over time.
Me and you are both at least one to two standard deviations above the mean in terms of artist acquisition rates. And Spotify hasn’t been able to help me with music acquisition as much as exploring physical music selections or Discogs, BandCamp, or eBay has, and in those cases I end up with higher quality listening experience as well.
I'd wager that there's a good number of people that don't even own a CD player anymore. $12/month to have music to listen to, even if I don't have new tracks pushed on to me, seems like a reasonable deal to me to not have to deal with the hassle of hosting it on my own server and, what, ripping my CDs to mp3s? If a friend comes in and wants to hear something, Spotify is more likely to have it than my local mp3 collection.
Owning your music files doesn't necessarily imply that you have to by them physically on CDs. Of course the music you are interested in might not be available in your preferred format or on your preferred streaming platform.
Yes, and it’s a shame people have abandoned physical media. Who said you had to host it though? You can also simply keep them on your phone. 1GB of storage comes out to around 20 hours of 128kbps OPUS, which will sound identical to Spotify’s offerings, and takes all of a few minutes to rip the disk, have a program automatically tag the metadata, and convert every song to OPUS. It’s also more likely that your friend will find their music on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you should get YouTube Premium.