[fragmede]

> buy 3-4 CDs

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.

[badmintonbaseba]

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.

[tourmalinetaco]

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.