[baddox]

Well, I don't really "own" my music in a legal sense, although I do own some licenses to music as well as some plastic discs and flash chips that store digital copies of music.

I do have the same intuition that you do that subscription music services are unsatisfying, but I think the line is starting to blur. I use iTunes almost exclusively as my music library, through iTunes Match and my own iTunes purchases. Other than the songs that happen to be cached on my devices, this is not physically any more permanent or "owned" than a subscription service like Spotify. Granted, I can download and backup music from iTunes, but that's an additional step that most people presumably don't do. (I do keep fairly recent backups of my music, and much of my especially cherished music is backed up from CDs, though I refuse to purchase physical media these days.)

[visarga]

I pay deezer 6$/month and can download the tracks on my flash drive or stream. The library is large enough that I never missed a song.

[yellowapple]

Never heard about Deezer before. Sounds like a good deal, but apparently it's not available in the United States, and I really don't feel like fiddling with proxies in order to bypass that.