As someone who buys a lot of music, this attitude seems very alien to me - 10 bucks for a very large collection? It's an insane deal - so good that hardly any artist can live off it.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of streaming services and prefer to own my music (a large part of which isn't available for streaming anyway) but for most people this is an incredibly fair deal.
$10/month when I already own a lot of music. I wasn't spending that on new music before streaming.
I've gone with Google Music for this reason - my personal collection is in the cloud for streaming purposes (saved me the hassle of a home media server) - I occasionally buy new music from various sources and upload it to my account.
Ok, got it - I use streaming in addition to buying my music, mostly as a preview hub. Maybe you stopped buying music that frequently at some point, but since I easily buy 10 albums a month the price for streaming and comfortable previewing is a fair share of that budget.
Yeah, spotify is not a great deal if you're just using it instead of your CD collection.
OTOH you can listen to hundreds of dollars worth of new music in a day if you want to, with no risk. If you pick something on a whim that turns out not to be good, just move on to the next album or artist. It's like going to a record fair with an unlimited budget, and a truck to carry your finds home in. There is a never-ending supply of crazy stuff on there.
I was an on and off subscriber to Rhapsody in the mid/late 2000's but was generally turned off by the idea of not owning my music because getting Rhapsody music onto a portable device meant having to pay more per month as well as using whatever terrible devices supported it at the time. Also, you would not get access to all of Rhapsody on the device, just whatever you chose to sync. So even though I would occasionally use Rhapsody, mostly as a radio/discovery tool, I was still buying music the old-fashioned way, either on iTunes, CDs, or pirating via Oink.
Once smart phones came around and data plans approached a level where streaming music wouldn't explode your bill, I think streaming became a no-brainer. It still took me two years of having Spotify before I realized I could throw away all my old CD's that were eating up space, but once I reached that point, the value of streaming, at least to me, was pretty clear.
Sure, there are gaps in the music, but I think for most people, those gaps don't exist. And even for the layperson replacing their CD collection, having a Spotify/Apple Music/etc. account means having access to their music on any device, anywhere they go. Duplicating that kind of access with a CD collection is difficult.
> and data plans approached a level where streaming music wouldn't explode your bill
Don't forget much of the world (I'm in the UK) already has generous enough data plans that many people stream without thinking twice. The US is an outlier in this regard.
yes, but it depends on your listening habits. I am oddly fine just listening to the music I own, and buying some more every now and then, so I spend significantly less than 10$/m now. Would be interesting to try a streaming service, but it would be a good deal more expensive for me.
Anyway, maybe I should try one of the free offers. :-)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of streaming services and prefer to own my music (a large part of which isn't available for streaming anyway) but for most people this is an incredibly fair deal.