The economics of the music industry were always heavily tilted to the record labels, but Spotify somehow took it even further. Their CEO is a billionnaire for what? Being an unprofitable middle-man that pays $1 to the labels for every $0.80 they get?

It pays US$0.70 for every US$1 it gets, it's in their financial reports quite easily to see.

Did you honestly buy music so infrequently, or did I buy music more than the normal person? In high school, I'd buy an album/CD a week. That wasn't just new releases but also meant including back catalog to fill in the collection.

Are we just opposite ends of the music acquisition spectrum?

Even a CD every other month sounds high to me, buying a CD a week sounds insane to me, where would you even put them all? I owned like... 6 CDs total before I started downloading MP3s. I would just listen to the radio. My friends were the same, they only owned albums from their very favorite bands.

Generational differences I guess. MP3s did not become a thing until way after I was out of college. I used my weekly lunch allowance to buy a CD for that week. Most CDs of back catalog content was $9-$15. The >$20 prices weren't that common for typical releases. Of course some special release with multiple discs were priced higher.

Where did I put them? I just had stacks of them like everyone else. Now, they are just in boxes labeled CDs. Most of the time, they were in a CD player in the car, in the disc changers, in the Walkman, etc. Lots of people would toss the case, and put the disc/liners in a flip book to reduce space.

When you are into music, you deal with it. Like drummers. Where would you even put the drum set? What a silly question honestly.

Singles were a thing though. I think they were priced at like a fifth of an album?

And took up exactly the same amount of space.

My generation didn't buy CDs. It was all mp3. I think the shift was when I reached CD buying age at 14.

I tried to compare the sub fee with how many CDs you would end up with.

Judging by my parents and friends parents about 40-80 CDs seemed like a common size of the music collection among people that had a collection, that propably had been growing for 20 years since mid 80s.

I also argue that video rental stores were way more value than todays streaming subscription.

Was your generation the same generation that never paid for any of those mp3s? Even when Napster/Limewire hit, it just never sat well with me the out right flagrant stealing going on. It was no less shocking to me than the groups flagrantly walking into stores and ripping them off. Of course people will counter with whatever reasons they used as excuses (I've heard them all). At the height of "mp3 trading", I knew many artists whose music was being distributed on these platforms that never saw a dime. Bandcamp is the closest to the ideal thing that I can imagine where fans/artist can exchange directly without a label ripping off the artists especially now that artists do not have to depend on studio time.

We would maybe rent two films a week, they probably cost £5 for the pair.

That's £20 per month for 8 movies? Not sure that's better value than Netflix.

It's not. Just typical nostalgia falsifying people's memories. My autism doesn't stand for it.

CDs were 20-30 euro. A complete fucking rip off. No highschool kid could afford buying one every week unless they had wealthy parents. DVD box sets of TV shows? Just thinking about it makes my blood boil so I'll leave it there.

I for one welcome our Netflix and Spotify overlords.

You guys must have had some heavy import duties or something. I was buying $9/CD for the older releases and $19.99 for new releases. My parents gave me $20/week for lunch, and I'd skip lunch and save that money to buy a new CD at the end of the week. My parents were far from wealthy.

Once I got into electronic music, things did get a bit more expensive because of the damn "import" stickers coming out of Europe.