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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

After reading so many good things about spotify, I gave it a spin for the first time this past week. It actually is the best music streaming service I've used before, but I'm still not going to subscribe.

New albums on CD are nearly universally under $10 now, and used CDs are even cheaper, so the price of Spotify is more than an album per month. That's a very steep price, and ultimately I think I'm happier buying 15 CDs per year than paying Spotify's subscription fees.

I don't see such high royalties are sustainable if Spotify can't be profitable under them.

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The average music consumption case looks a lot different than 15 CDs per year. I've listened to hundreds of different artists this week and I consider myself a pretty light music consumer.

Whoa dude are you serious? You still use CDs?

I think for most people this is a non-starter, maybe you convert them to MP3s and sync them to all your devices?

Right now I use Spotify and can listen to my music at work, home, or on the go using my phone. And that's fine with me. I don't pay for Spotify though which means I have to listen to ads and their mobile experience isn't as good.

Yes I convert them to MP3s (well ogg) and sync them to my devices. Other than my bluray player, I don't have a working CD player in my house (my 3 disc changer separate died a few years ago).

In any event, DRM free MP3s are usually within about $1 of the album price, and many of the places that sell MP3s have some option to stream from their cloud storage. I go with the shiny plastic discs because a) I'm a Luddite and b) some genres of music have audible distortions in mp3 (mainly pre-echo!) that I find bothersome when listening with headphones.

I’m shocked that people consider 1 CD per month to be expensive for access to millions of albums.

Not to mention I find Spotify's discover weekly feature to be worth at least 50% of it's monthly cost. Every week it generates a 30-song playlist tailored to my tastes and I end up saving probably 10 of those songs on average to my collection. I find it to be really well done.

Okay everybody has raved about discover weekly; I've only had 2 of them now, but have yet to hear a track I don't already know, much less an artist. I mean I enjoyed them but it hasn't lived up to its name of "discover" yet; it's so far been popular tracks of fairly well known artists.

Quickly browsing through the current list, about half of them are songs I've heard on the radio in the past month.

There are few alba I like fully. I also have varying listening habits, like to discover new stuff (great algorithms!), like to just hit play and like the convenience of all the music on all devices - with the state even synced among them very well. Down side: I don't own the music. But apart from DLNA playback not being easily possible it's not really a pain point.

Maybe one day I'll even switch from the free plan to paying them.

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