The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music

Music seems like the last non-software digital good it is possible to (mostly) avoid streaming [0]:

* Movies / TV shows - completely streaming (ie direct streaming via Prime Video, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, etc) or DRM-laden video libraries that you don't own ("buying" on Amazon).

* Video games - Steam is basically streaming in the sense that you don't own "your" DRM-laced games (if you lose your Steam account, goodbye games and save files), and most other platforms provide you with Steam keys (eg Humble Bundle). Someone told me that itch.io and GOG are a little better on this front, but I haven't looked into this at all. Certainly the consoles are no better than Steam (eg the Nintendo Switch store).

* Short-form video content (like music videos, "YouTube videos") - by and large, all of these are completely locked inside YouTube. Even alternative sites like Vimeo and PeerTube are sparsely populated or serve niche communities. This format is probably the least accessible outside of streaming.

* Podcasts are a mess in general, with mainstream ones staying mostly in iTunes and more niche stuff disappearing into premium services like Patreon and Gumroad, but I suppose the positive thing is that they haven't succumbed to layering everything with DRM yet.

* Ebooks are also incredibly fragmented outside of Kindle, which is a DRM hellscape.

With music, you can access services like Bandcamp to purchase (actually) a lot of indie content, large communities (eg hiphop and electronic music) post new music in DRM-free downloadable formats, and mainstream content is often available for purchase as DRM-free .flac or .mp3 files from a variety of sites including Amazon. Music streaming is definitely eating the music consumption market pretty fast, but I predict it will be a long time before digital music ownership disappears.

[0] Note that I am using "streaming" to refer to "consuming a digital good which you do not own through a service or platform".