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Comment by sleepyhead | Hacker News Reader

I'm not arguing that what Spotify pays artists is reasonable, but what many fail to understand is that streaming is very different from buying. I don't own the songs I listen to on Spotify thus pricing must be different. And I listen to a lot of music I would normally not buy making it more similar to radio in many ways.

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You NEVER "own" the songs you buy. You only "own" the right of listening to those songs whenever you want.

So how is "owning" a CD any different from Spotify?

Also, the value of a song diminishes the more you listen to it. Seriously, even if you love a song, put it on repeat for a day and you probably won't listen to it again for a couple of months.

So it's not like Spotify customers will one day buy the music, unless they really have very specific needs, like being somewhere with a bad or expensive Internet connection, but if you subscribed to Spotify in the first place then I doubt that.

If you don't think it's different, wait for publishers to pull albums from Spotify. This happens all the time. poof gone. Does this happen to your CDs?

> So how is "owning" a CD any different from Spotify?

Because if you quit Spotify you lose all the music. The CD you can keep for life without having to pay $10 every month.

Does "owning" a song makes any sense in the digital world, or is it a relic of the physical album days?

Even besides the licensing/ownership fact (you have always purchased a license to listen to the music privately), I bet there's more music released in a given day than hours in that day. I keep thinking that the model where you can just listen to whatever you want for a flat flee makes a lot more sense in this universe.

I'd buy an argument like that for pandora, where you can't control play order or exactly what you listen to, but come on. Spotify is a total substitution for purchase: listen to pretty much whatever you want in the order you want as many times as you want up to and including 24x7. The $5/mo subscription gives you most even moderately popular music you want for the price of 4-5 cds, with shipping, per year. So obviously spotify shouldn't be forking out $.70 per track per play, but hearing things like artists like Jons Hopkins getting the price of a cd for 90 thousand plays (ie if a song is 5 minutes long listening to it for three hundred and twelve days) is far far too low. [1] I don't know how to set the right rate, but this isn't it...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293892

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