>It is way cheaper long term.
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.
Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.
Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex
Besides being a plight for culture and enemies of artists Spotify is quite a bad collection too.
But you are right that many of the my dads CDs cant be found on streaming services.
People don’t even realise what they lost, but then again they probably don’t care either way
You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?
>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?
No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.
Plus no more buffering or streaming artifacts.
Unfortunately, though, very few DVDs are 576p.
Percent of non-HN users who've ever ripped a CD: Negligible
Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.
People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.
I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.
Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.
Similarly, as you age you'll have less time spending on entertainment. The initial investment might be higher, but it will eventually be cheaper. And you'll curate more instead of mindlessly watching whatever crap there is.
Don't just look at the next decade. Look at the entire rest of your life and keep in mind that inflation made a thirty cent school meal go up to five dollar over the course of someone's life. Your money will continue to lose value, so you'll have to pay more and more for streaming. And you can never stop without losing access to everything and being left with nothing.
Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.
Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.
Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13
There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.
So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.
So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.
I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..
I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.
> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.
Sure. And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.
> There is a compounding effect
That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.
> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.
Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services. I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like. And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.
A library of 300 songs is tiny. I guess you don't listen to much music? Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.
Right now I'm listening to trace classics from 2000 :)
This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.
If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.
If you are someone who wants to frequently listen to new music, then sure, Spotify is cheaper than constantly buying new albums. But I at least don't do that; I listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager and I pick up 0-1 new albums per year. So again, no real advantage to using Spotify.
LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.
You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.
Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.
Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.
- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
Also, the company has a pretty terrible leadership: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...
I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house
In one single afternoon Amazon Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.
I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.
I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.