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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.

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.

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300 songs is not many at all. I have purchased around 20,000 songs in my life. Would it have been cheaper to use Spotify? I suppose so but (a) they don’t have all the music I want and (b) I prefer having the independence to control my media. Also Spotify didn’t exist when I started :)

300 songs might not sound like many, yet that is how many items have been added to my library or to a playlist in 12 years.

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.

I have 15 years worth of songs, account is less than 10 years old. Arguably I would be okay dropping some of those songs if I wanted to buy the songs. The biggest difference for me though is the issue of discoverability. It is very easy for me to find and save new songs on Spotify, it would be much harder for me to find the songs I like if I had to pay for them, especially since a lot of the songs I like are not just songs from popular artists but are often just one of two random songs from random artists. Is there a good middle ground here? I keep a copy of my song list in case I want to ditch Spotify but this is the main hurdle for me.

In my last.fm account it says I have listened 122.000 different tracks, I would have gone mad listening for the 300 same songs for 12 years, it would be like torture for me.

Is this arguing in favour of Spotify?

> 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.

I tend to listen to the same music all the time, I just checked, I add about 30 songs to my library a year.

Right now I'm listening to trace classics from 2000 :)

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