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And how many CDs can you buy per month for the price of a Spotify subscription? I am not going to be spending hundreds of Euros per month on physical media, and I also value my time too much to bother with ripping and converting these, just so I can end up with a worse experience for more money, while also producing a bunch of unnecessary plastic rubbish.

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I don't understand myself, what you actually gain from constantly buying new music. Either the music is good, or it's not. If it's not it's not a loss to not buy it, and if it is it's not going to stop invoking the emotions you like it for, or intellectually demand you. You can hear the same music for hundred of times and still discover some new aspect, instrument, melody or sound, you haven't noticed yet. (if it is good)

If I would try to chase, constantly, new music, I wouldn't be able to actually listen to anything, and thus wouldn't enjoy anything at all.

(The only thing that makes sense to me, if people want to be like their peers and up to trends, so simply "listen" to new music to be able to talk like they now what's en vogue right now. But then it's hardly about the music itself and more like collecting an evergrowing checklist.)

At least for a family plan ($22/mo), around 2-20 or so depending on the CD. That accumulates pretty quickly, and of course you don't have to worry about limitations like living at the same address.

This may be the main difference between consuming content and listening to music. For some people, more is not always better and the process of building a collection and putting time and energy into it is a big part of the experience.

Yep - I’ve noticed I’ve stopped “having music playing” and I’ve more started “listening to the music” if that makes sense.

After ten years of Spotify subscriptions, you own nothing. Put that $12.99 or more per month into discs instead, and you'd have quite a nice music collection that's still yours ten years later.

Local used CD store sells albums for 7USD - could even get two a month and put money away on months you don’t want to buy anything.

You dont own those either. If you lose your copy, it's gone forever with no remediation or claim of ownership except at the specific retailer you did your transaction at. The source where it came from is unaffected by your loss, and they can decide at any time to stop selling their discs with or without your involvement. The nostalgic rose tinted pandering behind vinyls and old media conveniently forgets the introduction of digital storage to actually ensure reliable redundancy, and so "buying" physical media is just a smoke and mirrors way of saying the disc is for vain aesthetics while the actual mental relief comes from the secondary process being able to digitize it locally.

Following the same mindset of circumventing the traditional process, I could spend one single month ripping every single song I possibly can from Spotify and have the same claim of ownership over their files that you do with a much larger variety and without all the wasted physical space on assets that are immediately digitized. The only benefit to your method is that you feel like it justifies hoarding.

Presumably people also have some sense of fair exchange when buying the disc to rip vs. ripping from Spotify. If you want to be strictly rational you can of course skip the Spotify part too and just pirate it.

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