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It's not that hard to set up Audacity to record the audio loopback input on your computer; https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_compu... is a way to do it on Windows, and if you're on Linux you probably already know how to do it so I don't need to explain it. (Which I wouldn't be able to do immediately without looking it up, as the last time I needed to do that it was on my wife's Windows computer).

I'll refrain from explaining the rest of the steps to commit what some people would consider to be copyright violation, though IMHO if you paid for the music you should have a right to download a DRM-free copy as long as you don't distribute it to others.

Though of course, that does factor into the "time expense" you mentioned. But it's something you only have to do once, and you don't have to do it for your whole library at the same time.

Sounds like piracy with extra steps and a worse end result.

Certainly torrenting the same tracks you'd paid for through whatever no-downloads-allowed store, if you can find those tracks, would be fewer steps, and whoever put those up would likely have tagged them already. But if you have obscure tastes in music and nobody is offering those tracks in a torrent, Audacity can rescue you from vendor lock-in.

The legality of torrenting music tracks you've already paid for elsewhere, which would be breaking the letter of copyright law but not (IMHO) its spirit, I will leave to others to debate.

Based on the description, it seems like fair use. It's like transferring music from your own vinyl record to a tape. It's not up to other people to judge why someone prefers to listen to music from a reel-to-reel tape instead of a vinyl record. The same is true for streaming versus listening from WAV files.

I think if you transcoded all the music you want from Apple Music so that you could just listen with an MP3 player or PC of your choosing instead of their software, if you continued paying the subscription fee indefinitely - would be pretty defensible, ethically upstanding, and let's be real, there is a 0.000000000% chance you'd ever get sued for doing that on your own.

The hazards of course are that if someone were to do so and stop paying the subscription fee, they're in dubious moral territory, and if someone built a tool to "help" you do it automatically that person is going to be sued.

Re-recording and correctly tagging every song I've added to my "Library" in the past decade in realtime would cost me thousands in lost productivity though, and I'm likely in the bottom 20% in the metric of "percentage of my library added in 2015-2025." So I'm locked in by the sheer impracticality. Someone who actually keeps up with new music, I can't imagine how many hours they'd have to spend.

Many people experience this but spend many thousands more on a vehicle lease and have to nothing to show for it afterwards

True. I think that's something many are ok with - but the transportation is a service, not much different than Uber. Which arguably is a more correct mental model of car-having vs. being fooled to any degree into viewing the car as an investment.

The need is "transportation" -- you have a number of ways to rent that transportation (bus, train, cab, Uber, rent-a-car, lease) or you can buy a depreciating asset (car) that cuts your per-mile cost slightly from the renting options.

And in the case of my Apple Music subscription I have to make peace with it being an entertainment service that I don't get to keep any physical or digital manifestations of after I stop paying. Like a movie ticket.

It's also revealing to do the maths on how much you'll spend on streaming if you assume you'll keep your account for the rest of your life.

I'm ~50. Let's say I live to 80. 360 months × AU$25 = NINE THOUSAND DOLLARS WAIT WHAT?

I mean, sure, I might spend $9k on Bandcamp or whatever. But I dunno really if I would.

Later that day

Damn though, Apple Music is convenient...

Consider that if you spend 9000USD on bandcamp you can pass the files on to your great grand children

I've been buying used CDs on ebay when I can get them for ~8USD per album, and buying FLAC/ALAC on bandcamp and qobuz for anything that's hard to find. A couple of albums that aren't streaming I had to pay 30-50 USD for a used CD, Ecstatic by Mos Def, Parabolic by Aoki Takamasa. It's kinda fun to find out what music is "rare" and what music is cheap.

Jellyfin + Finamp is a solid combo, and a flash modded iPod 4th gen (last one with a black and white screen) to play music in the car. It's a good feeling to know none of my albums will ever disappear. (To be sure, albums have disappeared from Qobuz, and now they have a message that says 'be sure to download after purchase !!')

iTunes 12.13 is actually a solid music player on Windows. Ripping CDs works great too. There's no iTunes that runs on the latest MacOS tho, since they supplanted it with "Apple Music". Kind of ironic, but Windows has always been bigger on backwards compatibility.