It is way cheaper long term.
Buying CDs would be so much more expensive than my Spotify subscription with the variety of music I listen to.
Another helpful element of the streaming services is no incremental cost to try out a new movie or series. I can start a new show and drop it 15 minutes in if I decide I don’t like it.
I will listen to 20 or more new bands each week on Spotify. It’s how I discover new music.
For someone who only listens to a small number of the same CDs over and over it might be cheaper, but it’s not a generally true statement.
Streaming could be an acceptable compromise if it was $10 a year for everything in existence, but the catalogues are splintered across multiple services and even when you combine them all there are plenty of things not available.
IMO, that can also be a problem. When I was young and buying CDs, occasionally you would buy one you didn't like at first. But since you had spent money on it, you'd listen to it. And I discovered some good music that way.
Same thing with movies and tv shows. Sometimes it takes a bit to get going, or I 'm in the wrong mindset for it, but repeated viewing or just sticking with it gets me through that.
You're probably objecting to the fact that you don't have 30 years, which is correct, but is also the point of the "long term" part of the comment. Someone who listens to stuff that is on the streaming services and is literally constantly switching between artists and who doesn't mind if some stuff disappears from the services sometimes and so on and so on is perfect for the streaming services, yes. However, the more of those clauses aren't true, the less obviously advantageous the streaming services are, and I don't think most people are sitting down every week and sampling a dozen brand new artists. A lot of people could, with just a bit of care to buy things frugally and used, build a CD collection with $14/month faster than they will want new music.
It can help to jump start a bit and not compare this to building a new collection from scratch. It also helps that such a jump started collection can start by buying the cheap stuff that fills out collections quickly.
On the plus side, the "cosmic jukebox" seems to have mostly worked out for music streaming and most stuff is available from most services, which is a huge point in favor of the music streaming services. In my opinion for movies and TV shows that can be legally acquired (putting aside piracy for the moment) the analysis tips much more heavily in the direction of just building your own collection. I don't even know what it would cost you to buy a month's worth of access to, let's say, 80% of my movie & TV collection (since I have stuff that is just plain not available on streaming at all). They're so fragmented it's insane. And with my rate of consumption of TV, oh, call it $50/month just for a nice round number, that's way more than I'm spending on building out the collection anyhow. Maybe if Hollywood would hire more writers who have taken and passed Writing 101 my consumption rate would increase, but that's not the current situation.
If going to physical stores, sifting through bargain bins, accepting whatever nobody else wanted, spending the time to physically rip the CD, and hoping that second hand bargain disc wasn’t scratched is your idea of a good time then that’s great for you.
I will pay $4680 over 30 years of my life to not have to deal with that and to be able to listen to anything I want whenever I want without having to manage a library or streaming setup.
That honestly sounds like a bargain when I consider the time saved over 30 years!
When you own 3 albums, you'll listen to them more often. You will put more effort into memorizing them. You'll listen to the tracks that were not designed to be radio hits by a committee but were instead the songs the band came up with on their own.
You get way more out of your investment when you invest mentally and emotionally into the full spectrum of their music.
This guy is talking about finding 20 new bands a month. He's not getting anything out of it other than a mild dopamine hit, and he thinks he's somehow cool for that?
It's like being a connoisseur of children's cereal and never having home cooked steak and eggs for breakfast. It's like bragging about your weight loss journey because you started smoking crack.
Friends might mention a band they enjoy, or you might hear a snippet on a video and look into it. Movie soundtracks occasionally have great music from well-established bands I've never heard of.
And you can go to live shows and check out local artists, buy their merch if they're any good.
Streaming is not the only way. Never has been, and never will be.
As far as your first question, is that a good thing, it's entirely subjective. But listening to a full album when you only "like" one song on it will expose you to new music, and might broaden your horizons or help you develop taste.
Or if you’re ripping your CDs and listening via apps you can just scrobble and get algo recommendations still while owning your music and without a monthly fee.
And amplifying that, we see more and more "built for streaming" music, which is not the sort of music I want to listen to. I have phrased that carefully; it is a personal opinion and I won't criticize anyone who discovers that actually, yes, generic AI rock that is pumped out by the hour is something they find some use for. I could see someone who wouldn't want to "listen" to that with intentionality finding it useful to code to or as background noise in their life or something. But it's not what I want, and unless the streaming services do something about it it is what is going to dominate their platforms over time.
I don't go in for super deep relationships with the musicians, reading about their histories and stuff, but I do enjoy the way that the music I like most on first listen often pales quickly and the tracks that I initially didn't like very well become my favorites.
The calculation might look like you derive value, but it could also accidentally impact your brain negatively long term.
Anyways Spotify is just a platform/gatekeeper for record labels to push their products and theres no way that spotify prices ever become static. They will need to continue to push more products through the model to continue to grow and pay for company especially as all the other players have wizened up.
FWIW if you lapse in payment they kill all your downloaded content immediately. Super annoying service. I get why but like 10 days after probably about 10 years of subscription seems like a real jerk move. Even content that wasn't theirs and was mine -- they wiped it. You own nothing.
If I enjoy an album, I’ll listen to it some 15-20 times before picking favourite songs or simply moving on. What you’re describing sounds more like consuming albums, not enjoying them. My 2 cents :)
If you’re thinking albums and hi-fi setups, it would be a lot!
A valuable part of streaming services is the recommendation engine. Spotify generates a new playlist called Discover Weekly that has songs and bands loosely related to what I’ve been listening to. I turn it on while I do yardwork. If I like something I pause and add it to a playlist.
It also has options to continue playing related music when your playlist runs out. You can also enable a mode that mixes suggestions in between songs in your playlist to mix it up.
I’ve discovered a lot of new music this way. It’s probably great for small bands who have good music but lack a marketing budget to get it out there.
How few songs do you listen to, and movies/shows do you watch, for this to possibly be true?
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.
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.
Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.
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.
Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.
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.
I would think this is only true if you watch a small number of shows and rewatch them often
I bought some complete series in DVD in the past but, even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player, there's the quality issue.
I got my 1080p copies on the high seas and that's just a whole different experience.
There's _a lot_ of stuff that has only ever been available in SD (or equivalent). Some of it was shot on film that could maybe be remastered, but that costs money. Some of the older/less popular stuff wouldn't be profitable if it was remastered (assuming remastering is even possible).
> even putting aside the inconvenience of having to manage discs in the player
You're allowed to rip media that you bought
They all have piles of audiobooks, audio cds, dvds, a blu-rays for $1-$2 each. Sometimes big boxes at yard sales for a few bucks.
I run linux too but I'm not going to pretend like my choice to run a niche setup means I'm entitled to pirate content because they don't 100% support it
Surely we are all entitled to do anything that does not affect others by default?
What you are doing is practically the same equivalent as downloading torrents, how do you have "more guarantees" than just downloading?
PS: I'm saying this because what you are doing is already illegal so there is virtually no difference.
I own many of my favourites in this way.
I only buy things that I’m really motivated to watch and play, and it makes it much more fulfilling as a result. Netflix turns watching a movie into something that just feels as hollow as doomscrolling Facebook.
you can stream for free/cheap if you lookout for deals.
Plus the collection can be inherited by somebody later. If they don't want it, it could be re-sold at second-hand prices.
It is way cheaper long term.
I get it, the big brands etc aren't very palatable. And some things get lost with no way to purchase because the companies don't care. But for things that are readily available I find it just as easy to buy if for a few bucks on ebay / local library sale / etc.
I'm not participating in the part of the relationship that normalizes destroying general-purpose computing. They want us dead.
If I buy secondhand, I still provide value to someone (the used books store, etc). There is an "equivalent exchange".