>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?

It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.

Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.

Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies. I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.

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

Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.

I stream on youtube to discover and purchase LPs and FLACs on bandcamp and tickets for live shows to support the artist and not the rent seekers.

Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.

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.

Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.

Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).

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.

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.

Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.

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.

Seems weird to question their statement, right? Surely they know their life.

This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.

You can relisten the stuff you have.

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

How few songs run on loop on Spotify? Not to mention radio.

A library of 10,000 songs can fit on most phones.

Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.

How much I would need to pay to get on Spotify songs not available there?

There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)