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.

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.

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 :)