I’ve been a Spotify member for 13 years and it gives me exactly what I want. Owning music is good and all, but ripping the CDs and setting it up so my family and I have access to it where ever we go is going to cost me way more than the subscription does a month, in both time and money.
You don’t “own” the music on physical media. You just purchased a license to listen to that music for the lifetime of the media it comes on. If your CD, record, or cassette is destroyed, you don’t get another one for free because you “own the music”. You’re still not allowed to copy it for distribution, use it for commercial purposes, or any of the other happy horseshit their lawyers put in the fine print.
I miss the era of physical media, too, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking it was some golden age of consumer rights.
I run Navidrome off a free small form factor PC recycled from work. My whole family accesses it via whatever app they like that supports Subsonic API (there’s dozens), and for security it’s only accessible via Tailscale, so they need Tailscale installed and connected.
Initial cost: $0. Plus cost of the apps, which is like $5 each user. Tailscale is free for up to 100 devices.
Time to set up: 1 day.
Ongoing cost: the very little electricity an energy-efficient SFF PC uses - way overestimating would be $2/month. Plus whatever music we buy on Bandcamp, physical etc that we own forever.
So it’s not way more expensive in my experience, and at the end of the day I give artists I enjoy much more money than Spotify streams ever would, and I’m not supporting a piece of shit CEO pouring a billion dollars into military spending.
Is it laziness or a lack of motivation?
I’ve been a Spotify member for 13 years and it gives me exactly what I want. Owning music is good and all, but ripping the CDs and setting it up so my family and I have access to it where ever we go is going to cost me way more than the subscription does a month, in both time and money.
In a month, sure. Over a lifetime? Not even close
Right, but you would own the music…
You don’t “own” the music on physical media. You just purchased a license to listen to that music for the lifetime of the media it comes on. If your CD, record, or cassette is destroyed, you don’t get another one for free because you “own the music”. You’re still not allowed to copy it for distribution, use it for commercial purposes, or any of the other happy horseshit their lawyers put in the fine print.
I miss the era of physical media, too, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking it was some golden age of consumer rights.
I don’t need to “copy it for distribution” to back it up for personal use.
I run Navidrome off a free small form factor PC recycled from work. My whole family accesses it via whatever app they like that supports Subsonic API (there’s dozens), and for security it’s only accessible via Tailscale, so they need Tailscale installed and connected.
Initial cost: $0. Plus cost of the apps, which is like $5 each user. Tailscale is free for up to 100 devices. Time to set up: 1 day. Ongoing cost: the very little electricity an energy-efficient SFF PC uses - way overestimating would be $2/month. Plus whatever music we buy on Bandcamp, physical etc that we own forever.
So it’s not way more expensive in my experience, and at the end of the day I give artists I enjoy much more money than Spotify streams ever would, and I’m not supporting a piece of shit CEO pouring a billion dollars into military spending.