>For me, buying a physical disc

physically drive to a store, find the cd, purchase, etc. or buy online, wait days for it to arrive, etc.

>transferring the files to my computer

hook phone up to computer, extract files, load onto dropbox, and then finally have access

vs.

>manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices

you literally click one button. that's all. And you login once and never again. no more difficult than logging into dropbox.

>either manage caching music local to the device

again, one button. on your spotify playlist / album there is a "download" button. click it. boom. done. listen all you want, without internet.

>absolute number one thing I need is the raw music files

you and about 1% of people. no one else does, hence why spotify is a billion dollar company and cd's are obsolete.

Somehow doing this with Dropbox is easy, but not with Spotify?

You can't imagine that it's easier to search for a new song on Spotify and play it immediately VS buying a physical disc, transferring the files to your computer, then transferring them again to each of your devices?

Just finding the physical discs is huge inconvenience

I want a radio experience, where some nice person somewhere else (or an algorithm, whatever) picks music for me. Bonus points if they don't come on after every song to tell me all about whatever. I'm not worried about the cost or inconvenience of using cellular data services to stream music, that's the primary reason I have a data plan.

I use a curated streaming service, but I can see the appeal of Spotify, because thanks to the mandatory licensing regime, they can literally stream any released music in a radio context; and having access to everything is amazing. When Launchcast was a thing, it's recommendation engine was pretty great, although they lacked depth in the genre's I want to listen to; I strongly suspect Spotify does too.

[1] https://www.di.fm/vocaltrance

Yet you seem to do it with Dropbox just fine... You make it sound onerous. The reality is it's a one-time effort of about 20 seconds for each device. Drop the hyperbole, it just makes you look silly.

> and either manage caching music local to the device (and frequently needing to clear items out of the cache to switch with other items)

How is "putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices" materially different from "manage caching music local to the device (and frequently needing to clear items out of the cache to switch with other items)"? If you want to put music on a device that's already full, don't you have to delete something first whether you're transferring files manually or downloading them through Spotify?

> buying a physical disc, transferring the files to my computer, and either putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices

is harder than

> Search for song, click "Play" on song

???

And let's not even get into backing up, keeping in sync, correct song metadata, etc.

If you honestly can't see how much easier the second thing is compared to the first, I would honestly go see a medical professional about it, because you're literally delusional.

This mindset is the reason why all software is terrible.

Also, it used to be 10,000 across 3 devices and bizarrely only 333 on each device (even if you only used one device)! I think they have since fixed that.