It's never going to say "our business model requires you pay 20% more to keep listening to me", or "we're going to stop working on your favourite playback device because we changed the DRM and expect you to buy a new one."
No service-based model can match those claims.
There’s a market. Not what it once was, because what was once the recording market was born out of necessity as much as anything else.
I, like a lot of other people, am definitely interested in the ephemera. I like owning records. There’s a tangible ritual to putting a record on, and there’s really something to be said for the sound. Even dirty records with their occasional pops and scratches. It’s a visceral appreciation for the medium, to be sure. That said I also buy a lot of paper books.
There’s also something to owning a copy. I use Apple Music these days when I’m commuting or on the road and it’s great. I can hear most anything I want for the price I pay each month, but I even still buy copies of albums I really love because they’re mine. It won’t go away if Apple decides to kill the streaming service, or if I decide to unsubscribe (which will be the case at some point because the stacking up of subscriptions wears on me).
On the whole? I don’t know. I’m curious about the data, too. But who is buying music? A lot of people! There is still a lot of people who don’t just see it as a commodity.
On that last note I’m not a great trend-chaser, so I probably have a certain lens I see the whole thing through—but I’m not the only one.
The main problem with streaming off Youtube is that, unless you stick to popular songs (>100M views), it's just a matter of time before some songs in your playlists become unavailable ("video is not available in your country", or unofficial upload gets deleted). I've been using NewPipe (Android) and Ivory (iOS) to play YT videos in background, so I'm not as annoyed with that as I would've been if I had been paying for Youtube Music, but it's still a deal breaker. Meanwhile on Bandcamp, some songs I bought have been deleted since that time, but I still have them in my library and can stream them in the app (I can't share link to these, though, as it's 404 unless you're logged into an account that has these in the library). Of course I could have been downloading YT videos to my PC, and stream them via Subsonic, and I was doing exactly this for many years, but I kept having weird issues with that (and it's metadata hell).
If I were to switch to Spotify, I would have to leave my music collection behind, as the songs I have on Bandcamp are not on Spotify, and vice versa. But I don't see a reason to, as Spotify would also be more expensive option vs buying 1-2 $2 albums per month. And the money I would be paying to Spotify wouldn't even go to the artist I listen to afaik, since the only thing that matters when it comes to Spotify payouts is the total number of times your songs have been played, which is determined in a large part by what the recommendation algorithm has been recommending to hairdressers and drivers, as well as what the current mainstream trends are.
Organizing data is a problem music freaks have.