6500 different songs by 1650 artists last year for me. I wouldn't say I listen to that much music, but buying individual albums is completely unrealistic. I've bought some, mostly to support artists, but in the future I'd be more inclined to buy merch (which is often unfortunately hard to find.) Similar to Steam, pirating is so much worse that paying a little for quality streaming is acceptable. As for data, I'm practically giving that away with last.fm anyway.

It's a combination of Spotify's fantastic weekly playlists, keeping up with new releases, and exploring new genres.

How do you find so many different songs? Shuffle?

You are essentially listening to 40 new songs per day.

Can't say for them, but for me I have a single playlist 6,994 songs on shuffle. I try to add songs every week, haven't recently as I also should be moving off of Spotify.

To what alternative are you moving into?

I guess I will just move to Apple, because the moving should be relatively easy.

Spotify "radios" (playlists that are generated on-the-fly once the thing you were listening to ended), recommendations (Spotify’s weekly playlists) and top 50 <country> playlists, browsing the "similar artists" tab on artists I like, browsing the "discovered on" tab to find playlists. Then, when I like a song from an artist, I usually listen to at least their most recent album.

Last week I found a Russian artist in a playlist I follow and I listened to all their albums. I don’t know how to pronounce their name nor the title of any of their songs, but it was a nice background music for coding since I don’t understand a thing of the language.

You buy albums

You sound like a 'radio' person and I'm a 'record' person.

I don't want to have thousands of different songs floating through my ears. If I'm in the mood for something new, I'll get a recommendation from a friend or an online service, listen to a couple tracks then decide if I should invest more time in the band or just forget about them. Interestingly after a few streams of albums it on Bandcamp, they nag you to buy and it's usually about the time where "yeah, you know, I probably should add this to the collection". Unless finding new music, I always listen by whole albums as the bands decided was best to listen to the tracks, not individual songs--so the numbers you bring up just aren't something I care about. Whole albums are cheaper and if only one track is good on an album, that band not really something I'm interested in.

I'm 10 years ive spent 1000s on vinyl.

In 20 years spent even more on digital.

I have tons of things not available on streaming.

Regardless, the fact my listening gets to be an isolated activity, the fact no one can take it away? Priceless