Support, experience, control. Physical media supports the artist. When you play a physical album you experience the whole album. When you own an album you control it and it cannot be taken away, edited or lost.
Streaming doesn't support the artist. Streaming obliterates coherence of albums. When you stream music you do not control it and it can be taken away, edited or lost without your knowledge or consent.
Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
No, I'm the same way. Sometimes an album only has 1 good song; other times an album is great but I can't stand 1 or 2 songs. The important thing is that I listened to the whole album! I'm judging the songs in the context of their creators. I'm experiencing them together and in order, and that's a very different experience than interleaving songs. Interleaving is fine and can be an artform in itself (we used to call it a "mix tape") but I believe you owe it to the artist to listen to the thing they made in its entirety. It would be like reading a book collection interleaving the chapters. It's not fair to you or the authors.
That's how I feel about it. You ARE missing something.
>Physical media doesn't support the artist much better either, that's been a topic of conversation since I was a kid.
I have many musician friends, and they would ALL disagree with you quite strenuously. The money they make on streaming is ~0. The money they make selling CDs is almost all profit - and it's also the thing they made instead of sliced and diced and mixed with other things other people made.
I don't follow. You're free to listen to full albums, in sequence, on Spotify. You can listen to any song at any time in any order, from the album, or custom playlists. It's just a large catalog of music where you can click and play/queue anything you see, with some recommendation systems that create custom playlists you can choose to listen to.
I'm getting the impression that many people criticizing these streaming services don't understand what they actually are.
However any music I care about I buy as I plan to own my library for decades to come.
Plus, you're missing out on a lot of great music that never has been available on streaming platforms.
So far it's only happened because the musician himself pulled the music, and I wasn't really enthused after that to try and find it again. As the gp said, there's so much music now... I might be missing out on some music but if I've already got too much to ever listen to then why does that matter? In fact, having to make the choice to purchase is necessarily going to limit the amount available and my willingness to take a chance on it.
Streaming has opened up so much for me that I would never have found browsing music shops. Of course if Spotify disappeared then I'd have to find another service or buy the music then. A problem for it's time.
I spent years buying music, ripping the CDs, organizing files, etc. I'm very glad that I don't need to bother any more. I don't own the medium the music is stored on, I don't really get why it matters.