If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.

not to mention that "forever" with online streaming services tends to mean, "until licenses change" or the company changes hands and they decide to invoke the clause in the ToS you agreed to that says that you dont own and aren't entitled to the thing you paid for.

See recently, Crunchyroll Funimation acquisition. People had bought blu-ray copies at extra cost for a digital copy which was honored by CR and retracted after the merger where they promptly deleted the media that these people owned and paid full price for individually.

If it works for you that's great. The comparison could be made that we can listen to music from [as many albums as we want] for $0 on Bandcamp, then buy the tracks we really like.

There's things missing from both platforms, of course.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened to me in the last decade.

Is it fair to say that you have fairly esoteric taste in music? I don't think it's the norm among Spotify users to feel that there is a ton of stuff that's missing from the library.

And if you are among the ones who can't find the vast majority of the music they want to listen to on that platform, then that's fair play - it's probably not for you. You likely have alternatives that suit you better. That doesn't really take away from the experience of the normies for whom it's got everything they want.

I wouldn't say esoteric but a lot of non-mainstream stuff; small bands; unoffical remixes that can't be licensed; etc.

I'm sure a sizable portion of tracks I enjoy are on there and agree that for most people it has most of what they want - most people listen to what is marketed to them. This has no bearing on the fact there's huge amounts of music available elsewhere that is not on Spotify/similar.

> and it's $11 every month, forever.

So the complaint is that not enough money is being paid for music and that it costs too much?

There's no complaint here.

But for me, yes paying $132/yr to not own anything isn't attractive.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

and was there but isn't anymore

There's even a third category: Is there, but only in a defective, incomplete fashion. (For years now, a number of Bob Dylan's live albums have been missing the gapless between-tracks transitions online. It almost feels as if Columbia ripped its own CDs for uploading and accidentally configured the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps…)