Tbh just recently I found the full extended version box set of LotR on DVD just lying on the street together with ~dozens more decent movies. I could probably fund my viewing habits entirely out of found stuff.

As for music; my dad ripped his whole CD collection many years ago, many thousands of CDs; more than I could listen to in a lifetime probably.

Plus I buy music on bandcamp to support a few artists I really like.

Paying for streaming services is just fueling the wholesale of our culture or worse the military industrial complex

That CD collection will be worth a fortune because I assume half of it can't even be found on the streaming services.

It's quite unlikely. There's very few niche albums that I haven't found on spotify

there is loads not on Spotify. It generally just gets lost with time, though.

Almost 90% of what I listen is not on Spotify.

Besides being a plight for culture and enemies of artists Spotify is quite a bad collection too.

The physical collection doesnt exist anymore sadly.

But you are right that many of the my dads CDs cant be found on streaming services.

People don’t even realise what they lost, but then again they probably don’t care either way

DVDs are 480p.

It never bothered me a bit. Used to watch them on my 55" TV before we gave it away. Now they're even sharper on my computer screen! :)

Plus no more buffering or streaming artifacts.

Some are 576p and at that point the difference to higher resolutions isn't as pronounced, especially if you sit a fair bit away from a TV that isn't 120".

Unfortunately, though, very few DVDs are 576p.

It’s unwatchable. I’m not being sarcastic. I pulled out some of my old DVDs, they look terrible.

"unwatchable" is ridiculous. I have plenty of 480p rips that I took from my DVDs, and they look just fine. Not remotely unwatchable.

Minecraft is unplayable, too

Mostly because I need to login to a Microsoft account nowadays

Good! Smaller files! For most TV shows it doesn't matter. Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?

>Good! Smaller files!

You know computers have the ability to compress videos, right?

>Do I really need 4k HDR to enjoy Seinfeld?

No, but the difference between 480p and even 1080p is pretty significant and definitely makes the viewing experience just generally more enjoyable. But that's just Seinfeld, where you can basically close your eyes and guess what is being shown 90% of the time with great accuracy. Where this doesn't work is with movies/shows/etc. where the visual component is important. If you go to a LotR watch party and bring a 480p rip and expect people to watch that, then you might need to get your eyes checked.

Good point. For LotR I'd likely spring for the 720p

you don't have to torture yourself like that

Percent of HN users who've ripped CDs: Significant

Percent of non-HN users who've ever ripped a CD: Negligible

Nah I know plenty of people who don’t care about venture capital but have been ripping cds for decades

This is going to vary by age range, right? For anyone over the age of ~35, the percentage has to be way, way higher than the full population, regardless of technical capability.

A library of 10,000 songs can fit on most phones.

Until Sam Altman disrupted the entire computer economy, HDDs were cheap and when you replace your desktop, the old one becomes a server.

I stream on youtube to discover and purchase LPs and FLACs on bandcamp and tickets for live shows to support the artist and not the rent seekers.

>I stream on youtube

Right, so then how you really access most of your your music is through advertising or ad-blocking, not CDs.

I use Bagal Radio.

...like on the radio?

No, most often I listen to my own collection.

Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.

Some of us owned thousands of albums (or movies, or shows) on physical media before the legal streaming party even started.

Personally, I also listen to a lot of ad-free college radio and watch a lot of online videos. Depending on what type of entertainment you enjoy, it's really not hard to pay next to nothing for it without compromising.

Movies and TV shows I can maybe see. There hasn't really be a show that I really wanted to watch for the past... two years, except a few that are on public broadcast or only available on DVD.

Music I don't get, you can't even buy a single CD for the price of a streaming music subscription, unless you buy used, in which case you can get as many as 10 CDs per month.

Video streaming and it's licensing model is horribly horribly broken, there's no reason why I should have three to five subscriptions just so HBO and Netflix can produce yet another drawn out true crime show about someone how got lost half way around the world in 1983.

Seems weird to question their statement, right? Surely they know their life.

This is not that unusual. I also have never had any of these, or any other, streaming services. It's been wonderful.

I'm not questioning not having streaming services. I'm questioning it actually being cheaper than buying physical media in the long term for anyone who listens to more than the occasional song or watches the occasional movie.

If the answer is "I pirate stuff", that's fine. But just be honest about it.

It's absolutely cheaper in the long run for me. I spent a fair bit on my CDs (and digital downloads), sure. But I never need to pay another dime in my life. I'm going to guess that I spent somewhere around $1000 on my music collection. But $13/mo for Spotify for 60 years (if we figure one listens to music from 15-75) is $9360. I'm coming out quite far ahead by owning my music.

If you are someone who wants to frequently listen to new music, then sure, Spotify is cheaper than constantly buying new albums. But I at least don't do that; I listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager and I pick up 0-1 new albums per year. So again, no real advantage to using Spotify.

buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.

Remembering that a song at full price on itunes store is $1~ and a monthly subscription to spotify is $13

There is a compounding effect, so buying my library as it is today will cost me about $300~, but that's because I've accumulated 300 songs over the course of about 12 years. (300/12) is about $25 per year.

So the delta is $131... for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.

The irony of course being that if I ever stop paying, I have access to nothing at all.

300 songs is not many at all. I have purchased around 20,000 songs in my life. Would it have been cheaper to use Spotify? I suppose so but (a) they don’t have all the music I want and (b) I prefer having the independence to control my media. Also Spotify didn’t exist when I started :)

300 songs might not sound like many, yet that is how many items have been added to my library or to a playlist in 12 years.

So I can't really speak to anything else than that. That's my usage pattern, yours may be different.

I keep yearly playlists (starting 2023) where I add songs I like and each one is only about 30 songs on average, so that somewhat matches the aggregate number over a decade..

I guess I stick to the things I like and find things I like in DJ sets or on the Gym radio- I'm not investigating new music through subscription services.

I have 15 years worth of songs, account is less than 10 years old. Arguably I would be okay dropping some of those songs if I wanted to buy the songs. The biggest difference for me though is the issue of discoverability. It is very easy for me to find and save new songs on Spotify, it would be much harder for me to find the songs I like if I had to pay for them, especially since a lot of the songs I like are not just songs from popular artists but are often just one of two random songs from random artists. Is there a good middle ground here? I keep a copy of my song list in case I want to ditch Spotify but this is the main hurdle for me.

Is this arguing in favour of Spotify?

> buy 13 songs a month, every month, for a year, and see how big your library is.

Sure. And when I had Spotify I added about that to my liked songs every month.

> There is a compounding effect

That doesn't sound compounding, it sounds like a linear increase of 13 per month.

> for convenience of being able to listen to a new song once or twice and never again.

Yes, that is the advantage of Spotify and other steaming services. I can listen to dozens of new songs a day, picking out my favorites while being exposed to new music allowing me to find more that I like. And if I don't like it, meh, didn't cost me anything.

A library of 300 songs is tiny. I guess you don't listen to much music? Back before I lived in the city 300 songs would have lasted a week, I'd statistically hear a repeat on the drive home on the first day.

I tend to listen to the same music all the time, I just checked, I add about 30 songs to my library a year.

Right now I'm listening to trace classics from 2000 :)

In my last.fm account it says I have listened 122.000 different tracks, I would have gone mad listening for the 300 same songs for 12 years, it would be like torture for me.

You can relisten the stuff you have.

LP's, 8-tracks, cassettes, cd's, mp3 players, etc.

You didn't have the whole world at your hands. You had to pick what to listen to, what to buy, what to carry.

Yes, it's nice having the world available, but also, it's nice being able to sometimes think, ponder, make a decision, and explore that decision.

Based on all the responses, people need to learn to make a decision and live with it for a bit.

- Picked a song and it's not the perfect one? meh, okay. - Also learn to be in the quiet. Oh, the song is not meh, but bad? Turn it off. It's okay. - learn to read a book

How few songs run on loop on Spotify? Not to mention radio.

There is so much garbage on streaming platforms, I rather research and pay per song/movie than waste time on trash. And that was before AI slop. Only reason I have subscriptions is family (cheap babysitter)

I have a hard time understanding your opinion. What do you even mean by garbage? There's thousands of legitimate music bands/musicians on these platforms. Naturally you won't care for a majority of it, but an interpret being niche doesn't make them garbage.

Spotify is full of AI slop trying to pass as artists. That’s garbage

Also, the company has a pretty terrible leadership: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-...

So dont listen to it? I mean what is the problem here.

I never listen to basically anything spotify recommends me, just songs from bands I already know and love. And if I were to purchase the whole discography of the breadth of music I listen to it would cost the down payment on my house

I do not use the service, I was responding to the comment about garbage

FWIW I went through a phase of this (feeling like streaming services were full of low grade stuff) until one day when basically nobody seemed to understand me except Amazon Music, which has an almost eerie recommendation mechanism that I think people don’t talk about much because the rest of the app is so meh.

In one single afternoon Amazon Music served up loads of niche old favourites I had not thought to search for, introduced me to a couple of artists I would not have known existed otherwise, and probably rescued my failing love of music.

I now play a game with it and pick somewhat diametrically opposed aspects of my music tastes in quick succession— Superorganism, Cardiacs, Gavin Bryars, Nanci Griffith, Vivaldi, Anouskha Shankar, say — and then see what it comes up with. Invariably one of the recommendations will be something I already adore and one will change my life.

I stumbled into the Chris Thile multiverse this way, for instance.

How much I would need to pay to get on Spotify songs not available there?

Buying breaking bad on DVD is <3 months of netflix subscription (no ads).

So if you watch <2 seasons per month on average, you already come out ahead, and this is assuming only a single subscription.

People tend to wastly overpay for subscriptions because they end up underutilized and are typically never cancelled quickly enough because people are lazy.

2 seasons per month? I started watching The Sopranos this week, I watched 1.5 seasons over the weekend.

Sure, but do you actually do this every weekend?

I mean obviously there are people that consume a lot more movie entertainment than the average, but I'm personally getting nowhere close to 70 seasons per year.

Bingewatching occasionally might not be enough to economically justify your subscriptions.

Even if he does do it every weekend, most of us don't. So the rest of us can accept the math.

Fair enough. I don't know how often I do it.

It should be easy to calculate this for your own needs based on your playlists. The advantage of buying is that you build up your own catalog of artists that you listen to regularly which means you don’t have to keep paying for them. So, at first, buying the albums would be more expensive but after a few years it would become much less expensive. The exception would be if you are always looking for the latest tracks by a large number of artists but I don’t think that’s most people.

Older popular music can be purchased second hand or as a various artists album which also saves money.

Our society overconsumes by insane degrees. TBH the world would probably be a better place if most people limited their consumption to what they could reasonably acquire on disk.

As you age, you have less need to grow your collection. You'll also forget about stuff from decades ago and can watch everything again without remembering much of anything.

Similarly, as you age you'll have less time spending on entertainment. The initial investment might be higher, but it will eventually be cheaper. And you'll curate more instead of mindlessly watching whatever crap there is.

Don't just look at the next decade. Look at the entire rest of your life and keep in mind that inflation made a thirty cent school meal go up to five dollar over the course of someone's life. Your money will continue to lose value, so you'll have to pay more and more for streaming. And you can never stop without losing access to everything and being left with nothing.