As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, 
    we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe
    clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and
    hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and
    intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.

Oh and that $1 song? I bought it because I heard it on one of those videos-that-is-really-just-a-still-frame-so-they-can-share-the-music for the song. Also, what is Grooveshark again? I've heard of it, but I don't think I've ever used it.

My experiences can't be atypical, can they? Was it really a threat worth shutting down and all of the legal expenses? This just hurts me because literally in the last couple of days I watched an unlicensed copy of a song, liked it, and then bought it because I could and I wanted better quality sound. The (different) album was a similar pipeline--A link on Reddit directed me to the song (in the form of a YouTube video) and I then ended up buying the album.

I can't be the only one.

I don't remember the last time I bought an album or song, but I use streaming music services all the time. Same goes for anyone I know. Admittedly anecdotal but then again so is your assertion.

I couldn't imagine relying on those services for most of my listening.

If you have an Android phone: Google Play All Access.

You can offline content to your phone as if you own the music, but you get full access to their complete library. It's pretty brilliant, IMO.

Edit: though that doesn't help you if you're looking for a radio-like service... I tend to listen to albums at a time, and discover artists through third party services (e.g., Rate Your Music) that then drive me to sample stuff on Play. So it works well for me.

It's the discovery I find annoyingly troublesome.

(But then I'm one of the people who grew up buying music, I've got ~1,200 albums on vinyl and ~5000 on CD as a testament to my music purchasing past...)

This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming

Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.

I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.

Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.

I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.

It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).

I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.

My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.

I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.

This is a pretty solid way to discover new music, but you do need that jumping off point to enable you to say to it 'find me stuff like this'.

It seems so easy compensate that second group that I work harder breathing each day. That first group, it seems like I could get a message to mars easier than to send them a whole dollar.

I would happily wear the t-shirt if I knew that it was in fact the most direct route to actually transfer money to the musician.

My old band is still out there, selling out Red Rocks, and any of their merch that you can buy at the show has the highest margin of anything. This is true for every band from John Mayer to the Avett Brothers to your local Dead cover band.

So help me God, buy a shirt at the show or on their website.

I'm betting the wheels are already in motion.

I thought it was odd that they would put up an image. Even the most novice developers could have build that page in HTML.