Piracy

I use streaming for music these days. For one, I'm able to get either cheap or free premium services via some tricks (Apple Music currently has an exploitable, constant free trial through Shazam). I'd still consider paying for a service, though, if I had to.

For me, I consume music much differently than other media. For shows, movies, and literature, I typically only watch or read something once ever, at the most once every year. This means I don't feel the need to retain or backup most things. I still keep what I acquire while I have space on my NAS, but there are no backups and if I ever need to free up space, I know the first volume to clean up.

Music I constantly listen to over and over. If I go through the effort of acquiring something, I'll need to make sure the metadata is consistent. When I had my old collection, I'd have to make sure it was backed up to cloud storage because I couldn't risk losing all that music I had found and curated. I found I was approaching the point where my monthly costs of backing up to Glacier-like services was beginning to approach the monthly cost of streaming. Plus, despite some of the discovery algorithms being terrible, it's still been a useful tool for discovering new music. I'm also able to take streaming on the go, I cannot take the entire library I curated. I'm not someone who knows ahead of time what I'll want to listen to.

I suppose this was all a long-winded way to say the cost-benefit analysis no longer made sense for keeping local music files for me. Part of it is streaming music services roughly have everything I want to listen to. I don't need to subscribe to 5 different services like video platforms. Music streaming services, at least now, mostly understand that they need to be more convenient that pirating.