I wasn’t trying to say streaming is wrong, I definitely use it from time to time, and though I trend heavily towards BandCamp and Soulseek I’ll cop to fidelity rarely being important for me outside of certain genres with heavier bass or effects that make flac worthwhile. Generally it’s very diminished returns for bloated file size - especially so on mobile devices and Bluetooth/car playback

I rarely see removed songs, but do occasionally see them. Since my library is well curated it is easy to see which tracks are unavailable. I would guess I have been impacted on less than 0.1%.

I have both fringe and mainstream taste, so I do semi-regularly encounter outright missing artists/groups, or occasionally entire genres, especially so in electronic - that alone is worth the effort of building and managing a collection to me. It is very disappointing to find an artist available via streaming, but not their self released/indie albums because of licensing agreements

It is extremely rare for me to not find the songs I want on Apple Music, but I have uploaded many tracks to Apple Music that I had to procure from other locations.

You can upload your tracks to the cloud storage for later streaming? That’s actually pretty neat, and solves a lot of the ‘wrong’ live version/acoustic rendition/etc problems nicely.

It’s been a pretty good experience—not one I would have predicted 20 years ago.

Tbh same! Looking at the music industry after the vinyl era where pressing was cheaper but albums weren’t, it’s nice that they eventually were dragged kicking and screaming to digital distribution - “piracy is a service problem” and they refused to learn for decades while disruptive competition grew online

When subscription music arrived and then the family plan followed, I subscribed and deleted everything

I’d much rather own it and the storage requirements (‘till HDD death do we part), than rely on a web of licensing and exclusivity arrangements between streaming platforms and labels, which can - and have - been capriciously revoked in a moment. That’s also assuming the service offers the kind of music you like, or has good fidelity. And there’s platform agnostic issues like data connection - when we head up into the mountains I still have my files to play, but my wife is fully dependent upon Spotify and good cell signal.

…but even then I think my kids would have wanted access to new music

And there’s your radically different use case. I value having my music collection and archive, I follow artists throughout their career, and seek out entire albums vs individual tracks. Someone who may not care so deeply or develops a different relationship with music based on playlists or radio hits won’t value the archival aspect as much, because music’s value is temporal.

Controversial opinion: while enshittification does exist (from ‘value engineering’ or feature regression) because the profit motive, this imo is more a case of the userbase getting what they ask for. Normies who aren’t super tech literate and know how to navigate a PC, weren’t buying early mp3 players like iRivers, because it wasn’t accessible. You had to:

1. Have a PC
2. Know how to use that PC to either rip from CDs to mp3 or acquire mp3s
3. Know how to sync files - most of these early devices were basically generic USB storage
4. Know that these players exist, and be willing to spend a lot (for the era) on them compared to a cassette/CD player

Until the iPod hit the scene, nobody had solved #2 (iTunes store), #3 (iTunes), and #4 (Apple marketing) at the same time. #1 was a timing issue, as digitization increased and home PC prices dropped the userbase wasn’t as large yet. The devices downgraded because the broader userbase doesn’t ask/use the extra features, they want convenience and to not have to think. And as they are the demand segment for industry, so goes the product - dumb it down and mass market it.