I played 5000 songs through spotify just last year. I don't listen to the same songs over and over. It would cost an insane amount of money, time, and space for me to discover even close to the same amount of music without Spotify (or some other streaming service). I consider Spotify an insane value at most any reasonable price because I really love listening to and finding new music nearly instantly.
This seems to be the point most people are ignoring. I'm on the Spotify family plan, with 4 people using it almost all day. The amount of songs we've discovered, played, etc is absurdly high. We churn through music constantly, so even if I pirated everything, it would be ridiculously time consuming and not worth the effort to curate things the way I have with Spotify. A good batch of the music I listen to isn't even available to pirate; back in the day I had to use youtube-dl to find and download those and sometimes the quality was terrible.
All that being said, I'm not buying the "innovation" bullshit excuse they're throwing at us and I think such a large price hike for the family plan is too high, but it's still at a price point for me that doesn't justify moving to something else. There is a limit though, and at some point I will just move back to the high seas (like I did with movies).
Yeah, me too. I'm constantly going down unheard paths. For me it's Youtube Music, but my life would be considerably less enjoyable if I had to weigh the cost of buying every CD I listen to. I also wouldn't have discovered a ton of music for groups whose albums I have since purchased. Without it I would have never discovered 90% of the artists I now love.
