For me, it's not the cost of the albums. It's the delivery system. Many years ago, I ripped my albums (300+), made them enabled on a media server. It was unintuitive and required maintenance. It did not pass the wife-acceptance test.

Spotify just works (for us). It's got almost everything we want to listen to. There are no tasks required for me to listen to anything. IMO, this is worth any extra costs.