Spotify used to be good but now they charge you the price of buying an album outright.
Might as well buy an album monthly and actually own it.
That works if you listen to just a small number of albums, but I average about 15 unique albums per month and probably 60 per year.
If I was really strict about paying for all my media (which I cannot afford now), I’d buy the albums gradually anyway, starting from ones I like most.
Also how do you discover so much?
To be honest I simply find Tidal + Plex integration to be more convenient than piracy. I’ll pay my $10 per month for the ease of use and still buy an album or two per month from artists I want to support.
My discovery is a combination of Tidal and last.fm similar artists/recommendations and people on various forums. It’s one of the few things I still go back to Reddit for. The other thing is that I like to listen to a band’s full discography when I discover them. I recently found The Ocean and all 9 of their albums are solid. That’s a lot to buy.
£10 = the price of every single album you listen to in a month, combined?
Yup. When I was kid and teen in the the CD era, I was buying 2 or 3 CDs a month for at least 10 to 20 bucks a pop. Or I would temporarily have my parents sign up for something like the BMG record club when there was a good promo where I could get 10 albums for cheap and then cancel. Fast forward to today and I can get unlimited access to all music for cheaper than a single album per month back in 2005. I don’t know how these economics can make sense even if you factor out physical media and physical distribution.
It was 9.99 for many years and now it’s 10.99, a ~10% increase. Not sure how a single, small price increase in years turns something from good to bad. Sure, there are many reasons to dislike Spotify, but pricing?