As for your other concerns, they are valid. But here's the thing. It's important to remember why streaming even came about. It was to combat piracy. If the services get too fragmented, too expensive, too meager in their offerings, people will go back to pirating. Right now, the reason streaming is a good deal for consumers and the record companies (artists not as much) is that it's so cheap (relative to the amount of money the same amount of music would cost you if you bought album by album or track by track) and so convenient that even pirates who have TB of music on their hard drives are hard pressed not to use it. In terms of recouping lost profits, streaming is the best bet for record companies right now.
Now, you will have some holdouts. Some big name players like Taylor Swift can play hardball. Some legends like Prince and Neil Young can hold their music hostage (and I should point out, Mr. "Free Music Is All Around Us", Prince has fought very hard for years to keep copies of his music off the internet, and even covers of his music, including that bastion of music discovery, YouTube). But ultimately, those are outliers. Taylor Swift is SO huge that people will buy her music--right now. If her sales begin to dip, prepare to see her music on every streaming service from here to Timbuktu. Neil Young and Prince are set, they don't need the meager revenue generated by streaming services. Neil Young is also trying to push hi-res downloads and his Pono player, so he has a vested interest in making streaming less desirable. That is a battle he is going to lose. Prince just hates his music being available outside of record stores for some reason, but he's Prince and he gets what he wants.
The Beatles are the big holdout at this point, again a band so beloved that people will continue to buy their music until the sun explodes. Also an outlier.
Most of the big names are available on streaming services, and it's in their interest to keep it that way. It's in the interest of record companies to keep streaming services broadly available and with the most music possible. The harder they become to use, the less content they have, the more pirating, not purchasing, will rise. The record companies know this. They're afraid of it. Afraid to death of it.
That being said, I agree with you about control. Of course the record companies want more control. All the media conglomerates want more control now that their man source of revenue--content--has been turned into digital bits that can be copied perfectly by anyone with a standard laptop. That's why we've seen the proliferation of DRM, and Netflix, and music streaming. But that doesn't mean that Netflix isn't a good value, or that streaming music isn't a good value. It's not a good value for long term storage of all the music you want to own, and I would never recommend someone use streaming exclusively without ever purchasing any music. But like with Netflix, you can use music streaming to listen to anything that catches your fancy, and then buy the few albums you really love or aren't available on the service. Netflix has tons of movies I'd like to watch, but I only need to own a subset of them because I love them so much that I know the ability to watch them whenever I want, wherever I want, and have a physical copy of it in case the license expires on Netflix or my internet goes out or whatever.
Same with music. I don't need to own every ABBA album, their greatest hits is fine (The Visitors is also worth owning, actually). But maybe I want to listen to more than what I can find on the greatest hits. Good luck getting that on the radio. But you know what I can do? Subscribe to AM or Spotify or Deezer or Rdio for $9.99 a month, listen to every ABBA album ever made, get my fill, maybe also listen to some Kanye, some Paul McCartney, some War on Drugs, Tame Impala, David Bowie, and Deerhoof. And maybe I'll hear something I didn't know before, and think it might be worth buying. Or maybe, after three listens in a month, I'm done and don't need to buy it. But you can't say I didn't get my money's worth if a single one of those albums cost $9.99 or more on iTunes.
