Don't run away. There is so much we can teach you.
Day 1 of Cable TV was a jaw dropping experience. It looked like your dad got a new TV, the picture was so clear. You went from 9 channels to 100. You could watch the new Star Wars without interruption a year after its release instead of waiting a decade and suffering through edits and commercials. There was a music video station. There was a sports station. You didn't know what do with yourself. You wanted to sit there and watch it all day and all night. And, by the way, this was before the VCR was in mass production. It was a huge deal. Earth-shattering.
Apple Music is nice in some ways, it's not even close to a huge deal. Cable TV was like the iPhone in it's day. One of those 'oh my God' moments.
BJ
For music enthusiasts, day 1 of services like Spotify was exactly the same thing. That I could listen to a substantial portion of the world's music library suddenly for free or for a nominal monthly fee was just a game changer. What you describe about cable TV
You didn't know what do with yourself. You wanted to sit there and watch it all day and all night... It was a huge deal. Earth-shattering.
is
exactly how I felt about early music streaming (and Napster for that matter).
It's clear you don't care that much about music discovery. Many of us do. And for us, $120/year is peanuts for what services like this afford us.
If you were going to spend $120 a year on iTunes downloads for the entirety of your life it's well worth it.
Except if you never pull down more than 120 songs a year. Except if 5 of your favorite bands drop out of the streaming business. Except if 5 must-have LP's each year are released a month earlier on a competing streaming service. Except if the record companies get together and force Apple Music to drop offline-listening. Except if the record companies get together and decide that they aren't supporting the streaming model at all anymore and are going back to good ol' downloading.
In those cases, you'd be screwed. Imagine it's 2025 and you've built a nice collection of offline music and playlists and Apple Music goes POOF. You're out $1,200 and every song you loved is deleted from your computer. What a nice day that will be. "Oh, but you got 10 years of listening enjoyment!" they'll say. And then you'll whip out your credit card and pay another $3,000 to download them just to get your songs and your playlists and your playcounts back.
Physically owning the media is the only way to ensure you're not gamed by the system. This reminds me of NFL owners and their PSL's, a way to fleece fans every 30 years for 'licenses' and ensure that their offspring get the big payday and the new stadium.
BJ
This is where you are missing the point. I don't care about getting the equivalent of $120/year in downloads out of a service like Apple Music. That's not why I subscribe. I subscribe not as a complete replacement for owning physical media or digital downloads, but as a supplement to it because it affords me the opportunity to discover music that I would never find otherwise. I can pull up something I hear in a film, read about in a magazine or online, something recommended to me by a friend, or share an entire playlist with them that they can then listen to immediately.
It's 2025 and Apple Music goes poof? I'm not out ANYTHING, because I spent 10 years getting to listen to and discover as much music as my heart desires for a pittance. You see no value in that. I see huge value in it. And your point is completely diminished because the physical media you place so much value in has never provided the permanence you see. For most people, the last 40 years have seen them buying many of the same albums repeatedly - from LP's, which damaged easily and were often replaced due to damage or wear, to 8-track, to cassette tapes (which again, wore out) to CD, to digital downloads and high-res. Streaming actually has the potential to upend that never-ending replacement treadmill that the music industry had people roped into.
Further, I wouldn't even need to shell out to buy that music as you claim. Just as you admitted in your own collection, MOST of what we buy we don't end up listening to that much. How much have you spent on music purchases vs. the portion you actually listen to? When you think of it in that light, purchasing music is a terrible value. On the other hand, with a streaming service, who cares if it goes under? What portion of the music I've downloaded or added to a playlist that I actually care about could be purchased for a tiny portion of what it would cost me to have purchased all that music outright, only to decide that I didn't actually like it enough to have paid for it. In that respect, a streaming subscription is a fantastic value as it's a hedge against buying music I don't like.
The reality is that Apple didn't build Apple Music because it was wholly unique. Obviously it isn't. They built Apple Music because they want to remain relevant in the music business, and in just a few years, let alone a decade from now, streaming will be the predominant method of consuming music by orders of magnitude, and Apple couldn't afford to be left out.
