In the last year or so, I have rediscovered an interest in owning my media (primarily music). Some people never favored the idea of streaming services over owning their own music, but most of us fell into that space. The idea of over 100 million songs available to you for the price of purchasing just one album seemed great! And let’s be honest it is great. Streaming also comes with other benefits (for Apple Music at least): less storage space is required, playlist collaboration with friends and family, family plans reduce the monthly cost even more, and superb sound quality with lossless and Dolby Atmos audio. There are also many downsides to it: you do not own the music you listen to, you are at the whim of the companies to not raise their prices, copyright issues with items becoming unavailable in your country, and more. Let’s go back in time and see how we got here and where I think we are going.

As an early Gen Zer I grew up in the days of CD’s and iPods (I was born just a year before the first iPod). We also had this beautiful thing called LimeWire that you never knew if you were going to get the song you wanted (likely in terrible quality, but hey it was free), a clip of Bill Clinton saying he did not have sex with that woman, or infect your family Dell computer with a virus. All of these items, while flawed in their own respective ways, led to one thing: music you owned and no one could take away from you (except for LimeWire I guess). Sometimes these things were a pain to manage. If you didn’t buy music from the iTunes Store, you typically had to add the metadata like the song name, artist, album, etc., unless you were just focused on listening to a CD. But I am primarily focusing on music you can take with you (like an iPod). This could mean hours spent at the computer entering this information for each song. Don’t get me wrong, I kind of enjoyed it, but also there’s no denying it was time consuming. Of course, this was solved if you bought music from the iTunes Store, but it would be unwise to buy music you already own on CD, and those files were not in the highest quality for those audiophiles out there.

While Spotify launched in the US in 2011, my first experience with streaming came when Apple Music launched in 2015. While I loved it at first, I quickly realized I really listened to a lot of the same music a lot of the time, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to pay $120/year ($10/mo.) to do so. I could just buy the music and own it forever. So I did. After a few months on the service, I decided to cancel it and go back to purchasing music. This lasted a few months, but as my music tastes started evolving and I was getting into new artists/genres and wanting to explore more, I went back to streaming and have been a subscriber ever since (almost 10 years!).

Now, sometime last year I found an old iPod I had inherited from my brother, still preserved from when it was last used somewhere circa 2011 with all of the bangers of the time. It made me realize something (again so apparent to those who never got into the streaming game), these songs were put on this device almost 15 years ago, have cost nothing to have on there ever since they were first purchased, and will remain on there for as long as I want them to. This struck me because I realized if I stopped paying for Apple Music today (well really Apple One), most of the library I have would be gone when the subscription lapses. I would own nothing after paying $1200 over the last ten years to listen to this music. This honestly kind of frightened me, so I decided to do something about it.

My husband and I have started building a CD and record collection. These are physical, tangible things we can hold and no one can take from us if we stop paying a fee. Also, we have been utilizing our local library to rip CD’s to our computers to sync to our iPods (maybe another post about iPods will come later). This is benefiting two fold because we’re utilizing our library, and the music was already purchased, unlike LimeWire where the music was stolen a lot of the time. We still purchase albums from artists we really like or smaller indie artists to make sure they are being supported more heavily. We still pay for Apple Music, because we do enjoy the service, but if/when we were to cancel, we would be set with at least our staples for music we enjoy.

There is one last thing I want to touch on with streaming, and that is the overload of information available to you at all times. This can go for both music and video streaming services as well. Do we really need 100 million songs available to us at once? I don’t even listen to 1% of that on a regular basis. With all of that at our fingertips, that can lead to the indecision on what to consume, and it also diminishes the value of what you are consuming because there will always be something else there waiting for you. With owned music, you only have what you have. In my entire Apple Music library I have 222 albums, and in my owned library it’s probably around 100. That severely reduces the decisions I have to make and helps prevent decision paralysis.

Overall, I can’t say whether or not streaming is the answer for everyone or if it is a net positive or negative. For myself, I think I am impartial. I like it, but I would not miss it if it were gone tomorrow. If it weren’t for the Apple One subscription and the other services I use as part of that, I would likely not still be a subscriber. For the time being, I am, but I still maintain a local library of music on my Mac that are synced to my iPod. I hope you enjoyed my take on music streaming, and I hope you share your thoughts in the comments.