Spotify is $10 / month, the price of one album. For that, I get an essentially infinite [1] library of music that's basically always available to me whenever I want, curated playlists, discovery features, sharing features [2], etc, etc. It all just works, I never have to think about it, etc.

By contrast, unless I'm pirating music, what does $10 get me? An album a month? So after a year, I own 12 albums and had to hassle with the files and downloads, whereas with Spotify it just works and I've listened to 10x - 100x that much music.

Yes, if / when I stop paying for Spotify, I'll lose access, but so what? I wasn't planning on spending 20 years paying a fortune to accumulate a music library and then stopping cold and never paying again, just listening to that music I bought. I'm happy to just pay $50 - 100 / month until I die for subscriptions to huge and ever-growing libraries of music, movies, TV shows, books, etc. Seems like a fantastic deal.

1. I don't have niche tastes or a deep attachment to any particular artist that I simply MUST have, so their selection is far beyond anything I really need.

2. I don't use these, but still.