[Tential]

If you're willing to pay for Spotify, you can download and listen offline. My guess is many people are OK with the spotty nature of the free service (not that spotty but travel is important to me as you stated).
Main thing for me beyond that is Spotify, you really don't own anything. They can change the terms at any time or you can be stuck offline. I haven't gotten internet service yet since I moved, it's been over a month. I have 74 terabytes of local storage though so I'm not worried. It's my first time with Cox, with a metered internet, again not too worried since I saved up a ton of data. But it's scary to me to put all your trust in a company that's there to maximize profits. As an avid investor, I don't understand how people don't realize the prices on any subscription they pay will rise a lot, once these companies kill off their competitors. Maybe because I'm listening to their investment calls but you're not gonna get a less than $10 subscription service forever....

 

[Kouzelna]

I checked into it yesterday, read all the features, etc. Bottom line is what I thought: to listen to even 320 mp3 takes a gig of data every 7 hours of music. Eek. So that would cost me extra. Plus it means you have to be online. Stuff you can "download" you don't download - you cache it to use as long as you're connected and logged in. Again, needing to pay a service, be logged in, etc. You can't make CDs for your friends, share it (unless they have the service), and if you ever aren't part of Spotify any more (their fees go up, you live in the mountains, whatever) you're toast, your music is gone. It's not like Audible, where you have the books forever that you already bought.

Obviously, my mp3 files are my mp3 files, and I keep them, period. That's the way to go, for me. And I get new stuff all the time and keep it in mp3, since that's the file that's most easy to use, share, etc. still. Though I'm looking into FLAC or similar for albums that I'd bother with listening to on a better amp. Since most stuff I listen to is metal anyway, and badly produced metal at that, 320 mp3 and headphones straight from my phone is good enough. Even better, really, since I can EQ the snot out of it with Poweramp. (And gee, it needs it).

Something else I wanted to mention, but forgot. Will write later when I remember. :-D

 

[Tential]

Yup preaching to the choir here.
It's terrifying to me. Or your favorite artist can just pull all their music. At any time.
I'm looking into flac too, I just started upgrading my library. It's no rush since I'm on iTunes, but I'll switch to media monkey to manage flacs.
That's actually the main reason I'm moving services.

I actually just bought "unlimited" data for my phone, but again, if I switched providers, I'd now be screwed like you mention because now I'm paying for my streaming.

It would be better in an unlimited data world, but now that I moved I understand the pain others in the USA go through. I have a data limit on both of my internet providers here now. With data not being free across the board, why would I stream and open myself up to a potential data overage?

For me, I use the smart Playlist feature of iTunes to build Playlists. It goes off of the star rating (mine is simple 5 is good, 1 is basically delete, but I don't delete anything, 4 is a 5 star rating, I just want to personally put the song into my genre Playlists (how I track genre), 2 and 3 I don't really use).
Then my Playlist is built based off of play counts.
Without my play count data I'll think I want to listen to lil Wayne when in reality, my data tells me I want to listen to Britney spears.
The more I listen, the more the play count data updates and I can decide I want to listen to all my music, or in the case of when I drove to Cali to move here, I just put in songs with the highest play counts and had an amazing ride as they were all songs I clearly listened to.

actually, the main reason I was going to consider Spotify or tidal again was that you can do the gdpr requests now that the EU implemented, and force the company to send you all the data they personally keep. I wanted to use the platform to pull their data and see if I can find any additional information about my listening habits.
Otherwise, Spotify just keeps that data, and that drives me crazy when a company has data and they lock it away.
Like when Netflix decided to lock away the date in which a TV series expired. They can at anytime take data away from you. That just doesn't work for me.

From listening to investors in these companies or from their investor relations, most of these subscription companies end game is to reap the profits they used to back in the past. Netflix expects to make cable subscription level money &($40+ a month), Spotify expects to make cd/album money, etc.
From what I hear, they literally expect to raise the prices of all these services to the historical average percentage of income people used to spend back in the 1980s-1990s. Despite the fact its infinitely cheaper to distribute music or TV, they expect to make those extremely old historical margins eventually, with hard work. It's truly insane.
They seem like great companies now, but once they corner the market, they will become just as scummy as all the cable/music providers of old.

 

[Kouzelna]

Yeah, wow, I didn't think about the artist thing. Basically, look: I don't want to be at the mercy of some other company deciding what I can and can't do with my purchases in my own place.

I don't do PC gaming. (I have an Xbox which I use in winter when the weather sucks). But being a Starcraft fan, years back I took the plunge and bought the first release of the new Starcraft. Blizzard (who make it) is infamous for their anti-pirating hysteria, making legit users jump through all kinds of hoops. But I figured, hey, I'm buying the game, purchasing the code, doing everything right so I have nothing to worry about, right? So I start getting into the game, playing the single-player campaign by myself, and on the 3rd day I set aside time and have several hours to get busy and have fun. 10 minutes into the game I get a message: their online system has to go through maintenance that night.... and since the system will be down I CAN'T PLAY! This is the single player campaign, and the game is loaded onto my hard drive! Not to mention, I've already logged in, so they know I'm a legit user. But since my credentials can't be "continuously proven" or something, my own single player game on my own hard drive will cease to function while they update their online system somewhere in some basement God knows where. I literally couldn't even believe it. And I learned a really valuable lesson about all this online/streaming/subscription service stuff: it's not dependable. (Not to mention, it's often slow - much slower than if you were just playing the version of the game/service on your drive with no online connection).

In addition, I pay for Amazon Prime every year, but since I'm located in Europe I can't access the shows I used to watch - even the TV seasons I PURCHASED! It used to work with VPN set for USA, but now even that is blocked. So again, here is something I actually paid for and now I'm locked out of enjoying it, unless I buy it AGAIN with a European account, I assume, though even then I don't know since Amazon isn't specifically available in my country. (Speaking of which, it's a nightmare ordering stuff off Amazon in Europe, as you might know. If you can find a product that ships, because many don't, it's much faster and usually cheaper just to order it from Amazon in the US and ship it to Europe. I'm still waiting on games I ordered from Amazon UK a month ago to show up).

A friend of mine uses iTunes, so what he did was switch his .flac collection to Apple lossless, whatever that's called. He swears by it. And he can use it on his Android DAP.

Smart Playlists are interesting, I like that idea. But for me, I have all my music tightly organized in folders by genre/band/album, so I just pop open the genre folder, and drag n' drop songs or albums into a new playlist and then name by band for transferring to my phone. Works really well for me.

With data, realistically I'd have to pay an additional $20 or so for enough data to run Spotify according to my usage, plus whatever Spotify costs which I think is $10. There's $30, which for albums I can't find free, means anywhere from 3 - 6 mp3 albums from Amazon or GoFundMe or whatever, or a horde of singles. On a monthly basis, that means I'm building up my collection that I can listen to anytime, anywhere, until my battery runs out - period. That's more like it for me. I like my devices to work for me, and make my life better and convenient - not some corporation's life better and more convenient!

Wow, wow, wow.... REALLY disappointing to hear the endgame plans of these companies. I thought the rise of these companies meant the end of that dirty, rotten, scumsucking behavior of the media companies of old. They ruined music, again and again, and made the experience of fans miserable. I would hate to see that happening all over again. It's a heyday for fans now: you can buy single songs, albums are easy to store and playlists easy to make, and fairly priced ($10 is cool - I can pay that), and bands have to actually get off their asses and tour to make money, as they should... not lean back and collect royalties and put out "best of" albums. And yes, I remember when CDs first came out, and the idea was quote, "it's expensive for us to make them now, hence the $20 price tag, but when technology gets better and we can easily mass produce these things then prices will go WAY down..." Yeah, right.