"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."

When they first came onto the scene, streaming services offered a fairly cheap and convenient way for people to listen to whatever music they want whenever they want. Prior to this music piracy was widespread because the alternative was paying $10 at tower records for each album or, a little later, $1 per song on iTunes. People didn't pirate music because they cared about owning a copy for themselves, they just didn't want to deal with the expensive and inconvenient alternatives.

Rising subscription costs, increased AI slop, etc may usher in a new Renaissance of music piracy similar to what we're seeing with TV/Movies.

And also, it takes ages to skip between songs, because I have to wait for the stream to load. On my local music player, I can flick between them almost instantly until I hear one I like. And shuffle doesn't repeat the same 20 songs, apparently YouTube Music and Spotify cannot implement proper shuffle, it's too intense of an engineering task.

Because too many people don't respect their own time and corporations used this + ZIRP to turn the internet into a ad hellscape of conveniences.

We don't have good options for local music discoverability, and the major labels don't have any incentive to even sell music to individuals in the first place anymore. I unfortunately pay for music streaming just because I don't like listening to the same songs over and over. So to me the variety of new songs you can get from the algorithms on streaming services is worth paying for to me. Luckily, I don't need to use Spotify, and just because they're choosing to bundle an AI subscription in to their plans doesn't mean all their competitors will too.

Too much work and waste of storage space.