craigb
 
Heh, that's me.  I have an unfortunate "completionist" bend to my psyche. 

But You DO listen to it. I'm quite sure that my friend never actually listened to a 10th of what he downloaded.
 
I too suffer from the "completionist" syndrome, by the way. But the way my brain is wired, I'll focus on one artist or band until I've completed my collection, and by the time I'm done, I usually know each album very well. 
 
So in effect, it counteracts my completionist tendencies.

With the occasional (wonderful) exception, I no longer know what song comes from what album.  Because I tend to play right through a discography or shuffle play from some set of conditions, I rarely see what album a song comes from.  Sometimes I miss this, but then I realize that the reason I could do this when I was younger was simply because I couldn't afford all the music I really wanted so I played the heck out of what I had.
 
Although I AM listening to quite a bit now, all of this is really setting myself up for the future.  Once all my songs have been imported, that's when I'm looking forward to coming up with segments to play as a mood hits.  I like a LOT of genres and subgenres so I want to be able to make my own "channels" instead of having a Spotify or Pandora account.  I might even get to the point where most of the songs have a rating (ranging from what I enjoy the most to the least and, maybe, a separate tag for which songs are the most popular for when I want to make a playlist that others will also enjoy).  Then, I can have dynamic playlists that only cover the songs I enjoy most (usually on days I need a pick-me-up) or playlists of only obscure songs to broaden my knowledge of some artists (for example, A-Ha has almost two-dozen albums which is a lot for a so-called "one hit" wonder - and many are excellent).

This is nuts.
 
In the 1950's vinyl records were being sold for about $3.00-5.00. The equivalent inflation adjusted price today would be about $30.00-50.00. CD's hit a high of about $18.00 and are still in the $15.00 range. For about $120.00 you can now buy more different songs than there are hours to listen to them in a year via paid on demand streaming, or 6 or 7 CD's that would provide less unique songs than you could go through in an evening, and people are complaining that streaming subscription pricing is too high for them? These are not audiophiles who are buying expensive recordings instead, they are perfectly happy with the quality of the music they are streaming. They are the contemporary incarnation of the same listening public who used to have to babysit or mow lawns for a week to afford a 45 rpm single. Sobering indeed for anyone who hopes to make millions recording music. 

I can't work it out. Sometimes I wonder if my generation is the last that really puts any value on music, then I see thousands and thousands of young people at Glastonbury, T in The Park etc, who have spent a small fortune to watch bands play live.

When I first started buying records, they were 99 cents for a single and $3 for an LP.  To put that into context, the minimum wage back then was 75 cents an hour, a middle-class income was around $6,000 per year, a new car was $1,500 and nice home could be bought for $10,000.
 
Records were actually fairly expensive then, even if you did get two songs for your 99 cents. That was 10 times the price of a hamburger, or equal to four gallons of gasoline.
 
About the same time, I started playing in a band. I'd make between $30 and $50 a night, far more than my part-time day job that paid about $12 per week. That was 1965. Today, I still play in a band and my typical take is $50 a night. I haven't had a raise since $50 would buy you 15 pairs of bluejeans.

When I was a student back in the early 1970's in the UK an album cost the equivelent of around 20 pints of beer, today a full price CD about 3 pints. The "too expensive" streaming cost of £7.99 would have just about bought two full price albums.
 
Or -  My monthly starting salery on my first professional job would have bought 25 Albums. Today, based on minimum wage for 18-20 year olds working a 40 hour week about 100 albums for a months earnings.
 
We used to save, stay in, work over time to get the cash together to buy music.
 
The again
[4th Yorkshireman:] Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, eat a clump of coal poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
[1st Yorkshireman:] And you try and tell the young people of today that ….. and they won’t believe you.
[All Yorkshiremans:] Source: LYBIO.net No – no they won’t!

Rain
 I love albums. Not those overly self-indulgent 90 minutes contemporary records, but albums in the classic sense. I like to sit back with a record sleeve or a cd booklet in my hands and read lyrics and notes and credits. Or just listen. And form some kind of bond with the music, make the record a part of my life.
 

that describes exactly the kind of product i've been working at putting out,
now for almost 10 years.
 
i have 3 full albums out now,
that more or less fall into the category that rain defines...
 
and yet it seems the great majority of folk just don't realize what it takes to create these things...
that it's not 'junk art', or 'the flavor of the week', but something that is meant to go 'further'...
 
but folks stole music via Napster for so long,
and it ends up with a situation like mine.....
 
where i get paid from spotify, google, rumblefish, iTunes,  every so often,
and the amount is some fraction of a cent that i cannot even relate to.
 
$0.00082062
 
what is that?
 
LOL
 
i am wrapping up the re-release of my first album, "Trouble", right now...
and i'm on the fence with whether or not to even offer cd's for sale,
or just do a 'digital' download version of it,
because it's not fun ordering a box of cd's and just sitting on it.
 
 
 

Glyn Barnes
The "too expensive" streaming cost of £7.99 would have just about bought two full price albums.

 
Ah, but they're not talking about £7.99, they're only talking about $7.99 which is considerably less!
 

craigb

Glyn Barnes
The "too expensive" streaming cost of £7.99 would have just about bought two full price albums.

 
Ah, but they're not talking about £7.99, they're only talking about $7.99 which is considerably less!
 

Well to quote the linked article in the OP - a bit confusing but. (well its why I was confused)

The YouGov study polled 2,000 UK consumers. Only 10% of the UK adult population are actually paying for a music streaming subscription. They pay an average of £7.07, or $8.67, a month.

 
Cheap for the amount of "content" available be dollars, pounds or euros.
 
Most of the bands I follow these days are small and independent, so I am buying CDs at a gig or directly from the bands website, an in some cases crowd funding. A lot of fan/followers do so least then there is half a chance they won't go bust and continue to make music I like.
 

I wouldn't pay $7.99 for my own music.