Of all my subscription, I think Spotify provides the most value on a dollar for dollar basis. Unlike visual content, that includes everything from 30 seconds clips of cats on YouTube to the highest quality content on HBO, for music most of the content can be rented from one service for a fairly low price. Unlike some movies there isn’t an upfront cost see the wasted content sooner. As a bonus the software included with the subscription is top tier and gets better over time.
Paying the $10/mo price in perpetuity is likely manageable for anyone with some security in their finances. The problem is that over time that price adds up significantly over time. I’ve subscribed to Spotify for over 10 years at this point. At moments I’ve subscribed to multiple services that provide music renting. For example I’ve tried tested out Tidal multiple times to see if the quality was worth the hype.
Let’s add up how much I’ve actually spent over the last 10 years. The subscription price for Spotify since its launch has been 9.99 per month, at least according to this verge article. That means every year a Spotify subscriptions costs $119.88, let’s round that up to $120/yr to keep the numbers clean. Summing that over a decade is $1.2k. That doesn’t include the family premium accounts which I’ve had for considerable time during the last decade. That price is slightly different depending on which family plan is chosen. Let’s assume I only had a family plan for half of the last decade which is a low number for sure. Given that assumption with a family plan price of $13/mo, the decade long sum is almost $1.4k. That’s a considerable amount of money. Although it’s more than reasonable, I think, for the service.
I just mentioned that price seems reasonable, so why stop using the service? Well it’s really for me how I use the service. I typically listen to maybe 3 albums on rotate for many months and I supplement that with with listening to a few playlist that Spotify would recommend, generally from the artist that I’m listening the most to. This means that after paying for a few albums at around the monthly cost of the Spotify subscription, I’ve mostly satisfied my music needs for some time. After maybe 6 albums worth of music I’ve satisfied my music needs for the year. I think this compounds over time. If I already have 6 albums from the previous year, maybe I’ll only need to acquire 4 or 5 albums the next year to satisfy my needs. So that over time I’m really only buying say 1 or 2 new albums that came out that year and maybe 1 or 2 albums that came out in the past. This means the average cost of my music needs should be around 20-40% of what I’m paying to Spotify. Another way to say that is I’m paying a full years worth of Spotify when I really only need to pay 2-4 months of subscription costs.
What I had decided to do was to accumulate an initial base of music to make up for the last 10 years of not accumulating music. The original plan was to buy around to cost of 2 years of premium subscription cost, which would be around $340. Given it was pretty fun to rediscover music, I’ve probably practically speaking spent around the cost of a 6 year premium spotify subscription.
How I decided to buy my music was a key consideration. I wanted to make sure the music files I use were of high quality. I tried to buy cds and buy music from different online stores. I eventually settled on Apple Music or iTunes for buying music. While browsing the store frequently has issues, doesn’t play music or slow for loading pages, buying the music is fairly easy, it’s fairly easy to find/discover music that I like, and downloading/redownloading and storing the music is fairly simple. I’ve also tried Qobuz. I like service, but it feels like the popular music is buried in the app and harder to discover. I like the fact that the you can download high quality music files. I’ll probably come back to site when buying more music.
Lastly I had to figure how to store and serve the music. I settled on using my current network attached storage(NAS) device setup to store my music. All my music is only around 17 gigabytes, so it doesn’t add any substantial cost to store. I decided to use plex as the way I serve my music for to listen to wherever I am. The plea server lives on a mini pc that has access to the music folder on my NAS. This setup has been working pretty well for the past month or so and I’m pretty happy with it.
I’m so far pretty happy with my setup. While maybe over time this setup will save me money, I’m more happy with the fact that I don’t need to pay a perpetual fee to listen to the music that I want to. That alone brings me more happiness and satisfaction than anything else. I don’t really feel like I’ve lost much and while I listen to a slightly more diverse set of songs now that I’m using my own music library, I still mostly listen to the same small set of albums.
Next week I’ll talk about how I (mostly) removed my cloud storage subscription.
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