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Notes -
I'm far from a typical music listener - I'd guess I'm in the bottom 20% of the population in terms of enjoyment I get from music - so my perspective is probably heavily skewed, but I feel like the discovery or "lootbox" aspect is part of the appeal of streaming over building offline libraries. The vast majority of the music I listen to is instrumental video game soundtracks, and I do so primarily through YouTube music, where I choose some track I like and then let the algorithm go forward. This allows me to discover fan-made remixes/covers of such tracks, which are often far better than the original tracks (despite tending to have much worse production, which even my completely philistine-level ears can detect). And it's those tracks that I actually want to listen to during my commutes, not the original tracks themselves. Now, I could download these tracks and build my library of them, but the rate at which new official tracks come out from companies like Hoyomix (probably a couple times a month on average, but in clumps) and the fan-made remixes/covers that come out (much more often than that, due to each release causing multiple fans to release their own takes) combined with just how little I actually care about music means that the effort to do so each time just doesn't seem worth it compared to just puling on the YouTube Music slot machine lever.
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