I found some of my favourite bands by downloading mislabelled songs on limewire.

The strange bit is, even in the 80s,I was paying waaaay more than that per year for records and tapes.

It's only the fact that someone suggested I had to pay them a subscription that causes me to download illegally

Don't fucking tell me I need to keep paying every year for something I don't own, I'm not buttoned up the back

I'm kinda waiting for this bad boy to come out so I can put into it all the songs I legally acquired all these years...

Qobuz ... check it out

Songs disappearing, pushing podcasts, and raising prices. That's why I went back to buying music. I salute the sailors

The apps is definitely a part of it for me. One if my friends got YouTube Premium, and since he has 3 profiles he can attach to it, hrs letting me use it. It's nice for the ad free videos on my TV. But it also comes with YouTube Music. It's honestly kind of annoying at times.

Like yesterday I wanted to listen to an album by a band, and they only have like 2 of 3 albums. The one I wanted to listen to is the one they didn't have. So I had to make a Playlist by finding videos of the songs.

And thats for a band that's not super underground. I listen to a lot of grindcore and black metal, and a lot of that isn't even on there.

And when you download things, you can only have it organized by albums. I can't organize it by band and then have all the albums.

It's also sometimes slow to load up stuff I've downloaded.

Over all its not the greatest experience. I'm currently looking at getting a mobile game device for my emulators so I can free up space on my phone, and then I'm thinking about just going back to having all the music on files on there and using an music player app. And like you said, I can have it organized how I want and customize things a bit more. Especially since I no longer have Comcast, so I can use Soulseek again.

I doubt spotify's small price increase mattered as much as the big increase in overall living expenses. If the choice is between paying for services like spotify or paying rent, then it is a lot easier to pirate music than housing.