I wasn’t trying to say streaming is wrong, I definitely use it from time to time, and though I trend heavily towards BandCamp and Soulseek I’ll cop to fidelity rarely being important for me outside of certain genres with heavier bass or effects that make flac worthwhile. Generally it’s very diminished returns for bloated file size - especially so on mobile devices and Bluetooth/car playback

I rarely see removed songs, but do occasionally see them. Since my library is well curated it is easy to see which tracks are unavailable. I would guess I have been impacted on less than 0.1%.

I have both fringe and mainstream taste, so I do semi-regularly encounter outright missing artists/groups, or occasionally entire genres, especially so in electronic - that alone is worth the effort of building and managing a collection to me. It is very disappointing to find an artist available via streaming, but not their self released/indie albums because of licensing agreements

It is extremely rare for me to not find the songs I want on Apple Music, but I have uploaded many tracks to Apple Music that I had to procure from other locations.

You can upload your tracks to the cloud storage for later streaming? That’s actually pretty neat, and solves a lot of the ‘wrong’ live version/acoustic rendition/etc problems nicely.

It’s been a pretty good experience—not one I would have predicted 20 years ago.

Tbh same! Looking at the music industry after the vinyl era where pressing was cheaper but albums weren’t, it’s nice that they eventually were dragged kicking and screaming to digital distribution - “piracy is a service problem” and they refused to learn for decades while disruptive competition grew online