Last.fm tells me that in the last 2 years I've listened to songs from 2,015 different albums (almost exclusively via Spotify). That goes up to 4,238 in the last

Last.fm tells me that in the last 2 years I've listened to songs from 2,015 different albums (almost exclusively via Spotify). That goes up to 4,238 in the last 5, and increases by a few hundred per year thereafter. The top 50 albums over those 2 years are a quarter of my listens, the top 100 are just over a third. Even if two-thirds of that album count is bad metadata (e.g. the same song counted against multiple different albums/compilations/etc.) it would still be prohibitively expensive to consume anywhere near the same breadth of content if I had to acquire perpetual rights (from Bandcamp/iTunes/etc.) for everything rather than effectively renting them out for a single play (from Spotify). The other thing I like about the streaming model is that artist remuneration correlates to how impactful their work subsequently is to my life (i.e. how many times I listen to it both during discovery and then over the subsequent years/decades) rather than how effective their marketing is at convincing me to buy the album up front.