I see this shift as a tech hype wave finally having its bubble burst under how shit a deal it is for everyone but the middlemen. Then again, I guess a lot of pe

I see this shift as a tech hype wave finally having its bubble burst under how shit a deal it is for everyone but the middlemen. Then again, I guess a lot of people actually like streaming services for music? This is alien to me. I just straight up never got into streaming music services. I've never had or wanted a spotify account. I think my use of automated discovery tools consisted of trying last.fm recommendations for a while. For the most part I like discovering music by word of mouth or bands touring together or through random happenstance. When listening to music on purpose I prefer to curate it myself from what I have in my collection (Which is mostly digital and I manage it through a filesystem. Most cloud file storage has a garbage featureset compared to like vanilla POSIX, let alone everything we've invented for file management on computers since). Sometimes, if I don't have something, I'll go try to find it specifically on Bandcamp or Youtube, but especially on the former I'm likely to buy it if I ever want it twice, and this is only untrue for the latter because stuff on youtube doesn't usually have a clear way to give the artist money, making it often easier to pirate than buy. I suppose I could still buy and rip CDs, but my last remaining optical drive is over a decade old and it's kind of inconvenient to do that I'm not trying to be elitist or anything here. It genuinely baffles me that so many people prefer to just have a random stream of music play at them based on what some recommender system thinks they won't turn off, interspersed with ads or for a monthly subscription service that may average out to slightly less than I spend on music (but I'm pretty novelty-seeking and really like supporting artists when I can, so I think I'm above-average in how much new music I will buy). That's not even considering how bad it is for the artists, how it's yet another piece of a surveillance web, etc. I know people mostly ignore that stuff, and that there's a lot of industry dollars going into making it easier to ignore. But the baseline use case just seems obnoxious rather than pleasant or useful. I don't know how to reconcile the fact that my preferences seem really far outside the norm without explicitly trying to be contrarian about it. What do people like about this stuff?