I still pay for music. I don't mean I pay for a streaming service subscription. I still buy albums. A mix of vinyl, compact discs, and digitally (almost entirely from Bandcamp.

Vinyl I tend to be choosier with. It's gotten really expensive (and annoyingly to me, personally, no longer really comes with download codes). So I tend to only buy stuff I'm pretty sure I'm really going to like, usually. CDs are for stuff I still want to have, and also I do a lot of skimming through stacks of used CDs for interesting things. Bandcamp is where I go for modern day "real" indie stuff, or sometimes more mainstream stuff that I can't be bothered to order in to my local record shop (I try to avoid the Amazons of the world for this stuff).

Most people I know think this is weird. (I still see lots of people at the record store alongside me when I choose to browse, for what that's worth. Well, "lots".) It is certainly a luxury item to spend money on now, and hard to rationally justify in terms of the value proposition. I liken it to collecting baseball cards.

That said, I'm not ethically, morally, or philosophically opposed to illegally downloading music¹ that I have not paid for. What I've found, though, is that if I turn on the spigot of just "download whatever you feel like" then I do not absorb anything that I listen to. I just turn into more of a hoarder, an archivist, than a listener. I end up with a "backlog". And on legitimate streaming services I become a slave to the algorithm. I give unfamiliar songs too little of a chance. I click next.

Even though I spend too much money on albums, I have my own limits. (And yes, this contradicts the lack of control I bemoaned just now. We are all beings of contradiction.) But the side effect of having a budget is that this limitation ends up "throttling" my consumption. Limiting how much I intake means I spend more time listening to what I have. I don't drink very widely, but I do drink deep.

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1. I refuse to call it "piracy" - that's loaded language. ↩