A few months ago we'd had Disney+, Paramount+, Hulu, HBO Max but we've cut back to Netflix and YouTube premium.
Switched to purchasing and renting when there's something we want to watch that isn't available and we're finding it to force us to be more conscious of what we're watching.
We're considering ditching Spotify and music streaming to return to buying albums so our children can start to be more thoughtful listeners. After falling down a rabbit hole of some insider music vlogs, I recognized how much streaming is harming independent music.
They could also consider making manual youtube playlists and setting up a media computer with something like TubeArchivist. Selfhosting youtube is the only actually useful thing in my "homelab".
I'm only mentioning this because for years I've been making music playlists and archiving them. When you come back to them on youtube a few years later a few songs are always gone/ unavailable. Some of my favorite songs don't exist on yt anymore
YouTube does a really good job at making playlists on the fly. Choosing the first song on YouTube will get you a playlist of somewhat similar songs. It took me a while to get used to relative to Spotify but now I much prefer the YT method.
Spotify is so cheap that it is worth it for the convenience alone. Not to mention Spotify is legal while piracy is not.
However, I agree that if you enjoy music (or any other art/content) someone produces, it’s only fair (and natural) to support them in a more direct way.
I suppose the qualifier here is "there's no moral point in paying for streaming". If you're fine listening to your favorite artist but paying Taylor Swift for your convineinece, cool.
You'll benefit the artist much more by throwing a real dollar at them and pirating their music.
On the music side, the current trend for vinyl has been a really great thing for my teenage kids. My eldest (who according to Spotify listens to about 130k mins of music a year) has really discovered an appreciation for the arc of an album when he has to spend the time loading up a disc.
Switched to purchasing and renting when there's something we want to watch that isn't available and we're finding it to force us to be more conscious of what we're watching.
We're considering ditching Spotify and music streaming to return to buying albums so our children can start to be more thoughtful listeners. After falling down a rabbit hole of some insider music vlogs, I recognized how much streaming is harming independent music.