Convenience. It’s the biggest reason why the current music industry has managed to get your average music fan away from paying for tracks iTunes to streaming on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and the like. A tenner a month for soooo much music. It makes sense. Subscription models are working in all sorts of niches now, and this is among the most prominent examples that work.

Streaming is here to stay. It’s the only viable solution to curb illegal downloads, and ensures that musicians get some payback directly from individual recordings. I get all that and it’s nice, but there’s still one problem for me: YouTube is better.

As of right now, every single song I want to listen to can be found on YouTube. The same cannot be said of any other platform. If you haven’t noticed from the blog and my tweets, I listen to a lot of hard-to-find, unreleased, mixtape and demo material. None of that will ever make it onto Spotify, but it’s there to stay on YouTube, and it’s hosted for free along with all the regular music I listen to.

I’ve been downloading music for free since I got the internet, and it’s still as easy to do. All the Apple Music and Tidal exclusives tend to be by the most popular acts, so I’ll be able to grab them from a Zippyshare link on release day. The mid-2000s taught me that if you don’t personally store music you like, it can get lost forever. So much music from MySpace-famous artists has gone forever because that’s the only place it was stored, and the musicians would prefer to distance themselves from earlier work. If I don’t keep it, no one else will.

There’s the whole discover-new-music thing too. All of these streaming services hype about curated playlists and all that. I’m really good at doing that myself, and when I’m not in the mood, there’s plenty of radio stations to provide that exact service. The day that DatPiff partners with Apple Music is when I’ll consider streaming. Until that happens, I’ve got better ways of getting what I need.

You will know from previous posts that I buy physical copies of albums, because I’m into this whole collecting thing. That’s not going to change and it’s how I support artists I like. I’m not even anti paying for digital music. I buy songs off Bandcamp, if I feel the artist deserves it. But again, this is probably stuff that can’t be found anywhere other than SoundCloud and Bandcamp. It’s what I want to listen to. I can’t find it elsewhere. If that £10 isn’t giving me every drop of music I need for the month, it’s not doing its job.

Casual music fans, do your thing. If it’s easier to listen to and find music, enjoy. I’m good though.

I’m clearly not normal, so tell me what you think.