So…Much…Music!

@nogaps 

Drop $15+ on a similar CD and hope for the best.   

I use Spotify and YouTube specifically to identify music I may want to buy on CD.

Some may take pride in thumping their chest about plenty of variety in their vinyl/CD collections and therefore have no use for streaming, and that may be true, for them, but from the viewpoint of all music produced throughout the world over the last 100 years, they're dancing on the head of a pin. It's like living in the movie The Truman Show. 

Sounds like you haven't been on this forum very long. There has been (and continues to be) far, far, more "chest thumping" on the part of the streaming cult than those who are content with vinyl and/or CD. 

I don’t stream. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Every thing I play is either on vinyl or a CD. I grew up in the generation that had actual new hits every week. After the 90’s music has all been downhill. Get off my lawn. 

Some people seem to be confusing quality with quantity.  Both have their merits, but in the long run I know which one I would rather have.

If you have a 1,000+ CD/vinyl/tape collection and it's not one of the best collections of music you've ever heard, in your humble opinion.  Then is getting potential access to 100 million song sreally going to help you?

A music collection is no different than system building.  Some people know how to do it better than others.

@onhwy61 

Well sure. But only under certain circumstances. If we assume you have a streamer that is sonically as good as your CD /Vinyl / or tape. Then the media type is irrelevant. 
 

Then it becomes a question of how you found those great recordings. It is likely you know about, heard about or sampled only a tiny bit of the available music out there. So, you have only collected from a tiny pool... with a careful choice before you buy an album. 
 

However, when you have millions of albums at your disposal then your means of exploration can change... mine did and I have discovered so much new music that I love that I almost never listen to my 4,000 albums (vinyl / CD collection). One can argue that, ’well, I use streaming for discovery." This implies a lower sound quality to your streaming system or why would you bother to buy something if it doesn’t sound better, and why would you want to spend all that time listening to inferior sound. ound quality makes a difference in your assessment of some albums... so if you could listen to them if full fidelity to make a choice, why wouldn’t you?

Anyway, for me I would guess if I could do this that if I ranked my favorite albums there were 3,600 vinyl / CDs in my collection that took 50 years to find. And now my top 3,600 albums 80% are albums that I stream... so 2,800 are albums that I found by streaming in the last ten years.