Besides supporting the artists who make it:
“What does it mean if your own personal music is being stored in a platform that’s hard for you to access, hard for you to download, has source code you can’t tweak, you can’t port it to something else if it gets bought by Murdoch’s tentacles?” The word “cloud”… acts as a form of linguistic wallpaper masking the fact that digital copies of “your” music are in fact somewhere amidst vast server farms in places like Maiden, North Carolina; Ashburn, Virginia; Singapore; New South Wales, and Victoria, Australia; and Dublin, Ireland, subject to the terms of impossibly long end-user licensing agreements and to disappearance without notice.
From Station to Station: The Past, Present, and Future of Streaming Music by Eric Harvey. Opening quote from Jace Clayton (DJ/rupture)
I would be heartbroken to lose albums I love to a platform or ELA agreement; it’s not worth the risk of that, to me, to move to any kind of streaming service. I continue to buy music (on CD, even, for albums I know I like and will want to hear in high fidelity).
In addition to these reasons, I have a lot of material that’s not available on streaming services. That includes things I’ve recorded myself, files I’ve recorded from vinyl, and tons of local music. Google Play would address this issue, but it’s the only service I know of that would, and the other issues remain.
(The quote above is just a small part of a fantastic article that covers many facets of the streaming phenomenon, both positive and negative. Read it if you can!)
Have you tried, or switched to, a streaming service? If so, how do you like it? If not, why not?