Comment by badfrog

I spend about half of every year traveling, often in particularly undeveloped countries and/or far from a mobile signal. Having my entire music collection on a portable hard drive is more convenient for me personally than being bound to streaming.

Streaming music services lack all the options in foobar2000 that I've grown accustomed to over the last 10+ years.

Personally, I buy music rather than torrent, but the pace at which I buy new music (either on bandcamp or physical CDs) costs me about the same as a Spotify premium subscription anyways, only I get to keep the music forever.

>I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap?

To provide you with another answer, most of the artists I listen to aren't on any of the music streaming services. Because local underground bands whom only have CD's handed out at their shows rarely exist outside of the pirating scene - which has a knack for distributing local underground bands with limited release/number of CDs. A small percentage of the bands/artists are on Spotify or Bandcamp but most aren't.

I buy what I can because I enjoy having the album arts but most of my music cannot be purchased or streamed.

There's also no guarantee that the streaming services will still exist in 10, 20, 30+ years - but there is an almost 100% chance that the hardware and software necessary to listen to or convert .flac will exist for me to continue to listen to my music.

I refuse to pay streaming subs, I buy second hand CDs for pennies and rip to flac. I'll always own my content and play it whenever/wherever I want at the best quality.

Some bands still refuse to be available on streaming (ex: Tool). Some will never be on streaming.