There’s a lot to the features that Spotify provides. First, there’s the social side: collaborative playlists, “jam sessions” that let your friends add songs to the queue, Spotify wrapped, etc.; then there’s the functionality side: I can play a song on my laptop and pick up right where I left off on my phone, or even switch to my phone while it’s still playing, the recommendations are great and, increasingly, people are turning to Spotify-curated playlists rather than making their own or selecting songs individually. All of those are things you can’t replicate easily outside of Spotify, with the exception of recommendations

Yes we’ll all go back to those services and be worse off for it. The reality is, nobody outside of this congregation of websites wants to go back to downloading mp3s. Truthfully, most people on here don’t either. I have a TB SD card that’s over half full with flacs and I still use Spotify because the features it has are more convenient than setting all of that up myself, let alone trying to pirate older music that’s relatively obscure. You ever felt what it’s like to sit on 6 different torrents for the same album for 2 weeks with no seeds?