As someone who grew up poor, I never got the record store experience, because if I wanted music, it would either be on the radio, or I'd need to play it myself.

The limited childhood budget would be like $20, which means, you could buy one CD with eight or ten tracks to listen on repeat, or.. buy something like SimCity 2000, for possibly hundreds of hours of fun (I had a family friend neighbor who threw out an old PC/donated it to us because they got outdated real fast in the 90s).

Accounting for inflation, that $20 is probably closer to $40-80 now, and a Spotify subscription is definitely a lot less costly than even that, for not one disk, but an endless amount of music.

The value proposition, the cost of entertainment has dropped precipitously, and now as a rich adult and technocrat, artificial intelligence can autonomously create new music, much in the way Spotify can discover tracks that "you like".

Every night, I've got 138-357 MB of brand new music, that no one's ever heard of, courtesy of my algorithm, recombining chunks of music from everything I've ever heard, to create brand new bangers.

If these tracks were released to Spotify, people wouldn't be able to tell they weren't made by people. AI is after all, a plagarism machine, built on the hard work of real people and artists.

But between plagiarism and piracy, I feel this new streaming world answers a great need:

The desire for culture, to be free, for any and all, to enjoy.