I think we are being distracted by the royalty issues. But it’s more of a cultural and availability phenomena, imo.
Most of us are of a certain age where we experienced music consumption previously in 2 states, either physical media, records and CDs, or cassettes, or live. The former was relatively vastly more expensive and therefore we really needed to get value for money and enjoy, cherish and memorise every facet of every albums we purchased. This becomes a mental ownership as the albums became imprinted in our memories clearly and unambiguously, so we can go back to our mental vault and pick out, anytime, when we fancy some Blues, say Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood, or some great Jazz… Wayne Shorter - Speak No Evil, and so on. These albums are mentally owned in our minds.
We are now living in an environment where music is on tap. It is just there…music. Excellent quality, no compromise. Millions of albums. Millions . And we are being bombarded daily with new recommendations from many sources, not least of which our personal streaming companies themselves, so each time we boot up our streamers, there ya go… another 20 albums flashing up and tempting us with fancy album art…
Now that becomes a really big problem for us because we are still of the mindset of not only physically owning the music but having a need to mentally own it too to be able to refer back to it later when we want to relive that enjoyment of prior listens. The sheer volume of the streamed music means that we are finding it much harder to accept the ephemeral nature of the sheer volume of music which is available and also face the growing inability to assimilate and mentally own what we are hearing.
I can listen to 20 new albums a day and whilst 1 or 2 will be noted as being good, invariably, they get washed down the river as new stuff is coming on all the time. That is becoming really very difficult for me to accept. But because of the new and exciting fresh stuff, I’m still ploughing on with new listens and the other good stuff which, even whilst I’m listening I am subconsciously saddened by this fact, is being washed down the river of good new music clamouring for my attention.
Really this is a major problem for us, especially those of us of a certain age who have not been brought up with the “new way”.
Back to the core problem… why I “can’t enjoy the music I don’t own”; the OP’s problem… ownership in the context of the OP, implies paying a massive premium to have a physical copy (by this I also mean unlimited right to store on HDD); in some cases, an entire month of streaming for 1 album. And that payment forces us to invest more time in specific paid for albums, and forces us subconsciously therefore to enjoy them more.
Now… app creators can help this problem by offering much better facilities for tagging and curating streamed music. Roon is good at this with the tagging function. There’s a whole lot more which can be done to help, but the whole essence of dealing with millions of available albums is currently hopeless generally. Tidal doesn’t even allow you to search within favourited albums, which is laughable, forget trying to keep track of good albums along the way and why, on the whole.
This exacerbates the whole problem of ownership, mentally, thus pushing us back to purchasing specific albums, as a sort of permanent marker for “good albums”.
So much more can be done, but developers are hopelessly ignorant to the whole new world of possibilities we have here with streamed music.
