Leerecs
You Are Renting, Not Buying
When you pay for Spotify, Apple Music, or any other streaming subscription, you are renting access to music. You do not own any of it. The music is not yours. It is licensed to you — temporarily — in exchange for a monthly fee.
This distinction matters. Renting something is fundamentally different from owning it:
- Rentals can be revoked. The landlord can end your lease. The streaming platform can remove tracks from your library, change their pricing, or shut down entirely. When they do, your "collection" disappears.
- Rentals have no equity. Every dollar you pay in rent is gone. It builds nothing. After 10 years of paying $144/year for Spotify, you have a listening history and zero assets.
- Rentals benefit the landlord more than the tenant. Spotify's business model captures value from both listeners (subscription fees) and artists (algorithmic placement leverage). The platform is the winner in this arrangement. Artists and fans are the participants.
The Catalog Disappearance Problem
Music regularly disappears from streaming platforms, and there is nothing listeners can do about it. Common causes:
- Artists pulling their catalogs (Taylor Swift and Spotify in 2014; Neil Young in 2022)
- Label licensing disputes causing catalog removals
- Platform shutdowns (Microsoft Groove, Rdio, Grooveshark)
- Independent distributor bankruptcies causing catalog orphaning
- Algorithmic suppression of tracks due to low engagement metrics
Each of these events removes music from listener libraries with no compensation and no warning. Every removal is evidence that rental access is not the same as ownership.
What Streaming Does to Artist Revenue
The rental model is worse for artists than ownership for a simple reason: the payment rate is calibrated to the volume of the streaming economy, not to the value of music to individual listeners.
An artist whose music is a listener's absolute favorite, played hundreds of times per year, earns the same per-stream rate as an artist whose music is skipped half the time. The streaming platform captures all the value that comes from being genuinely beloved — through increased subscriber retention, ad revenue, and platform valuation — without passing it to the artist.
This is the structural flaw of the rental model from an artist perspective. The value of music to specific listeners is not reflected in the price paid for it.
The Ownership Alternative
Music ownership solves all of these problems:
- Owned music cannot be revoked by platform decisions
- Ownership purchases build a permanent collection that has value
- Direct ownership transactions pay artists 1,500–6,000× more per fan interaction than streaming
- Ownership creates a direct relationship between artist and fan that the rental model obscures
This is why Leerecs exists. Not as a streaming platform with a merch store attached, but as an ownership-first ecosystem where every transaction is a permanent purchase. Read more: What Is a Music Ownership Platform? | Ownership vs. Streaming Compared