Thing is, what you’re describing is a logical fallacy. That because things got worse they’re going to continue to get worse. The slippery slope fallacy.

Yes, you used to have dozens and even hundreds of songs that nobody could take away from you. You were your own server. However, now that we have a service like Spotify where you can listen to most of the world’s music, not be required to store it, not have to buy each album, each track, but instead pay $15 and listen to anything, anytime, make nearly unlimited playlists of nearly unlimited tracks… it doesn’t make me miss the old days. I don’t feel nostalgia for the days when my disk walkman skipped because I walked too fast or the headphones on my head were $3 and I couldn’t even hear the lyrics properly. Now we have lossless compression, headphones that would cost thousands just a few years ago being only a couple hundred, devices that don’t skip, don’t lag, don’t buffer, but instead of you fronting the cost all at once you make payment plans. You take for granted the things we dreamt of and demand improvement, not stagnation, and god forbid a decline.

You can still live in the past. Download and store entire discographies from any of the dozens of pirate sites, force them onto your device, then play them as if we still lived in 2009. But the artist doesn’t see a dime for that. The pirate site doesn’t see a nickel. So you either support the people who make things you like in a system you don’t, or you fuck them over to try and stick it to the system itself. Thing is, I think the system will survive even when the things you like, don’t.