Maybe you’ve wondered if paying for a music streaming service is actually worth it, or whether you would be better off economically just buying the songs on itunes.

To find out whether we’ve all been wasting money on our beloved streaming services, we’ll use following values (CHF is the swiss national currency):

  • Cost per song bought (iTunes): 1.30 CHF
  • Monthly cost for music streaming service (Apple music): 12.90 CHF
--> Flat cost for Apple Music: 12.90 CHF * 12 = 154.80 CHF

--> Amount of songs I can buy with this money: 154.80 CHF / 1.30 CHF ≈ 119 songs
graph showing price developments of buying songs vs streaming them

Fancy graph

From this we can conclude that if you add less than 119 new songs to your library in a year, you’re technically wasting money on streaming services1.

  1. At least if we disregard all the other features streaming services provide. ↩︎