Not renting the soundtrack of my life.

David J. Danto

Travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD on

Not Renting The Soundtrack Of My Life April 2026

I have never been comfortable with “renting” things I could be purchasing. That includes the idea of subscribing to music.

Maybe that is partly because I travel so much. On airplanes, in airports, in hotel rooms, and in rental cars, music is not just background noise to me. It is part of how I settle down, block out the chaos around me, and make an unfamiliar place feel at least a little familiar. That is exactly why I want my music to be mine.

That is what much of the music business now wants us to do. Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and just about everyone else would prefer that we subscribe, keep paying, and treat music not as something we acquire, keep, and carry with us, but as something that is merely available to us for as long as we stay on the plan. That may work for a lot of people. It has never sat right with me.

I still believe in buying music.

No, not in the sense of owning the copyright or pretending I somehow control the artist’s work. I mean buying it in the normal-person sense. I paid for it. I have a copy of it. I can keep it. I can load it onto the devices I use now and whatever devices I may use in the future. If I bought the CD, or the album, or even the MP3, I have something tangible or at least transferable to show for it. That matters to me.

I feel the same way about software, by the way. I own Office. I own the latest downloadable and installable version because I have no interest in renting productivity software that I can simply buy and put on my computer. Word has not changed enough to make me eager to subscribe forever just for the privilege of typing documents. The same mentality applies to music. If I can buy it once and use it where and when I need it, that still seems like the sane model.

Maybe part of this comes from having lived through too many format changes. LPs turned into cassettes, cassettes turned into CDs, CDs turned into downloads, downloads turned into streaming, and every few years the industry acts as though it is perfectly reasonable to ask you to buy the same music all over again in a shiny new wrapper. (I may have forgotten the MiniDisc format in there somewhere.) The whole thing reminds me of that joke in Men in Black about having to buy the White Album again in the new alien format. Funny line, but also a little too close to home.

I am tired of buying the White Album again.

What pushed this back into my head was something very simple. My wife and I had just seen Graham Nash in concert at State Theatre in New Brunswick. It was a wonderful show. There was one song he played, Cathedral, that she had not heard in about four decades. So afterward she wanted me to add it to her iPhone, and with me being IT support for the household you can guess whose job that is. I decided to do what used to be the easiest thing in the world: go buy the track and put it on her phone.

Not stream it. Not “save” it inside some app that can later decide it is no longer available. Buy it.

That used to be normal. You would go to Amazon or Apple, pay 99 cents or $1.29, download the song, and be done. The artist got paid. The store got paid. You got the music. Everybody won.

Now, somehow, that simple transaction has become weirdly difficult.

The obvious purchase options often are not there anymore. Instead, the services nudge you toward a subscription. They want the monthly relationship, not the one-time sale. If you do not want that, your choices start getting ridiculous in a hurry. You can buy a used CD, perhaps, but then the shipping costs more than the disc. It makes you buy a full album for ten or twelve bucks – used on CD – when all you wanted was one song. So the market has managed to create a system in which the legal, straightforward, pay-the-artist route is often the hardest one to take.

That is insane.

In this case, I did what a lot of perfectly honest people end up doing when the legitimate market stops making sense. I found the song on YouTube, downloaded the audio from it through one of the many tools floating around out there, converted it to MP3, fixed the metadata, found the album art, imported it into iTunes, and loaded it onto her phone.

Think about how stupid that is.

I was happy to pay for the song. I wanted to pay for the song. The system would not let me do that in any clean, simple way. So instead of spending a dollar and compensating the artist through a legal storefront, I spent the better part of an hour building the track by hand like it was some sort of basement bootleg project. That is not because I wanted to cheat anybody. It is because the industry has made the honest path harder than the workaround. And this is not the first time this was the only sane option available. One time I felt so bad downloading songs from a new artist that I sent him cash on his Patreon page to at least try to compensate him.

That is a broken market.

And yes, this matters to me in everyday life, not just in theory. I travel a lot. On airplanes, I listen to music on my iPhone through my earbuds to settle down and relax. I n rental cars I am not able to rely on my satellite radio subscription, because for some ridiculous reason it cannot be temporarily moved over to the rental car, and only an idiot would pay to re-rent a subscription they’re already paying for from the car rental company. And I certainly do not rely on whatever random station happens to be available in a strange city. I am playing my own music from my own device. In hotel rooms, especially the anonymous kind where every room looks the same and the HVAC sounds like a jet engine, having my own familiar songs matters. Even waiting in airports, music is not just entertainment. It is a way to put myself in a known place when everything around me is noise, delay, and inconvenience.

That is why ownership still matters.

When I am traveling, I do not want to wonder whether a cellular connection is weak, whether a streaming app has logged me out, whether a song has disappeared because of some licensing dispute, or whether a subscription I never wanted in the first place is still active. I want the music with me. Paid for, downloaded, organized, tagged correctly, and available when I press play on my known and preferred playlists.

That used to be the promise of digital media. Convenience. Portability. Flexibility. Remember when Steve Jobs showed us the iPod and it explained it was your whole music library in your pocket? What has happened since then is we have backed into a model where access is rented, permanence is discouraged, and the customer who wants to do the right thing is treated like an inconvenience.

The part that bothers me most is that this is bad for artists too. If fans who are willing to buy a track can no longer easily do so, that does not create more respect for the system. It creates resentment. It creates hacks and workarounds. It creates a quiet little gray market of ordinary people doing extra labor just to recreate what used to be a basic retail purchase.

That should embarrass the entire music business.

I am not saying subscriptions should not exist. Clearly, they work for many people. But they should not be the only sane option. There should still be a simple button that says: buy this song. Download this file. Keep this copy. Thank you for supporting the artist.

Instead, we seem to be moving toward a world where you can rent almost anything forever, but own less and less of it outright. For me, that is not progress. That is a step backward disguised as convenience. It provides recurring revenue to companies already making too much money via a process that keeps me re-buying access to the same stuff I already have with no added value.

And the next time my wife comes home from a concert wanting to hear the song that brought back a memory from forty years ago, I would much rather spend 99 cents than spend an hour proving just how broken the system has become.

After decades of candid travel commentary – from loyalty program “magic tricks” to hotel check-in roulette – I’ve decided to turn some of that honesty into apparel. These aren’t novelty shirts; they’re the exact truths every road warrior wishes they could say out loud. Whether you’re quietly muttering “My loyalty points devalued while you read this shirt” or admitting “If delays build character then I’m the whole movie’s cast” you’ll find plenty of familiar sentiments… and more. Everything is produced by a reputable outfit, with black tees that work under a sport jacket plus hoodies and wicking travel gear for life on the road. The site also has my honest and snarky takes on technology trade shows. Take a look at Tinyurl.com/TechAndTravelWear. Even if you’re not buying they’re fun to read and commiserate – and if you do buy something, maybe I’ll break even. If you want a style you don’t see, just email me and I’ll add it.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!