(Comixology is - I believe - one of those ‘buy each comic’ things and not a subscription service, so I’m more replying to the subscription model stuff like the post about the Bollywood music.)
I used to buy a lot of Music on Amazon Music (which at the time had DRM-free albums with MP3 downloads and a reasonably decent app for downloading them), but eventually I just hit the point where a subscription was cheaper and more reasonable and so now I just have one of the big subscription services, which I won’t name so this doesn’t come off as a weird shill for them. It’s not Amazon’s music subscription service at least.
I think the point of these subscription services is that it’s just ephemeral access, which…honestly is kind of nice for me for music at least. I pay a fee to access it, some portion of which goes to the musicians (yes, these deals are also bad, but musician profits are kind of just a nightmare scenario on everything except buying direct from them), and I don’t have to pay my own time and/or money to hold onto the files, organize them, keep them backed up, etc. It also means I can check out artists I’m interested in quickly without having to pay more money up front to find out I don’t like the album/etc. My subscription is about the cost of an album every 3 months, so it’s nowhere near as expensive as listening to new music all the time, and I’m not hammered with advertisements like on the radio.
I still have an extensive collection of MP3s, a large portion of which are legal but getting them retagged and organized and everything is kind of a huge chore. I haven’t really touched that collection in a long time, because frankly it’s just way more of a pain in my ass and I’ve got lots of other file reorganization chores to take care of that I’ve been putting off that are probably more important.
TL;DR: Subscriptions/etc are a product and they may or may not be a good deal, but I disagree with the idea that they’re just wholly useless or terrible - you just need to understand what you’re getting into and don’t pretend that you’re paying for ownership, just access.
IMO I think DRM-free games/etc are a much bigger problem, because if you buy a game on the Playstation Store, it’s locked to your account and when they turn it off in ten years or so, you lose all that access. I still buy digital games, because I’m just going to pirate them when they turn off the store and feel zero ethical conflict about it.
