Memory has become more inexpensive compared to the past. A fast 128GB SD card can be had for around 20 bucks. The file collection on my phone is slightly smaller than that, and it contains enough music to play for over two weeks continuously. It’s a slightly unsatisfactory solution that mobile and non-mobile collections are separate and must be managed a bit - with manual transfers over USB and occasional file deletion and clean-up phases. However, it’s far less work than it used to be burning CD’s and making mixtapes etc. (almost nothing in the collection exists on streaming services, so that is a non-option).
Trusting media companies like Apple to manage and host ones information collection seems bound to fail. Using the network to access a static collection also seems a bit bonkers and wasteful of bandwidth.
