Weekly Poll: Do You Prefer to Buy or Subscribe to Music?

If you listened to the claims of startups and entrenched tech giants alike, you’d be led to believe that it’s terribly hard to find and listen to music today. That’s anything but the truth, of course. If anything, it’s easier to find and listen to the music you want today than it’s ever been.

There’s the older, traditional route of buying music on CDs (and even records, if you’re an audiophile), and that still works perfectly fine today. There’s free over-the-air radio, complemented with internet radio often from the same stations. You can likely find most songs you want to listen to in music videos on YouTube, and can keep the song forever with music downloads, either directly from artists or from stores like iTunes and more (as well as less legitimate sources, which are the real reason music industry leaders keep searching for new business models).

But that’s not enough. Now, we’ve got an insane selection of music subscription services, where for a low fee per month you can listen to every song imaginable, and then some. You won’t own any music, but you’ll have more accessible than you could ever listen to. There’s also brand-new in-between services like the new iTunes Radio that give you auto-generated radio streams of songs in a genre you like, with options to buy the songs if you want to listen to them again.

It’s getting to be a bit too much, and sometimes one could wish for a return to the simplicity of just flipping on the radio. So what’s your favorite way to get music nowadays? Are you still listening to traditional radio, buying songs directly, or subscribing to music services? Or are you using a mix of all 3? We’d love to hear your thoughts on music in 2013 in the comments below.