---

Streaming vs Owning Music: What's the Difference?

When you stream a song, you're renting access to it. When you own it, it stays yours. Most of us switched to streaming without thinking much about that difference. It matters more than it seems, both for your library and for the artists you love.

Streaming is access, not ownership

A streaming subscription gives you a huge catalog for a monthly fee. But nothing in it belongs to you. You're paying for access, and that access depends on deals between the platform, labels and distributors.

When those deals change, music can disappear. Licensing is territorial, so a track can vanish in one country and stay up in another. Songs also go offline when a distributor account lapses, a sample clearance expires or a rights dispute comes up. Your playlist just shows a greyed-out track.

And when you stop paying, the whole library goes with it.

"Buying" a download isn't always owning either

You might think a paid download from iTunes or Amazon solves this. Read the terms and you'll find you bought a licence, not the music itself. Apple's terms say previously purchased content "may not be available for subsequent download at any given time." Amazon keeps the right to stop providing access to music "due to legal reasons."

So even a purchase can come with strings attached.

Side by side

	Streaming subscription	Buying a download	Collecting on Orbit
What you pay for	Access to a catalog	A licence to a file	Each play, until you've collected the release
What happens if you stop paying	Library is gone	You keep the file	Your collection stays in your account
How the artist is paid	Share of a monthly pool	One-off sale, minus store cut	Directly, the moment you press play
Proof of what you bought	None	A receipt in your store account	A record on the blockchain, in your own wallet

Why it matters for artists

How you listen also decides how artists get paid.

On streaming platforms, your subscription goes into a pool that's split by total streams. A stream earns an artist fractions of a cent, and on Spotify a track needs 1,000 streams a year before it earns anything at all.

When fans buy music directly, much more of the money reaches the artist. Bandcamp, for example, says artists receive an average of 82% of each sale, and it has paid artists over $1.5 billion in total.

Ownership isn't just about keeping your files. It's one of the most direct ways to support the people who make the music.

Do you have to choose?

Not really. Streaming is great for discovery: trying new genres, building playlists, finding your next favourite artist. Owning makes sense for the music you come back to again and again.

A simple rule: stream to discover, own what you love.

How Orbit combines both

Orbit is built so you don't have to pick. You stream like you would anywhere else, but every play is a small payment that goes straight to the artist. Those payments add up, and once you've paid enough, the release joins your collection.

You can also claim it on-chain, so there's a permanent record in your own wallet that you collected it, and that you backed the artist when it counted.

No subscription pool. No minimum stream count before the artist gets paid. And the more you listen to something, the closer you get to collecting it.

Start with something from the Orbit catalog: