I can see the case for streaming music - it appeals to the Geek in me - but....

As has been stated - quality of audio is an issue. I enjoy listening on a high-ish end set of speakers - and there are some truly terrible copies of audio floating around the cyber world - it takes time to seek out and store good clean audio copies, and importantly, at a high sample rate. Also, audio levels are all over the place - I like to have known levels - EQ is often tweekable to improve a track, sometimes a bit of limiting can improve the punch - in other words - I fart around with every track in my collection to try and eek out that little bit extra.

Storage is so cost effective these days - why not collect stuff? - I see both ways being used by me - but I certainly won't be dropping my collection any time soon....

:)

PS: I don't have a zillion tracks (about 6,000ish) people who quote having 100s of thousands of tracks must surely have loads of crud in their collections? How many "good" tracks are there? - I have stuff in my collection I will probably never play - but keep them "just in case".