I’ve got an 8 G player and after I hit about 500 songs (mostly from the alternative genres) I really didn’t want to add anything else. So now, one or two tracks get added every couple of months- and I’m really only in the 2-3 GB of music.

The other issue is generally when I use the player most often, I don’t really have good access to the internet or cell-phone networks (e.g. flying, China, swamps in the NT).

I’m not too worried about the effect on my internet bill. Streaming 128 kbps AAC 16 hours a day, every day, would only come to about a third of my current internet use. Significant, but not scary. The bigger issue is that it would be 50% more (every month!) than the size of my entire music collection, built up over more than 30 years. I’ve acquired at least 95% of it from ripping CDs that I own, but even downloading it would be less traffic than just one month of streaming.

The thing that I would absolutely detest about streaming is that there is a very good chance that the company will simply go away and I’ll be left with nothing. That’s already happened with Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” music, a mere four years after it started.

I also kinda like to listen to my music when I’m somewhere without internet or even cellphone coverage. Such as .. oh I don’t know … on a trans-Pacific flight.

In the UK you can listen for free, with an ad every 15 minutes (which you can’t skip – if you turn the volume down on the ad it stops and waits until you turn it back up). Or you can pay for ad-free.

Of course it’s a complete abuse of the internet and some record labels are not present. E.g. there’s no Pink Floyd.

If the sound goes to your computer speakers, there are programs that can intercept and save it to files.
Then again, the DRM in Vista and Windows 7 *may* make this more difficult. In that case, stick with XP.