Amazon paid music subscription will soon include ads and lose downloads

That's the problem with subscription services. It's a coercive relationship where the terms are unilateral. As an alternative, I've been buying music from Bandcamp for quite some time now and have a huge library built in addition to the CDs I already owned and ripped to my NAS, which I can stream from anywhere thanks to Jellyfin.

If I miss out on some stuff because it's not easily obtainable, whatever, at least my music is my own and doesn't magically go missing because of some random subscription licensing deal.

My favorite is when I canceled Spotify years ago, and they show this custom playlist like "we'll miss you" and has all these songs to say goodbye with or whatever. But.. due to Spotify's frequent delisting of songs, one or two of the songs were not playable. Gotta love it.

Not to defend Amazon here, but I think this is talking about the already severely limited streaming benefit of Prime, not the dedicated Amazon Music paid subscription. The former is not really comparable to a actual paid music subscription service.

This is the enshitification path, sooner or later these services have to turn to shit or charge a premium to be sustainable.

Step 1 is to provide a good value, then lure in creators, then lock them in and profit.

Well then.. I'll gladly stick to Spotify

As expected. This is the default path, happened may times before starting with premium TV channels.