Might cost me a fortune in CD purchases as a result though!
Isn't the aim/design/goal of streaming to reduce (eliminate?) the amount of physical media people buy in the future?
It's a shift in business model. Money will be earned from 'leasing' or 'renting' licences from whoever owns the right to currently sell on the licence to endless generations of customers rather than sell physical media.
Even JRiver are recognising that in the future fewer people will have their own local media collections and more people will use steaming services . . .
The same thing has clearly happened with video streaming, Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, catch-up/on-demand services etc has signalled the end of traditional broadcast TV, recording TV programmes and DVDs/Blu-Rays.
The problem is that you have x companies with y amount of shareholders trying to protect their IP/business model/customer base/income stream in a competitive market. This results in z different, incompatible, closed source applications that can only stream their licenced subset of the available media. Make the most of being able to use one (well maybe a bit more than one) application to enjoy your media, it's only going to get worse.
The consequences of this is will be an even bigger boom in pirated media (but the law and technology will catch up with this) reducing income to the 'artists', reducing the amount and quality of the produced media. This may have other consequences of 'self produced' media (like YouTube) gaining popularity (I watch far more YouTube than broadcast TV) but that business model doesn't work for the content makers so that may lead to further a diversity of closed source media applications and so the game continues.
What would I want? The ability to watch/listen to/enjoy the content I want to watch, when I want to watch it, in the quality I want, and here's the thing that'll never happen. . . with just one app on multiple devices. . . . Very happy to pay (I pay for my UK TV licence, pay for my cable TV, I pay for the media I buy) maybe £100 a month. So I have £1200 a year available to someone who can do all of the above (if they can sort out the licencing)
We're all doomed, I say, doomed
Spike