As a music consumer, do you feel the need to own your CD collection ? Or has your consumption been overtaken by streaming ? As a mark of how strongly companies believe consumers can be lured from the former to the latter, the French music-streaming service, Deezer, is about to launch in the UK to take on other services such as we7 and Spotify, according to a recent article in The Telegraph.

When LPs shrank to CD format, there was a lamentable loss of the tangibility of an album: those lavish gate-fold prog-rock albums from the 70s, often with lyrics printed inside and weird and wonderful cover-art, became a thing of the past.

Nowadays, with the advent of on-line listening available through streaming, listeners no longer even need actually to own a copy of the CD: they can listen to it whenever they like, add it to their Library, offer ‘shouts’ about their preferences and even share their preferred tracks with friends. Services such as Spotify are really taking advantage of this, enhancing their service with links to Facebook and the ability to integrate with Twitter last year.

Spotify’s founder, Daniel Ek, calls this moving people ‘from the ownership model to the access model,’ managerial-babble for enticing consumers away from purchasing music and encouraging them to access content via streaming services.

Will this be the future of your digital library, a cloud-based one that you don’t own but can access whenever you like just as easily as your own library on your PC or your shelves ? Do you still enjoy the pleasure of ownership, or does the ability to stream suit your listening lifestyle ?