I agree that the future is bleak. I also agree that it makes life more difficult for those of us who don’t conform to this “I own nothing and pay a subscription for everything” lifestyle that people seem to be blindly moving in the direction of. I don’t pay for Spotify or any other streaming service (not that they even have all the music I listen to, I always hate it when people justify their existence with the “iT hAs EvErYtHiNG” line), I have my own music collection that I’ve curated over decades which is entirely offline. It won’t fit on a smartphone unless I pay a ridiculous amount of money for a model with tons of storage or convert my entire library to inferior quality. Ultimately it’s not a deal breaker feature for me so I do use a modern phone without external storage. I am fortunate that I own an MP3 player and multiple older phones with microSD support, including an XZ1 Compact which is what I currently use for portable music instead. It would be more convenient if I could just have everything on a single device like I used to, though.