Music at a Lower Opportunity Cost than Piracy

I saw a couple of articles over the weekend on a new music service called Spotify. It's big in Europe and starting into beta here in the US. Go read about the business structure.

A couple of interesting quotes. First on opportunity costs:

Ek likes to say that to succeed, any music service needs to be more convenient than piracy. Spotify is. You open an account. You download a program. And you can listen to any one of 15 million tracks, the result of two years of negotiations with the world’s music conglomerates...

Second on ownership versus renting:

In Stockholm, no one brings a laptop or a hard drive to a party anymore. They just log in to Spotify. Americans own their music; Swedes rent it. For 100 years, the recording industry has traded one durable good for another, and the need to store it all has defined habits, courting, and home design. In Sweden, this era is slipping away.

Which is better, owning a lot of tracks, or renting 15 million. I'm not sure that the out of pocket cost is very different.

HT: Marginal Revolution