I had the same thought, uofmtiger. My wild guess: The executives and investors behind these services are probably presuming that the majority of listeners from the millennials forward have been conditioned to access music in a quick convenient, digital format at the click of a mouse/pointing device or via a smartphone or internet-connected device and will continue to do so indefinitely into the future. Despite recent talk of a resurgence in vinyl sales (driven primarily by retro nostalgia) and the supposed "death" of the Compact Disc, the overwhelming quantity of music today is consumed and listened to as digital singles presented primarily as .mp3s at an average bit rate of 256 kbps. They correctly surmise that this generation of listeners do not have the time, patience, or even attention span to actively listen to the average 45-50 minute album, use music as "background noise" during the course of their day-to-day existence, and simply may not deem it as important as previous generations of listeners. Since digitalization removes the tangibility of the product and thus reduces the desire to collect that historically has come with physical formats, music, from my point of view, has begun to lose its sense of "permenance" in regard to being something worth collecting for a lifetime. The majority of it has simply become short-lived streams of one and zeroes that are consumed in the moment and quickly forgotten about as they disappear into the ether of ever-cycling torrent sites and online file hosts or go up in smoke on crashed hard drives. This summer's "hot" single ends up being deleted from the SD card in one's phone to make space for this autumn's release.