The Spotify Car Thing cost $100, but I can't use it anymore.
EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn't work with anything. It's mildly infuriating because today, I can't still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.
Please don't make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.
This type of shit is why I just want a vehicle with a CD player that can hold multiple discs. Then I could just burn my favorite music onto a few discs and not have to worry about not having paid to have access to the music I want and don't have to worry about a song I dislike popping up randomly.
My car has a SD card slot that it will read music off of. The first week I had it, I loaded up a disc with as much music as I could. I haven't switched it out in 3 years.
It has been quite nice. Until this post, I had almost forgotten where my music was coming from.
There's a lot of better ways to do that like for me I typically ether just plug my phone into the line in port or if there isn't one I just pair my phone and play mp3s off of my MP3 player app and if your car demands you use a service just get a Bluetooth radio transmitter so your car thinks it's just listening to ordinary radio
One that can take a USB storage device or an SD card would be much better. Same result, but no messing around with discs and it can hold way more music.
But an android head unit is more open and less susceptible to cloud companies stopping their service because its media player can work offline with local media, and you can still sideload apk into the unit even if play store no longer work on the unit.
You might really enjoy Plex + Plexamp.
You own the library and choose your media but you don't burn CDs and can instead stream/pin (for offline) songs or playlists like you'd expect from a paid music service.
You could buy portable DVD and CD players back in 2005 that would keep playing without a hitch even if you dropped them. Admittedly this was mostly down to them caching the content in RAM and spinning down to save battery power...
I haven't used a CD deck in over a decade. I literally don't know how CDs would even sound in my car's deck, because it's a dead technology. I genuinely cannot believe anyone in a developed nation would still purchase a CD.
The only reason to purchase a CD nowadays I think is memorabilia, or to support an artist/group.. aside from that it's pretty much as you say, physical media is a dying format.
Vinyl is an outlier, but even then modern vinyl players are noticeably worse than ones manufactured several decades ago
I got an old beater with a tape player and discovered they make Bluetooth adapters just like the old fm adapters i used years ago. Combined with a gig hdd dedicated to music on my phone and it feels like the old days again of burned cds and pirate bay