Your house is full of Amazon Alexas streaming Spotify; in the car, you pull up YouTube on your phone to play "Everything Is Awesome" (again!) for the kids. SoundCloud rocks. When was the last time you bought music on any physical medium? But back in the old days, music barely existed online. "Downloading music required people to search for websites where songs were posted. Most were unreliable. Links broke," we wrote more than a decade ago. "Traffic spikes slowed download times.