0, I buy music to support the artist. The value is giving back to a musician so they can create more.

Depends on what you’re buying IMO. If you’re “buying” it in the sense of buying license to listen to it like with DRM like iTunes, nothing could make that worth it IMO. But if I’m buying physical media of the music itself (eg. Vinyl) then I’m usually willing to pay whatever the market price is for that album.

I always hate these questions (is X worth it?) because you’re asking the Internet to give you an answer to a subjective question. If you want to sort out the answer for yourself it comes down to how much money you can afford to spend on entertainment and whether you think £1 of that amount for a song is worth it.

If you’re rich and £1 doesn’t matter in slightest and you like the song then it’s “worth it.” If you’re poor and you have £20/wk to spend entertaining yourself then maybe not. Anyway who knows, if you think the song is worth the price then go for it.

Also, just to throw this out there, there are an awful lot of ways to listen to music on the Internet that won’t cost you anything. You could always use one of those then later go back and buy music that’s particularly meaningful to you. Remember that streaming music pays the actual artists almost nothing, go buy physical media (or better yet go to one of their shows and buy merch) if you want your favorite artists to actually see any money.

By the time I actually buy a song, I’ve been listening to it repeatedly at least 10 to 20 times. At that point I’m buying it to put in my offline library and the cost is worth it immediately. The £1 per song price hasn’t changed in a very long time. My music taste is very narrow, so I rarely find songs I like anyway. My entire music library amassed over my lifetime is 780 tracks currently (after removing some I lost interest in previously). So I definitely get my money’s with out of my music.

If I get to keep the music in mp3, flac, or some other file format? Even a single play is worth it

Why not listen first and then decide if it’s worth buying? Go listen to the songs for free on YouTube or other means. Then if you like it, buy it for any price you feel is fair. I do most of my music shopping on Bandcamp, you can listen to the songs there before buying. For older albums it isn’t uncommon the artists let you name your own price.

I grew up in casette and CD era, so I use that for comparison. It’s a bit of a stretch, but it works for me:

An album or cassette had roughly 10-20 songs and cost (in today’s inflation) roughly £5. Not all songs were bangers so I round it all to £0.5 per song.

How many listens to be “worth it” I think is how much listen I would get out of it before I would happily buy a new one if it wore out or broke. So at least 50.

At price of £0.99, I think a song is worth it at 100 listens.

Though songs bought to support indie artists are worth it immediately. :)

I usually do some goofy math like cost / uses. The first time I used a $300 washing machine I considered that a $300+ load of laundry, next time we’re down to $150, and so on.

For a song I’d probably at least want a few dozen plays out of it for $1, although nowadays everyone just subscribes and streams.

I could be super wrong, but I don’t think people who purchase music think about the value of those songs in that way anymore. Some people buy songs for the physical display of the package, the potentially higher quality playback, to avoid music from disappearing due to copyright or label issues, to support an artist since streaming is like fractions of a penny, for offline listening which isn’t tied to a subscription feature, just for collections sake, for more emotional reasons - physically connecting with a song/album, to justify their recent impulse record player purchase, etc. Sometimes people just want to spend money (retail therapy), so they’ll buy an album (digital or physical), never open it, and just keep streaming.

I have a $10/hour entertainment budget. If a movie ticket is $15 and I get 1.5 hours of entertainment then it was a good purchase. if I pick up a game for $60 then I expect to get at least 6 hours of fun from it.

Using this measure I’ve decided books provide some of the highest value entertainment and fancy restaurants some of the lowest value entertainment.

But that’s just me.

The question isn’t how many play, but how many song does your plbylist have.

If you pay Spotify/deezer 9.99 a month this is phe price of 10 song a month. After 5 years it’s a 600 songs play list.

If your plbylist aren’t that big, it’s a loss, if your playlists are bigger, it’s a win

I genuinely think that you should listen it as many times until you can hum or mentally sing along with it… if this makes any sense. Like if you are able to associate the song’s title a melody then it’s “worth it”. For me(I’m not even kidding), this is probably after playing it 4-5 times on repeat.

You don’t “buy” music. You buy a license to listen to that music for as long as the license issuer still owns that particular song.

So never. Pirating music is the only path to ownership.

I have lots of music which I got basically for free, and a lots of music for which I paid.

My general attitude towards music is that I’m in it to explore, learn and enjoy the indescribable human connection that I get through, and only through listening to someone’s little “message in a bottle”. Doing this for many years (I’m 44 so over 30 years now) I’ve learned that training my brain on multiple styles and genres, the connection can always get deeper and more rich.

So I would not be able to ever say a purchase was not worth it, because I would always assume such decision to be rushed. I had too many experiences when I listened to something, didn’t quite like it, but later I somehow “grew into” it, and then I learned to love it for years and years.

Different music ends up playing different roles in my life. Some albums end up teaching me a genre or a style, some end up acting like a gateway drug, some end up as a “stand in” for whole genre. Some end up as “holy relics” of who I was, and are re-visited from time to time to see whether I’ve changed and how. Some end up on a shelf and get re-discovered, some end up on a shelf forever.

(That “stand in” part is kinda tongue-in-cheek, but it sometimes almost works; eg. I would never set out to get a Dub album, but Dub Guerilla is one of the 100 best things I’ve ever heard, and it’s just so darn satisfying that it satisfies all and any of my Dub needs.)

Sometimes my brain can be just really petty about things, like completely disregarding an album because of a track or a section which I feel is a mistake. Sometimes I just know I will need much more time, sometimes I feel certain things might remain hard to get into maybe forever.

Don’t get me wrong, somewhere among those piles, there are really things that I won’t ever care to pick up, and perhaps would not purchase them again, but it almost never has much to do with number of listens. It might be things that I just got with bad expectation (ie. not listening upfront) or things that I enjoyed because of content (eg. lyrics) but I have changed and moved on.

Other times music is best experienced live, for some bands the “spirit” simply cannot be tamed, let alone reproduced. Sometimes I get album from band directly after a show and then end up never feeling it again from the CD, but then again, I would say it was not worth it, because it’s still a great way to “tip” the artist, and sometimes it will just work out.

(A bit more related to the OP: Incidentally, just today I broke my all-time record by spending about 20 EUR for V​í​n by Janus Rasmussen, and for reasons completely unrelated to OP and the price (but related to a sub-thread) I also did something I would never do normally–put one of the tracks on repeat for several hours. That’s not to brag about money–it’s just funny how it ended up accidentally as “$ per listen” experiment, although )