If you never watch or listen to content you don’t want to buy outright or pirate, sure, VLC has nothing over Netflix or, say, YouTube. Especially if you prefer

If you never watch or listen to content you don’t want to buy outright or pirate, sure, VLC has nothing over Netflix or, say, YouTube. Especially if you prefer ad-hoc discovery! Seriously, arguing over these analogies is like arguing between buying books and a for-profit (albeit digital) library. It says more about the comment that brought up the comparison (in the way that it did, as if they are mutually exclusive) than it does about the two services. Like you said, it depends on your habits, but there’s no point in arguing, or denying, that Netflix or Spotify do not offer anything more than VLC or WinAmp respectively. What no one has mentioned is that VLC and WinAmp offer features that the others lack. Somewhere in those features is an argument against vendor lock-in, but that trade-off of features is exactly what revolutionized how most users consume content by default, so I don’t think it’s a very good one. I recently started buying music again for a few different reasons, but I’ll be damned if I lose the discoverability in Spotify.