Is everyone using music subscription services these days?

That's the article that there is a thread about started yesterday? Very good read it was too, and I agree that streaming can lead to music overload if you don't watch out.

 

See, that's not what I'm saying or what I think. I think the way humans use music hasn't really changed much in 3,000 years of recorded history. It's mostly always been social and functional -- it's made for worship and ritual, it's made for dancing, it's made for courtship and mood. We probably don't use it to transmit history and events the way we did in the days before the printing press and the advent of news publishing and widespread literacy, and maybe we use it more for the empathic sharing of personal history and emotion in the post Freudian era -- we don't share the story of great floods and disasters in music, we share the stories of Beyonce and JAY-Z's marriage. But in a general sense I don't think humanity enjoys music less or even very differently than humanity did over centuries of civilization. We've replaced the informal performance of music with the informal use of pre-recorded music over the last 100 years. And certainly there's more recorded music and more access to recorded music now than there was. But I don't know that the role music plays in the lives of people has changed all that much.

 

I'm currently using Deezer after switching from Tidal. Deezer now supports lossless and Android Auto, and seems to stream better than Tidal. As a person ready to turn sixty in a few month's, I still have that youthful thirst for new music, and streaming services are a great tool to keep me up to date on the most creative new artists emerging.
I like the fact that I can stream and the artist is getting paid. It's not much but it is at least something. And if I really love something, and it's well mastered I'll buy the vinyl version.

 

I would argue that the attention span of listeners today is much shorter than those of the past. Music is cherry picked and in turn what gets churned out is attuned to this type of consumption and so the circle turns; music is blandized across all genres and becomes the sparkly thing that catches our ear for the moment. Next please...oooh, shiny. Next?

So, I guess we view things differently.

 

I use Spotify free to trial new albums, and if I like them enough I'll buy the CD.

The only thing that tempts me a little with streaming is the hi res aspect, but I don't want to have to pay £10 - £20 a month for that. I'm happy buying CDs!

 

I signed up to Qobuz ten months ago. It's not cheap in some respects, but the heavily discounted download prices has helped me build up a large hi-res library. I use it to listen to other stuff that interests me too and will probably renew for another year.

I also have a record player, SACD player with a large collection of records and CDs/SACDs. I don't feel the need to tie myself down to one thing, and appreciate them all as part of the whole. I understand people who don't subscribe though.

 

Well, we certainly have more leisure time entertainment activities since the day of subsistence farming and pre-electric lights instead of reading a long book, even in installments, we might watch a TV show or listen to a podcast and there's a different kind of attentiveness and a different kind of time commitment related to those different kinds of things. And things happen faster because there's instant transmission of all this cultural output across the globe vs. the days when something had to be carried from place to place either via an oral tradition or some kind of printed publication and, people traveled by horse and ship. But popular music as we sort of think of it today is probably around 150-200 years old and it's always been characterized by novelty and moving on to the next thing. There was the Hawaiian music craze after the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and sales of ukulele's exploded and all kind of novelty songs got published, and then there was the blues craze after "Crazy Blues" in 1920; and then there was the jazz age and everyone was doing the Charleston...then later everyone was doing the Twist, then they were doing the Hustle, then they were doing the Gangnam Style dance....etc. Some things last longer -- blackface performance dominated American popular music for a long time and after a couple of decades of development settled into a relatively fixed mode of performance. Industrialization turned was was once a kind of oral tradition folk process into an industrial one. And transportation and communication changes altered the pace and mode of transmission, and almost certainly altered what were once more distinct cultural and regional differences. And as human we have more things to do other than work to feed ourselves than we did 1,ooo years ago. So, there are obviously differences. But I think in the broadest and most essential ways, humanity makes and uses music in pretty much the same ways for the same purposes as it always has.

 

I've been a Spotify user since it first became available in the U.S. I use it to find new music, research old music, to listen to those albums/songs I like but not enough to buy, and general listening when it's not possible to sit at home in front of my turntable. I buy more records now than I did before since discovery is no longer the bottleneck it was in the past.

 

Pressure at $10/month? I use Apple Music all the time so don't have to worry in any event, but at 30+ cents per day, I can't see this as pressure. But that's just me.

 

Google Play Music is $15 for up to six family members on accounts linked to a family plan. At the max, 6 people are listening to whatever music they want whenever they want wherever they want for ~$0.08 a day. That's about the cost of 1 CD per month. And it includes YouTube Red (ad-free YouTube). I know Spotify does something similar (not the YouTube part, obviously).

That kind of breadth and depth and flexibility and value is worth a lot of trade-offs in being able to look at liner notes, hold covers, etc. IMO.

 

Yes.
And as to how to use (addressed earlier by someone else): I was reading a thread where I was reminded of Sugarloaf (Green Eyed Lady). I don't own any Sugarloaf but was able to listen to that song immediately. And then to the even better "Don't Call Us, We'll Call You".

And then I've been listening to a playlist of Pink Floyd Deep Cuts.

Yesterday, I was concentrating on what Apple kindly keeps tabs on, my Heavy Rotation: Wilco A.M. Deluxe, Mavis Staples' latest, Son Little 'New Magic', etc.

It's a great resource.

 

I'm a big fan of streaming. I've had a Google Play Music sub in its various names for three years which has allowed me to enjoy a whole range of music I would never have come across before, and has made illegally downloading music an unnecessary chore. Early on there was a fair bit of stuff not available for downloading which I synced from my own stuff but over the past year or so its very rare to find something not available (the Bob Segar backlist being the main thing that comes to mind).
For 90% of people music is something they generally just want to have in the background, curated for them. They used to have to listen to ads in between - now they don't, got to be an improvement! For us more 'active listeners' my own experience (and data from Spotify) suggests having a music streaming service broadens your taste considerably. You can investigate artists you read about in traditional media, forums etc or on the platform's New Music page which you'd never have heard traditionally on radio (or would have to ask for at a record store), so my exposure to genres and artists has increased massively, which is great. I still have all my favourites at my fingertips as well (including offline when I'm out) and often reacquaint myself with music I've forgotten about as well through playlists and the 'radio' stations on Google Play Music.
I've tried Spotify and Apple Music and they have some great features in terms of music discovery. The artist interviews on Beats 1 and video features are pretty interesting.
I do get a bit annoyed when I hear that streaming is ripping off artists. I absolutely understand artists negotiating and pushing to try and get the best rates they can, but there seems to be a perception that they are being ripped off. For a start the biggest platform Spotify isn't even making a profit, so simple maths tells you they aren't. Only way they can make more is if people are willing to pay more for subs or advertisers cough up more. I'm sure Spotify would be charging more for both if they could. Secondly I think they just need to get real - the music industry was in what looked like terminal decline in terms of revenue for years. Streaming has turned it around, and I think the revenue they are getting is aligned with the ease of getting music illegally. There has been a paradigm shift from recorded media as being a premium physical item with fairly good margins and royalties to it being a relatively easily copied item which is thus cheap. The industry has changed and recorded media is now more playing the role of radio before, a method of exposure and distribution of art. Like the news media music needs to adapt to the ease of reproduction and transmission of media in the Internet age and take advantage of the massive opportunities it provides for exposing talent on the global stage.
I totally understand some people's desire to 'own' the music physically, and there definitely is a loss in the packaging/notes etc on the streaming platforms which is something they need to address. Personally after dealing with a few deceased estates and moving house I've come to a point where I like simplicity and come to see all these physical things we accumulate as so much clutter. I haven't quite parted with all my CDs - have stored them for a while to see if I can live without them but so far I've been able to. I still choose to buy albums digitally that I really enjoy (even though I can listen to them as part of my subscription) just to show my appreciation for really good work.
At the end of the day its about the music - I'm sitting here this morning enjoying "Between Two Shores" by Glen Hansard. I'd probably never have heard of this album if it had come out 25 years ago, and its unlikely I'd have had the opportunity to hear it. That's definitely good for me and only creates opportunities for him - if it wasn't for streaming I would never have bought the album to try it out (would never get radio play here) and at most might have illegally downloaded it.

 

Has it?

 

Judging by a number of news reports and data such as this. Of course who knows what the future holds ... but it does look like a significant shift

 

I use Amazon. I love it.

I went through what you're experiencing a bit when it first became so easy to download stuff. What made the difference for me was disciplining myself to treat downloads/streams just like albums I'm buying. So I keep track of them just like I keep track of albums I buy; I think about each album, and my listening, etc. just the same as I would if I had bought it/as if I had a "physical" copy sitting in my living room.

 

At that, by the way, when I was a kid, it wasn't unusual for me to have a backlog of music to listen to. A large portion of my purchases were from garage sales, thrift stores, cut out bins, etc. I'd go to a garage sale, buy a box of 50 albums (often for about $20), and then I'd be hitting more garage sales the next weekend. And then in the late 90s, I'd be buying CDs in lots from people on eBay for dirt cheap, too. I always listened to everything multiple times eventually--you couldn't find a box of 50 LPs at a garage sale every weekend, but sometimes I'd have a "need to listen to" pile of 100+ titles.

Part of the charm of it was that I'd be picking up a lot of stuff where I hadn't the faintest idea what it was. That turned me on to a ton of music I wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

 

It was conjecture, not an argument,
though I suspect you may have missed the point of my post. I was addressing the issue of permanence.....again, as conjecture....

*edit: ...to that, your statement that expression and medium are interlinked only reinforces my point.

 

Yeah it has. The industry is growing now, for the first time in a long time and certainly people I known who I spoke to in the biz last year said while no one was saying it was a golden age all of em were breathing a sigh of relief for the first time in a long time.

 

I have to disagree, looking at the sociological and historical aspects of it.
In some ways, I think your view is very accurate. Where I disagree is in the comparison of pre-recording industry history vs. its advent ~ and, in comparison between serious music appreciation and casual listening.
We're basically talking about two different paradigms, and then academic discipline, or study, vs. entertainment.

 

I realize that many on this forum listen to cds for sound quality, a tangible listening experience, the satisfaction of owning a collection, etc.

I find myself in the situation of listening to music almost exclusively on Spotify, to which I have a paid monthly subscription. This is my preference and completely a matter of choice. However, I am still buying the CD release of artists I love for the sole reason of supporting their work. I don't really want to add cds to my collection at this point, but buying a digital album seems superfluous when you stream. So I just play them in my car cd player.

Eventually new cars won't even have CD players. I hope that the music industry finds a way to better compensate artists for streams, or else I'll be continuing to buy items that I neither want nor need simply to fulfill my moral code.

 

Thanks - that's a useful presentation that shows the point you made.

 

My only concern is having some way to play the physical media I have & maintaining the space to store it.

 

Nope. Don't use one.

 

But I think that was always the case -- a small subset of sort of art music made for listening, and maybe by people who kind of studied each others works and wrote essays about music and sound and tone -- and then most of the music in the world, made in more of a folk tradition for dancing or worship or social purposes. All that happened in the recorded music era, the way I see is, is that we kind of industrialized the folk music and the folk music making processes. But it's still basically the same set of stuff -- music make for dancing and mood or to support some other kind of entertainment like drama or film or music made to sing children to sleep or to kind of drunkenly sing along with, etc -- which now and always comprised the vast majority of music and basically all of the folk music -- and then the small subset of music made exclusively as art music for listening. And all this popular music in all these pop genre -- rock, jazz, country, R&B, hip-hop, whatever -- is just kind of folk music using these same sorts of received forms and them, passed along and repeated and varied by individuals just using records instead of oral transmission. It's different for sure in that we now have this expectation that to some degree these stuff is personally expressive. But I think of most popular music as a kind of commercialized and industrialized folk art.

 

Some interesting observations and commentary, @chervokas. You refer to the 'small subset of music made exclusively as art music for listening..' which I am guessing you mean to include jazz and classical. It might make for an interesting sociological discussion-point to find out just how 'small' the subset of aficionados within those combined genres actually is. I'd mind it a fairly educated guess that "folk", if we may liberally broaden that label to encompass everything not 'jazz' or 'classical' - and then, to the exclusionary, for purposes, label 'art music' - is perhaps in our present age representative of the larger of an unevenly divided pair of subsets. That would certainly make a revealing, if not compelling, sociological statement. But this is where I am relatively certain there is enough historical foundation to assert that the balance remains in flux, and in a global culture of 8 billion people, the term 'small' may be somewhat remiss. I don't want to wander too deep in the weeds within the context of this thread, but it is an
interesting discussion nonetheless !

Thank you for your thoughts !