Have you not made a purchase of an album because you could stream it?

yes. NY archives II .... i'm grateful ... as times are tough.

 

I was joking at the expense of Death Magnetic, though to be fair it's an album I reasonably enjoy

I don't know what quality we're supposed to be getting from Spotify but their files are not nearly as good as an HQ download (320kbp) or a CD Rip (I rip HQ FLAC). Ultimately my preferred option is to own the CD. I have it, it's mine, I can re-rip it if I need to and it's there if the album gets pulled from Spotify and so on. It's also just nice playing a CD, albeit a nostalgia thing. But failing that I much prefer to have an HQ download now. It sounds a lot better and helps the music come alive, and I can add it to musicbee for my own playing around with and library organising needs.

It's an expensive hobby/waste of money this music listening but I don't spend money on much else ...

 

Streaming sites don't have anything different than what you'd find in a CD shop. They generally have the most recent remaster of older albums, and newer albums only have one mastering. Nothing to gain except artwork and clutter, I guess.

I have pretty sensitive ears for limiting and dynamics, but I find the Apple Music codec perfectly adequate for most things, and I definitely can't hear their mp3-style compression on most things I listen to, particularly if i'm listening while working or driving or otherwise living life. Like, a Haim album with a DR5 rating just isn't going to matter. But there's always Tidal or Deezer or Qoboz or Amazon for FLAC (or FLAC equivalent streaming).

 

Yeah, I guess if my ears were better, maybe it'd matter. But that album isn't the kind of thing where I think anyone could hear the difference between a 320kbs stream or a FLAC file, and unfortunately most music made after 1995 is the same.

I grew up with CD's, I used to own 2,000+ and dragged them between multiple apartments. But for some reason, I had no problem giving them up and have zero nostalgia for the ritual. Although as I've gotten older I realize a lot of the CD's I used to own were often bogged down with second-rate tracks, so that probably helps. I mean, like, I love a lot of the stuff on Fleetwood Mac's Say You Will but I'm never going to listen to all 18 tracks of it at once, because about a third of them are pretty forgettable and the whole thing is an absolute sonic mess.

 

What is this "streaming" that you speak of?

 

My only problem with loud CDs, personally, is that they aren't designed for headphone listening and you tend to get this very harsh brittle effect at the peaks. But then, I don't use bassy headphones because I want them for Classical music. I feel like lowering the volume and upping the bass helps a bit. I just got curious and listened to some Death Magnetic and the same, really, the CD sounded a lot better than the Spotify file. It may not be a brilliantly mastered CD in terms of loudness issues, but if you like the album then the spotify files can be bettered.

I guess another issue for me is that I'm a librarian and I like ... organising things. Spotify frustrates me because it has such an awful user interface, it doesn't allow me to play with my music collection the way I want to and it constantly keeps telling you to listen to this or do this. There's quite a big difference for me in purchasing and storing my own music in terms of the way I relate to it in a collection sense, it helps me mentally organise what I'm listening to and why and in musicbee I can filter and arrange things to my heart's content. By Genre, year, artist, star rating, play count or when I last played it, or anything else I can think of. If it's my music it comes with a whole host of memory triggers for me - like, when you bought something, you often remember when and where and have a bunch of associations with buying a thing, maybe for someone's birthday or a pleasant period of your life.

Don't get me wrong, I love spotify and use it a huge amount and as an aid to discovery it's utterly indispensable. And as a way of managing music on the go too (cheap headphones on the go anyway, so who can tell what quality you listen to?). But part of me always has and always will find it a little soulless. ironically making music free has somehow shackled us to it in odd ways that seems to have removed us from the excitement of music discovery and music as a personal story. I like having music at my fingertips but I'm not entirely ready to give up my old ways.

 

They are....
yours is the first post I've seen aside from me where the poster doesn't seem rich, and thus baffled by why anyone would not just buy the most expensive, rarest CD they could find because it sounded a little better than the most common ones, with nose in the air about streaming......
I am grateful for streaming, I cannot afford CDs any more, figure the past half a year I have not bought many, not compared to how it was before.

 

I didn't say there were any. I'm just not prepared to shell out for compressed modern CD's with DR values as low as 3. I've never seen a graph associaeted with CD mastering but out of curiosity I checked on the link below and was shocked at what I'd discovered.

Album list - Dynamic Range Database

If new artists want me to continue to invest in their music then record companies shouldn't crush the dynamics plus include PDF's with downloads. That said, I simply don't have the luxury of being able to afford to buy every album of interest not to mention space being a factor, but so far that hasn't been the case. In fact, this is going to be my next purchase and be sure to check out how good it sounds.

Up Jumped the Devil....Discovering the music of Robert Johnson part 1. A Sound Liaison 'One Mic +' Audiophile Recording., by Carmen Gomes

 

No. I only stream if I can't buy the CD.

 

A stream is something that Runs past my house that I could fish in.

Music is something I purchase and take home put it on a turn table or CD player and I could sing and dance to.

I would never place my stereo equipment near the stream.

 

I use streaming services (Tidal atm) to discover music i like and already have on cd. Tidal can stream in cd quality and higher, so it sounds generally better than Spotify. Music i really like i will buy either digitally or physically.
I like a certain amount of certain cd’s in the house for the times that internet does not work i usually stream
6 months out of a year. Basically that is enough to satisfy my needs.

I don’t know the specifics of Spotifiy’s stream but i like the hifi or master setting from Tidal way better.

 

You're literally streaming via YouTube.

 

I pay for Spotify and have never had this happen to me in years of owning it.

 

Yeah, that's why I use Apple Music and maintain an actual library. None of the other services have a user interface that allows this in the same way you'd have a normal media library of files.

I'm surprised the 2008 Death Magnetic sounded better to you, but to each their own, I guess. I mean, for that one you (legally, anyways) just have to choose the least terrible option from two terrible options. But it's always like this for modern hard rock/metal music, unfortunately.

 

It is a "cart-before-the-donkey" question,
so I'll have to answer by saying the primary purpose of streaming for me, besides highly portable casual listening, is to hear an album as many times as I need to in full CD-quality audio in order to decide if it is something I like enough to buy, and then go and buy it if I do.

So a "yes" only in so far as the albums I find not worthy of owning - for reasons ranging from there being more songs on them that I don't really care for than songs on the album I do like, to cases in which the music is overall listenable but ultimately inessential, redundant, or otherwise superfluous.

 

I appreciate you pointing that out , I thought we were talking streaming services.. Spotify and the like but I believe I already rehashed this above with someone else. We can argue the pedantic for eons here and I’ll fall on my sword if you’d like on this but I did answer the actual question the thread asked in my original post you quoted and I assumed that was the.. actual point that mattered.

 

As one of those nasty people who use peer to peer services, streaming has radically cut down on my downloading habit.
I'd prefer go to Spotify.
Also I do buy on Bandcamp Fridays.

 

have they continued this into 2021? I thought it was ending in December.

 

I stopped buying "physical" media once downloading/streaming became established. No regrets.

 

Yes I buy way less music than I used to. Another factor - as major as Spotify- is that Covid ended my habit of browsing CD/LP stores.

 

Yes, however, there are also albums I have bought that I may not have without having streamed them and deciding “OK, I need a copy of this...”

 

Same here. I use streaming to check things out, (mostly new stuff), and buy if I like.

 

I still buy A LOT of music. Because there is a large handful of artists, I want to own their catalog. However, having said that before streaming, if I really liked it or was curious/interested in a release, I bought it. - Obviously with streaming I don't have to do that for the latter. Which then saves the money for the outrageous box sets and other expensive items that I didn't have to worry about before.

 

I think with films and TV, that’s because most people watch most things once. There are exceptions, of course, but it is not usually assumed consuming those media requires ownership. Before the proliferation of home video, you had to go to a screening to see a film, and you had to watch TV shows as they aired. Once home video came along, rentals came with it, so you still didn’t need to own what you wanted to watch.

That’s true of music, now, but it’s a more recent development, as streaming has only been in wide use for a little over a decade. Up to that point, someone had to own a copy if you were going to hear something.

 

Ours gets spotty at times, so even though the streaming options usually work fine, I’m not willing to rely on streaming entirely, either.