Spotify controversy continues, Joe B weighs in

Bookmarking this thread. Can hardly wait to return to it in five years.

 

It definitely took some time. I think cassettes would've died out instantaneously if in-dash CD players and Discmen were rolled out (and affordable, and actually functioned properly) in the mid/late 80's. But admittedly CD's were a better product at the time. Thing is, they're not a better product now...they're digitally identical, and most of the mastering is crap, so what's the point?

It's like watching a streamed movie on my AppleTV/Roku vs. a blu-ray...sure, if I had a super expensive TV and was intentionally looking for it, I'm sure I could tell a quality difference. But I just want to watch the silly movie, and whatever HBOGo or Netflix or whatever streams at or my cheap $350 TV displays it at is totally fine, because it's the movie itself that matters. (I honestly don't even know if what I'm watching is properly displaying at 720p or 1080p, to be honest).

Now, I'm like that with music...with a good recording/mastering, of course I can tell the difference between an Apple Music stream and a FLAC file, and I love the rare occasions I get to sit down with my HE-560's and listen to really involved music without having to do any life stuff. But for most of my listening, the Apple stream is fine, I'm usually working or driving or showering or doing stuff around the house or...whatever. And this is how most people are, and honestly it's how they would've been 20 years ago, too if the technology had existed then. It's the music that matters, not the delivery method or (above a certain threshold, that all digital services now operate above) the bitrate. Honestly, the 256 AAC rate (which IMO is a better codec than mp3, but not as good as Vorbis) is fine, and the less time I spend thinking about all of that, the more I can just relax and soak in the actual music.

 

Where do you think the music is going to go? If it's not available, it's worth exactly $0 to the rights-holders.

 

Artists need to refuse the bait.

In other words, negotiate contracts that specifically exclude streaming.

Maybe it's an impossible dream, but it's a pretty simple idea.

 

Everybody's an expert.

 

Sigh.

Not every CD is brickwalled. I'm not going to go over this (again!) it's been done over and over. The vast majority of CD's I buy are not brickwalled. Just as, with Vinyl, people look for the best pressings, so with CD you seek the best masterings. It's not rocket science.

As for "Mediocre photography" etc - you're being hyperbolic. I'm older than most here, but it's rare I can't read a CD booklet. The whole "tiny almost unreadable font" is yet another myth. Seriously, if you can't read most of the text in CD booklets, the problem isn't the text, it's your eyes. Get them seen to, problem fixed. I mean, you read newspapers etc. - right? Are you blowing everything up to a 72 point font?

Cluttering up the house? Hardly. Putting things into my house that I enjoy is a pleasure. What else am I going to put in it? What else would I want around me?

I'm happy you've found something you like - but understand we don't all think the same way. I tried Spotify - I did not enjoy the experience. I enjoy choosing which mastering I listen to. I enjoy not having to deal with MP3's. I'm proud of my collection, it tells the story of my life. But a "superior" product? How is streaming on Spotify better than an ECM disc, exactly? You can choose any ECM release if you like.

I'm not going to argue this point back and forth. The one and only advantage I experienced with streaming was having access to a complete library. This stopped being useful pretty quickly when I tried to listen to a specific Alvin Lucier release and found the selection was very poor on Spotify, among other artists I enjoy. Still, I only have so much time in the day to listen to music anyway, so having the world of music one-click away wasn't a benefit.

You feel differently - you go with the wave until the next "superior product" comes along. Me? I don't see any advantage to changing things on my end.

 

I don't see the problem here. Never had to deal with a CD changer in the boot, because I had a single CD player in the dash with a disc holder in the front of the car. We've had music on the go, as someone else stated, for some time. The one and only difference now is that you're streaming over the net, and the huge catalog. Otherwise, functionally, there's been no step forward.

 

+1000

Being a music enthusiast is so much more fun when one is not shackled to prehistoric conventions in home-based listening rooms. For the marginal loss of sound quality one picks up a world of freedom, choice, and convenience. Streaming works. It's the greatest technological innovation since the iPhone was launched in 2007.

And it compensates artists. Though they might complain it's at least generating revenue, and most of us own physical copies of what we stream so the artists are getting paid for the same content twice.

 

Yah know, a lot of music gets lost. Sure, not the major artists, but still - a lot just goes. We can all name even named acts whose releases have not made it to digital. It happens. Not being available kills interest, and eventually, no-one really cares.

 

Most releases from the last 20-25 years only have one mastering. Of course I listen to a ton of 60's-80's stuff, but also a lot of stuff from after then. Believe me, I wish this wasn't the case, but it is. There's no "good" digital mastering of, say, any Stones album after 1990 or Iron Maiden album after 1995, or most of Paul Weller's solo catalog, or post-90's Springsteen, or the last 25 years of Pet Shop Boys/Erasure/Depeche Mode records...I could be here all day.

If you only listen to music recorded before 1994, or just experimental classical or jazz or whatnot, then yeah, you have options. And I like a little of that stuff, but I'm mostly a rock/pop person.

I was thinking of that specific release. I even had lasik, my eyes are fine. My point was that I'm just not missing out on anything by not having the booklet for that album. If I really need to read Mick's thoughts on relationships circa the early 2000's, I can pull up the lyrics on any number of sites.

What does ECM mean?

There's always random stuff I won't be able to find, but there's so much there that I get my $10 worth a month out of it. I don't go into it expecting it to be absolutely complete in every single genre/artist/label, but I'm okay with that.

 

That's true. And kind of unavoidable.

I think it's hilarious the Dave Clark Five stuff just randomly appeared, decades too late for it to really matter.

But this is also why I don't lose sleep over mass amounts of music suddenly vanishing from digital distribution or "the man" suddenly deciding I can't listen to things.

 

How much longer will youtube be a free streaming service though?
They are already in the process of wanting people to sign up for it

 

Ho hum. Must be that time of the month - time to start another "Spotify is killing music" thread.

 

I think there is at last a partial solution. And it's in the hands of popular artists themselves - start their own streaming service. Some of the most popular artists in each genre banding together would have enough clout to upend the current faulty model. Even those who didn't sign with the artists service would have more leverage when it came to renegotiating their contracts and licensing. Streaming is a process that should eliminate both the middle man (record company) and greatly reduce the costs of streaming origin.

But if an artist is just going to sign their career away to Live Nation, maybe they're less of an artist and more of a product.

 

And a bad one. Only the biggest names could do that and their fans would follow them to wherever their music is whereas 99.9% of the bands put there would stay off streaming sites and nobody would care.

 

My point is to remember what put us in the place where we're now at. Virtually all music has been available on the internet for 20 years now. It's just been a matter of how to get it.

In the early days of this it was Napster, but then spread to other areas as well once Napster was gone. Streaming services are just a way to squeeze *some* money out of the existing public's desire to have whatever they want, whenever they want it. IMO, the price of Spotify is really just for the convenience of taking the songs and harnessing them into a single, easy-to-use platform. Granted, it is likely that the majority of the audience for streaming services did not regularly use Napster or other file-sharing platforms (the number of people using them have been overstated by the record industry), but plenty of them did.

My point is just that if streaming services become too expensive or Youtube starts charging, then somebody else is going to come along and provide the content (illegally, obviously), for free. I mean, it's already there *now,* it's just that most people aren't bothering with it, and doing it is only getting easier as tech improves. And as I've said in a number of other threads in here, if people believe that there is something special about the music of the 1960s-1970s, such that it will be listened to for generations to come... well, then the clock on copyright is ticking on that stuff too - as it's now more than halfway through its term of protection. We're only a few decades away from when all the Beatles/Stones/Who/Zeppelin stuff is legally free for everybody, forever.

Will the best albums from 2055 for a price be able to compete with the best of the 1960s for free? Some of us will live to find out.

 

As physical media falls out of favor, downloads vs. streaming will take over the debate.

Downloads provide choice and can serve audiophiles.

Streaming customers take what the services give them.

 

I'm not saying some CD's aren't brickwalled. You just named seven artists I have no interest in. Regardless, I could name some CD's that are poorly mastered, I know it happens. The mistake, imo, is in insinuating that ALL CD's are poorly mastered. This is simply not the case. I buy a lot of CD's, even today, and I can assure you I'm not having a problem getting great sounding CD's.

I listen to a broad range of music. The last box sets I bought were the Dylan ones, and the Ramones 40th Anniversary sets. I also recently bought the Be Bop Deluxe Futurama set. Without going into silly amounts of detail - none of these are brickwalled. As I said, just as collectors do with Vinyl, with CD you must pick and choose what you buy. Bad pressings of Vinyl soon get flagged, so you move on to something else. Same with CD. This selection process is well worn and practiced. However, no-one said Vinyl was rubbish because bad pressings existed. In the same way, CD's aren't bad because some idiot compressed a release or ten. This is, I'd say, one of the primary aims of the very site we're on - finding the good stuff, avoiding the bad.

ECM is a record label, primarily releasing Jazz and Classical titles. The recording/CD quality makes angels cry.

As to your latter point - that's why it wouldn't work for me. I don't listen randomly. I've grown up with music, I've accumulated a curated collection of 1000's of CD's, all tuned to my personal tastes. If you want, you can think of it as my own personal Spotify designed very specifically to my likes, loves, loves lost, youthful exuberance, and just plain good times. I don't need a screen, don't need the Internet, and don't need to pay $120 a year for the pleasure of logging in.

I have, perhaps, 3 to 4 hours a day of intense listening. So I only have to fill that amount of time. It does me no good having 10,000 hours of available music I've never heard before to fit that time frame. Time is the constraint.

 

The industry is busy killing off downloads. The Download market is dying.

 

I’d pay $20 a month for Spotify, maybe even $30. I get that much value out of it. I just finished reading a book about 20th century classical music, and the ability to listen along as I read about works and composers I was previously unfamiliar with was great.

If the industry kills physical media completely, and jacks up the price of a Spotify subscription to a price I’m not comfortable with, I’ll cancel my subscription and listen to my LPs and CDs only.

 

especially those that never even played the first gig.

 

I'll buy that the download market is hurting, but it will never die. I can make and sell a download right now. That's not going to change.

Yes, the industry is trying to change the model to be somewhere between cable TV and software licensing. The result is they own it and you subscribe to it. You don't subscribe, you don't get.

If they start passing laws making it difficult to make, buy, and sell downloads, that's a different issue. Otherwise, there will always be indie downloads, regardless of what the big companies do.

 

Why do people swoop into threads they don't like to tell us they don't like them?

Don't click them. Solves things rather smartly.

 

I understand that, but I just don't like where it looks like it is going.

 

I pay ten bucks a month for YouTube Red. I don’t have to watch commercials. and I can download videos to my phone for offline viewing. When I used to live out in the country without broadband, that was an even more valuable feature for me.

As with paid Spotify subscriptions, paid YouTube subscriptions generate revenue for the artists. I guess you can argue about how much revenue goes to the artists, but it would seem to me that people here would want to encourage paid subscriptions. I subscribe to two newspapers online instead of just reading my five free articles a month, because I know in the end you don’t ever really get something for nothing, and you have to pay to support businesses you like.