Spotify controversy continues, Joe B weighs in

Whoa, that's a whole lot of forum clichés there, friend.

Streaming isn't "a machine deciding what people can listen to". If you know what you're doing, you can shape the service to be exactly what you want it to be. Upload your own rarities/boot files straight into the platform. Use those "like" and "dislike" buttons judiciously. Create a series of playlists reflecting your very favorite songs. Within a few months you will find that Spotify/Apple/Pandora suddenly is reading your mind and serving up not only your favorite songs but also songs you once disregarded that suddenly sound fresh to you.

Not to mention, sometimes you just want to hear the mono version of Meet The Beatles, and all you have to do is ask for it. "Hey Siri, play the Beatles US albums in mono" and on it comes.

 

This.

Because downloads (the next 30 years) and used CD's (the last 30 years) are a very big problem for legacy artists trying to generate revenue. So long as there are physical files that can be unlocked and reproduced, there will be consumers who aren't compensating artists fairly.

 

The industry will kill physical media, but the cost of a Streaming subscription will go down. No different than the cellular industry where it used to be $50 a month to make phone calls, $30 a month for 500mb of data, and $15 for text messages. Today's unlimited-everything plans for $35 happened because all consumers got onboard the new way of doing things.

Critical mass brings down prices and increases service for all.

 

Again I understand that.
My bigger point which is redundant if we can't see outside of our lifetimes, is that a centrally controlled music file computer/business, becomes the complete control over all music, who can listen to it, and what they can listen to.
Sadly, much sooner than I expected, players to play our physical media, are going down the tubes at a rate of knots. I'm thinking of buying a couple of spares to be honest, because it appears everything is moving into the NSA's system as streaming only, including movies and such

 

Whereas if we turn it all over to the business machine, they can fail to compensate artists at all. Hire some corporate pretty boys and girls to make pretty videos, with pretty oooo ahhh songs and bob's yer uncle

 

I was generalizing.

You are correct. That's how I use streaming services.

Many listeners, however, are prone to being steered.

 

The brief blip in history of musicians making widespread living selling recordings appears to be coming to an end. Since nearly all the music i have loved in my life came out of this era, I am not altogether pleased with this, but I can't stop it. I pay for Spotify, it makes my life better than almost anything I know of next to air conditioning, and would pay easily 5x what i'm paying if i had to.

Still, I have seen video streaming retrench so have gotten rid of none of my owned physical or digital recordings. The alternative vis a vis me and all musicians who make micropayments off spotify is either i continue listening to the recordings of yours i bought forever ago, and tbh in almost all cases used so i've always sucked when it came to keeping musicans alive, or not listen to your music and get you those micropayments. In 95 percent of cases where you are getting micropayments from me via spotify, there was never the reasonable alternative of my buying your records new from the label and getting you the 70 cents or whatever. I can both see its danger to ecosystem of music production yet will never, while it exists, abandon it, unless the monthly fee gets to like over 100, tho honestly i should pay even that given what i get out of it.

 

I absolutely love this sentence. For me from 8 years old to soon to be 59. I'm glad that people have the option to stream. I'm glad I have my physical media. I'm being buried with it. LOL

 

Says the guy who pops into every Radiohead thread to complain about how he hates everything Radiohead has done for 20 years!

 

(literal) lol

 

Until the NSA comes and takes away my CDs and LPs, I’m not worried about anyone having complete control over what I listen to.

 

It seems to me that the most successful artists are not complaining at all. Because they are reaching new audiences and getting billions of plays.

And that's always been the goal of "popular" music, no? This stuff isn't art. It's not irreplaceable. When we got bored with Satisfaction we started to listen to Ruby Tuesday. $0.29 cent 45's have always been disposable. Hell, streaming keeps this old stuff front-and-forward and compensates artists. I'd bet the Stones haven't seen this much revenue from their 1965 catalog since, well, 1965.

 

Ya got me there, but....I actually go into those threads to find out if Radiohead have come to their senses and released something listenable. Then, once inevitably disappointed, I leave.

 

You believe this?

 

they're already doing that and have been since day one

This suit came to "scout" us one time and I guess he wasnt impressed. He told me he wasnt bothering really much anymore to hear new groups or listen to CDs - he told me he was "scouting the modeling agencies" because he could fake anything except cute.

 

yep... they're playing the long game.... and winning.

 

so much speculation it's turning into a tragic comedy...

 

that will never happen. LOL, they care not.

 

It all goes back to the same issue that hardly anyone talks about--the original music publishing & recording contracts signed by the artists in question. Who's getting all the missing money? The record labels and the music publishers.

Identify the root cause, and find a good lawyer to put things right--that is the only possibility to change this dire situation.

 

I'll always be wired for physical media with music (and books), though I do use streaming sites like YouTube and Spotify (free version w/ ads--I don't listen to it much) for background listening and exploration, a helpful surveying tool. If I really want something, I'll buy the physical copy or the download if it's only available that way. It's just in my music collecting DNA.

But with that said, I recognize that I'm a dinosaur in this respect. Like it or not, music consumption has changed vastly in our lifetimes and the physical media that we treasure is not going to make a mass market comeback versus streaming. Young people don't want to deal with discs, aside from the odd vinyl enthusiast, and are no longer conditioned to purchase music in that way. Bemoan it if you will, but you can't turn back the clock on new technologies.

I'll let future generations sort out those questions for themselves and I'll keep enjoying my hobby my own way for the rest of my days. You'll have to pry my discs from my cold, dead hands!

 

Pretty much correct...

 

Don't you get it? There's a massive conspiracy by the streaming services to get everybody hooked, kill off all physical media and then, when everyone least suspects it... jack up the price 5X and laugh evilly while rubbing their collective hands together! Why keep talking about such boring things as market forces and economies of scale?

LOL.

 

Adjusted for inflation, we do have those prices now. It would be around $23 to $24 in today's money. That was and is kinda high imo.

 

I don't use streaming services and never cared to, so maybe I'm being naive with this idea (please let me know):
Why don't big name bands opt-out of streaming and refuse to sanction it (especially of they are making so little money). Imagine if Metallica or The Rolling Stones refused to have their music on any streaming services and you could only buy physical media or digital downloads. Wouldn't this create a ripple effect with other bands/artists doing the same making spotify and those services collapse like a house of cards?

 

Artists are financially doing the same via streaming as they did via CD's, cassettes, and vinyl. What the artists are doing is using streaming's perception problem to try to correct a compensation that goes back 40 years and they're, of course, failing.

Go back 30 years, a new band breaks on the scene and in order to have their album recorded, produced, pressed, boxed, and shipped they have to take an advance from the record label. By the time all that studio time is used and the CD's ship, they are lucky to break even and have that physical media pay off that loan they got from the label. The physical media didn't make them any money, but the label's PR and the plays on terrestrial radio get the band noticed enough so that they can put on a big tour with hundreds of shows and dozens of tables of t-shirts. And that's where the artists make their money- touring.

Flash forward to today and it's the same situation. What's different is instead of talking about 100K physical units sold we're talking about millions of streams. So it sounds like, whoa, the artists should be making more. But they shouldn't. The business is just as it's always been. Labels make the money off the recordings, artists make the money off the touring. If anything, streaming has a far larger reach so artists should therefore be building bigger audiences and bigger tours and thus make bigger bank.