The Pros and Cons Of Streaming

Is that Roger's new album?

 

I buy music downloads from iTunes. For movies/TV I am okay with streaming. Just don't have space for discs anymore.

 

The entire experience of streaming music bears little (if any) resemblance to what I love and have always loved about discovering music. I've said this before on here (probably too much) but I simply don't relate to any self-described music fan over the age of 25 who prefers streaming to the ritual of interfacing with physical media (which would also encompass reading credits, electing to hear a specific master of an album, making connections between artists on one album you like and another album you like, etc). To me, streaming is passive, impersonal, and lame. It devalues music, which is the most important thing in my life. It feels like McDonalds.

And--of course--it rips off artists, but we've been over that a million times on other threads.

 

Agreed! Pros and cons are subjective when it comes to the issue of streaming vs. owning physical product. As you suggested, to the casual music fan, there may not be any perceived cons to streaming. Whereas, for hard-core music aficionados (like nearly all of us here), there are too many drawbacks to being a "streaming only" music listener.

 

I'll never be one to stream from a service. I stream from my own curated and quality controlled sources. F the entire music industry for thinking it's OK to horrible clip, and reduce every piece of audio for the last 20 years to having no DR at all.

I've made my own effort to de clip and try and fix every piece of audio that goes in my digital media library and I never should have had to do that.

 

The greatest thing about streaming for me is for discovering and hearing music and artists I would never hear on radio. And I’ve discovered a lot of great stuff!

 

Disagree.

It's about the music, not fetishism over packaging.

My latest favorite bands are bands I discovered on Tidal and have no intention of getting "physical product" because what is the freaking point? It's already CD quality.

I don't listen to music with my eyes....

 

Strawman much? Not everyone who sees negatives in streaming, or more precisely, prefers other means of music listening, is a packaging fetishist or listens with his eyes, but you already knew that.

 

The "freaking point," aside from choosing to own something over merely renting it for an indeterminate amount of time, is to support these new artists you've "discovered" so they can continue to make albums and tour.

You have no idea how much it would mean to one of these artists if you found their Bandcamp page and bought a t-shirt, which would likely net them more dough in one fell swoop than four years worth of Tidal plays.

I will never get why this is so difficult for people to understand.

 

Typically what I still buy now are more obscure artists that either haven’t been available for streaming or that are more likely to get lost 8n the overwhelming amount of choices.

 

At this point in my life it's not possible for me to own physical media. To be more precise, I don't stream too often, it's more about the huge collection I've digitized, that I can now carry with me easily. I do miss handling albums and CD's, but it's just not practical for me. In general, streaming is one big pro for me, but it's a much smaller factor than it used to be.

 

Most listeners are never going to care about this or about how much a musician gets paid, just like most people don't care how much their favorite athlete gets paid, or how much their favorite actor gets paid, or how much their favorite novelist makes.

Most people listen to music on the radio, or they stream music. They never buy music, or rarely. Even back in the '60s, 70s, '80, the height of recorded music on physical media -- when you went into people's houses, they didn't have thousands of records or CDs like we do, not even hundreds. Maybe they had a couple of dozen or less, and mostly just the big ones -- Whipped Cream and Other Delights, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Thriller.

Music is not an object for most folks and it's not worth spending a lot of money on to most folks. It's a pastime, a mood enhancer, something they flip on on the radio in their idle time in the car or to distract them while they're at the gym or doing chores.

And, to most people, pieces of music and even artists are fungible: if one artist goes away, or one piece of music goes away, they'll listen to another. Or, increasingly, they'll listen to something else entirely other than music, like a true crime podcast or a cooking podcast or whatever, while they're driving or while they're doing their chores or while they're at the gym.

Even people who say, "Oh, I love this band" or "this song" or whatever....if it goes away, they'll find another band or song to "love." They don't love these things they way they love their spouses or siblings. They love them the way they love pizza or ice cream -- if their favorite local pizza place goes shuts down for one reason or another, they'll be sad, they'll miss it, they'll talk years later about how great it was with fondness, but they'll find another pizza place to eat at.

Media becomes most financially valuable when it draws a huge audience, or when it can piggyback on some other media that draws a huge audience -- like music used movies or video games or TV shows (the 25th highest rated broadcast TV show in the US last week drew an audience of 3 million), or when it draws a particular audience that has a particular kind of financial value -- CNBC might not be the highest rated cable network, but it draws an audience that has relatively high financial value compared with, say, the audience for a much higher rated network like the History Channel.

There are, of course, well established ways of supporting art and media with smaller audiences -- grants of various sorts, "membership" type support. But even with membership type support, supporting members typically represent a fractional part of the whole of users (I wonder how many SHTV forum members have donated), and there's often some kind of added benefit offered to members beyond just the media itself.

Like everything else in the world of entertainment media, and all media -- and recorded music is media -- the financial model for the media has undergone a profound, disruptive change in the internet age, one in which services, subscriptions and membership have proven to be more attractive to audiences than piecemeal purchases of products (CDs, T-shirts, whatever). People who seek to make a living making recorded music are going to have to find new models for supporting their recorded music that fit with the new kind of demand. An appeal asking audiences to go back to the old ways (at least until such ways develop their own kind of retro chic), or scolding audiences because they don't assign the kind of value to the goods or services one wishes they did, is very unlikely to result in a return to the old ways or a change in the psychological of fiscal value audiences assign to the media, services or experiences.

 

+1

What I like is queuing up a Genre I really like (ex. 70's Soul) and mixed in with the Al Green, Kool & The Gang, The Spinners, and all the other acts I've known and loved for 40 years all of a sudden a song like Betcha By Golly Wow by The Stylistics comes on and I'm like whoa, how did I miss that one all this time?

So "new music" isn't just the crappy new k-pop boy bands and Nickelodeon teen girls infesting the music scene, it's actually "old music" that's been newly discovered by the listener. Last year I discovered that Steely Dan actually released a bunch of albums, not just Best Of and Aja.

 

The biggest issue to me with streaming is where will Spotify and iTunes be in 10 or 20 years time? What if its not profitable for them to continue? Not to worry, we can all go back to cds and vinyl. Oh wait, no we can't.

 

I support Supertramp by streaming Breakfast In America once a month which is far more than the $0 I paid them listening to it once a month on my physical CD for the last 30 years. Streaming pays Supertramp. The used CD I bought put no money in their pockets. They lost my revenue because CD's are the big rip-off to the artists of today.

Next week some 70 year old is going to pass away and his widow is going to sell his entire physical Beatles collection to a used CD store and a few days later some 18 year old is going to buy the entire canon for $100 and the Beatles see none of that money. Used physical media is the enemy of the recording artist. Streaming gets them paid now and by further generations in the future.

I will never get why this is do difficult for you to understand. Used CD's are the enemy. Streaming is the hero.

 

The artist got paid for every legal cd out there. They were already paid for the used cds. Don't see your point.

 

The artist got paid for the CD exactly one time, the first time it was sold.

There are copies of George Michael's Faith from 1987 out there that have changed hands 5 times since it was released. George got paid his royalty off the original $14 retail sale in 1987. Since then, 5 other listeners and their friends and family have been able to enjoy his best work for free instead of each paying their $14 to purchase their own physical copy.

People bash Streaming when they should be bashing Used CD's. They are the devil in this situation.

 

Why would you quote my original post only to completely fail to engage with it in your "response?" How is buying a t-shirt an "enemy of the recording artist?"

 

And you think George Michael deserved more than his royalty from each $14 CD? You got to be kidding me.
If you sold your old Rolex, would the Rolex company want or expect their cut of that transaction? No!, but why? Well because that would be idiotic. They were already paid.

 

People used to spend a higher percentage of their income on music purchases. Particularly in the Seventies. This necessarily affects the quality of music produced.

 

Streaming music has a much higher environmental impact than you thought

 

I bought a used Chevrolet, and GM only got paid once for it.

 

Streaming music costs more than you think

 

And you participated in recycling.