The Pros and Cons Of Streaming

This has been done! Bjork had an app for her Biophilia album and Kristen Hersh had one for Crooked. Both nicely done with extra content. Not sure why there haven't been more of them.

 

If you have a subscription, then you can play back your digital files through a streaming service and hopefully the artists gets more money. But the bulk of the pot goes to the artists with the largest streams which is usually not what I'm listening to.

 

Probably greed. The record companies here don't seem to want to acknowledge the simple economic concept of supply & demand. Even though they continue to tell os over & over that CD sales are falling there has been no noticeable change in prices.

Normal price for chart type more popular artists are @ $22 ($20 discounted) whilst less mainstream artists are more likely @ $28 or higher.
My interests are generally not chart/popular artists.

 

That's crazy. Where I'm at a new release is right around $10 - $12 no matter who it is.

 

It seems like a lot of these discussions trend towards either/or debates instead of and/also.

I started streaming on Tidal a few months ago and am quickly becoming a fan firmly in the and/also camp.

I simply cannot keep buying CDs at the rate I have been for the last few decades. Space issues.

In the next week or two I am purchasing a high end server from Wolf Audio and will have library via J River and Tidal and/or Quobuz built into it. Best of both worlds, imo.

edit: here is a link to the Wolf page
Home | Wolf Audio Systems

 

I wouldn't worry. You have a thing of beauty that you will treasure forever. The streaming alternative is just convenience which is not what music is about. It is much more than that.

Not to many years ago you could see a band in a pub, club or venue every night, search out music in dozens of individual stores with knowledgeable staff, read about music in your preferred weekly newspaper, watch new bands playing on weekly TV shows and much more. This is all dying and people just skip through tracks on line without any real buy-in. Somehow it is not the same to me.

Take that Kinks box off the shelf now, pop a CD or vinyl album on, savour the music with a glass of your favourite tipple, flick through the wonderful book and photos and read the sleeve notes in the accompanying booklet. Warm glow? I thought so.

 

Weird because the whole premise of my original post was, I thought, written in the and/also viewpoint.

 

On a positive side some of records I like are OOP on CD and cost a pretty penny, such as excellent 2012 Outlaws "It's about Pride" and Unicorn "Shed no Tear Studio Sessions". The only other option is to buy mp3, and I rather stream for "free" as I already paid for subscription.

 

Although the record companies have long held the line that high tax charges have caused high album cost the truth is that since 2000 the gst tax rate has been a flat 10%.
The exchange rate is another long touted excuse yet when the AUD$ was at parity or above the US$ CD prices did not change one iota.

 

I have bought a lot less physical media since I now have a paid Spotify membership. I have thousands of CDs. I don't need to obtain anymore. The only CDs I buy now are from legacy artists that I love- Kiss, Motown, etc. Physical reissues that are well done. I'm considering selling a good portion of CDs of artists that I could live without a physical copy of their stuff and that will most likely will be on a streaming service forever. Now that Spotify has 99.5% of every artist I need. It just makes sense. I don't think it will ever revert back at this point other than maybe the streaming price point could be a bit higher down the road.

 

I have to admit, even in Australian Dollars, those prices are ridiculous. But it's worth pointing out that I don't think there's a CD plant currently in Australia.

 

I have a Spotify subscription, which I use to try out albums I read about in jazz magazines, before deciding to purchase or not purchase. This has saved me money from buying albums I do not like, but net/net, I end up spending a lot more money because I find so many artists and albums for which I want a high resolution & good mastering version.

My wife loves music, and Spotify is her primary source of music. It really is perfect for her, with access to her favorite music on her phone and tablet. She loves listening to vinyl on a nice stereo,, but is also happy listening on her iPhone with earbuds. She has all her favorite songs and albums saved, follows other peoples play lists, and everything is at her fingertips and mobile.

 

The biggest upside to streaming is the ridiculous simplicity and phenomenal sound quality of the HomePod which allows you to play all your music, and every other song ever recorded, without needing an audio system or connection to a device.

 

I will say, on price, $20 a month for Tidal Hi-Fi, $240 a year does not go in the "con" category.

If a new CD on average -- and I'm looking at things I wanted to or did listen to on CD this year like music from Henry Threadgill or Mary Halvorson or Myra Melford -- is going to cost around $15, the annual price of Tidal Hi-Fi is the equivalent of spending the money I would have spend on 16 new CDs over the year (and that's not including pricing for more expensive specialty items like box sets, etc.) If I listen to more than 16 albums I don't own per year on Tidal, I've actually saved money in annual cash flow terms, and I listen to way more than 16 new or new to me albums per year on Tidal.

Of course, the economics are not directly comparable, because I have to continue to paying to hear them again, which I don't have to do with CD, so over the listening life of the music, I'm paying more, and possibly a lot more on a per CD basis. However, I'm also getting additional services including on-the-go access to lots of music that I might maybe already have on hardcopy.

But for me, what streaming has done is create a situation where I listen to more new -- both newly released and new to me -- music per year than I have in 20 years, because it involves no marginal increase in cost to listen to more, and because I don't need to commit to physically holding something that I may be curious to hear but in the end may not want to listen to over and over and over again. That's a huge overriding pro for me. $2o a month for a service that enables and inspires me to have more new music experiences, gives me instant access to those experiences, and holds and organizes the material for me so I don't have to, is great.

FWIW, in the year or two that I've gone all in on streaming, I've not had a single recording I wanted to listen to disappear from a streaming service, but I've had lots of new stuff -- like stuff from the ECM catalog -- come online.

I have no doubt prices will increase. They have to. For one thing, streaming providers aren't profitable today, for another thing, artists and others in the chain are looking for greater and greater pieces of the pie. At what point will the economics no longer make sense for me? I don't know. But for now I'm finding it a great boon to my musical life.

 

I think the word to describe the amount the artists receive is tiny.

"But musicians still aren't getting a fair shake. Here's the math:
Spotify pays about $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights.
And the "holder" can be split among the record label, producers, artists, and songwriters."

To my mind streaming does not replace owning of physical product, however, it does replace radio. Just wait it won't be long before streaming becomes heavily inundated with ads.

The huge upside of streaming, as bvb1123 has pointed out, is that it facilitates discovery of new music, however, the eager musical adventurer needs guidance towards the direction his/her interests may take them. Forums such as this facilitate that guidance.

 

Nothing wrong with having a hobby, but the shift in revenue caused by streaming has really harmed career artists who used to be able to earn their livelihood making art. There used to be a number of different classes of full-time musicians -- from superstars to journeymen, all of whom made their living from music in one way or another. The streaming economy makes it harder for someone not selling/streaming in the mega-millions to earn a reasonable income. It used to be if you sold a modest amount of albums (25,000-75,000), toured a bit, got nice airplay and the occasional film and tv placement, you could do ok...now two of those four streams are stunted.

While not everyone is good enough, lucky enough, or savvy enough to make music their career, I wouldn't expect every musician whose income has been depleted by paltry streaming revenues to just shrug, say "I do this strictly for fun," and carry on...

 

Very good points. I don't really consider the monthly payment a big con either but I know a lot of folks who do. Me, I'd rather spend the money on Spotify and check out stuff I'm interested in than flying blind and ending up with a CD with only one song I like on it.

 

As per my calculation for the music I listen to most -- which is lots of new jazz, and lots of it on small label or via artist directly - the price tends to run from $13-19 per CD, $14 or $15 being pretty typical. I just bought Henry Threadgill's Dirt and More Dirt from Pi Recordings via Bandcamp on CD. It was $14 plus $3.50 shipping plus another buck and change in tax, so $18.53 for hardcopy was the total purchase price, nearly as much as I pay per month for all the music I have access to via Tidal Hi-Fi

 

May be it is a bit off topic, but I would differentiate Tidal and Spotify. Spotify quality is not the same, and clearly subpar in comparision with CDs. Tidal Hi-Fi on another hand sounds practically identical, and sometimes even better (MQA masters) if you have appropriate equipment. There is no way I will stream at home Spotify if I have real CD/rip/hd download of an album. Tidal is another story...

Selection however on Spotify is often better, however.

 

I won't stream due to quality issues. Even if streaming lossless which is pretty much only Tidal you are still stuck to loudness war issues.

Every piece of audio I have I declip before putting it in my local media library.

 

Well, luckily for me I must be half deaf or something because Spotify sounds fine to me. However, I normally listen to CDs around the house and use Spotify for exploring new music. I had a 6 month free trial of Tidal HiFi and didn't notice any difference between it and Spotify so i canceled Tidal.

 

It is a fair argument for most of new recordings... Wonder if someone will create "on the fly" declipping DAC.

 

If I could buy new release CD's for @ $10 - $12 no matter who it is I would be buying way, way more than I currently buy.
I'm out of control now at those prices I'd be way out of control.

 

The "pros and cons" are really dependent on what you want out of the service. If you want a reasonably affordable and legal way to discover lots of music, it's a godsend. If you're wanting to hear your favorite specific masterings of albums you already own, then yeah, it probably won't be of much use to you.

 

I concur.