Tag: music streaming

The Digital Evolution

On By bigbadburchIn News9 Comments
searching for my favorite hits on Spotify

I had a pretty big change in how I do things as far as music is concerned, and I thought it’d be a good bit for a post. Digital music has been around a very long time if you want to consider the CD, but for my purposes today I will refer to the MP3 or digital revolution of the early 2000’s, that which more or less displaced the CD as a viable format.

In the early 2000’s I was not an early convert to hard drive-based digital. I was “old school” and still respected the physical format of music. I recall between 2004 and 2006 people I knew were themselves fully converted to the iPod or whatever MP3 device was around. I was not having it, I was very die hard against it and was a total elitist snob about it. Yes, I had digital music on my computer where I made playlists out of albums I wouldn’t necessarily buy, and yes that digital music was not necessarily acquired legally, but I was still in the “so and so put out an album, and I’m going to buy it” mindset. And the prevalent format at the time was still the CD, this was just before the hipster revolution that saw the massive comeback of vinyl.

It wasn’t until sometime in 2008 that I relented and got my first iPod. A good friend bought a new one for himself and sold me his old one at a good price. I had all of my CD collection and also copied my friend’s collection to a hard drive to put on my new iPod. Additionally I had great access to several other friends’ CD collections and I was able to quickly build a massive digital library. I had my iPod almost stuffed, and it was something like 17,000 albums or some crazy shit like that.

And going digital did truly work out well. I have to give props to those who spoke well about it when I was too obstinate to listen. It changed how I listened to stuff, mainly in that I would give far more time to albums I had laying around but didn’t often play. I also took more chances on styles outside of my general vision, even if I didn’t always land on something I really wanted to hear again.

As time wore on, the concept of maintaining a digital collection gave way to streaming. Spotify was first, then many others hopped in the streaming market. It’s far more convenient to pay a few bucks a month to access a vast catalog of music instantly than it is to rip CDs or buy digital downloads. Just as digital became the prevalent format, the concept of a streaming library overtook a hard drive full of stuff. Artists might not get paid worth a damn out of streaming and especially Spotify, but that is another conversation for another time.

Once Spotify worked out a few early issues (their search function was pure trash when it first released) and they cut deals to land many prominent artist hold-outs like Metallica, Pink Floyd and others, I did start using it. Far easier for me to check out an artist I never heard of on there and decide if I liked them enough to buy the album, rather than shell out on a blind purchase that I may not like and, at least in terms of a CD, was now worthless due to the digital market.

I did still hold on to my digital collection, though. For a long time phones had SD card slots and it was really easy for me to keep my digital collection on it. I would use some whatever player to access my own collection and then use Spotify when I was playing stuff I didn’t own or new stuff.

That all changed just last month, when I upgraded my phone. Most smartphones no longer use SD cards, their own internal storage is pretty huge. I decided to not move my digital music collection over to my new phone – I have more than enough space if I don’t move it, but copying it all would take up nearly half of the storage.

This does mean that I’m now using Spotify for all of my on-the-go music. I do download stuff if I’m gonna be in a spot without service, but it’s all streaming for me now. I either go for albums I know and love, new stuff I want to check out, or old things I missed. I also have some massive playlists I’m building based on decade or genre, those are works in progress but I’ve already got a massive amount of stuff on a few of them.

It is cool how Spotify sucks as much as any other digital music player when it comes to the shuffle feature. I’ve never found one that has a really good randomization, most of them seem to gravitate to songs that get played a lot, and that often means the first batch of songs it plays out of a shuffle. I have seen worse programs, but the Spotify shuffle does leave something to be desired. It has a massive recency bias, in that if I add new songs to a playlist, well, guess what I’m gonna hear on my next shuffle? I guess it gets the job mostly done, though.

That just about wraps up what I wanted to say about this next step in my listening evolution. I do still maintain both vinyl and CDs at home, but it’s all in on streaming now for me when not at the house, or when checking out unfamiliar stuff. I do wonder what the “next steps” in music listening are, but I’m far too old and unimaginative to speculate on how things might go.

Gently Down The Stream

On By bigbadburchIn collecting1 Comment

I’ve talked a bit before about how I, and we as a whole, consume music. I grew up in the old days where you had to have some form of a physical collection if you didn’t want to be stuck with the radio. I’ve transitioned through a few different formats over the decades, from tapes to CD’s to digital and back to vinyl.

Now we are in the streaming age. While vinyl sales are still holding strong, there are some cracks in the wall. I wrote at length about my concerns a few weeks ago with where vinyl could be headed if something isn’t done to address the supply issue, among other concerns. The CD is still a semi-viable and cheap format, but it doesn’t do a lot that streaming doesn’t do.

And let’s face facts – streaming is by far the most convenient way to enjoy music. Pay roughly $10 a month and enjoy access to a service’s entire catalog of songs and albums? Yeah, there has never been a better deal in music. Sure, pirate downloading was fun and free I guess, but the RIAA’s heavy-handed lawsuits that would demand six figures from working-class people for downloading Appetite For Destruction weren’t so fun or cheap.

As an aside on streaming – yes, the audio is compressed and yes I’ve noticed the differences when comparing how things sound on Spotify compared to when I load a FLAC version of an album up that I own, but the vast majority of the music listening audience isn’t concerned about audio quality. The streaming services work just fine for the masses and they aren’t going anywhere.

Despite still being a physical format collector myself, I do use streaming. Spotify is the service I use. I pay for the normal premium version so I don’t have to listen to annoying ads. I had the student discount for a few years but I’m fine with the $9.99.

Honestly, Spotify is a wonderland for music. About 99% of what I look for is there. All I have to do is type in a name and boom, there’s a complete discography within reach. Some artists have 50 or more albums out – I do ok for myself but I don’t have the money for that kind of shit.

The big pro of Spotify, or any streaming service, is discovery. I’ve been able to explore new genres like indie rock or all the post-punk, post-metal or post-whatever stuff that I simply couldn’t get to with X amount of money to spend on records or CD’s. When I find an artist I really, really like, then I can shell out the cash on their physical releases.

For the listener, there are no real cons to streaming services. Sure, a service might delete an artists’ catalog in the case of “cancel culture,” but stuff like that is rare. I wasn’t queuing up R Kelly for my next playlist anyway so it’s no real skin off my back. And, without getting too much into it, I can type in plenty of nefarious names and find all their stuff still on the service. The companies aren’t on some moral crusade to rid their catalogs of anyone who has broke bad – rather they simply do what every company does and respond to the greatest outcries. Pretty common stuff in the 2020’s.

Of course the listener is only one part of the music chain. The artist is the one who makes the music and has to make a living on the music. And the streaming services are infamous for low payouts to artists. This article outlines how Spotify pays out to artists and a rough average of $3 to $5 dollars per 1,000 streams seems to be the going rate. That isn’t a truckload of money, especially for independent and underground artists who might be lucky to hit 10,000 streams on their most noteworthy songs.

Am I obliged as a more than casual music fan, to spend money on physical releases to truly support my favorite artists? Does me streaming a new band I’ve never heard of take money out of their pockets and hence food off their tables? I know music fans with this total diehard mindset, that “true fans” should support the artist as directly as possible.

I’ll say that I consider the stance admirable but misguided. Here’s a helpful lesson – the music artist has been getting ripped off since the dawn of the music industry. Read about Motown, read about payola, read about how album sales and money really work. Look up how much TLC got for being one of the most mega-successful groups of the ’90’s.

I get the argument that streaming services don’t provide artists the financial support they need, but nothing in the industry really ever has. Anyone who isn’t a supernova success won’t see windfalls, and even some of them will find themselves ripped off through shady label tactics, bad management, or greedy dope dealers.

I myself am just one person and I can’t counteract the financial sins of business by not using streaming. The service serves too many useful purposes in terms of discovery and also in not having to blow more money than I make just to find out if an artist is up my alley. I can enjoy more music and cover more, different stuff on here without having to go in debt to do it. If anything, I can use Spotify for the more “mainstream” stuff I like and give my money to the independent and underground acts that more desperately need it. I won’t say that’s the line I’ve taken just yet but it’s something that I’ve seen on the horizon as I go forward, and also as I round out grabbing those bigger releases I want in my collection.

There are alternatives to bigger streaming services, of course. Bandcamp is now relatively famous as a place for alternative or underground, even unsigned artist. Bandcamp gives artists and now labels a far greater degree of control on how their music is purchased and distributed, and as a result, lands more money in the artists’ pockets. Both digital and physical sales are supported on the site, and Bandcamp has even begun helping artists obtain small-run vinyl pressings to sell, a very tough thing to do for smaller artists in today’s supply shortage market.

I do use Bandcamp and at some future point I’ll start a semi-regular thing where I go over some of the lesser-known artists I’ve found through there. I don’t go hog wild on it but I don’t at all mind giving a band ten bucks or whatever for a good album or shelling out for a small-run vinyl pressing of something that really catches my attention. Bandcamp is helping keep the underground alive in the wake of the digital revolution that threatened to swallow everything whole.

As I go forward I’m sure I’ll remain a combination user of both streaming and physical releases. I don’t really wish to have the world’s largest collection or anything but I like having what I have. I do use the digital space to my benefit, though, in order to find more areas of music that I might not have access to through old-school means.

The face of music listening has changed a lot in 20 years and will probably change again in ways many of us can’t foresee as we sit here today. For the time being, streaming is here to stay and is the prime method for music consumption. It has its bad sides, but so does anything that is a business. For the fans? It really couldn’t be much better.