physical music non-purchasers: how do you acquire/consume music? (NOW WITH MORE SOULSEEK)

mostly just spotify. i've pretty much stopped putting music on my phone except for stuff i do or stuff my friends do (i.e. stuff that wouldn't be on spotify). do 90% of my music listening at work and spotify on computer is the easiest way to do that.

feel like i explained this on the other thread.

spotify for older stuff and non-dance music.
mp3s from soundcloud/beats in space type shows, etc for dance mixes
some mp3s from beatport if i've been djing or am about to soon
and some mp3s of more rare or hard to find stuff from blogs
will be buying some vinyl again soon enough too

itunes - tryin a be a good citizen, reserved for things i know im into
soundcloud/youtube - checkin a song out, jammin a sweet mix or w/e
torrents/mediafire etc - checking an album out, getting albums from the huge kanyes of the world where im not really concerned w/their finances, things that arent on itunes

purchasing mp3s (itunes, amazon mp3, emusic, etc) = new releases / pop music on demand. usually on my phone. impulse buys.
streaming music (pandora, spotify) = all types of music. lots synced on my phone. use it a lot tbh.
streaming video (youtube) = check this if i can't find what i'm looking for anywhere else. hate the sound quality. watch lots of live stuff tho.
downloading mp3s from blogs (mediafire, rapidshare, filestube) = music from around the world.
downloading mp3s via filesharing networks (soulseek, etc) = techno n that
torrenting mp3s (bit-torrent, pirate bay) = rarely do i want the whole discography of something in one go, but if i do, i'll try here
downloading artist-approved free content = yup
borrowing physical music from the library = nope
borrowing physical music from friends = yup
shoplifting physical music from stores = sometimes feels like it when i buy pristine jazz records from store down the road
listening to terrestrial radio = not for music, no, sadly
listening to satellite radio = um, no.
watching music channels on tv = you're a poor human being if you still do this

100% streaming

These conversations always make me feel a bit estranged and ascetic. I do basically none of these things, except sometimes buy or "steal" mp3s for something I already own on vinyl and love to the point where I want it portable. I've always found the possibility of grabbing any music I want out of the ether more than a little overwhelming, to the point where I don't even really know where to start. I already feel like I have too few hours per day to really listen to and enjoy music, and so many things I already own that I haven't digested enough. The last thing I want is to feel like I'm in constant "preview" mode, giving a cursory listen to a recent download to justify the time and memory I spent acquiring it. I feel silly admitting this and more than a little out of touch with the way most people who love music as much as I do digest things these days, but I've found that I need to fairly strictly limit the way I actually encounter and intake music in order to preserve what I love about listening to it. If I'm curious enough about something, based typically on strong recommendations of trusted people, or things I read, I will go ahead and buy it in my preferred format (usually vinyl, more than occasionally CD, depending on genre/availability). I realize it sounds rigid, but it's the only way I feel I can give it a "fair" listen. Also, I think having actually purchased something makes me more likely to spend time and attention on it, which ultimately leads to more satisfaction on my end.

classic tuomas up there

mp3 blogs and spotify for me

good post Clarke B

I wish I was more like that. I'd probably love things I've downloaded onto my phone a lot more if I owned the record. I heard that Lindstrom and Christabelle on vinyl at a friends house a few weeks ago and it felt like a completely different record to what I'd been listening to through headphones.

I'm quite discerning with what I buy physical copies of- quite proud of my little record collection, it's always things I really want to give a "fair listen" or things that I want to play out.

spotify subscription
private torrent site
purchase of music on cd/vinyl (cd usually ripped immediately, vinyl usually listened to on the weekend and a digital copy torrented)
podcasts/downloaded mixes/soundcloud etc
itunes/amazon/boomkat/bleep

most of these are pretty equal, I tend to use torrent stuff to preview music sometimes

Thanks, Crackle. It was actually having quite a few experiences like yours with the Lindstrom & Christabelle that cemented in my mind how much of a difference the medium makes for me, especially in those early tentative stages of getting to know a record. It sounds corny, but there's something almost sacred for me in listening to an artist or record I've been curious about for the first time.

So my new truck comes with a year subscription to sirius radio and I'm surprised at how much I like it. Heart&Soul is by far my favorite channel, but others are great too, XMU, 1st wave, backspin, shade45, the metal channels are good and the classic rock ones are too. Even spa which plays ambient is great. I think I'll pay once the free time runs out.

definitely kind of disgusting how much more reasonable the pay satellite radio stations are than the terrestrial ones

I feel very similar to Clarke B upthread. Especially with Spotify. I'm sure it's great and really good at organising your music into a profile and eventually starts working in an intuitive way, but to start I've usually found it daunting to use, the prospect of having EVERY SONG EVER at my fingertips, to the point where I find it almost debilitating wondering what I should listen to next. I guess I'm a big browser. I like to scan through my music until I find something that picks my fancy rather than thinking something up and finding it.

What you said about "justifying the time and memory I spent acquiring it" - not sure if this is the same thing, but when I owned a larger CD collection, I used to sometimes challenge myself to work out the time and place I bought a release, and often I could remember pretty well what shop and what I was doing that day. My music collection has always served as a sort of diary for me in that respect. Of course individual tracks and albums remind me of places and times by the sound alone, but with CDs I would be "ah, I remember being given that as a present" or "I remember going out and buying that on release day, and it was also the day I got my GCSE results", which are little warm moments I don't think I'll get so easily with MP3 downloads.

Try retaking your GCSEs.

What you said about "justifying the time and memory I spent acquiring it" - not sure if this is the same thing, but when I owned a larger CD collection, I used to sometimes challenge myself to work out the time and place I bought a release, and often I could remember pretty well what shop and what I was doing that day. My music collection has always served as a sort of diary for me in that respect. Of course individual tracks and albums remind me of places and times by the sound alone, but with CDs I would be "ah, I remember being given that as a present" or "I remember going out and buying that on release day, and it was also the day I got my GCSE results", which are little warm moments I don't think I'll get so easily with MP3 downloads.

― This Is... The Police (dog latin), Wednesday, October 10, 2012 12:02 PM (43 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've always done this; it's something I love about my collection. A good handful of my used LPs still have the stickers on them showing me what I paid, which for certain things I bought long ago can be funny given how much they're going for these days. I also sort of re-live the thrill of finding something especially rare or wanted-by-me when I play the record. I'd say it's definitely still more "about the music" for me, and I try not to be overly sentimental with these things, but I can't deny that it's part of the fun.

Torrent, Youtube, Spotify, iTunes.

I was bought the David Byrne and St Vincent album on vinyl (came with a CD as well, which was very cool + handy for me) for my birthday this weekend. I think if I'd simply downloaded it, I'd have probably given it a quick flick through the individual tracks, 30 secs each, and put it in the "to go back to pile", but as such I've had it on the turntable non-stop because, well it's just there isn't it? It being on the turntable means it has less other music to jostle around with and I can give it a bit more attention. The nature of vinyl means I'm also more liekly to listen to at least a whole side all the way through. And strangely with vinyl, I fidn myself playing an album more than once in a row, which rarely ever happens with MP3.

I usually stream to test stuff out, then get it on mp3 if I like it. Even in the post-physical world I still like to feel like I 'own' a piece of music.

if you think we've been mocking you try saying this nonsense to a 19-yr-old music fan

xp

dude, you can't even turn a tv on, so...

i am not pretending that says anything about anything apart from my technological incompetence

"we" have not "lost" anything by my inability to work a remote control

I haven't really discovered much new music I really love from sirius radio, (aside from R&B) but I have caught up on a lot of indie I had never heard before. Vampire weekend, animal collective, Purity Ring. I hardly ever look up music on youtube, I'm not already invested in, so sirius has been a great way to hear music I never would seek out on my own. Their jazz stations could use djs who dig deeper.

i'm currently around 80% spotify 20% downloading from secret underground music-sharing webrings

i do buy records i like sometimes but almost never before i've heard them

My music collection has always served as a sort of diary for me in that respect. Of course individual tracks and albums remind me of places and times by the sound alone, but with CDs I would be "ah, I remember being given that as a present" or "I remember going out and buying that on release day, and it was also the day I got my GCSE results", which are little warm moments I don't think I'll get so easily with MP3 downloads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE

I'm not denigrating mp3s or downloads at all. 90% of my listening is via digital and I like it that way. I'm only saying what works for me, and recently I've been rediscovering physical formats. There's no shame in saying that.

oh man, i remember when i added this album to my spotify playlist. it was that day someone mentioned it on an ilx thread.

if you think we've been mocking you try saying this nonsense to a 19-yr-old music fan

xp

― lex pretend, Wednesday, October 10, 2012 12:13 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Personally, I try and not let the imagined disbelief and mockery of hypothetical 19 year olds dictate how I feel about anything...

lol u old

lol u 19

the prospect of having EVERY SONG EVER

wish people would stop saying this about digital music services cuz it isn't even close to true and probably never will be

personally i would mock the idea of one's sacredwarmfuzzy moments deriving from the format rather than y'know the actual lived experience of hearing the music, regardless of what format it's on. the people i was with and the things i was doing or just how the song made me feel. these things have nothing to do with whether i'm listening on a cd or streaming it off soundcloud.

The format is part of the lived experience, though. I guarantee that plenty of 19 year olds will grow up and look fondly back on whatever medium they're using now to listen to music. It's unecessarily hostile to portray that harmless sentimentality in such a negative way.

yep they're all going to be pining for their iphones one day

wish people would stop saying this about digital music services cuz it isn't even close to true and probably never will be

it is more like "the prospect of having EVERY SONG I CARE ABOUT EVER" for at least 75% of the people out there

yeah that's more accurate

spotify, soulseek (older stuff mostly), youtube, itunes store purchases (newer stuff mostly)

yep they're all going to be pining for their iphones one day

― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, October 10, 2012 12:55 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I genuinely believe this!

I was agreeing with you

I'm so old I can't even tell anymore

iphone themed fleshlights by 2025

soulseek is so amazing for finding obscure limited-release avant-garde/experimental stuff

Xposts Well I just wrote a fairly lengthy defence/riposte to ronan and lex but my iPhone lost it (what's wrong with a pen and paper etc etc). But Clarke B pretty much summed it up above anyway. For me, personally, I think there's nothing wrong with admitting a certain attachment to the medium and acquirement of said medium and how all the external influences that may affect one's attitude towards the music I choose (and choose not) to listen to are as important as the essential absorption of sound. As a human being my enjoyment of music is drastically informed by even the slightest of conditions, and the format does play into that. If this doesn't apply to you, then more power to ya, but context, setting, experience, time and space all matter, and that's before I've even hit play.

a mix of purchasing digital music and torrenting. I should support the artists I like more than I do, but just grabbing an album from a torrent site is just so ridiculously easy and fast that it's hard to resist sometimes.

There unfortunately don't seem to be much decent streaming options in Canada. I would definitely use something like spotify a lot.

it's interesting that lex thinks memory can (should?) be somehow divorced from physical artifacts

When people say they like vinyl or CDs because they like to have something they can hold in their hands, or they like the artwork, or they prefer the sound, or they feel some ritualistic attachment in getting up an putting a record on, they're not lying or trying to be stick-in-the-muds. It's not necessarily related to nostalgia either - I thought vinyl fans were simply fetishists, weirdos and codgers for a very long time until a friend came round with a record player one day and started cranking out tunes. Since owning a record player only about a year ago, I can safely say that were I given the choice of listening to an album on mp3 through decent speakers or through my cheap little portable and its internal speakers, I'd genuinely have a hard time choosing.

I do feel like a fetishist sometimes, to be fair. I spent about an hour and a half the other week mounting and aligning a new cartridge on my turntable. But I like it! It's fun to do stuff with your hands. Lex is like the guy who would tell a whittler, "Look at you, you smug weenie with your little knife set; don't you know you can buy a miniature Indian chief head and a wooden piccolo at the store?"

Dog Latin, just wait and see how much more you love your records when you start playing around with a more serious setup... That's the thing for me; sure, it's sentimental to some degree for all the reasons we've been discussing, but it's really about sound. I honestly don't understand how to think about "the music itself" without at least some vital relationship to the way it's being presented...

I'm gonna sound like an old man here, but being obsessed with music before the internet, you had anticipate music and look harder. One record would last me for months. Almost all of the music I bought through mail order was stuff I had never heard and didn't really know what to expect. Reading catalogs and sales list, waiting for the record to arrive. It was fun. I still spend quite a bit of money on used record, most of which, i dunno 65% of I still have never heard before. And if I didn't track down these records I would never hear them, since there still is A LOT of music that can't be found on any of the means in this poll. I don't understand how the format is irrelevant or why it should be, Records are fun. Maybe lex just doesn't have the collector spirit in him.

Vinyl is awesome but not for these weird misplaced nostalgia reasons. Great sound, proper pitch control mainly

Comes with issues too tho, especially if you've little space, not gonna criticise digital...often not been in a situation I can play vinyl

I'm not saying records are The format to listen to music on. Mostly I listen to music in my truck since I'm always on the road, split between my ipod, which is mostly ripped records and the other half is sirius radio.

A friend tried to "trade music" with me like this last year and I was like, are you friggin kidding me, I am not going to copy this hard drive of your "cool tunes" and then dump the same from my library. I'm gonna give you a handful of albums you might like.

Her man ended up hooking her up with a turntable/stereo setup at her new place and I've loaned her a few albums on vinyl and she's listened to the few things I selected that she might like a hell of a lot more. Very few people actually can just throw some large chunk of digital music into a random playlist or whatever and really get much out of it.

"you never know when you're going to want to listen to something" is kind of a misreading of the opportunities that technology has given us by making access to a lot of recorded music omnipresent

so much at our fingertips and the situation we feel it best addresses is instant gratification of our whims

kind of wonder if there's an overlap between that and the people who think they need their whole music collection on their ipod with them at all times

I did not know until I had completely filled my ipod that it was possible to choose which files went on it. I rarely have more than 10 albums at a time on there now. It occasionally sucks when I'm somewhere away from my computer and I'm not in the mood for any of the albums I'd "packed" for the day, but it beats the hell out of having to scroll past hundreds of albums and artists that I don't want to listen to at all and may not have listened to in years.

instant gratification of my whims is AWESOME and i wish for more of it

I quite like delay of gratification and the heightened state it can induce, actually.

To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, and all that.

maybe that's why you give a shit about bits of plastic

lol

lex's essentialism/New Criticism model of music is so weird coming from him imo

i don't have a model of music! stop ~putting me into boxes~

"you never know when you're going to want to listen to something" is kind of a misreading of the opportunities that technology has given us by making access to a lot of recorded music omnipresent

so much at our fingertips and the situation we feel it best addresses is instant gratification of our whims

This is kind of a misreading of what I said. I mean obviously the best thing is access to huge swathes of music you'd previously have had to hunt around for months for. But the joy of wanting to listen to a song on the way home from a pub and knowing you have it with you should not be underestimated.

Cosign on the pub-walk.

Lex, I've got huge amounts of time for you, but you do an awesome job of caricaturing yourself, never mind anyone else putting you in boxes!

disclaimers: 1. this probably isn't the best thread to put this but i don't know where else to post it, 2. it seems like an obvious point so it's probably been mentioned before but i haven't seen anyone else say it, and 3. i am not arguing that spotify has a "fair" payment scheme, because that's a complicated question and i don't know what fair payment for music is exactly.

but

in the ongoing discussion about how musicians get paid for music (in the grizzly bear thread re: nitsuh's article, for example) i keep seeing comparisons of how much musicians get paid for spotify streams vs. how much they get paid for radio play. this irritates me because it's a false equivalency:
* a spotify play is a play to one person. a radio play is a play to thousands of people. so of course you get paid more for a radio play
* almost all of the musicians on spotify are musicians who aren't getting radio play anyways, and wouldn't have been even 20 years ago, aside from maybe occasional college radio play.

basically, please stop talking about spotify and radio payments like they are somehow equivalent and comparable

yeah but you could make the argument that spotify payments should be more because it's on-demand and you can listen to it as often as you want

and the musician gets paid each time you listen to it

To define the amount of money you get from Spotify as "payment" sort of stretches the definition of that term

it's a consideration