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

nostalgia isn't bad!

The sticking point here is "weren't actually better" and the presumption that you can call BS on someone's own highly personal rememberance of an already personal past

did anyone even do that? you can do what you like, but what i call bs on is extrapolating that highly personal nostalgia into society-wide trends as though it's a thing that "we" do

lex, half your steez on this board could be pretty much boiled down to you mapping your personal preferences and experiences into universal and absolute 'truths'.

I prefer to listen to clean vinyl and/or high bitrate files, but use Spotify a lot. My last apartment move involved me both getting injured and then fired because of the sheer weight of the vinyl.

Starting to wonder why I keep it.

Carrying milkcrates up and down 3 flights of stairs lead to a sprained ankle and missing a week of work.

So I got a new apartment and a new job at the same time.

The sticking point here is "weren't actually better" and the presumption that you can call BS on someone's own highly personal rememberance of an already personal past

all completely subjective, i agree.

You're selling the gulag short a little, it's hard to look at a loaf of bread on my table and not think that something has been lost. I'm just not sure we appreciate it as much now we don't have to fight five other prisoners for it.

Once something happened.

also, lex assuming youth are just like him and that he has an eternal handle on the teenage mind

Teenagers, as a general rule, do not tend to be interested in obsolete or declining technology. Or paying for things when they don't have to.

The kind of ironclad Popism I dislike seems to take the honorable notion that "maybe teenagers aren't all stupid and maybe there's something worth paying attention to in what they like" and turns it into this sort of weird deification of the teenage mindset.

I was a fucking prick when I was a teenager. 17 year olds are the most disgusting savages in the world.

It's not deification, it's realism. People who have grown up with the internet are as unlikely to be interested in CDs even when they're older and wiser than 20-somethings were in buying VHS tapes.

They're more likely to be buying digital music rather than stealing it, and vinyl junkies will be around for a while yet, although they're a minority.

slsk

It's something you get in all debates about new technology. Someone always takes the line "but won't people miss that?" Which people when? Certainly not the people who were born too late to have anything.to miss, because they were busy enjoying other things.

you mean people who have grown up with the post-2000 internet

processors used to suck at decoding/encoding highly-compressed formats and bandwidth sucked

Most of the people who grew up with the post-2000 internet are now in the age range that used to be considered the main record buying demographic. Not sure the fact they had a dial-up connection when they were six or seven is particularly relevant.

very true

most of my home music listening and new music consumption is streaming now: Spotify, Bandcamp, DatPiff, etc. part of it's just a logistical preference -- I use multiple computers I use at different times for different purposes, so it's a pain in the ass to try and get the same files on all those computers, or keep the iPod sync'd up with the main computer that i put most of my iTunes library on, etc. plus I basically ran out of room on said computer a long time ago so I end up having to delete stuff to make room for every new acquisition.

3-4 years ago I was still buying CDs on the reg, as well as buying lots of digital music on eMusic, Amazon, etc. but the reality of parenthood, THE ECONOMY etc. put an end to that. i hope that someday i will have discretionary income to spend on at least my favorite music someday, but for now i'm living in the cloud and on the cheap.

was somewhat surprised to read someone like french montana is making like $60k in a year from Rhapsody, with other 70 or 80 for his label. i don't even know anyone who uses rhapsody.

*with another

my answer is overwhelmingly "downloading artist-approved free content" via rap mixtapes followed by whatever downloading dance mixes is.

when you turn up the volume, mp3s sound not good.

eq helps a ton, though

like right now an mp3 of "karvel" by bjork almost made me jump out of my chair due to some extreme EQing left over from the previous track

deification of teenagers by people too old to know is a ludicrous ilx staple, but i agree with matt on this particular topic, loosely.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

These results kind of bear out my concerns that lead to the first thread - i.e. that people who consume digital music by and large don't pay for it. Only approx 15% of voters in this poll pay for MP3s, and even those who stream legitimately (and pay subscription, which we've sadly not got breakdown of)... Well, we know the revenue models of streaming services, and they're not working for artists at the moment. Now you may say that ILM isn't a representative sample, but I'd be shocked if 90% of voters didn't identify as both serious music fans and law-abiding citizens who believe in fair pay for fair work. I doubt a wider sample taking this poll would reveal a higher proportion of people paying full price for all their digital music. My worry is that if the economics of the music industry erode any further, we'll be left with a less creative and fascinating industry, and we'd all be worse off for that.

i didn't vote in this because my digital means of consumption is spread fairly evenly over a number of options, which i'm guessing is true for most others as well

btw nick i'm not sure we needed an ilm poll to tell us that the Music Industry Is Dying, it's kind of been a thing for a while now

Just because we're all aware of it doesn't mean the message doesn't need reiterating every so often. I think it's quite important!

Only approx 15% of voters in this poll pay for MP3s

That may not be completely right cos we're talking about primary means of acquisition here. Not will results be affected because people can only vote for one option, but the results will be skewed somewhat as it's easier to listen to more music through Soulseek, Youtube, Spotify, than it is to acquire it through purchase. Technically, more music might be being bought than ever before but this could be equally and exponentially matched by people accessing even more music through non-traditional / free means.

Yeah, that's a fair enough point, and an ILX poll can never be sophisticated enough to pull out data that you could use to form anything more substantial than a hunch. There's something about the word 'acquisition' in the poll question which makes me think that this poll isn't just about how we listen to music mostly (raw hours is probably streaming digital radio at work for me, although today I'm in the office alone and playing MP3s [ripped from CDs I own] off my iPhone).

The ontology behind this whole question is very complex and touches on ethics and environmental issues (I had a CD of music I already own air-mailed to me from Japan, ffs, think of the airmiles). There is no satisfactory answer or conclusion or approach; simpyk, what you're happiest / most comfortable with doing as an individual. Which feels a little too late-period capitalism relativist to me.

The ontology behind this whole question is very complex and touches on ethics and environmental issues (I had a CD of music I already own air-mailed to me from Japan, ffs, think of the airmiles).

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a jumbo jet filled with CDs. (There are or were I believe actual people who eschewed the usual digital transport mechanisms of torrent etc in favour of mailing hard drives full of music.)

lol. some guy coming up to me at a party a couple years ago, asking "do you want all the music in the world?" He then whipped a hard-drive out of his trench-coat and offered to let me grab anything I wanted off it. There was some classic rock that I probably would have grabbed, but it was far from "all the music in the world". The red flags on it were a lot of trance and a very complete Incubus discography, so I politely disengaged from the conversation.

The circumstances around that were that I had stopped into the party on the way back from Best Buy and had a new external drive outside in my car.

Pretty stupid story, I guess.

"all the music in the world" is great

some guy coming up to me at a party a couple years ago, asking "do you want all the music in the world?

Last time this happened to me, my nose turned into a sausage and my wife ended up hacked to pieces whilst still inconceivably alive inside a wooden box.

what?

you heard

I remember some discussions I had with friends in the late 90s-early 00s (when file sharing became really big) wondering how long it would be until there were people who basically had all of recorded music released throughout history on a single hard drive. And then they could just go out and sell copies of "all music" for 10 bucks or whatever to people on the street. Fun times (with drugs).

Yeah my friend once had bought a similar hd off someone with 'all the music in the world', alot of which i copied, most of which now sits on DVD+Rs and have never been listened to. I think the dream of personally amassing every song ever was kind of something in the early 2k's but thank god for streaming and youtube and the sheer reality seeping in of how laughably impossible that would be.

why would anyone want all the music in the world when 99% of it is guaranteed not to appeal to you at all. And your spouse ends up in pieces in a box too.

To futilely bat back at the looming specter of mortality?

there was definitely a thing people did in the napster days where sometimes you'd come across something you weren't really that interested in but figured you might be at some point in the future so you just downloaded it, since who knew if this would be easy to find in the future if ever you really wanted it.

Basically something like "oooh, this guy is sharing Frank Zappa's entire discography. I don't really know anything about Frank Zappa but some people seem to really like him. I better download this just in case."

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

Props to the shoplifter.

I kind of assume that was Scot S.

there was definitely a thing people did in the napster days where sometimes you'd come across something you weren't really that interested in but figured you might be at some point in the future so you just downloaded it, since who knew if this would be easy to find in the future if ever you really wanted it.

Basically something like "oooh, this guy is sharing Frank Zappa's entire discography. I don't really know anything about Frank Zappa but some people seem to really like him. I better download this just in case."

― silverfish, Monday, 15 October 2012 16:19 (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Monday, 15 October 2012 16:21 (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Semi guilty of both these things at one point or another? The latter happens when I suddenly HAVE to listen to, I dunno, O Superman or something RIGHT HERE NOW or else I'll have a mini breakdown right there on platform 9.