Thread For Chatter About The Streaming Music Economy

i guess mp3s still make sense if you listen mostly at home. if you travel and/or spend a lot of time working on company laptops then having all your music as mp3s on a hard drive as home is really the opposite of convenient.

i pay roughly $30 a month for Spotify, Apple and Tidal because being able to virtually anything I want for the amount that used to buy me 3 CDs is pretty fucking cool and i pay way more for cable TV, which i care about way less.

― a goon shaped tool (some dude), Wednesday, May 18, 2016 8:09 AM (6 hours ago)

Chance the Rapper has me considering this too, but I really can't afford multiple direct debits. I have Spotify since I pretty much only listen while travelling/on work computers, but increasingly missing out on new stuff is depressing. I guess I will succumb to another service at some point, but nothing about it seems beneficial for either artist or audience. I just don't want to lose anything! My memory cannot be relied upon to later recall forgotten and not saved artists.

if you travel and/or spend a lot of time working on company laptops then having all your music as mp3s on a hard drive as home is really the opposite of convenient.

Everything I put in iTunes is automatically uploaded to or matched within my free Google Play Music account (up to 50,000 songs), so my library is accessible everywhere.

There's also Subsonic, which lets you stream your music collection from your own computer.

i also might feel weird about everything i listen to being fed into a system and tracked and analyzed. that probably makes me sound narcissistic or like one of those weirdos who's paranoid about licking stamps...but i like how cds and records are off the grid.

it also weirdly satisfies me when my spotify discover weekly is wildly off-base. i contain multitudes!

stream-curious but i still rock mp3s, and also have a literal iPod

Is there a single benefit of Spotify over Apple Music? Apple Music has a better interface, is already integrated into my iTunes and iPhone (so I can have Siri queue up just about any album or song while I'm driving), and now it has pretty vital exclusives. What does Spotify offer?

for me its just spotify happening to be my legacy service. i have a few huge playlists there that i'm not eager to try and port over or reconstruct on another platform.

What does Spotify offer?

I like that someone can provide a product like Spotify without being Apple. If Apple had done it ten years ago I might feel differently. Competing service providers would be better without the utter bullshit of exclusive content.

The mere existence of Apple Music has fucked with my local files. Apparently just having an Apple Music tab on the application, even without signing up, causes iTunes to go back and try to match your local files with the files on the Apple server. I have a lot of local files so each time I opened iTunes it would massively slow down my computer and make it impossible for me to play any of my songs. That, plus the horror stores of Apple Music deleting local files from hard drives keeps me content with Spotify over Apple Music.

As far as the platform itself, the collaborative playlisting and social aspect of Spotify is the biggest advantage over Apple.

even aside from the cost, having to switch between three programmes depending on what i want to listen to is the opposite of convenient (and especially so on creakier computers).

Don't you have Sonos, which has an app that integrates at least two of them?

I have Spotify, Tidal, Soundcloud and Mixcloud all set up on mine now and it integrates them all seamlessly.

The actual Spotify desktop app (and to a lesser extent the Android app) remain regularly unbearably slow and clunky and it beggars belief they haven't sorted this out yet, especially given how smooth and fast the experience used to be. I've not bothered to download the Tidal desktop app because I don't need it, but the UX of the Android app leaves a lot to be desired.

The Apple Music UI is complete bullshit and the worst of all of them.

At this stage though my playlist library on Spotify is so big and the social aspects so useful that I'm not really prepared to switch unless there's a very good reason to.

loving the fact we had the build up as to whether matt dc was going to get sonos, and the happy glow now that he has it !

(i am fast approaching the 65,000 limit, and so having to think about my options)

i remember a time when i had my immediate listening music spread out on vinyl, tape, mp3, cd and minidisc so maybe this isn't THAT inconvenient but it's inconvenient

Interesting. So much of Spotify's popularity seems to boil down to "it was first." It's got the biggest base of grandfathered-in users. Seems like Apple Music could easily add the playlist features and social components if they wanted to.

I won't use Spotify because it ran soooooo slow on my computer, and always opened itself without me asking it to. Such a big, nasty program I began to think of it as a virus. Also that alien green and funeral black design is utterly garish; I simply hated looking at it.

It it was a while ago that you tried Spotify, the client has probably been rebuilt once or twice since then, so you might want to re-test your assumption that it's slow. (It's definitely still black and green.)

i will cop here to distrusting spotify as a working service for quite sometime in favor of an old build. I've updated to the current build (i think just before the end of last year) and am finding it robust and pretty workable for my needs.

some of my thinking on picking up or switching to tidal/apple/google services is of the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" variety but the balkanization of exclusives is a very good argument to open all doors and then have one key service of your own choice for everyday listening

if you had told me as a college student that i could buy all you could eat music with about 75% of anything I want for under $400 a year, I would've leapt at the chance. I was likely spending at least that much every three months on physical media.

Spotify has ben rock solid for me since the beginning of the year or so. The newish phone app update was a huge step in the right direction too

Tidal seems to kind of suck for jazz, pretty weak selection. I'm assuming some of the major small jazz labels haven't signed on yet.

A lot of the artists I searched had a bunch of off-brand looking comps and very few original records.

i have a sonos speaker which mostly goes unused bc when i tried to match it up to my main itunes library it said something about wanting to keep my laptop on all the time

i have a couple of rolling playlists in spotify (for other ppl) and idk whether this is just because i'm on the free version but every time i go in it's so slow, freezes all the time, search function is unreliable etc etc. horrible experience all round.

Maybe it's time to update the app? Before I switched to Premium I had a really old version that I for some reason thought was superior to the new ones and didn't update. Well, it wasn't better.

http://www.thembj.org/2016/06/the-drama-of-artist-payments/

^nothing too new here, but seems a reasonable and of the moment primer
(unless someone wants to disabuse me of that notion?)

_Should_ a song cost as much as an avocado? Discuss.

how ripe is the avocado?

Trying to buy more records new, but most of my records these days are bought off Discogs or the Cat Protection shop in Llandudno

I'm surely not the first to think this, but it just occurred to me that the economy of streaming is very different in that in order for songs to generate profit they need replay value - whereas you only need to sell a copy once, doesn't matter economically if people listen to a cd or not

Yeah -- i have favorite records, like all time favorite records, which I have never listened to more than a couple of times a year just because that's the kind of records they are.

And some conceptual/experimental music is probably not meant to be streamed over and over

The letter and signatories to the letter we've sent to @BorisJohnson this morning.#BrokenRecord pic.twitter.com/i8o9AWGRVs

— Tom Gray #BrokenRecord (@MrTomGray) April 20, 2021

wait, what are the two words??

The "two words" thing is kind of a flourish, but the idea is that there's an "otherwise than" in that particular law that, if removed, would facilitate applying the UK's "equitable remuneration" laws to streaming music by treating it as a form of broadcasting instead of a form of sale.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473

I've read some pretty convincing theories around a possible trajectory for Spotify that gets further away from artist-centric music listening:
-Since they obviously make their money from subscriptions and ads, they only stand to lose money when you listen to music that has publishing/copyright holders.
-It's easy to imagine using machine learning to just generate long, endless AI background music based on your 'preferences'

But how would this square with their current moves toward TikTok-y videos from artists, which sucks in its own way but puts the human element right in front of the listener? Maybe it's a two-pronged approach...get human artists to use 'Discovery' mode and make even less money from listeners in exchange for exposure, and try to wrest eyes from other social media platforms, and then generate infinite copies based on what does well for the listeners who don't care about who makes the music?

sounds about right, what a terrible platform, anything with shareholders turns to garbage