That's the end of....owning music?
Okay, I've lurked on emusers for years - at some point in my emusic tenure I found this site. I've dutifully sorted through Bandcamp Goodies and Lecture on Free Stuff as well as tried various different sites for downloading music. I don't even remember their names. Oh wait, I do: Mtracks, Limewire (the legal download service), and of course Guvera - Blue Note for free.
I quit Emusic long time back, right when the first major arrived and the price soared. Still, I've pulled together a music library of over four thousand albums, and the only thing shady in the collection is the ethically dubious copying of library CD's.
My latest download failure was Drip. Cool site, enjoyed digging deeply into different labels, but when it went asunder, I decided to go join the masses. Truth is with 4000 albums in your collection, a new album might get listened to twice, perhaps three times if I love it, in a two-year period.
In that time, I have amassed quite a little musical setup for deep listening, several mid-fi headphones like Hifiman 500 and Senns 650 along with some great amps. And when Drip sent out their death memo (it's official on Friday), I started by looking into streaming.
I joined Tidal because I have the equipment that merits streaming lossless. The site itself is bizarre. Everything is hip hop on the front page, so I quickly zoom past to my "album favorites" where I have stacked up three hundred or so albums to explore for the next couple months. Then I'll reload.
And that's it. I think I'm done ever paying a penny for music beyond the subscription fee. It's kind of sad. These artists aren't getting my money unless I see them at shows, and that rarely happens. And I don't think I've ever heard intentionally a Jay Z album, and he's getting my monthly fee for Tidal.
I don't know if anyone can make me feel better or worse, but there you go.
I quit Emusic long time back, right when the first major arrived and the price soared. Still, I've pulled together a music library of over four thousand albums, and the only thing shady in the collection is the ethically dubious copying of library CD's.
My latest download failure was Drip. Cool site, enjoyed digging deeply into different labels, but when it went asunder, I decided to go join the masses. Truth is with 4000 albums in your collection, a new album might get listened to twice, perhaps three times if I love it, in a two-year period.
In that time, I have amassed quite a little musical setup for deep listening, several mid-fi headphones like Hifiman 500 and Senns 650 along with some great amps. And when Drip sent out their death memo (it's official on Friday), I started by looking into streaming.
I joined Tidal because I have the equipment that merits streaming lossless. The site itself is bizarre. Everything is hip hop on the front page, so I quickly zoom past to my "album favorites" where I have stacked up three hundred or so albums to explore for the next couple months. Then I'll reload.
And that's it. I think I'm done ever paying a penny for music beyond the subscription fee. It's kind of sad. These artists aren't getting my money unless I see them at shows, and that rarely happens. And I don't think I've ever heard intentionally a Jay Z album, and he's getting my monthly fee for Tidal.
I don't know if anyone can make me feel better or worse, but there you go.
Comments
But for me, streaming is just a supplement. You can't even listen to ECM on Spotify, not to mention much of the more-obscure jazz in my library. I do finding myself buying more CDs (esp sets with nice packaging and info), as I perceive that they have better value than mp3's. But eMusic still has the best prices on downloadable music. If I'm going to pay a modest monthly amount, I'd rather spend it on music I know I like and want to keep...Not what Spotify happens to have the licensing for.
1. Some of my favorite music is not on the streaming services. It can only be purchased. (This is not just all the obscure ambient music I listen to - I have quite a few CDs that were in print runs of 50-100 and can't be streamed - but bigger things like ECM).
2. (It might be that this is actually #1) I enjoy the actual process of sifting and collecting and organizing and rating and finding and bargain hunting. I don't want a huge heap of other people's music just sitting there. It's a hobby. Curating playlists still does not feel the same. Streaming playlists is not a substitute any more than sifting through other people's mailboxes would be a substitute for a stamp collector or a walk in the park is a substitute for house plants (or find your own better analogy). As hobbies go it is not particularly expensive (I spend way less on music than some folk I know spend on their sports) and I enjoy it. (Tied in here somewhere is all that research in psychology and economics that says we ascribe greater value/quality to things in which we have specifically invested resources - sometimes the buying is part of the caring, and I don't want to care less about the core part of my music; this might be a distinct consideration, the long-term effect on self and relationship to music, who knows.)
3. Some of my favorite artists are sufficiently not-popular that the amount they are ever going to get from streaming is microscopic. I am not going to hear them live because they are often in distant locations, The only real way to support them is to buy their releases. You can't support everyone, but I'd like to support some of them.
4. A great deal of my listening is offline, (Walking to work, on planes, etc) I know you can do offline listening with the streaming services, so this might be mostly what processes I am most used to, but I like having my own music with me without feeling I am renting it.
5. Who knows how long the current streaming services are going to last? I am still not entirely comfortable with the idea that I pay in money regularly and then for whatever reason may at some point have no access. (Of course this is mitigated by your existing 4000 album library, and I also use streaming as a complement to my purchased music. Not everything needs to be bought.)
The more serious conversation I have with myself from time to time is not should I quit buying and just stream, but should I concentrate my buying more, quit buying lots of bargains to spread my buying widely and focus the budget on a few choice things that might be more expensive, such as deluxe editions and the like. But the actual logic of discovering things does not always work that way, or maybe it is just that old habits die hard. I still can't resist an emusic booster sale.
@Greg if you are using iTunes, there used to be a feature to have your ipod wiped and reloaded with a random selection of songs. I never used that feature but it could make it easier to hear more of your collection on the go; if you do that every time you need to recharge the ipod.
This might be via kickstarter or bandcamp, but many times I will go to a bluegrass festival and buy two or three CDs (probably overpriced compared to iTunes), but I know the band is getting 100% of the profit in that sort of context.
/edit - I see GP mentioned something like this..../
1. At least 80% of the stuff I've downloaded is stuff I own, it's just easier to download it.
2. I find myself missing my own Amazon account with my stuff in it.
3. The stuff I download that I don't have, like right now I'm listening to DS2 by Future, I find the whole time I'm listening I'm wondering if is something I should buy instead of just listening. And also kind of wondering if I might not rather be listening to something I own, like the Purple Reign mixtape by Future.
I think different people have different degrees of tolerance for owning vs. renting, and obviously a lot of us are on a fringe. Also it differs by media. My brother has a huge movie collection; I have like 5 movies. And I get a little bummed when a movie or show leaves Netflix, but I just move on, where if any album I have gets corrupted I'd be upset...
For me, this is the crucial point (and, since it's a cognitive bias, I think one that applies to many people). It's called the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect - people value things they've purchased more than things they haven't. That heavily impacts my own habits - I stream plenty, maybe 25% or so, but the endowment effect plays a significant factor in that I own the other 75% of my listening.
And it's also interesting that the effect applies to digital music - for some reason it makes a difference to me to have those ones and zeroes on a hard drive in my house as opposed to temporarily on my phone, even if that temporarily could effectively be very long time.
I like that Discover Weekly mix. It's been a good way to learn about new artists or tracks.
I think I will go back to buying more music regularly, most likely a mix of physical and digital albums. I definitely like the idea of supporting artists, especially from smaller labels.
It's like having a radio station
with 700,000 tunes of my own choosing.
I'm not sure how many 'songs' I've got these days. There are maybe 300K in one library and 25K in the other, with some amount of overlap. But I can stop anytime I want.
(Lots there though, so inject sparingly)
that I'm glad I bought 20 years ago in physical form,
because it has a great big booklet with lots of info.
(which is not to say that a physical copy isn't still better than a pdf.)
I don't think I consume music the way many of you do it. I tend to think of some particular music track or style and want to listen to that specific piece of music, sometimes over and over again. I don't need Pandora gatekeeping my music listening.
When I am in the mood for random listening there are a gazillion streaming sites that that will fill that need, most at no cost. My personal favorite right now is Satelite radio mostly for the jazz and because they are pretty flexible in terms of allowing you to listen to the type of jazz you prefer.
When the zombie apocalypse occurs and there is no internet for streaming I can still put my hard drive on random play and listen to my own tracks.
I guess renting and owning music is similar to owning or renting your home. Different strokes for for different folks. Everybody's needs are different.
I am with you on this one. I almost never listen randomly. 95% of the time I choose a specific album, I almost always listen to the whole album, and when I do occasionally listen to playlists they are ones that I have specifically constructed to be like themed albums. That's why I don't listen to radio much, Internet or analog. Random listening feels to me like having someone read random pages from random books all the time in the background; there's no time to really focus in on the story and start getting the nuances.
but, for me, I wouldn't equate it with random track listening,
because I'm not listening for stories.
To each his own
What really disrupted my listening habits was the cassette tape. Making mixed tapes of the music I wanted to hear, sequenced the way I wanted ("themed albums" as you call it), changed everything for me. I got to the point that making a tape felt as if I was playing my music collection like an instrument. The 45 minute time restriction seemed to help foster a sense of craft in creating an enjoyable playlist.
These days I get a kick out of being able to use the tags I assign to generate programmable playlists. I've even kicked around the idea to create a post about some of the playlists I use to encourage others to share their playlist ideas; could be interesting.
Anyway enjoy your album listening - nothing wrong with that. Some artists put a lot of thought into their disc's sequence. I'm sure they would be happy to hear that people are consuming music the way they expected.
I remain very suspicious of streaming service's discoverability feature. Pandora was pretty awful about that. Somehow Beyonce keeps getting on everybody's playlist -- wonder why. Even the smart playlists seemed to have a commercial logic behind it.
I'm sure you are aware of the pitiful streaming royalties. Buying albums is much more profitable for artists, although I have to wonder how much of a cut they get when you buy things from emusic.
A while back, I tried to give donations to artists for creative commons artists. I gave $20 to each of them. I saw that many artists were uncomfortable with asking for donations though.... (You can see which ones I donated to and how to download their stuff here).
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/special/11-incredible-musicians-you-can-download-for-free-best-of-jamendo/
I think the important thing is recognizing that just using a streaming service is not an adequate enough way to show your support for artists. You have to do more than just pay for spotify. (Ironically when rdio went under, the biggest casualty was emusic, because it was harder for me to listen to albums to decide whether I wanted to purchase them).
It's hard to maintain music collections on the file system. (I currently have about 190,000 music files, and that's not including the flac files and backup files). My amarok music player can handle this collection fairly well, but I have to admit that keeping it maintained and well-organized is a bitch. Also, the storage space is always increasing. Also I frequently forget about huge amounts of music. A lot of the playlists have to be made manually. I had to start a spreadsheet just to keep track of which albums I loved and which ones I did not. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pDSA9n3k2UkXczGgSglTbTkUyNQRC6PonQDu7xPTtCc/edit#gid=98756300
One thing about streaming services is that they are similar to the blanket licenses which were issued outside USA. (basically it divvied royalties according to plays). But 1)bigger labels learned how to game the system and 2)it set absolute limits on the money for the music business. I'd like to think that music business has the potential to grow, and is not merely a finite amount of cash which all musicians compete for.
I think I read somewhere that the average amount spent by American adults per year is about $15. If you factor out the people who pay nothing, it actually jumps up to $50/year. I'm sure most of us pay more than $100 per year, maybe substantially more. What I'd like is to see people spend their money in a way that optimizes support for artists.
To summarize: I support owning stuff because it is more likely to provide benefits to the artists. I support streaming to the extent that it helps you to buy more things by the artist.