Slashdot Mirror
How Long Will It Take Streaming To Dominate the Music Business?
journovampire writes with this story about the booming music streaming business. "Streaming is on course to make more money for the U.S. music business than downloads and physical sales combined within the next three years. The U.S. appears poised for streaming to become its most valuable music format in either 2016 or 2017, according to MBW forecasts – so long as you include SoundExchange royalties generated by digital radio platforms like Pandora alongside subscription and ad-supported platforms like Spotify. But in the other three biggest recorded music markets in the world – France, Germany and Japan – the public appears more hesitant to allow streaming to take over."
Radio pays much, much less than streaming. The industry does not want anyone comparing streaming to radio, because it disrupts their "Pandora and Spotify are getting rich off the artists backs" narrative.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/17/spotify-royalties-appear-to-be-awfully-high-despite-what-thom-yorke-says/
"So, for a song to be played to one person (which is what Spotify is) the radio play gets .024 pence, the Spotify play gets 0.4 pence."
Streaming really only makes sense to me for disposable music, like modern pop music. You know the stuff. The candy sweet radio friendly tunes that are auto-tuned to hell and EQ'd and processed to sound just like a previously successful pop song. The stuff you can hear a few times then want to turn off the radio if it comes on again. I don't listen to that sort of music, it bores me, so I don't bother with a streaming account.
I'm the sort of person who still buys albums, albeit on CD these days. I only buy the ones from artists which I think have a long shelf life and a lot of re-playability. I like the fact that I can toss on an album I've had for almost 30 years and just listen to it again, without needing an internet connection or a current subscription. I like that I get to hear the 'b-sides', the tracks which don't get promoted or aren't considered good enough for radio / streaming highlighting. I actually enjoy many of those tracks far more than the one or two that are there to sell the album. If an artist can't place 6-10 good tracks on a record, then I'm not really interested in hearing what they have to say.
I rip all my CDs to lossless FLAC, iTunes, and MP3 at the same time, then store the archive quality FLACs on my media server. ITunes can't play back FLAC, so I basically don't use it any more, preferring XBMC to get the job done.
I have about 350 albums now that I own and can playback whenever and wherever I choose without needing an internet connection or the permission of some greedy corporation who lock my playback down to only work on their hardware (I'm looking at you Apple!).
I've been collecting music for about 30 years now and still have access to every track I bought (bar the early stuff on LP). If I subscribed to a service for 30 years, all I'd have at the end is the sense of regret I couldn't listen to any music any more, despite the thousands I had spent on it over the years. That's approximately $5400 at today's rates, about the same as I pay for close to 380 albums. The cost is about the same, but if I stopped collecting today, I'd still have 350 albums to listen to.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
You're basically paying regularly/multiple times to hear the same music you could just pay for/download once.
True. On the other hand you don't have to buy songs you only listen 2 twice, or listen to for a week and then tire of never to listen to them again. Depends on your personality.
The economics becomes a question of do you explore new music more or less than you return to old favorites.
Because your right, if you just like pink floyd, then buy the discography and never pay for music again. Win!
On the other hand if you've got 10,000 tracks in your itunes collection and not one of them has been listened to more than 3 times then what is the point of buying anything ever?
Most of us are somewhere in between those two extremes. And at the right price points streaming becomes more sensible than buying.
I'd take spotify at half the current price. I already sub scribe to netflix.
1) You can't listen to your music when you dont have an active internet connection.
Spotify has offline support. Its not quite as bad as you suggest.
My band(s) has already given up any notion of making any money on digital sales or streams, not to mention CDs. We press records and cassettes these days, and do CDRs of live show recordings and that's it. No CD press runs at all. Weird how it seems we're back in 1992. (CDs basically mean they sit around in boxes in the garage, taking up space. We've sold out of every record and (recently) cassette we've produced. It's still not a huge number (like 300 or so of each.. for a local band that's not bad) and none of us can quit our day jobs, but basically one record or one cassette sale is > everything we've gotten from digital at this point).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I already have enough monthly bills.
Eh. I used to buy at least one CD per month. Each CD cost more than I pay now per month for streaming, and I got a couple of good songs and some filler (most of the time) instead of thousands of good songs.
Yes, I could buy used CDs and store and organize them in my basement and digitize them all myself and store and back the digital files up in my own RAID array, and then they'd be mine, all mine my precioousssssss ...
Or I can just pay 9.95/mo and not worry about any of that. I'll take option B.