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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."
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.