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Streaming Now Officially the Number One Way We Listen to Music in America (pitchfork.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It's official: according to a new year-end report released by Nielsen, over the course of 2016, streaming became the primary mode of music consumption in the U.S. Overall on-demand audio streams surpassed 251 billion in 2016 -- a 76 percent increase that accounts for 38 percent of the entire music consumption market. Plus, "the on-demand audio streaming share [of total music consumption] has now surpassed total digital sales (digital albums + digital track equivalents) for the first time in history." Nielsen's data is in line with others' findings.
,,, but iTunes is an interface abomination.
It boggles my mind why people are more prepared to keep paying for bandwidth and the associated problems such as connection dependencies, interstitial ads and increased battery usage, rather than just using local memory to store music.
I'm one of the few diehards that likes to listen to FM radio because its simple, couple buttons to press in the car and someone else chooses the music. I'll put up with ads for that.
Guess I'll have to give in at some point and stream my favorite stations over cellular data/4G LTE with a device that can then get the sound into my car stereo somehow.(my current car has an AUX in 3.5mm jack which is handy, but now everyone is deleting the analogue audio jacks from phones lol) which seems kinda somewhat more complicated!
What is everyone else doing?
While the US may still think that "[They] are the World", you really aren't. Not that it would be clear from the title.
umm. radio.. the original multicast streaming service.
So,
whats the difference between streaming music over a wireless connection versus listening to an AM/FM station over an analog tuner?
Fidelity is in the eye of the beholder.
That being said, its all a monetary thing. nothing else..
Curious to know how they obtain these stats. I personally use a local music library that is played through Foobar2000, so most likely not being tracked at all. And I know I'm not alone in this, either. There are plenty of us NOT using the latest and greatest tracking technologies in our every day lives to do the things we've always been able to do anyways without said tracking technologies, so how do we figure into the stats while simultaneously not being tracked?
Freakin' MBA's. There are almost no actual dj's left in the country, all you have is presenters, who play what some idiot 23 yr old MBA, who knows nothing about the local market, or the audience that's followed a station for years, tells them to play.
Late eighties, I was listening to the main rock station in Austin, TX, and they were allegedly doing a sixties afternoon. I vaguely remember one tune by the Stones, one by the Righteous Bros, and nothing else I had ever heard of. I call the DJ, and he said, "don't blame me, I could do a way better job", but the MBA was deciding.
You've had a classical station for decades? You'll only play the Top 40 classical pieces. You've been a progressive rock station for decades, and your audience expects this? Forgedaboutit, you'll play what my market reports tell me you should play, that's popular with a different market segment elsewhere in the country. Yeah, it's a change of format, who cares, all that matters is selling advertising, and nothing else.
All crap, all the time. I stream, so I can listen to actual dj's from around the country who know what their job is about.
I bet a thousand dollars good old fashioned radio is more popular, which would make the statement "streaming became the primary mode of music consumption in the U.S" fake news.
Prove me wrong, bitches.
I can stream 4K video, albeit with a reduced color space, and I can even stream theatrical releases using the same source as a theater. Why isn't anyone offering high resolution audio streaming?
Yay I love free (and ad-free) content!
Music files are great. No DRM, standard format. You can back em up, stream across the network, keep them forever, build new interfaces and integrate music into basically any application or device. I'm almost ashamed to say that I stream. But it's almost exclusively streaming now, Spotify and Soundcloud (and a bit of radio).
Why? Spotify is also brilliant. If you hear about a song or artist during the day, or just think about some music, you bet you can get it on Spotify (in stark contrast to Netflix, which I gave up on before the free trial ended). I use it for parties and for finding new music, and impulse listening. And when I have a subscription, it's hard to justify buying CDs (for the better quality) or downloads.
$ wget http://some.domain/some.song.mp3 &
$ mplayer some.song.mp3
I can start playing the song while it's still being transferred over the network. It's streaming AND being saved locally for future play. They are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Now, you can elect not to save something you transfer and call that "streaming" if you like. But it's purely an artificial restriction. To stream you must transfer it, and to save it locally you must transfer it. The transfer process can be used for either, or both at once.
Maybe it's my work, etc... History but I just can't comprehend the streaming obsession. I'm a sysadmin, and nearly every damned user I have is on Spotify constantly. My wife is on Pandora constantly.
I have a pile of a couple of hundred CD's I've bought over the years I've turned into Oggs and I have digital albums I've bought online and put on my phone, my desktop at home, my desktop at works and everywhere I want my music.
My music works when the Internet is out (which is part of the history I spoke of, I've lived in a seaside shack that lost DSL every time it rained in the past. My music works when I driving in the middle of New Mexico where the FM auto seek just goes in circles and I have 0 bars. My music worked when I worked at the Johnson Space Center in a building that was intentionally shielded in a huge Faraday cage literally built into the outer wall during the cold war to keep Soviet bugs from broadcasting.
I had at least one user who bitched every time time Spotify quit working. I have users that will bitch to upper management if stuff like that doesn't work often enough upper management will tell us to fix it even though it's not company software, not officially authorized to be installed, and has zero to do with getting the job done.
There is nothing preventing these users from bringing music in on their phones and playing it at their desk, nor is there a policy or security apparatus that keeps them from copying a huge load of music files onto their machines.
Why would you leave your music - especially when it's these people who obviously care about it enough to bitch to management - to the whims of bandwidth when you can have it on your own storage that will work even when the powers out as long as your battery holds up?
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The Nielsen report says nothing about how people listen to music. The report is about how people directly pay for music (either through streaming subscriptions or more traditional sales) and does not include radio (the audience isn't paying a direct fee for those, after all) or any other form of listening that isn't directly paid for by the listener.
The only way the headline would ever be valid would be if people purchasing CDs and MP3s listened to them once and then destroyed them, which is almost never going to be the case.
https://youtu.be/T22MTBhU4Zg
http://www.mattmontag.com/music/universals-audible-watermark
on your phone, it's no longet iTunes. it's apple Music. So I think you are a bit dated here. Not that I'm a fan of the new interface either. But I don't like to see apple getting beat up over regurgitated issue like lack of a 3 button mouse.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
the car radio is great for simple eye's free interaction. It's also good for discovering new channels both locally and as you travel. It's a great human interface. Cuing up something on my phone to play it tedious, clumsy and I end up laying the same things too often. Even streaming blows as it's just too complex and too many choices.
Someone needs to make a radio dial like interface for streamed music. limited selections so it stays not complex but evolves in with new music and also has things like NPR or BBC or whatever news channels you like.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't stream my music. While maybe in the future that might be okay, with no data caps, everyone having very very fast internet. But when my Internet it down, as it happens, i still have music to listen to.
My internet goes down, I still have TV shows and movies to watch.
Plus my music is flac quality.
Be seeing you...
Yes, just like radio used to, which is essentially what streaming is. The fact of the matter is that most people aren't really music fans per se, they just enjoy listening to music, just as it has always been. Guessing the poster is too young to remember.
Ten years later, nobody remembers Jango. Yes, it still exists.
The two factors pushing online music streaming (imho) are:
Lack of FM functionality. I had a Nokia phone in 2003 (I can't remember which model), it was one of the first phones with a camera and it also had FM functionality to listen to local radio. So there was no need to dump gigabytes of mp3's onto the phone as I had any FM-station available like a regular radio.
iPhones having limited space (16gb / 32gb etc). Once you've done a few rounds of your favourite albums, or are constantly deleting mp3's to make space for camera pictures/videos, or even get fed up with iTunes being fiddly (instead of a 2-CD album of 32 songs, you have 32 albums of individual songs), you get fed up with the whole thing.
So it makes sense that streaming music is the most-popular given the scenario. However I wonder if it would still be the case if phones stuck with the FM functionality.
AUTOPLAY WHEN I PLUG IT INTO MY CAR USB.
Seriously.
I tried all of the tricks online and finally just got rid of all the music files. This was about 4 years ago and I haven't gone back since. $10/mo for spotify is a pretty effing good ROI in my book!
Sad but true.