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.

Comments

Why?

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:Why?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The long term problem with streaming is going to be artist compensation. The streaming financing mechanism works in revers - it takes consumer's entire life to "listen" to a track enough times to represent the $1 up front for rights to listen forever. This means the artist gets their $1 over 10-50 years rather than up front. This is really bad for new, mediocre, or unpopular artists while being "ok" for established artists that can afford to live on 1/10th the pay at time of track release.

THIS. Streaming is definitely convenient for many people, but it's a terrible deal for artists, generally speaking. Spotify, for example, pays out less than half a cent per stream (less, I think, for the "free" listeners, rather than the paid accounts). So, if you account for the fact that online download sources are taking a cut, the revenue might be around 70 cents for a downloaded track. A specific user would have to listen to that track well over 100 times to bring in the same revenue.

How many tracks in your music collection do you listen to more than 100 times in a reasonable span of time? I suppose it depends on what sort of user you are. Some people have favorite songs on playlists that they'll literally listen to thousands of times. Others have thousands of songs and rarely listen to anything more than a dozen or so times. Most people are probably somewhere in the middle.

As AC noted, the issue isn't necessarily unworkable by major artists who already have established careers and reputations. But for some new or lesser-known musicians, getting a $10 fee for albums or a $1/track fee may just provide enough trickle of revenue to keep them going with a hobby and lead them to try to do more stuff that will get broader attention. If that revenue (which might be only the thousands or even hundreds of dollars) is now reduced by an order of magnitude in streaming revenue, that may not be enough for artists to stay interested.

I know there's this popular myth around that artists are "creators" and will just create stuff no matter what -- they have some "impulse" to do so. That may be true to some extent. But most people also have bills to pay, too. Having a few hundred or a few thousand dollars coming in extra may justify taking all that extra time in evenings and on the weekends to try to "make it" as an artist... or at least justify an ongoing hobby. But at some point for every artist it's just not worth it.

I'm a pretty decent keyboardist. I used to play for a lot of weddings (and funerals and other events). It's INSANE the kind of prices people pay for wedding crap, so I could easily rake in money that way if I want to. And I'd be sharing my talent and whatever too. But the stress and the hassle of weddings just became not worth it to me. (It's just the craziest day in most people's lives.) Now instead tell me that my revenue for playing at a wedding was an order of magnitude lower -- a few small bills rather than a few hundred dollars? No way I'd have played more than a service or two before quitting that stuff.

Re:Why?

[deadwill69]

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 have a few reasons this works for me. After spending almost 20 years building up a digital music library it boils down to time and money.

Time: My first foray into this was ripping my own CD's and Napster. Napster for the one-of-songs from albums/cassettes/CD's that I lost long ago and felt no strong desire to re-purchase for the one song I liked. CD's were a major pain. I ripped some 1200 of them on 1x to 4x burners. (I still have the manual for the 1x Tascam in the basement. Probably have to old Tascam too) Took a year. Then format's got better. Re-rip at 12x. And again a few years later on many of them at 20x. I managed to amass a collect of over 600,000 mp3, mp4, Wav, and other files. Then I went through and re-imported to get back to higher quality mp3s and get rid of all the separate formats. Keeping it clean, readable, searchable was a part-time job. CDDB didn't exsist and all of this was manually entered. Hell, I'm sure there's a large amount of this data dumped into CDDB after it finally came about.

Then their is the whole mess of players. When I started there was only WinAmp that could handle more than 8 or 10k songs in a library. Then came iTunes and somewhere around there AOL bought WinAmp. They could handle 100k with ease and was quite a nice interface at the time (I still have an old mac 8600 with iTunes 1.1 on it and it still runs great). As time went on, new players came and went. Export library, import to the next or just start from scratch and wait days for my library to import. No fun going days with out music while your waiting for your library to import. Again. Or computer dies and you start over. iTunes still is the only player that reliably will load my library. (I've done VLC-not very user friendly last I tried, xbox- just sucks, XMBC, etc) All the major and some of the minor just can't handle over 20 or 30 k reliably last I tried and very few had/have the functionality of iTunes. (It's been a few years now since I tried last) So now, I have a computer in my stereo that is dedicated to only music. It runs iTunes, but I now have a wife and kids. This means I don't have the time to devote to maintenance or much else. I could turn the machine on and fire up player of choice that loads 600k songs, but it's just easier to launch Pandora Free (I'll do adds if you don't charge) or youtube and hit a playlist. It takes 3 seconds and I can be ensured a relative easy evening of musical pleasure. Then add on the continuing cost of keeping your collection updated with the latest music you do like. This is an ongoing task that just seems like more work.

It's like owning a home, at some point you pay someone else to do the things that no longer make financial sense or you don't want to do anymore. I still don't mind yard work, but I'll call a roofer in a second. It's not worth my time to maintain a music library for regular consumption, so I let someone else do it for me. As for mobile, I read books or listen to the radio. I'm quite comfortable with radio hell and it gives me something to bitch about later.

Will

Ps. I hate iTunes and have since abandon Macs except for my historical machines that are mostly for sentimental reasons than anything else. Oh nostalgia!

Stats

[darkain]

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?