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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?
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?
whats the difference between streaming music over a wireless connection versus listening to an AM/FM station over an analog tuner?
If listening to Spotify you get to choose the music. If listening to radio station the DJ picks it.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
LMOL umm no you don't choose the music. The music is selected for you...jackass.
What?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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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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?
Tidal has just started to offer a few days ago. It's included in the Hifi subscription and only works on the desktop clients for now.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
$ wget http://some.domain/some.song.m... &
$ 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.
You are simply not getting it. All streaming services I know have a download option. The real difference is a rental subscription vs buying non-DRM copies. Whether the economics work out depends on your listening habits.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
LMOL umm no you don't choose the music. The music is selected for you...jackass.
Funny, I thought I remembered searching for a song this morning and playing it on Spotify this morning ... guess I didn't realize I was really living in your universe.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
no stupid, on the free version you can customize your stations and the paid subs you can create your own playlists and only listen to what you want to listen to
Tidal HiFi is 16/44.1, i.e. CD quality, so it's not necessarily a reproduction of the studio master, which could be e.g. 24/44.1, 24/88.2, 24/96, 24/192, various DSD formats, etc.
The Hifi subscription is CD quality and has always existed in Tidal of course. What I mean is the newly launched Tidal Masters, which is part of the Hifi subscription and delivers 96 kHz/24 bit. See http://tidal.com/masters
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
Thanks for that. I didn't see a link to Masters anywhere on tidal.com. Another thing I can't find: a publicly searchable catalog. Do you have to join to preview "curated" selections?
For me, Masters shows up as the third panel on the homepage. But no worries, I'm glad I could help. I believe that in a browser you can search by going to the hamburger menu top right, then click web player. Or try to go to https://listen.tidal.com/ directly. But they also have a free one-month trial period.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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...
The only reason these songs were mastered in such a high sample rate / bit depth is to reduce artifacts when blending multitrack audio into a single output. There is no reason not to downsample that to 48KHz/44.1KHz, because human hearing is incapable of hearing the difference.
I'm not sure what the benefit of a higher bit depth is when you're already listening to music with the dynamic range crushed out of it. 16-bit is a pretty wide range of volume already, thought I could see 24-bit being reasonably worthwhile.
Someone mod this up, seriously. What's the point of a high-quality stream if it's going to be degraded like this.
Damn - I guess I didn't just open up a Leonard Cohen album and have it playing... Someone else did that...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Because it's completely pointless. You can't hear any difference anyway.
Eat the rich.
There is literally no audible difference at all.
Eat the rich.