Since the early 1890s we’ve had something physical to listen to music on. Starting with wax cylinders, we’ve progressed to reels, vinyl, cassettes, 8-tracks, compact discs and eventually digital players and the digital format popularized in part by MP3.
I recall the days of Napster and Kazaa striking fear and curiosity into the public mindset. It seemed like everyone thought that digital files were going to change the music industry, and I’d argue that it did. The industry adapted with services like iTunes and Rhapsody.
Physical CD sales have been on the decline, and we’ve been seeing more services that offer digital downloads of our favorite music at competitive prices. Cloud services like iTunes and Amazon let us control and listen to our music almost anywhere we choose. However, physical files may also be going the way of compact discs.
These days, I see more and more music streaming services like last.fm, spotify, grooveshark, and pandora giving users options to simply make playlists of whatever music may be available for streaming. Anyone can upload their own music to last.fm and have playlists to listen to on their phones on the go. You can do similar things with spotify and pandora. Most of these services require a subscription fee to get the best portable functionality from them.
Bit Torrent websites are becoming more and more reclusive as government agencies attempt to shut them down, however futile their efforts.
I find it interesting that the trends are towards no longer owning tracks. I’ve always been a big advocate of owning a track, whether it was digitally or physically. I buy plenty of music from iTunes, bandcamp, and Amazon MP3. I no longer buy CDs, but I will still buy vinyl when I want a physical copy. Vinyl is especially great these days since most of them will come with a voucher for the album on MP3 with no DRM.
I really hate the term “cloud” because I think it’s being misused and overused, but I think cloud storage is the way music is heading. More and more people are venturing into territories where owning a physical file is not the highest priority.
What do you think? Are listeners heading away from owning their own music, or are we just temporarily giving into streaming services because of the novelty and convenience?
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Interesting post.
I still like owning tracks. But I like that I don’t have to backup a track if I purchase it from a service that backs it up for me on the “cloud.” I remember back when I was a subscriber to Yahoo! Music service, and I had purchased DRM protected tracks from them. It didn’t matter to me that they were DRM protected until Yahoo! decided to shut down their service. To continue playing the tracks I had purchased, I had to burn them to CD and then rip them back off, just to remove the DRM. What a pain.
I had also bought some tracks from MSN Music, and when they changed their service, I somehow lost my account with them, and now I have DRM protected tracks I purchased from them that I can no longer play. DRM protected tracks that I bought from the American Idol site years ago are also no longer playable. It sucks.
So I stopped paying for tracks with DRM protection. If something changes with a music service, you can easily be stuck with physical files that are worthless. Who wants to own tracks they can’t play? It’s as bad as owning a mangled cassette tape.
While I like having tracks backed up for me on the cloud, I also don’t want to rely solely on a service to store my purchased music for me, because no matter how big companies are, they might still go out of business, or drop their music service, or whatever. So I always download purchased tracks to my local computer, even when it is also backed up in the cloud.
Streaming music avoids the DRM issue and the backup issue, but you are limited to whatever music is available on the streaming service. I like listening to a lot of oldies. Streaming services that carry oldies don’t often carry all the oldies I like to listen to. Moreover, some streaming services, like last.fm, offer different versions of songs than the ones I want to listen to.
Since I have to purchase tracks I like that the streaming services don’t carry, I’ve pretty much given up on the streaming services except when I am in the mood for discovering new music. The streaming services offer recommendations once they know the genres and artists you like, and every so often the recommendations are good. I’ve discovered several artists I now enjoy listening to, and whose tracks I have purchased, by listening to recommended or similar artists on last.fm random radio stations.
Sometimes tracks that aren’t available on the streaming services can be purchased as MP3 files, but sometimes they can’t, and if I can find the tracks on CDs, I’ll buy the CDs. I’ll usually rip tracks from a CD to listen to them digitally, but every so often I like to pop a CD in the CD player and listen to my music that way. And some songs I just like so much, I am rather fond of owning them on something physical I can put on a shelf and point at to say that I own that music, and I’m proud of it.