You are sitting in a chair in the sky.
I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee. In the 90s I was buying CDs with five good songs and five filler for £15. In the 2000s I was finding stuff that I could pirate, downloading it, and playing it on my beige desktop computer because there was no such thing as a smartphone.
Any music? Nope. Maybe the popular stuff that plays on the radio.
There is a site [0] that ranks how “mainstream” one’s listening habits are based on their last.fm profile.
Punching in my username, I get ranked as 12% mainstream (i.e., only 12% of last.fm users listen to music more obscure than mine). Keep in mind, this is relative to last.fm users, whose musical tastes are probably more obscure than the general population.
Approximately 95% of my lossless library is on Spotify or Apple Music. So I’d say they’re doing a pretty good job maintaining a comprehensive catalog.
Apple Music has a feature based on iTunes Match that will take your local files and attempt to match them based on their metadata and audio fingerprint.
The last time I used it, from my (then) ~5000 song library, it matched ~3600. That means that a good third of the music I listen to is not available in the same exact version on streaming services.
I dug into why, and reasons include:
- The LPs were never licensed properly. Such as Exmilitary by Death Grips, which is a bootleg release with copyright issues.
- The artist hasn't signed up for streaming, like it used to be the case with Tool. Or they only stream on one platform and not another. Dr. Dre and Jay-Z come to mind. All three artists I mentioned in this bullet are "really mainstream."
- The version I like is not the streaming release. I like the casette version of Ashes 2 Ashes, Dust 2 Dust by Tommy Wright III, but not the CD reissue.
- The artist is actually too niche. I have quite a few things in my collection from Bandcamp or Soundcloud that don't exist elsewhere.
- The release is "weird." Like the radio stations from the classic GTA games.
This is not an obscure artist. They have over 1 million subscribers.
Sure, maybe you won’t find that one band from the 90s you loved that played a few shows and only ever recorded anything on tapes that have been obscured over time.
But one of the reasons I use streaming over the radio is because streaming libraries offer 1000x times the diversity of any radio station or chart.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/5ph69t/why_does_sp...
That is unfortunate. In the early 2000s, I was cleaning up buying used CDs for $1 on Half.com and Amazon.
The whole thing about "1 good song on a 10-song album" is a remnant of Steve Jobs' iPod marketing pitch designed to get people buying songs piecemeal for 99c on iTunes.
Regular people buy music if they want to support the artist. Trying to maximize the number of good songs per dollar spent is a kind of alien calculus that's led us down this path of algorithm-driven one-hit-wonder hell.
Yup. I remember people used claim "piracy would ruin the quality of music" - but the truth is, it's these streaming services that are killing the art of the album.
And it's a worse experience than the chairs in the sky we used to sit in the 50s and 60s...
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/vintage-airplane-phot...
>I can play any music I want right now for a £10/month fee.
Which is not that great in itself.
Streaming is for the 5% of the people obsessed with variety over building a relationship with select music (and who does that while claiming its a "false dichotomy"), and casual listening skimmers (the 95%).
You can still buy music on Apple Music, it's not copy protected if I recall correctly, then play it back in WinAmp. That would currently be the best experience from both eras.
Having music only on your desktop computer and takes space isn't the best experience for the absolute majority of people. But it's good that the ones who want can still do that.
A chair in the sky is great.
But in the 1990s we were travelling without moving through the aggregate of everybody's music collection that they already paid for.
In the 2000s we were using idle bandwidth to move the distribution cost closer to zero than ever before.
In light of that, I wonder if in a decade you'll be praising an uncomfortable sardine can that drags us across the desert with better than 25% departure delays.
It sounds as if you are claiming that because person X already paid for a CD, everybody else connected to them via Napster has a right to listen to that music. If so, I disagree. People complain that Spotify et al. underpay musicians. Piracy pays them zero.
Meanwhile: I pay once for all the music on Spotify; I can listen to stuff like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0T-H-fVlHE0 which was never available pirated; anything I want starts playing within seconds; and it's conveniently provided to me on my phone, along with playlists that regularly find me music and podcasts I like. Which aspect was better in the 2000s?
