So Much Streaming Music, Just Not in One Place | Hacker News Reader

So Much Streaming Music, Just Not in One Place

nytimes.com

54 pointshvo55 comments

The glory days of media companies are over. Record labels aren't needed to distribute music. Cable companies aren't needed to distribute shows.

I have Spotify and Netflix subscriptions and that's about it.

It's certainly annoying that some artists aren't on Spotify but I feel like that's not a winning strategy for them in the long term.

I'm not going to have replaced cable and CDs and bootleg mp3s with juggling subscriptions to 10 different services.

I'm going to be content with the content that is available.

I'm totally fine not hearing the new Kanye album. I can listen to his old albums or one of the infinitely other great rap or hip hop albums on Spotify.

And if I'm not listening to the new album, I'm not DJing from it, falling in love with it, and buying tickets to the world tour. I doubt he'll have any trouble selling tickets though.

Netflix has it tougher with video. They don't have nearly the breadth of content to keep everyone happy in the first place, and re-watching the classics isn't as satisfying for video.

So their strategy of producing originals is brilliant.

I expect and hope Spotify does the same. They already have killer live Spotify sessions. And they are doing more and more to promote new artists through discovery tools. A Spotify record label could be rad.

If artists don't want to play, they don't have to.

Spotify is hiring aggressively from record labels. Not sure if they are going after the A&R folks, though.

And then there is the longstanding rumor that Jimmy Iovine creates an Apple record label. I wouldn't be surprised if this is going on right now.

(No idea how Apple, Inc. deals with the Beatles' Apple Corps. in the music trademark world, though...Those two have legally tangled in the past.)

Buy them and shut them down.

> ... it can be frustrating for consumers that no single outlet has everything.

I'm not sure there's a better example of first world problems. I know this frustration as well, but for me it's a perfect reminder that maybe the ability to stream any song at any time isn't that big of a deal in the broader picture. One could say that the issue here is really corporate control of creative properties, but I'd wager that most people would be perfectly happy with someone like Apple controlling everything if it meant they could listen to any artist at any time.

Well, yeah, but you could say that about anything. Having a machine to toast your bread isn't that big of a deal in the broader picture either, you know? But people buy lots of toasters, which means there will be plenty of toaster-industry people worrying whether the current toaster experience is optimal.

Nope. Prices would be dictated by them.

Also I'm not convinced by this steady stream of "first world problem" laments. It's like your uncle saying "you're lucky you don't live in Africa" when you're a kid. Even if you got your hand cut off he'd pipe up "I saw a kid with no arms - happy as could be, quit your moaning!".

I'm not sure there's a better example of first world problems.

You forgot to remind us how if we're not paying, we're the product and not the customer, and something something Betteridge. Now that we've gotten the obvious out of the way, let's move on.

but I'd wager that most people would be perfectly happy with someone like Apple controlling everything if it meant they could listen to any artist at any time.

I don't know if I'd be happy with it, as a single controlling entity can't end well, but my streaming habits work as if that were true: Apple Music is my sole paid streaming provider (though I listen to a few sources that are donation-only). I'm not "frustrated", but I'm not going to juggle more than that.

Hence, it's probably worse on the artists than the listeners. Me, if it's not on Apple Music then I probably won't ever notice the difference. The artist, however, has to make sure they have all of the services covered.

> The artist, however, has to make sure they have all of the services covered.

There are "middlemen" services that do exactly this for artists, but can still be cost-prohibitive for the really small-time acts.

I'm in a minority who actually seek out these artists, and yes, it is incredibly frustrating that I pay for Apple Music, but for some of the bands I really care about, I need to open up the Bandcamp app, or the Soundcloud app. I always make sure to bug them on their Facebook pages to let them know their presence is missed on Apple Music.

Although, I'm obviously more likely to pay for an album if I have to go through the Bandcamp gateway. Makes me feel good about myself, and gets actual money to the artists, so there are benefits compared to the streaming services' model of paying artists fractions of a cent per play.

I think we are the opposite, I have found nothing nothing but frustration in the apple music. Shitty interface, short samples, bloated as a three day dead whale AND proprietary.

I however love bandcamp and soundcloud. They have changed the way I discover music. Not so much listen to music, that's still a download it and play it myself sort of thing.

The only reasonable way to go is buy/download music DRM-free and store high-quality files on your own HDD. I've been burnt too many times. Youtube taking down files. Grooveshark disappearing. Newgrounds outages. Never again. I like a song, I hunt it down and download it, whatever tools it takes to do so. In general I download everything I like from the internet because it's gonna disappear. When I look at my old bookmarks, like 50% are defunct now.

This. I used to be a strong proponent of owning music, until rd.io. I loved rd.io, and used it as a sandbox -- If I really enjoyed an album / song / artist, then I would get the files. But, after a few years with rd.io I started to get a bit more cavalier about ensuring that I had a copy of the music.

Fast-forward to the end of last year: rd.io shutdown. I've tried a few other services since, each with its own share of problems (I'm currently on Google Music). Now, anything I like, I download. With hard drive space, and backups, it seems significantly simpler to assume that any song can disappear tomorrow.*

* While a service disappearing is a relatively rare event, content churn has always made missing songs a somewhat frequent event. However, for me, rd.io's shutdown emphasized the general incompatibility between the expectations I have for music, (anything I have listened to in the past, I can listen to in the present) and the realities of what a subscription service can deliver. And so, previous annoyances turned into a line in the sand.

We don't speak of grooveshark disappearing. Never. My playlists :( The next one that'll hurt is if/when soundcloud pivots a bit too far. Funny how the best platform for listening to music online without having to think about it is YT nowadays

Ah I missed the good old days of caching everything locally.

If you were enjoying groovesharks services, you're unlikely to be the target audience for paying for stuff.

You are mistaken. I spend a lot of money on music. If I think a composition is deserving of compensation, I will most likely buy the album even if I find a free download link. I didn't use grooveshark much but there were some songs that were extremely hard to find in other places.

Even if a streaming service was guaranteed not to disappear after a couple of years, licensing agreements and conflicts mean that content can simply disappear from the service after a while.

With the ever lowering price of storage, simply syncing my digitized music library to my computing devices offers the best experience.

What should (but will never) happen, is an agreed upon streaming API that arbitrary clients can connect to. Pay for a subscription and you can use (Amazon, iTunes, Spotify) from a single application. The only trick will be the application will no doubt need to placate rights holders that no saving of streaming-only content is going on, which will mean some kind of DRM.

Ha, one can dream. I'd love to see something like this for books too.

I stream my own music from Ampache, and their are many clients, but I don't know of any commercial offerings.

Am I the only one that sees this as a good thing? The only real holdouts are some of the top selling artists, the ones who, in my opinion, already get way too much attention. If a few people end up trying something new because they can't immediately stream the latest Kanye or Taylor Swift, I think the world will be a better place for it.

You aren't, just understand the medium through which NYTimes expresses its viewpoint favors a "Centralized" model of everything.

Disclaimer: my own blog - https://blog.thekyel.com/?anchor=piracy

This is really, IMO, an economic problem. I'd love us to have a system where these artists can just release their music, in the format they want, and the consumers can grab it. Unfortunately, we're still stuck in the old business mindset of selling physical CD's. And, as our economic model is based on selling a physical product, we don't really have a solid way of making sure the artist gets paid, so we jump through logic-hoops to make it happen.

If you like Classical, Baroque, Jazz, or a couple of others

try http://stream.psychomed.gr/

44khz 320kbit no ads, no talking

I am just a happy listener

This is great and it comes just as several Dutch AVRO stations discontinue streaming, so I am actively looking for replacements. AVRO streams were 256kbit, and no talking ever - perfect!

You can find a decent list of streaming classical stations here, but many have occasional announcements and some do news breaks with extended talking. http://www.listenlive.eu/classical.html

For the simplest and lightest-weight streaming on Linux try Radio Tray (https://bitbucket.org/carlmig/radio-tray) which might be in your repos already.

How is this different than cable vs satellite television programming? I could say "So much on television, just not in one place."

There's no such thing as a "DirecTV original program." Satellite and cable are just two ways to deliver the same bundle of programming channels.

Actually, Directv does have the Audience network for original programming.

...and when was the last time it aired something culturally significant?

Now there's a pretentious remark if I've seen one. What you consider not culturally significant, someone else might consider entertaining. And entertainment value is somewhat important in the television and music industries, FYI.

Huh? Why are you suggesting that entertainment and cultural significance are two separate things? Entertaining things are culturally significant. Breaking Bad and Big Bang Theory are both culturally significant.

My point was "when was the last time they made something that would impact on someone's overall choice of TV provider?". The lack of either Big Bang Theory or Breaking Bad might make that choice for a person.

>"when was the last time they made something that would impact on someone's overall choice of TV provider?"

Again, what you consider entertaining or significant is your business. But to claim the entire network has no value to anyone else on Planet Earth, well...

>But to claim the entire network has no value to anyone else on Planet Earth, well...

I cannot see this claim being made by anyone. Care to link to that claim?

I was responding to the comment that the network had nothing culturally significant.

>...and when was the last time it aired something culturally significant?

And yet you haven't been able to name something culturally significant on the network.

Streaming channels typically stream mainly the music of established artists, not original music. So the analogy still seems similar to me.

That's not always been true. Before it was available as an over-the-top service, NFL Sunday Ticket was only available on DirecTV, making it basically a DirecTV original program.

Even then, there are several stations that are only available on certain providers. Locally, our cable company produces a local news channel. It's not available anywhere else.

If a consumer is paying fees to multiple companies, then the rights holders can collect more in royalties and licensing agreements than if they were dealing with one entity.

I have a Spotify subscription, a Spotify account in the UK I access through my VPN, and my wife has Apple Music that we share on family plan. US Spotify has most of what I listen to, UK Spotify has some guilty pleasure girl groups (Girls Aloud, The Saturdays) and Apple Music as the best selection of K-pop in the US.

Think of how many albums you could add to your permanent music collection for that $300 a year! Before you know it, you would own everything you want to listen to, and wouldn't have to keep paying a monthly fee to rent access to it.

About 30-50 I would guess. You can easily listen to more than that with a streaming service.

This only works if the albums you enjoy are a static set. New releases and discovering existing but unknown albums means you are already paying a recurring cost if you buy all of your content. The main advantage of owning over renting is that you can keep your existing collection if you stop paying.

>The main advantage of owning over renting is that you can keep your existing collection if you stop paying.

Clearly. It's not your collection if you're only renting access to it.

Do you think you discover 30 albums per year worth buying and adding to your collection? I listen to a lot of music, and I certainly don't.

> Do you think you discover 30 albums per year worth buying and adding to your collection? I listen to a lot of music, and I certainly don't.

How do you discover albums/songs?

I simply don't have the time I used to to spend "discovering" music. I used spend a lot of time combing through DJ record pools (a habit I got from DJing many years ago when I subscribed to some) and using that to find stuff I'd like, in addition to terrestrial radio, going to clubs/bars, finding stuff on YouTube, and just randomly hearing music "in the wild".

I've been doing streaming services for the past few years now (one at time, but I've done several). Most of the streaming services make it easy to customize playlists, or turn a playlist into a "radio" station that plays similar songs (but that's still customizable), and I've found this is an awesome way for me to discover music. I've found a ton of stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have known about (and I think I spend less time per new song/album/artist I find and like vs what I used to spend listening to record pools).

I started using some of the free (versions of) services, then switched to paid to get unlimited skips and offline support for my phone.

I also used to spend a lot of time copying music around and keeping it refreshed: SD card for my car, MP3s on my laptop/iPod to bring to work or travelling, and main collection on my server for the living room HTPC or my personal PC. All of that is obsolete, I just stream everything and with zero effort, have the same playlists everywhere. I use my phone + bluetooth in my car. I do have some stuff downloaded (and auto-refreshing) on my phone for travelling, but I stopped worrying about it because I'm generally way under my data cap while streaming (no doubt thanks to caching).

For the past year and a half, I've been using Google Play Music. Killer feature there is I can 'upload' any song/album I already own and it's seamlessly integrated into the service -- which means I can listen on any device, and some songs even show up on other radio stations I've created.

I'm not totally okay with not 'owning' the stuff, but I feel I am getting decent value for what I pay, and that includes my ability to just listen to music. If the service I use shuts down or changes significantly, I'll reconsider my relationship with the music industry at that point.

> Clearly. It's not your collection if you're only renting access to it.

I never said it was.

> Do you think you discover 30 albums per year worth buying and adding to your collection? I listen to a lot of music, and I certainly don't.

I certainly don't spend that much on music. Most of what I listen to is simply through Amazon Prime, which I would pay for even without the music portion. Even if you prorate is based on the services I use, which is subjective as to specific costs per service, it's not much.

Most audio streaming apps have terrible UI across platforms. Spotify and Saavn are the only ones that are satisfactory and useful and I end up sticking with those.

I am ready to not listen to artists I like if they're going to make me jump through hoops and cause frustration just to listen to them.

I went through a maddening period recently of trying to find something, anything that met the following criteria:

1. Lossless playback. I am willing to / currently pay for it. I don't care if it's a placebo--I think I can hear the difference when I'm listening through good headphones and a reasonable quality DAC. Plus, some musicians like Neil Young have made this a not-odious condition for being on a service.

2. Best effort on catalog. A huge catalog isn't actually super important for reasons stated below. Amazon's catalog is a little on the sparse side, but the others' are fine.

3. Allow personal user-uploaded tracks, and stream them back to the uploader account losslessly. This allows me to backfill the crazy and not so crazy stuff I've purchased over the years that is not on any of the streaming services.

4. Support a reasonable number of devices such that I don't have to choose between Prime Video and your streaming music service on my TV (to which my hifi equipment connects digitally). Right now I'm running Tidal (best compromise for me) sideloaded on a FireTV.

Or distilled to first principles: "Allow me to enjoy the convenience of streaming music, while allowing me to access any content I wish (even if I must pay for it), at the same quality I experienced when I was 16 shopping at the local record store."

Nobody does this.

Google Play Music: Not lossless; doesn't support FireTV because arbitrary corporate bickering reasons. Props for self-uploaded tracks.

Amazon Prime Music: Not lossless (worst encoding). Props for self-uploaded tracks.

Apple Music: Not lossless; limited device support. Props for self-uploaded tracks, however the interface to self-uploaded tracks and streaming music not really well integrated on AppleTV.

Spotify: Not lossless; no self-uploaded tracks.

Tidal: No self-uploaded tracks.

Deezer Elite: Only available in lossless on Sonos. Props for amazing catalog and self-uploaded tracks.

In terms of fixing things...

Amazon Prime Music could be my choice overnight by going CD quality (not like they don't have the infrastructure to do it). Their device support is surprisingly good. Their catalog isn't great, but I'm willing to buy / upload CDs that are missing--provided Amazon doesn't start shitting-up their content availability to drive CD sales.

Google Play Music also not too far off mark. Fix the lossless thing, and I might be convinced to live with their Amazon bickering.

I suspect Apple will launch lossless soon, but also think it will be a cold day in hell before I can use Apple Music on something like FireTV. Also, the integration of self-tracks and streamed-tracks is bad and should feel bad.

Deezer Elite: OMG, don't make me buy a Sonos. I want you.

Tidal: I like jazz, and your partial Pat Metheny albums and anemic Dave Holland selection kill me. But if you allowed me to upload my own, I could buy my way around your content negotiation failings.

Re:1 You don't care whether it's a placebo?!? We should get in touch, I have some expensive sugar pills to sell you that will do wonders for your ailment of choice.

To be clear, I don't think it actually is. I think many people don't listen in a way that any differences could be discerned. Streaming over your car stereo, going down the highway, for example. Or listening on a cheap phone with a bad DAC and cruddy headphones.

I've read about various tests (usually not conducted with sufficient rigor to make me think too much about the results) in which people:

1. Couldn't differentiate lossless and lossy encoding 2. Preferred the lossy to the lossless.

The former case isn't too worrisome for me. The latter case is, in that it signals that there is a discernible difference, and that we're habituating to compression. Yesteryear's LP pops and hisses replaced by crunchy, compressed cymbals.

I am too young to be crotchety about the way music should sound, but I swear the music industry has turned me into this :-)

I seldom care whether something that works for me personally is a placebo or not. If I can harness the power of my brain with a sugar pill, excellent. The placebo effect is powerful, and was the basis of a lot of medicine before the 20th century.

Where it does matter, obviously, is science, which is the only tool we have to come up with solutions that are better than placebo. But "better than placebo" is a fairly high standard[1].

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246102: "The placebo effect accounted for 68% of the effect in the drug groups. Whereas clinical trials need to control the placebo effect, clinical practice should attempt to use its full power."

If you have a mac and an iphone, you could try vox loop, where you upload your own music (any quality) and then streams it back at the same quality (works with wav / flac).

Only bad thing about it is that you have to upload your own music. As for having a big catalog, well, you can either buy the cds / vinyls and rip them, or have access to a good private tracker.

Yeah, I've decided that "buy everything" is too much of a cost difference compared to the utility of the streaming services. I'd like to not have to buy an album outright (and wait for it to arrive, rip, and upload) all or most of the time.

And, I'm not really keen on pirating music of living artists. I tend to listen to less-than-popular music, so I kind of feel like they should be compensated for my listening. Tidal's supposed higher royalty schedule is one thing I like about them (I hope the little guys are getting something).

If it changes your mind at all, the royalties from streaming services are essentially zero. You might as well just pirate the album, as far as the artist is concerned. If you do buy the album outright, you will certainly be paying them more than they would ever get from years of you streaming the album.

Spotify certainly allows self-uploaded tracks (I know, I use them daily), though it's certainly not obvious how you do so and may require a paid subscription.

Really? I've never seen that feature--I know you can have your own local tracks stored on device, but as far as I can tell, those don't carry over if, for example, you're using Spotify Connect.

I didnt know this could be done either - heres a HTG link on how to do it.

http://www.howtogeek.com/223024/how-to-add-your-own-music-to...

Yep, thanks. It's annoying, tricky, and a bit painful to get right, but you can do it.

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