Is the Era of Free Streaming Music Coming to an End?
pitchfork.com
pitchfork.com
Older people, especially those with money, will certainly pay for music either by buying the music or paying for subscription services or both, and I don't see that changing but kids, the ones who I know at least, won't pay for music they can get for free, and they all know how to get it for free. Streaming services try to bring that behavior into the light and at least try to monetize it, but eliminating free streaming is only going to drive them back to the shadows. I really think that efforts to stop people from listening to music for free will be about as effective as prohibition or the war on drugs.
sure i could torrent, see if the seed health is decent, check if commenters gave positive feedback, and then store a 500mb - 2gb file. but a la carte streaming is actually much better. cable just needs to die but it wont when the internet & media companies enjoy 2 monopolies & gov subsidies
The music industry needs something they can really get behind that's good for both the consumer AND the publisher, and I don't think any of the services right now have really come out enough on top to say that's the one. I would say the big contenders right now are Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music. We'll have to see what happens.
That used to be just because they were crooked and cooking the books (how else do you explain millions in sales again and again without any substantive profit to the artist to show for it); which is still true.
What's true now is that they simply aren't necessary. Digital distribution offers a far more efficient and direct distribution method.
Bringing this back to Valve; publishing physical copies of games/etc is now far more something to do for collectors as a bonus. Access to the games themselves are handled via Valve, GoG, humble 'indie' bundle, etc.
I don't suspect music distributors have much longer to go really.
A few weeks ago I discovered the Analog Africa label[0], which is all about old school afrobeats. The label lets me listen to any album for free on their bandcamp page, puts in effort to track down the original artists, write great liner notes and blog entries on the process[1], etc.
I don't think I've spent as much money on music as I have on this label in ages.
So yes, I'm very much agreeing with Gabe Newell's claim that piracy is a service problem.
I don't think the two are directly comparable, given that playing a game necessarily requires running code and games can easily require an Internet connection these days, in fact it seems like more and more popular games are online multi-player types. It is significantly easier to make it too hard to be worth pirating a game, so I would argue that Valve offers some nice carrots but the sticks are sufficiently pointy. Meanwhile, with music, all you need are the bits or the sounds which you can then turn back into slightly lower quality bits, I don't think there is a reasonable means to make pirating music more difficult.
PC gamers are tech savvy. They understand the real danger of running random crack.exe files and pirated software from the internet.
You're not going to get a virus from playing an audio or video file.
The value of services such as Spotify or SiriusXM is really dependent on listening habits. I drive very little, so no matter how cheap SiriusXM offers their service to me, it's still not worth it. And I love their service, too. It's a fantastic service. But it's not something I'm going to pay for.
I agree on the second point, I have a 7 minute commute so a streaming service just isn't a huge thing for me. I'm a collector and my music tastes are admittedly fickle, so I stick to managing a library in an ownCloud instance that I control. It's just easier for me.
What?? Before Napster, we made tapes. I still have tons of them. We exchanged tapes and copied them, and also we recorded the radio.
It was exactly like Napster, only much slower and complicated -- and also, in a way, nicer, because putting a tape together was a form of expression.
I don't think free streaming can go away without being immediately replaced by increased piracy, but we'll see.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
Sure, but it took a lot longer and required a great deal more effort--though significantly less so once CDs came on the scene. Also, if just about everyone I knew at the time is any indication, we also bought quite a few albums.
I don't disagree with your basic point but Napster did change the equation. (I also tend to agree about what will happen if free streaming goes away--although the other dynamic in play is the many people who now expect instant access to a huge music catalog rather than owning MP3s. For them, having to go back to assembling a music catalog would be a big step backward even if they could do so for "free.")
1. How much money should consumers/advertisers
be charged for access or proximity to music?
2. How much money should artists, publishing companies,
record labels and other rightsholders be paid for
that access?
In reality, the actual floor on how much rightsholders get paid is only up for negotiation if the music comes as a result of interactive streaming from music provided by the rightsholders (read: Spotify). If it's internet radio, where the user doesn't choose what they hear (non-interactive, read: Pandora) the rate is set by Congress regardless of the business income or rightsholder desires. And if it's user-generated content subject to the DMCA (read: YouTube) there's no clear need to pay anything to the rightsholders (see Grooveshark). So, there are tons of arguments about #2.
As far as #1 goes, there's never been a music company that got to million-user scale and was long-term profitable, so clearly companies (and their investors) are willing to send more money out the door than they make. Fixed-rate subscriptions have a perverse property that your best users by engagement metrics are your worst users financially--they cost you the most with all that listening. Advertisement-based monetization matches consumption to revenue, which is nice, but as Pandora and Spotify will both attest, the revenue from ads thus far is way short of what they or the rightsholders would like.
So what to do? Talk about it in the press and see if you can get public outcry to force someone to pay your company more?
It sounds implausible, but I like the idea of some kind of subsidized access to music.
2. Basic income
In the 1930s, The Works Progress Administration did a lot of interesting things with the arts. Some of it involved prettying up overpasses and federal buildings, and some of it was much more ambitious, like the Federal Music Project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Music_Project ), which did everything from holding free concerts to recording and studying various types of traditional american music.
But... back in the 1960s and 70s, and to a lesser extent in the 80s, access to unemployment payments in the UK were much easier than they are now. And so a lot of people used "the dole" as basic income while working on a music career.
As an informal system, it worked pretty well. The UK got a lot of tax money from of the most successful musicians, and the entire sector brought in significant international revenue.
It wouldn't work now because there's too much music being made, and too little income from most of it.
You'll still get a handful of exceptional breakout YouTube stars. But you'll get a much bigger mass of wannabes with no real prospects.
That's not necessarily bad, but it would be a first in history - instead of bread and circuses, it's going to be laptops and social media.
Music as an item you buy is DEAD. It has been dying since Napster, and no amount of copy right law, or services is going to put that genie back in the bottle. The tools available to artist now, make it even easier to "make" music, you don't need a full studio any more. Artists are even starting to think this way, watch Diplo and & Skrillex on Charley Rose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb85hwOotts
How then, does a musiscian make money? Licensing, Concerts, t-shirts and merchandise, an artist is now a brand. Its a brand that has the ability to endorse and enhance other brands. Take a "fan club package", Membership, great seats to a show, meet and greet and photo. All in its going to be between 800-2000 for 3 minutes with a top tier artist, a photo and a hand full of tchotchkes. Heck there are artists that even get paid to show up and have drinks: http://www.gq.com/story/how-celebs-get-paid-for-club-appeara...
Here is the grim irony of all of this, the music industry did it to itself. Long before "digital" was a thing touring and t-shirts was how an artist made real money. A record labels creative accounting practices would likely leave an artist with little to no cash from millions in sales. Now that you don't need a label per-se to get distribution, and it isn't where your going to make money anyway, there is less incentive to go that route at all. How many hip hop acts have become successful off of pushing out mixtape at a steady clip? Google will provide you a rather extensive list from several venues.
True for electronic music ,etc - but do you see it being true for rock/acoustic/etc ?
Regardless of what you think of Kesha, she went into a bathroom and recorded a Bob Dylan cover. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNCEV7ZSNFo
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/amnesty-international...
People have been trained for almost 100 years (since radio) that music is free but ad supported via radio. So thats bunk.
The industry is just pissed people wont buy $20 cds anymore. Suddenly people had another option for on demand music with napster.
Here we are 17 years later and the industry still hasnt gotten over it. I guess why shouldnt they - easiest money ever. But time to put big boy pants back on.
I think ultimately key music services are going to collude or move in lockstep to increase ad frequency. And frankly i think its smart to put the hottest stuff behind a paywall / available only on subscription. Record labels are essentiallly caught in this trap where you can go exclusive and reach a small percent of audience or dont be exclusive and reach everyone. An artist could go exclusive behind everyones paywall, now that would be interesting. Pandora youtube spotify whatever - listen to taylor swift new album now thru subscribing.
Is the Era of free GPS maps coming to an end?
Is the Era of free social networking coming to an end?
...I see no reason music is any different. Nothing is free, but ads and other forms of monetization will win over subscription services.
With freemium and one-time purchases, individuals can choose to pay more for more valuable content than can be funded by ads.
Some content remains too expensive to fund with the ad model, such as major motion pictures. Numerous product placements and the ticket don't pay for the entire movie; even concessions profits are needed.
I don't think we are headed to a post-recoring era. I think we are entering an era of MORE recording than ever. What used to take a studio, and a bunch of musicians, is now something you can do with a macbook, and a solid mic. The combination of social media (Facebook, twitter, instagram) and distribution platforms (youtube and soundcloud) not only lets one directly distribute but promote, and interact. For a lot of people in the US this means that "startup costs" to be a recording artist today are negligible.
On the consumption side, how often do you listen to music while engaged in a visual or physical task? Going for a run, commuting to work, washing the dishes, writing code... all settings where recorded music without interaction is something thats easy to consume.
However, as long as FM radio is still a thing... "free streaming" music is not going to end.
Or does anybody see a piracy based service that compete with spotify on selection, and easy of use ? how would such service look, technically ?
Huh? "Home Taping is Killing Music" Was the slogan on every LP and tape, and played before every film, in the late 70s and 80s. It wasn't and it didn't. We had crappy ghetto blasters with 2x speed twin tape decks from every Japanese manufacturer designed for tape copying (not that anyone in their right mind copied anything at fast speed). We'd record tracks off the Rock Show on the radio and trade tapes in the playground. We'd borrow LPs to tape, regularly. 95% of my music was on copied tape. None of us could afford to buy all the vinyl we wanted.
Then CD burners came along and copying was so much easier - long before Napster. Just don't let the screensaver or print job kick in if you were on a Windows PC as it'd wreck the burn.
2 generations have been used to having free music, despite what the streamers may wish I doubt YT Red etc will make much of a dent. I'd imagine most will go back to torrents, or step up from CD copying and trade libraries with friends. Those likely to pay are those with Sonos or other home streaming hifi. If streaming becomes difficult to access there'll be a YIFY/Popcorn Time type site along any moment.
TL;DR Does the headline end with a question? The answer is no.
To be more specific, geriatric and upper middle class.
edit: I actually think that music torrenting is dying because habitual torrenters all have all of the music that they want. The next logical step is to spend $20 on a hard drive and give that entire collection to a friend. Or $80 if you're a fiend for flacs.
Using a business model that wasn't self-sufficient - whether VC money, or loss-leader money, or similar - meant that easy streaming stoked a demand and a sense of entitlement in the consumer. Then later, that sense of demand was used as justification to say "Welp, I guess the genie is out of the bottle" and then ask for songwriting organizations to agree to shit fees.
Moral hazard - a risky action was took, when the actual risk was borne by those (the songwriters) other than the people taking the action (Spotify etc).
It's unethical. Saying so is not a failure to accept reality, of course it happened, but it doesn't make it any more ethical. It was a cultural failure and there's a huge counterfactual that is out there that people cannot easily accept - the large amounts of quality, life-changing music that went unwritten.
What would kill streaming music? A court decision against Google that made them take down all pirated music, or pay vast amounts to the music industry. As long as most music is on Youtube, not much else matters.
I think he is missing the key point of advertised streaming too. It's just plain old price discrimination. If there was no outlet for free advertised streaming, than most people would simply just pirate it. This way, they are at least making some money off of those people.