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More and more of my music listening and purchasing happens on Bandcamp. It's pretty much exactly the model I want as a consumer and the music there is a lot more interesting than what's going on on the major labels anyway.

Bandcamp is amazing. The terms are easy to understand, the pricing is fair, the audio quality is guaranteed (they require uploads to be CD-quality lossless foiles, as a minimum) and it's super easy for the musicians to manage tagging and even physical merch sales.

It's exactly how music sales and distribution should be done.

It also has some of the highest margins for the musician. I don't mind paying $10-15 for an album if I know the majority of it gets back in their hands rather than the distributor or label.

And you can choose to pay more than the recommended price, for artists you particularly want to support. According to Bandcamp's statistics, a lot of people actually do that.

+1 for bandcamp. As a plus, they have sane filenames and metadata for the stuff you download. Beatport, for example, gives you a download with the name of the song + a long hexstring. I started using beets.io specifically because of this.

Bandcamp's tagging is spot on, with sensibly-sized embedded cover art and everything.

  >> lot more interesting than what's going on on the major labels anyway.

The Pandora recommendation system has gotten much better recently, and has become a good way to find good relatively unknown artists.

I basically only send to the streaming services as promotion. Eventually, I'd like to ignore them entirely and get all my sales on Bandcamp.

Yep, I prefer to buy music through Bandcamp as well. DRM-free lossless FLAC is the best.

I get your perspective, but music streaming is preferable for the majority of consumers. Most people are using mobile devices as their primary device, especially for music, and not having to download songs is a cheaper and more memory efficient alternative.

I knew kids in middle school who would spend hundreds of dollars a month buying iTunes songs with their parents credit cards. Now kids just need a $10 subscription. That's a solution for consumers.

> Now kids just need a $10 subscription.

For life. If the track they want is on that service, otherwise they need 2 $10 subscriptions. Or 3. Now tell me - do you think that helps the small artists who get a tiny % of listens and thus practically no revenue at all from sales?

I bought hundreds of pounds worth of music, and now I listen to it. Sometimes I buy some more stuff. I'll never have to pay to listen to Dark Side of the Moon again though - and I'm happier that way.

Sometimes I feel like conveniences will ruin our lives.

I think the major market revelation is that entertainment can sometimes be fungible. You don't need lots of subscriptions because one is enough; if they don't have content you're looking for then no big deal, you'll find something else.

I'm a person for whom a subscription makes perfect sense, for the most part I don't have a list of artists I'm a fan of, I just want decent quality and variety.

Music is not fungible, and definitely genre is not fine enough on some services. If I want the Goldberg Variations from Gould, Wendy Carlos won't cut it. Nor do I want some sopophoric Chopin piece afterwards. Kenny G doesn't belong on the same service as Jphn Coltrane. As bad as iTunes was for this, Spotify is worse.

I think there's also a second slightly terrifying question. What happens when you can no longer afford $10 a month?

This may not be a boat we see ourselves being in, but the subscription services (once dominant) are free to raise prices. Maybe it hits $25 a month and suddenly what was convenient and cheap is just more than you can justify because you've lost your job and are living off savings.

Suddenly you no longer have access to your music. The playlists you love, the one that gets you through a shitty day etc.

Gotta make sacrifices, though.

If you don't own a collection of music, then you're just working to support the stream of music in your life. If you truly value specific music which can't be had in other free means, then it's worth your time and effort to own what gets you through your day.

Music has really taken a turn since the age of the television though (I get it). It's just too unimportant to so many people, though. I'm sure these same people bought their TV outright, and aren't renting that either.

I could rant on this forever. Nice infographic here (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/03/how-much-...).

... And a really shitty solution for musicians.

But honestly, I see the appeal; I really do.

If you're the kind of person who has a mostly static, well defined set of musical tastes, congratulations, subscription services aren't targeted at you! They still sell CDs and I really doubt that individual track/album sales, in some format or another, are going anywhere for quite some time. Buy your music and micromanage your library and tags to your hearts content.

For some of us, music subscription services are liberating. I absolutely love Spotify. I've discovered more new artists and genres of music that I enjoy in the last 2 years than I did in my entire life prior to that. All because there is no marginal cost to hearing a good song and immediately checking out that artist's entire discography. It beats pirating, even that has additional work in the form of finding a working torrent with good quality and managing the actual files myself. Having a recommendation engine, being able to piggyback on my friend's playlists to see what they've been listening to, having new releases and curated playlists available in a few taps...all gravy on top. I wasn't always a believer, sitting around somewhere I have a hard drive with 50GB of music I haven't touched in years. I put a huge premium on keeping my music under my control and organized. And then one day I gave it all up and discovered it was actually better this way.

I find it interesting that there is some sort of problem with Spotify but not with say, Netflix, even though it's essentially the same model. Why the difference? Is it because cable television has always been a subscription model, with individual purchase being optional? Is it because music is a fundamentally different media with different expectations? I do know that if I was forced to choose between the two, I would go with Spotify 10/10 times.

> They still sell CDs and I really doubt that individual track/album sales, in some format or another, are going anywhere for quite some time. Buy your music and micromanage your library and tags to your hearts content.

That is getting harder and harder by the year. Both Apple and the music companies go out of their way to make it incredibly difficult to manage my library.

It took two days and third-party tools to move my library from one iPhone to another. In the end I had to resort to manually copying down the name of every single track on my current phone to make sure it gets moved over onto the other phone. This is because the tools couldn't get everything. Getting all the metadata over still hasn't been 100% completed.

The problem is that I don't have a static, well-defined music taste. It changes all the freaking time. My music library needs to be able to keep up with what I want out of it. As it's virtually impossible to easily get tracks in and out of an iPhone, the single source of truth for my music library has become the tracks on the phone itself.

If I don't take painstaking care to ensure that every last file is moved, then some tracks which I really really love to hear, that I can listen to on repeat for hours, can completely fall off my radar and I won't hear them again for months / years.

Managing music files manually is something I absolutely must have. But there's nothing those goddamn assholes want more than to push me onto their shit fucking subscription services where my music life becomes accountable to their greedy whims.

Sounds like your issue is primarily with Apple not providing proper access to your iPhone?

Tons of music is available as non-DRMed files, or CDs, and I can move those files around however I want on my devices. I suppose some really popular stuff might be exclusive to streaming or DRMed channels, but I can't say I could name any right now.

Yes. Fucking Apple.

I don't care where I get my music from. Honestly I just get most of it from the iTunes store. I just need to be able to manage it once I get it.

I tried using iTunes manual management. It's awful. Unless all your music comes from iTunes, then you're back to manual file management. Now I don't even sync my phone to my laptop anymore, I just don't trust it to not fuck with my music collection. iTunes touches the phone only when I have music that I can't buy through the iTunes Store or I'm switching phones.

I am not willing to carry around a third device just for music. I am not willing to devote space in my apartment to CD storage. I'd love to be able to store my music in the cloud, but the difficulties Apple has placed on music file transfers mean that the phone itself has to be the repository for the state of my music library. Even if I do that, I still have to be extremely careful when moving devices, it's not a magic bullet.

If Apple makes this any worse then I will be forced to migrate to Android. I tried it once a few years ago but was burned really badly by the LG Nexus 5, a truly horrid device that could not stream Bluetooth music properly. I was actually happy when that thing took a 5 foot dive onto a tiled floor so I could run back to the Apple Store and beg the ghost of Steve Jobs for forgiveness and absolution.

> I am not willing to carry around a third device just for music. I am not willing to devote space in my apartment to CD storage.

You'll have to play by their rules then, unfortunately.

Did you read the rest of my post? Streaming services solve a lot of the problems you're having, the same ones I had before I switched over. I remember the same thing, days of trying to extract raw MP3 files from my iPhone in some obfuscated format. Using third party tools that promised to make it easy but really just fucked up my library worse. Streaming gets rid of all of that. All of your music (well, most), available wherever you are, no hassle. There are real, tangible reasons that the subscription model has taken off other than the greed of corporations. Sign up for a free trial and give it a chance man. And for the record, Spotify is bleeding money, hardly a bunch of greedy assholes.

Maybe I should write a blog post, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Subscription Music Services"?

> All of your music (well, most),

That's the problem. If it's not well and truly all of my music, then it's worthless. I will take the pain of manual library file management over not having every last one of my tracks available in one big library that I can shuffle.

You can generalize this to, I will never put my music lifestyle in the hands of your company's relationship with the music labels.

I've seen this sort of behaviour modification with online competitions, especially on facebook. E.g. The "like, comment and share" type competitions. I would argue many of these competitions are dubious as there is no oversight and I've read enough about fake ones to take the view that I would rather not go near any of them. But so many of my acquaintances slavishly follow the instructions in the hope of winning a gift card or some other piece of tat.

Actually facebook and its more savvy advertisers and posters seem to really good at this sort of thing. The amount of people, whom I would consider educated, who share freebooted and farm-produced content surprises me.

Similarly there is a UK Fishing forum that requires you to accept and open promotional emails from the store that owns the forum in order to be a member. I'll happily throw in a few quid a year to support a useful forum, but going through the hoops of having to open marketing emails to reactivate my membership is just too much.

For apps like 1Password one would prefer one-time sales. (And I am glad I have it)

However, as with apps, at some point the money will stop flowing in. And then you have a problem keeping your business.

If we compare this to the past: you bought some software for managing your contacts. This cost 50$. Then, one year later they released a new version with new features and bugfixes, again for 50$. Even if your userbase didn't grow, they probably bought the software ever x years, giving your company revenue.

Now however, nobody dares to charge for a new version of some software. (Even in the AAA game industry people are asking for DLCs instead of a 20xx full version), reducing income from one-off licenses.

This might all have started with the app stores.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that might push me to the open source lifestyle. Now if I could just get a decent Linux laptop...

Actually, that might be the only thing holding me back. 100% of my computing is done on a laptop. I'd have to start using desktops again to get a decent experience.

> (Even in the AAA game industry people are asking for DLCs instead of a 20xx full version)

Not sure if that's true. I'd love to read a more detailed analysis on history and driving forces behind the current DLC fashion. The way I see it, it's what the companies figured is a better way to extract money from players - instead of spending a year or three on another game, they can release a bunch of smaller DLCs every few months.

I've never seen anyone comment on this, but games used to cost $60 15 years ago and $60 today, but back then it was more money due to inflation. If they sell the same number of copies at full price, they make less money, and selling a game at straight up more than 60 dollars would be weird at this point

1Password is leaning HARD against one-time sales now.

Just came up this weekend on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14766966

https://medium.com/@kennwhite/who-moved-my-cheese-1password-...

The music industry don't have to pry the music library of your hands. You will eventually die. They get the kids young and hooked instead.

This sounds like the description of a drug dealer.

Sounds a lot more like religion to me.

On this note, I fully expect that after my death my kids will be able to listen for free anything of my music that they'd enjoy, just as I am able to listen to my grandfather's records.

The earlier physical/analog artifacts could degrade with time if not properly preserved, but anything that's ever sold digitally will last until the copyright expires; the songs ripped from CDs that I bought in 1990s will be available to my family forever.

I used to have a fairly immense CD collection. That was great and all in that I had full control of my music, in as far as I could rip it to MP3 and then load it onto my iPod (at the time) or lend it to a friend or whatever else.

Now I'm a massive Spotify user (and fan). It has given me the ability to listen to a huge range of music that a. I couldn't afford to buy and b. I couldn't afford to keep in physical format.

Most of my old CDs haven't been listened to or touched in a long time, partly because I can stream that music on my phone and but mostly because my tastes in music have changed, also that they're all now sat in my parent's loft gathering dust.

For the vast, vast majority of the music I listen to, I'll happily use Spotify and I don't have this great big anchor of a CD collection following me around. I can have most music I'd ever listen to always to hand almost whenever and wherever I am. And I don't have to deal with backing up MP3s on external storage.

I must say, I feel like I've got more control over my music than I ever did with a massive CD and MP3 collection following me around.

Richard Serra's most controversial piece, Tilted Arc, was removed after 8 years from a plaza in front of a building in Manhattan because "those who worked in the area found the sculpture extremely disruptive to their daily routines, and within months the work had driven over 1300 bureaucratic employees in the greater metro area to sign a petition for its removal."

"Serra states that the case exemplifies the U.S. legal systems preference towards capitalistic property rights over democratic freedom of expression."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilted_Arc

>Companies like Adobe decide to not sell licenses anymore, rather to rent access monthly. Not that I use Adobe, but Feedly dinged me for $69 for their Pro option again this year. Do I really need to pay yearly for a damned RSS reader?

I've come around to the subscription model. Customers are not satisfied with the 'single purchase' model. They want to purchase the product, and also purchase lifetime updates. Its not really sustainable to sell software at a fixed price point while providing free updates. I would rather companies do the subscription model than give stuff for "free" and then do other unethical anti-privacy things.

It depends on the product and the person. Google Music has saved me money. I listen to quite a bit of music and was averaging about $200/year on buying CDs. Now, I average about $50/year + my $120/year subscription.

As bonuses, I get my catalogue easily sync'd across devices, easy access to new music, and youtube ad-free.

I don't mean to discount your view, I just wanted demonstrate that there is a rationally minded market for these services.

Difference here obviously, is that when you stop paying, you no longer can listen to music.

This is a trend that I've maintained for 15+ years. I don't expect it to change anytime soon. I am subject to them dropping content that I care about, but anecdotally, I don't recall that happening with anything I listen to in the few years I've subscribed.

My point here is that $200 on CD's you have forever. $170 on a service, you have nothing. Yes, it's very convenient, it just that it's ephemeral.

IIRC Google Music had a lifetime cap (2 times) on downloading your MP3s. Is that still the case?

No... kind of. They have a 2 time cap on downloading from the web client. If you install their app, you can download unlimited times.

Ah, but can you copy that file to the PC?

Yes, it's a chrome extension and downloads the file unencrypted directly to a directory of your choosing.

>If the industry manages to wipe out individual track sales, I will pirate music. I would hate to go back to those days, but it's preferable to not having control over my music.

But it's not your right to have this music and you're just stealing it. They're not taking anything away from you, you're just deciding you'd rather steal it than pay for it.

No. I'd rather pay for it. But if they don't want to sell it to me then I'm not going to go without. Music is not like bread. But I'd steal bread too if it was a choice between that and starving.

This is kinda off-topic.

Why does that matter? The OP sparked off an interesting thought in the parent and it’s relevant - highly relevant too - enough to share it.