Can I just stick my head into shrimp and cheese grits in dark roux instead? Don't think I'd have a problem with that.

I use my 80GB iPod classic a lot when I am traveling but anything that requires I have an Internet connection to listen to music is pretty useless to me. I worry that at some point streaming will be the only way.
 
I was buying downloads for a while but I have mostly gone back to buying CDs. I like to own a tangible product.
 
I remember paying three or four pounds for an album back in the 70's. As a student I had to save up to buy one. I 40 years the price has tripled. By contrast another student staple, a pint of beer is around 20 times what it was in the early 70's Taking inflation into account an album is the cheapest it has ever been.
 
And I  (we) considered "In The Court of the Crimson King", "Grave New World", "Close to The Edge" and "Tarkus" etc to be worth several weeks disposable income each. Times have changed.
 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

bitflipper
I will never warm to a service that expects me to listen to music on my frickin' telephone.

 
You don't have to listen on your phone. Spotify, for example, comes as a desktop app and a phone app. There is nothing wrong with listening to music on your phone by the way, it's exactly the same as listening on an iPod (or Discman or Walkman for that matter). The quality is not degraded in the slightest. With the Spotify phone app, you can either stream in real time with your cellphone connection or you can download your playlists via WiFi onto your phone to listen to them even when you're not connected (and thus save your monthly data quota). I have a 64GB iPhone with hundreds of tracks on it courtesy of Spotify. The bitrate is 320kbps, excellent quality. I'm not going to pretend that the quality is the same as listening through my RME interface on my ATH-M50's, but I also have a pair of cheaper Audio Technica cans which I use for the gym, and the sound quality is better than any Walkman or Discman I ever owned. 

bitflipper
I will never warm to a service that expects me to listen to music on my frickin' telephone.
 

I understand, but have you ever plugged any good ear buds...or IEM into a phone to at least get it out of the "transistor radio" category? 
Dang, you can't even buy a decent stereo nowadays anyway, much less speakers unless you want some stooped tower suckers that are silly expensive.

Rain
That's one way of putting it... And I guess that once artists completely give up on the idea of making any money w/ their music, the problem will entirely be solved.
 
Here's another interesting one which helps put things in perspective and see just how much streaming really means in terms of revenue...
 
http://www.theguardian.co...potify-youtube-payouts
 
In short: "92% of her income last year came from sales – $75,341 – with a further $6,380 coming from streaming services."
 

But to put things in perspective again, you'd have to factor in what percentage of the music-consuming public is streaming. I think there are around 60 million Spotify users worldwide. What percentage of music listeners is this? It has to be less than 5%. I should think Spotify accounts for the vast majority of streams. I just don't understand why artists are expecting to make as much as they did from CD sales from what amounts to a tiny percentage of the CD market. 
 
The link you posted doesn't seem to work for me so I can't read the Guardian article, but from the figures you quoted it would seem that this person's streaming income accounts for around 8% of her income (I'm too lazy to do the math properly). Well, that seems about right given how few people, relatively people, are streaming their music. 

mixmkr

bitflipper
I will never warm to a service that expects me to listen to music on my frickin' telephone.
 

I understand, but have you ever plugged any good ear buds...or IEM into a phone to at least get it out of the "transistor radio" category? 
Dang, you can't even buy a decent stereo nowadays anyway, much less speakers unless you want some stooped tower suckers that are silly expensive.

I have to say, I've listened to some pretty sweet "audiophile" rigs in my time, but my Equator Audios (before a power surge blew 'em ) paired with ARC2 and my RME Babyface sound better than them all. I really mean that. 

sharke

Rain
That's one way of putting it... And I guess that once artists completely give up on the idea of making any money w/ their music, the problem will entirely be solved.
 
Here's another interesting one which helps put things in perspective and see just how much streaming really means in terms of revenue...
 
http://www.theguardian.co...potify-youtube-payouts
 
In short: "92% of her income last year came from sales – $75,341 – with a further $6,380 coming from streaming services."
 

But to put things in perspective again, you'd have to factor in what percentage of the music-consuming public is streaming. I think there are around 60 million Spotify users worldwide. What percentage of music listeners is this? It has to be less than 5%. I should think Spotify accounts for the vast majority of streams. I just don't understand why artists are expecting to make as much as they did from CD sales from what amounts to a tiny percentage of the CD market. 
 
The link you posted doesn't seem to work for me so I can't read the Guardian article, but from the figures you quoted it would seem that this person's streaming income accounts for around 8% of her income (I'm too lazy to do the math properly). Well, that seems about right given how few people, relatively people, are streaming their music. 

Yeah, the link don't seem to work for whichever reason but it does work when I access it via history.
 
"
Keating’s biggest source of income last year was Apple’s iTunes Store, where sales of 32,170 single tracks and 3,862 albums netted her just over $38,195.
 
Meanwhile, 185 tracks and 2,899 albums sold through her profile on direct-to-fan site Bandcamp earned a further $25,575, while a mixture of physical and MP3 sales on Amazon earned her a further $11,571.
 
403,035 Spotify streams earned Keating $1,764, while more than 1.9m views of videos on YouTube – mostly those uploaded by other people featuring her music – earned her $1,248.
 
US personal radio service Pandora generated $3,258 of royalties – but from an undisclosed number of streams.
Keating also notched up 266,331 streams on SoundCloud and 222,226 streams on her Bandcamp site, neither of which generated royalties for her."

Rain


Yeah, the link don't seem to work for whichever reason but it does work when I access it via history.
 
"
Keating’s biggest source of income last year was Apple’s iTunes Store, where sales of 32,170 single tracks and 3,862 albums netted her just over $38,195.
 
Meanwhile, 185 tracks and 2,899 albums sold through her profile on direct-to-fan site Bandcamp earned a further $25,575, while a mixture of physical and MP3 sales on Amazon earned her a further $11,571.
 
403,035 Spotify streams earned Keating $1,764, while more than 1.9m views of videos on YouTube – mostly those uploaded by other people featuring her music – earned her $1,248.
 
US personal radio service Pandora generated $3,258 of royalties – but from an undisclosed number of streams.
Keating also notched up 266,331 streams on SoundCloud and 222,226 streams on her Bandcamp site, neither of which generated royalties for her."

 
I think where people go wrong is in comparing streaming numbers with sales and having this expectation that the figures have some kind of relationship with each other. A stream is best compared to the audience for a radio broadcast than the sale of a CD. I'm not sure how much anyone should expect to get from a single listen of a track. I did read a breakdown of the figures in comparison to radio royalties - can't find the link but I seem to remember a Spotify stream royalty earning something like 15 times more than the royalty payment per radio listener.
 
Think of it like this: take an album that you've listened to on a regular basis for years. Divide the price you paid for that album by the number of tracks on it. Then divide that number by the approximate number of times you've listened to it (I know this is all guesswork but I don't think it's a stretch to say that you've listened to some of your favorite albums more than 100 times over the years). Does that seem like a fair price "per listen"? How does it compare to a Spotify stream payment?
 
One thing you have to remember with the streaming model is that artists are not going to get their money quickly. They'll earn money from fans slowly over the lifespan of that record, i.e. as long as the fan keeps listening to it. And of course, the more good tracks there are on an album, the more they're going to make. Gone are the days when artists got advances of hundreds of thousands of dollars for CD's which were sold on the basis of one or two great tracks and which were padded out with crappy filler tracks which didn't get listened to. There is now a huge incentive to write top quality songs that fans will listen to over and over, and to fill albums with those songs.
 

I see what you mean and I guess there's no arguing in terms of paradigm shift, and that there is no going back.
 
As objectively as possible though, I'd still point out a major difference between traditional broadcasting and streaming. The minute you can listen to anything you want, anytime, you're basically given the same access to the material as you would if you'd bought it. There is virtually no reason to buy a CD.
 
Whereas traditional broadcast was still more of a promotional tool.
 
I remember being a kid and sitting through one hour of videos on late friday nights to have a chance to catch one video by Scorpions or Motley Crue - occasionally...
 
The scarcity of it meant that if those band put out a VHS, we'd buy it in order to be able to decide when and where we wanted to listen. Streaming annihilated that concept. The promotion tool became the product, and music was left behind.
 
 

dubdisciple
At the same time streaming services (and i am including Youtube) are giving artists more options for getting their music heard outside of the Clear Channel Monopoly on radio stations and the few remaining record labels.

Looks like Google (that owns and operates YouTube) is no longer following their motto "Do No Evil" is now taking lessons from their cohorts in the record industry. Their recent 'take it or leave it' contracts with artists on the stream service do not appear to have the artists interest at heart.
 
More here
http://pando.com/2015/01/...reators-that-built-it/