Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music Streaming revenues rose 41 per cent to become the largest source of income for recorded music in 2017. Trade group the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's annual survey recorded streaming growth for the third year running, up 8.1 per cent year-on-year. Paid streaming rose 45.5 per cent. However, it's still …
"You gotta have pure silver speaker cables etc"
Probably the same sort of people who would buy these:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0073HGBNI/ref=sspa_dk_detail_4?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B0073HGBNI&pd_rd_wg=WXBxG&pd_rd_r=31PM70FAE0VZ38KFRTSA&pd_rd_w=lO1jN
PS if I know you and you buy these then I will disavow all knowledge of you. If you are the vendor and you manage to actually flog these then I tip my hat.
I used to spend about 40 quid a week on CDs/LPs. After my boss handed me my 200 quid on a Friday I was straight down to HMV. Even buying stuff I already owned as the CD or record was wrecked.
Absolute fucking madness. I get Spotify free with Vodafone, but I WILL be paying the 10er a month when my free 12 months runs out next week. Set everything to Extreme quality and have them cached on your device. Much handier than spending a fortune on physical media and FTPing it to your phone etc.
DISCLAIMER:
1) This was about 10 years ago when I was in my early 20s.
2) HMV had already shuttered all the local record shops, the cunts.
3) The internet didn't exist for me until about 2011
My mate comes round every 6 months or so. I play him music on youtube, he uses a spotify playlist he's built up since his last visit. One in five or so of the tunes he's listed won't be available when he goes to stream it. Not popular enough for Spotify to keep paying to host them. They'll be on youtube with about 200 views.
I prefer a music collection where tunes don't just disappear after a while so I have an SD card full of mp3s.
Most streaming services such as Spotify allow you to save/download music on your device so you don't have to be connected to listen to your favorite albums....
I used to like the physical experience of having stuff in my hands, to be able to read a booklet and so on, but to be honest, I mostly like how easy I can find new and old music now. Stuff which I otherwise never have been able to listen to bcs I couldn't find a CD or vinyl anywhere...
Physical is nice, in that it's yours. You don't have to rely on some third party not shutting up shop. Look at Amazon and Microsoft for very recent examples of this.
I get fed up of downloading albums that tun out to be remastered / fucked up versions of the original.
Having listen to a cracking interview with Marc Almond and David Ball the other day about the Soft Cell farewell gig, I downloaded Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. WTF? A dozen other random bonus tracks shoehorned in that really didn't work. I'd like to say this was a one off, but find it on so many these days it annoys the crap out of me. Don't even start me on getting the bloody track names wrong (Stone Roses was one that had this).
However there is the issue of space. When you have 1000+ CD's albums, several hundred CD singles and close on 200 vinyl albums and 12" singles, it just becomes impossible to store them and enjoy them.
So at the end of this mini-rant although I prefer the original CD's, I have to admit that streaming and downloading is more practical.
I have a handful of downloaded albums and I always have the thought that I'm missing something or other. But then I do mostly have works which benefit from liner notes etc. An English translation of some Mande lyrics tends to be helpful.
"Good luck playing that vinyl in your car on on the move, a shit medium for audio recordings that belongs in the past. It's inferior to digital in every way."
Oil paintings are inferior to anything you can create on Photoshop, but people still paint and enjoy going to art galleries looking at physically created images. Not some shite put together on a computer.
That aside, these days if you purchase vinyl (like I do) more often than not it will come with a CD version of the album or a download code for the MP3 of the album. So I can still listen to the vinyl at home on my turntable, or I can listen to it on the MP3 player in my car.
>That aside, these days if you purchase vinyl (like I do) more often than not it will come with a CD version of the album
Consumerism in all it's glory and future generations can thank you for the landfill.
>Oil paintings are inferior to anything you can create on Photoshop
No electronics required for oil painting however you do need them for recording, cutting and the playback of dreadful vinyl which has been superseded by better recording and playback techniques, namely digital. By the way there are some brilliant digital artists that use Adobe illustrator or similar and not Photoshop which as it's name suggests is intended for the manipulation of photos and not graphic art.
Vinyl is a religion (similar to Scientology), not a science.
"Good luck playing that vinyl in your car on on the move"
You just need one of these!
(I'll stick to Bluetooth though, because MP3s don't get scratched every time you go over a bump...)
"Good luck playing that vinyl in your car on on the move"
Technically you SHOULD NOT be messing about with any device while on the move regardless of it being hands free etc. You shouldnt be distracted listening to any music or even the radio.
You are driving. That is your only concern. You want entertainment? Dont be the driver!
Technically thats what you should be doing in your car when moving. Watching the road, undistracted.
Also, who in ther right mind would play music on vinyl or even digital formats in a moving car? That environment is so noisy and lo-fi for anything above spoken word (LBC is a great station). Might as well as listen to Darkside of the Moon or Thriller on a mono 3W speaker hanging out of a broken kitchen radio.
I assume you have a data plan and wifi at home? It doesn't have to be one or the other. You can have both. Your vinyl for listening at home and streaming for out and about. Plus you have the ability to download x amount of tracks for offline listening for when you are on an airplane or the tube.
Having used Spotify for nearly 10 years losing it would be a real shock to the system. I used to spend far more than £120 a year on purchasing CDs and now I buy I only buy when one of my favourite artists releases one.
Try one of the free trials and if you don't like it, fair play. Everyone's listening experience is different.
ack on physical media. but if I can DL in a simple format like mp3 [i.e. no DRM] them I'm fine. I don't use a "DRM encumbered" operating system anyway.
I might want to point out that if artists produced music WORTH BUYING, then more people would BUY IT.
I have to wonder how much streaming/downloading THIS year is for things NOT produced within the last 3 years...
[and a better marketing channel for JPOP would be nice]
I'm wondering who all these people are who've suddenly taken an interest in streaming. Nobody I know does, and I personally have hours of exactly the music I like instantly available without any external connection.
Still, if the 'industry' is happy, maybe they'll leave the rest of us alone.
This post has been deleted by its author
They probably have no clue it is a streaming service.
They will find the app download it based on recommendation perhaps and it plays them music for a bit then asks them to pay if they want to keep using it. They pay and get counted at one of the streamers yet they likley have no clue they are.
I too know very few people who "upgraded" to streaming for the sake of "upgrading" to streaming. These people know more about the industry and tech and history of the issues than the general layperson.
This will happen with electric cars also. People who "upgrade" from petrol will do so due to their own convictions on saving the planet or money or being cool with all the new stuff and will know of the existence of the "upgrade" option etc. Most other people will upgrade due to recommendation / incentives / or simply the car that looks nice secondhand happens to be electric and the other half love s the seats and its got low mileage...
"Most other people will upgrade due to recommendation / incentives / or simply the car that looks nice secondhand happens to be electric and the other half love s the seats and its got low mileage..."
Sounds like you are surrounded by not very clever people. Are you in the USA?
"There is a system called Windows
- specifically you open the window and stick your head out, it's real life but the controls for what is playing are a bit limited"
The controls are limited but easy to learn.
When leaning out of the 'Window' you 'SHOUT' to one of the many real-life 'performers' what you would like to hear.
Often you will get a response that is very entertaining and can involve many 'performers' at once.
It is theoretically possible that one of these 'performers' will respond to your 'SHOUT' with the 'correct' response ........... although this has yet to happen in my experience. :)
I'm over 70 and have an Atlanta Georgia AM streaming Oldies on the Internet. Free. So some of us over 50s do have an interest.
However, you are correct about HiFi and real life. Real life is better if you can get far enough away, so as to not damage your ears. WTH is up with 130 db @ 300 feet, anyway?
>Streaming is a young person's game
I'm well over 50 (try 70) and I use digital music sources a lot. Its the only way to get half decent radio reception where I live (and while fiddling with a tuning knob and slide dial has its olde worlde charms you can't beat "Alexa, play <fill in the station name>" for convenience). (...and yes, we have the option to connect to real speakers via Bluetooth etc.). Playlist services like Pandora and Amazon are useful for background music, a radio substitute.
But.....
Once you start using hifi systems then the little details matter. You don't have to go stupid with oxygen free silver mains sockets, 'directional' data cables and the like but you do need a decent DAC with a proper clock source to recover the music. (No, you don't have to spend five figures on the thing -- even instrument quality ICs are quite cheap.) Lossy compression relies on perception trickery so even AAC will sound a bit off. You will be stuck with WAV or FLAC files; since media players tend to be fiddly to use ("playlists", "songs" and so on) you will often find it easier to just play the CD. (I do have the capability to play vinyl but it really isn't as good as the fanbois make it out; its just that a lot of pop music CDs are mastered at too high a level, they're too compressed so they sound awful on a decent system. Classical doesn't have that problem; the people who make classical records are for the most part people who listen to the product.)
(BTW -- I'm not going to go into valve vs.solid state. I've got one of each. They have their good and bad points.)
no interest? I'm 63, and I use Spotify extensively. My collection of 1000s of CDs is collecting dust. wrangling my MP3 'rips' onto various player platforms was getting just too annoying.
now, my FAVORITE way of listening to music is live, at concerts, primarily at places where listening is the norm as opposed to partying/drinking/yelling.
> Streaming is a young person's game. The over 50s have no interest
My dad streams over Spotify, I don't. He also has a lot of CDs, most of which he systematically copied over to his Brennan*. He listens to Radio 3 over FM a lot. If he hears a track he loves, he looks at the BBC website for that show, ticks the track he wants, and the BBC website generates a playlist that can be exported to Spotify.
Another over fifties family member with more money had some Bose jukebox multiroom system, but these days uses some iPhone and Sonos setup.
Don't forget that many over fifties have money to spare!
*A small device containing a laptop CD drive, HDD and amp. CDs placed in are automatically ripped, with track titles taken from its internal database. It's not connected to anything except speakers. It's a nice machine, but hard to recommend to tech literate Reg readers. The man who made it used to work for Sinclair Research and for Atari.
> Streaming is a young person's game.
> The over 50s have no interest.
Speak for yourself. I still have a very good quality vinyl system, which is enjoyable to listen to in ways digital isn't, but I wouldn't claim it is more accurate - just that the kind of distortion analogue delivers sounds euphonious and pleasant to the human ear. But most of the time, it's streaming all the way for me.
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