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Posted

Streaming has proven a disaster for musicians IMCO. They don't get shit.

In saying that, I've now almost downloaded from Christmas 1988 to now my entire CD collection to FLAC and it's on several back-ups and I could easily give that away to someone for free.....

Rock music relied very much on mystic and needed to be rare. The record companies knew this and now you can get it all for almost free like water, its lost the hold and magic. But then again rock and pop music in the 60s, 70's and 80s sense is effectively dead. Like the swing bands.

I use to think that rock/pop music was the most dominant cultural force in the last four or five decades of the 20th century, I actually now believe we only thought that. We digged the marketing spin.

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Posted
2 hours ago, rostasi said:

It depended on the various situations, but it usually resulted in them asking me to provide music for them -
either in full or partial - after word got out or after I had offered something. For example:
at one place I had been providing music to their customers for so many years (over a dozen),
that I eventually ended up bringing in my 400-disc changer. I've even had situations where
I would arrive for lunch and would be given a business card or some other form of contact
that was left by a previous diner because they liked what they were hearing.
There was a time when I was providing music for at least 5 restaurants at one time.
I even did this on some overseas trips. Streaming services are the thing now, so...

Cool stuff. I did the same a few times for a friend that owned a bar/restaurant. I also had the pleasure years ago of making cds for a friend's wedding reception/dinner since they were trying to avoid the usual DJ crap and it was a smaller setting.

Posted
2 hours ago, ArtSalt said:

 

I use to think that rock/pop music was the most dominant cultural force in the last four or five decades of the 20th century, I actually now believe we only thought that. We digged the marketing spin.

What was more dominant in the cultural landscape? 

 

Posted
20 hours ago, Scott Dolan said:

What was more dominant in the cultural landscape? 

 

I don't know: television, film?

If rock and pop was so culturally powerful, how has it fizzled to where it is no longer the zeigeist of our time? Perhaps, we only believe it was that central to everything.

Posted

I think they key word in all of that is "was". 

If it isn't now, which I think is highly debatable, that doesn't mean that it wasn't then. 

Jazz was once popular music. Just because it's more a niche genre now doesn't change that. That history is already written and settled. 

  • 1 year later...
Posted

Visualizing 40 Years of Music Industry Sales

30-years-of-music-sales-2.png

Gone are the days when people would line up at the music shop for a hot new release. In fact, CD sales are down 80% in the past decade. Today, physical format sales only account for 17% of the industry’s revenue.

There is, however, one bright spot in physical format segment: vinyl. In 2017, vinyl sales hit 25-year high after making a slow and steady comeback.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/?_lrsc=1e225585-6a12-4a71-b2b5-6ab5f9f62804&utm_campaign=1610-GDC-SOC-MUL-OTH-MUL-Elevate&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin_elevate

 

  • 5 weeks later...
Posted (edited)

I occasionally stream music via Apple Music through my Apple TV into my stereo. I notice that I always quickly lose interest, and I think it's because of, not in spite of, endless choice. Somehow, when practically the entire world of recorded music is at my fingertips, no one piece of music matters; and my mind quickly turns to wondering what else I could be hearing. When I actively choose a physical disc to play, I listen.

Edited by riddlemay
Posted

That is a really outstanding point, as I’ve noticed that at times, too. 

For me, the bigger problem is keeping track of what I’ve heard and really liked. I find myself having to make notes on my iPad, or else I’ll never remember. But sometimes I forget...

Posted

didn't know we were still discussing this but I continue to buy CDs as not only the bargain they are (prices of used are going down down down) but as someone convinced that the future of the music is inseparable from the preservation of hard copy. The storage of digital everything, in the next 10-20 years, is going to get so absurd and cumbersome that anyone who wants to know whatever happened in 20th century music will be required to seek out physical media. Data bases and data sheets will become like maps of your anus - physically strange, un-navigatable, and incomprehensible for anyone without advanced and undesirable knowledge. For those uninterested in the 20th, music will become one of tiny-tinny-speakered forests of hard-drive files with tiny name extensions. Those with physical copies will be able to not only see better what they own, but will find it easier to manage because of the very limits imposed by the physical/material world. By 2100 the landfills will be so clogged with dead hard drives that people will see this (our current) age as being like the age of indiscriminate fracking, a desperate last gasp of capitalist expansion and contraction, all done in the interest of quantity rather than quality, and ending on a literal scrap-heap of history.

Remember, you heard it here.

Posted

I disagree in that hard drives are getting smaller and smaller with more and more space for memory. Storing digital media is getting less and less cumbersome by the day, seemingly. And while hard drives will indeed line every landfill, they will have been replaced with newer, smaller, and larger capacity versions. 

 

Oh, and the “tiny, tinny forest thing” doesn’t really stand up. ITunes is far easier to quickly navigate by album cover, artist, etc. than my collection of 1000+ CDs. 

Posted

I understand the appeal of storage/streaming. And my CD collection is too large, unwieldy, and something difficult to manage. But eventually those hard drives have to hit the landfill, do they not?

Posted (edited)
43 minutes ago, AllenLowe said:

I understand the appeal of storage/streaming. And my CD collection is too large, unwieldy, and something difficult to manage. But eventually those hard drives have to hit the landfill, do they not?

??? Absolutely, which is why I said this:
 

50 minutes ago, Scott Dolan said:

And while hard drives will indeed line every landfill, they will have been replaced with newer, smaller, and larger capacity versions. 

But let me ask you, How do you manage, store and locate anything in your collection now? For example, is your collection in alphabetical order, genre, era? Let's say I come over and you tell me about this CD/LP that you bought 30 years ago, and haven't listened to for 29. How quickly and easily would it be for you to find it in your collection? 

Edited by Scott Dolan
Posted

That's my concern too, Jim. I'm sure 70-80% if what you can reliably stream now will be reliably streamable years from now.

But there's no way to predict which 20-30% will suddenly disappear at some random point 5-10-15 years from now.  And given my luck, a higher proportion of the more obscure stuff I value most will be among the losses.

I don't stream stuff now much, or only randomly (and from YouTube mostly). But if I moved over to relying more on streaming, I might more easily give up my physical copies of certain artists (on certain labels), than others.

Like Monk on Columbia, that's probably (safely) gonna be around forever to stream. Same with Booker Ervin on Prestige. But there's no way I'm gonna get rid of any of my Terumasa Hino CD's, cuz I can't imagine all that much being available now, and then what is, could easily be gone in X years.

Likewise, there are any number of pivotal 20th Century classical works that I don't really listen to but a time or two each year -- "Quartet for the End of Time" for instance (or Schoenberg's string quartets) -- that I'm pretty positive I can stream somewhere or somehow (forever). But some more obscure stuff (with only 1 or 2 released recordings in the CD age), I'm not turning loose of that stuff on physical media.

Everything's probably case by case. But yeah, I could probably see reducing my physical collection by 1/3rd without too much worry. But half of what I have, I would seriously doubt I'd have reliable access to (via streaming), ad infinitum. 

Posted

The recordings themselves do not have to disappear. All that has to disappear is the license to allow the service to keep the tracks on the service.

I've been using Apple Music for a couple of years now and have had 2 or 3 albums just outright become unplayable and have also had various other songs move around or go away mysteriously because the licensing changed. I think 25% might be a high guess, but 10% is not out of the question. IMHO.

 

Posted

Call me a Gloomy Gus, but I can see a point in time (not ours,although, who knows....) where there's a big "conquering" and there is a targeted effort to destroy access to certain "knowledges". It's happened before, multiple times, and there's no reason to think it can't happen again. And when it does, people who have hard copies stashed away will have "secret knowledge" on their hands. History is written by the winners, or so they say, and it's not until the losers' recorded stories start turning up that that begins to change.

That's why although I have no qualms with streaming and/or cloud-based storage, I still like to have a Plan B. Just because.

Posted
Just now, Scott Dolan said:

At any given 5-15 year period in the age of recorded sound has 20-30% of it simply disappeared? 

And even if it did, why would it now in the age of cheap and massive storage, high speed internet, data service, etc. ? 

Well, physical copies certainly won't disappear.  But I don't trust that everything that's currently available to be reliably available forever.  80% or more, yes, probably all safe (so maybe my 20-30% is a bit high -- maybe it's more like 10-15%).

In any case, it's not some NON-trivial small number of recordings (like 2%).  As Jim eluded to before, companies come and go all the time, and so do agreements.  Not, not most of them (I realize), but who's to say that something semi-obscure won't be in the next batch of stuff that doesn't seem to be "accessible" any more, for whatever reason.

I agree, the great majority of "popular" jazz recordings will probably be accessible via streaming for decades to come.  But how much stuff that has only ever come out on CD once (or maybe twice), might either never be available -- or maybe be available for a time, but then in some huge acquisition, be easily excised because the costs don't outweigh the benefits.

For instance:  How many movies and TV series have been on Netflix for quite a number of years, only to disappear.  I'm not on Netflix, mind you, but I've read about that numerous times (meaning a couple times every year, for several years now).  It's not boatloads of material, but it's not a non-trivial tiny amount either.  It used to be a really good, art-house-oriented video-rental store would have TONS of films that I understand only a fraction of which can be streamed today.  Maybe 75% of all of Hitchcock's sound-era films can be streamed today (I don't know), but it was just 28-ish years ago that I remember going around to every video-rental place in the small town where I went to college (population 30,000), and collectively in that tiny town, I personally binge-watched 80% of Hitchcock's sound-era films, JUST FROM WHAT WAS IN THE 5 VIDEO-RENTAL STORES IN THAT TOWN OF 30,000.  In a much larger city (back then), I could have probably rented 90% of them, I'm betting -- which is probably WAY more than you can stream on-line now.

The music holdings owned and license by huge conglomerates stand the best chance of "survival" -- but that still leaves a ton of lesser-known stuff, that's more likely to get the axe at some point or some of it, at least).  How about Charles Tolliver's or Billy Harper's great 70's recordings?  Most of Woody Shaw's studio dates are probably safe (most were on major labels), but how about all the live stuff? - and there's TONS of *live* Woody Shaw, close to a dozen CD's (give or take, hell it might be 14-15, I've lost count), just off the top of my head -- but most of THAT hasn't been on majors.

Maybe my CD collection is overly obscure, but off the top of my head, I would fear a disproportionate part of it (maybe 25%?) might easily never be on any streaming services, or be available for a time, with some portion of it suddenly disappearing at some point.

Yes I'm pulling numbers out of thin air, but I'm deliberately NOT trying to be hyperbolic and suggesting the majority of the 3,000 CD's I own would suddenly disappear from streaming services.  But you can't tell me with any certainty which part of it will disappear (on-line), and I do think some of it will -- and which "some" is the big question nobody knows.

Posted

Plan B is a good idea.   Keep a physical and digital copy stored locally and upload a copy to your favorite streaming service for cataloging and retrieving.   I've had uploaded material disappear from Amazon so I don't assume that once uploaded, forever uploaded.   Just last year Amazon purged most music uploads - and after requesting they don't delete my music, I still lost about 10% in the cloud.  It was older music not available in their store.   I am weary that I get the less compressed codex too. 

I love the benefits of streaming 'my music' for all the reasons stated above.   One of the neat features of streaming is the statistics it provides.   I have purchased enough music for my lifetime.   If I were to listen 24/7/365 it would take me over 20 years to hear each tune once.   It's because of this that I have become selective in what I own.   

Posted

Rooster, consider this: I can tell you none of it will disappear with the same amount of certainty that can tell me that 10% or more will. 

It’s all speculation at this point. 

Either way, physical copies can be lost, stolen, rendered unplayable, etc... that’s why I personally don’t see the logic in making it seem like potential loss is exclusively attributable to digital/streaming media. 

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