The Shift from Owning to Streaming Music: "Why Music Ownership Matters" article

[fitear1590 2414]

https://thesmartset.com/why-music-ownership-matters/

A band I follow recently shared the article "Why Music Ownership Matters" and I thought it was an interesting read. Here are a few exemplary quotes, in case you can't read the entire thing:

Quote

Last year, more songs were streamed on any single day than were downloaded during the entire year. Sales of physical albums and downloads are in free-fall, and the rise in vinyl purchases isn’t enough to reverse the larger trend. Even with the massive increase in song streaming — which rose 83% in 2016 — the overall economics of the business are dicey. Music revenues are still far below what they were in the last century.
...
The transition from physical to digital music may be less damaging than the shift from ownership to streaming. Most people in the industry are complacent about the latter change. They care about cash flow — they want listeners to pay for streaming. But they rarely worry about how the behavior of music fans changes when they no longer own recordings.
...
Even in the internet age, the passionate art lover wants to own the work of art. I suspect that some smart scholar could even measure and quantify the value added to art when it becomes objectified.
...
This connection between ownership and passion is vitally important to the economics of music. If you eliminate the former, you erode the latter. Yet there’s an even bigger danger to a music ecosystem that gives up on ownership.
...

What happens when the mega-corporations who run the streaming services decide to delete a million songs that aren’t generating sufficient profits to justify their storage costs? Or ten million? Or maybe whole genres — 12-tone-row music, Native American chants, 1920s jazz, etc. — because they just don’t draw a meaningful audience? Just look at how ruthlessly Netflix has reduced its offerings to lower its costs. Those old movies didn’t justify their upkeep anymore, so they got deleted.

So, what do you think, does this article have a point?

I must admit, the power streaming companies have over individual pieces of media can be scary and it's something I've thought about before. There was this one older German movie I really liked on Netflix streaming a while back. In physical form, the movie only exists on VHS in the US and region 2 DVDs in crappy quality. Netflix, for whatever reason, had some remastered version in pristine HD quality. But now that the film is no longer available in their online library (to quote the article: this particular movie likely didn't 'justify upkeep anymore'), it's like this HD version never existed. I would gladly pay for a Blu-ray version, but it's simply not offered. Maybe I'll never get to watch it again and that sucks. Sure, that's just one movie, but think about the bigger implications of streaming's role in archiving.

I will say, one aspect that seemed downplayed in the article is the material difference between downloading and streaming. Both are digital, rather than physical, but remember, this article is making the argument that the shift from 'ownership' to 'streaming' is the more significant one. So, I would think downloading technically falls under the category of 'ownership' (you have file ON your computer hard drive), rather than 'streaming.' These days, I would say about 80-90% of my non-Japanese music listening is done via streaming, like Spotify. Is there some difference in that culture of listening via streaming versus listening by downloading?

And since this is a Japanese music forum, what can we make of this article? Do you think the general 'Japanese music industry' or particular Japanese music scenes are still promoting music ownership over streaming?

Discuss!

[chemicalpictures 1888]

Makes sense. Schoolboy's Q second album, I think, was removed from spotify with no explanation. At the time I didn't give much thought to it, but looking from the consumer viewpoint, that's pretty fucked up. I am not entitled to anything when I subscribe to their service, I'll have to listen to what they want to make available... I admit I'm becoming lazier and lazier, basically all my non japanese music is listened through spotify too, and yeah, we should be aware of that, indeed. Lucky for us, torrents are always there to save the day, I guess. I still buy physical copies of releases I like, but I also think that's a fading trend, pretty soon releasing physical copies of albums will be limited to collection editions and etc. abide to the technology revolution, I guess.

 

About the japanese industry, I think it's a matter of time. Japanese consumer base is the weirdest in the world. They are absolutely open to some technologic innovations, but extremely conservative to some others. They will resist while they can, but will succumb eventually, I think. And that is kind of positive for us in the west, more music will be available to us, when they finally decide to change.

 

 

[togz 2004]

Hmm this is interesting and I never thought to look at the big picture like that. I definitely stream a lot more now but I still buy things I really want to have a physical copy to. But I can see how you loose a sense of the artistic aspect too so it "looses its value" but there are even some bands that only release digital copies of stuff idk man this is tricky. 

[Zeus 7997]

If I don't have control over it, it's not mine. that's been the philosophy I've carried for the better part of ten years, and it's one that hasn't failed me yet. The only time it comes to bite me in the ass is when I don't heed it. I learned my painful, personal lesson not with the loss of my music library, but with the loss of my cyber locker. The death of MegaUpload meant that things I had backed up on that site are lost for good and I'm not getting them back. @fitear1590's example of the movie is another aspect to this conversation.

Industry support of streaming standards stems from a place of profit; with any technological revolution there are bound to be inventions which do one simple thing that upsets the natural order of the ecosystem. One early example is how casettes could record the radio and the head of the MPAA (at that time) complained that the invention was going to kill the radio and introduce rampant piracy. There are plenty more, but the general point I want to get at is that these technologies allow the individual consumer to exert some level of control over our products that was thought infeasible at the time of its creation. This is the first result of a technological revolution where control shifts back to the company owners and away from individual consumers. Companies can determine when something is available, where it's available, and for how long it remains available. I can rip a CD as many times as I want as long as I own it and the tools to do so, but when Netflix or Spotify or some other company can just decide it's no longer profitable to market and remove my access to it, that's it. If I don't have control over it, it's not mine.

 

There's also a compound effect here, one I've noticed outside of music circles. "The cloud" is nothing more than someone else's computer and hard drive. If it's stored elsewhere, I don't need to store it locally, right? So by now, I thought we would have terabyte iPod models to hold all the media we could desire, but we don't. Manufacturers everywhere have taken a slide back in the amount of space they are willing to ship with their products by pushing "streaming" and "cloud services" as an alternative.  If I wanted any half-decent media device with internal storage, I have to either buy something that supports SD cards or import the device from Japan and pay a heavy price tag. Shrinking local storage only incentivizes people to give in to streaming, which I think is a bad development even if it's not pointedly malicious. (Not to mention most of these companies introduce data caps to limit the amount of streaming you do, also shared with other forms of "data", effectively putting an upper cap on how much music you can listen to...as opposed to having the music on an MP3 player where you can listen to it until the hard drive dies. Even if the former limit is technically infeasible, it's still there...)

 

Note the emphasis on "control". I don't have the obsessive need to own something as long as I can do with it what I want, when I want, where I want. Buying CD's versus buying digital copies is one and the same to me, especially when my entire collection lives and breathes digitally. I can control my digital collection and it's something I know all of us here have in common. If I pay for streaming, I'm not paying for a copy of the music. I'm paying for the right to stream the music at a predetermined bit rate for a set amount of time, in specialized locations.  I can't even stream and take the subway because the signal will cut out once I go underground!

 

Perhaps I'm more sensitive to this because I've identified with a music scene that thrives and depends on ownership of physical media, but streaming is just not for me.

[nekkichi 6043]

this article:

 

another serving of boring preachy straightness over here:

 

 

must suck to play music no one cares for. if only he had a chance to enter the scene just before the beatles exploded oh my oh MY!!!

[jaymee 405]

Hmm... I generally consume music in three ways:

 

iTunes/Bandcamp/etc. 

Since moving to Japan, I've stopped buying physical copies of most things. The reason? Lack of space. So I prefer to "own" things digitally if they are made available and are priced fairly. iTunes Japan sometimes costs as much as physical copy, though, which leads me to my second option...

 

Rental CDs

You can usually rent CDs at Tsutaya for like 5 for 1,000 yen. That's about 200 yen a CD, which is the same price as buying one song off of iTunes Japan. So for many older/major releases, I will buy and rip the CDs. Tsutaya usually holds off renting new releases for about 1-2 months after the release date.

 

Buy the physical copy

I do this when it's an album I REALLY love and like most/all of the content of the album, or in rare instances, there is some special bonus that makes it worth buying the CD over downloading it or waiting for Tsutaya to carry it.

 

 

I feel like most artists nowadays release a CD with maybe one or two good songs, and the rest is filler. But if you only buy a few songs off iTunes, the price can be almost as much as buying the whole release. Although I sympathize with artists, I feel like if record labels weren't so greedy about making a profit and selling something palatable to largest audience at an ever-increasing price, the quality of music would improve, the market wouldn't be as oversaturated, and it would re-ignite a passion in consumers to buy.

 

I personally only use streaming services to discover new indie music, keep up with recent releases, and listen to music I already own in some format. (Quicker to type a song name into YouTube than search my iTunes library.) If I don't like it, I'm not likely to listen to it again, and if I do, I'll buy or rent the release. Most of what I buy is indie stuff not available in Japan, so I have no choice but to buy it digitally.

 

I agree with the sentiments of the article overall, but I also believe that music companies shouldn't blame consumers for not purchasing most of the crap they offer up and call music. It's a two-way street.

It's been said many times, but the overseas J-music fandom wouldn't be what it is without online streaming and downloading. Nobody is going to pay $30-$40 for an album on a whim.

Edited June 22, 2017 by jaymee

[Peace Heavy mk II 7200]

An interesting piece about streaming that's been discussed at work is that big artists, at some point, will no longer need to make music.

 

Every time someone like Beyonce, as an example, releases an album, the streams of her entire catalogue sky rocket. Most of the money she makes isn't from the new album, but it's from people seeing she has new music and then going back and listening to their favorites from 10 years ago. This same thing happens when they do large events, i.e. the Super Bowl or VMAs. Why spend the money promoting and producing a new album when you can just cash in on the rest of the stuff you've already done for free-ish?

 

Imagine X got behind that mindset too? We'd really never see that new album

Edited June 22, 2017 by Peace Heavy mk II

[nekkichi 6043]

52 minutes ago, Peace Heavy mk II said:

An interesting piece about streaming that's been discussed at work is that big artists, at some point, will no longer need to make music.

 

Every time someone like Beyonce, as an example, releases an album, the streams of her entire catalogue sky rocket. Most of the money she makes isn't from the new album, but it's from people seeing she has new music and then going back and listening to their favorites from 10 years ago. This same thing happens when they do large events, i.e. the Super Bowl or VMAs. 

she doesn't own masters for everything released prior to lemonade, so her streaming revenue for older releases is either non-existent or very modest,

and everytime she's performing older material she is has to pay WMG a fee for all stuff they own.

 

58 minutes ago, Peace Heavy mk II said:

Why spend the money promoting and producing a new album

that's the reason she is on a self-owned label now, as opposed to T🐍ylor who has been on a private indie thing, iirc, funded by her parents, since her very beginning.