How do you prefer to consume music?

[secret_no_03 959]

I cannot stand streaming music, for one I don't use my phone for calling so I have no minutes nor data, and I prefer to have files that are mine, which is why I'd be far more likely to pay for extra mega space than sign up for Apple music or something of the such. I also hate Spotify, I've never liked it since it came out, I've had it and deleted it probably ten times and paid for it a few times, for what I listen to its pretty useless, so I don't see the point and I much prefer music players whether they're android or Apple. So, what about you? How do you consume your music, physical (I don't know anyone who uses physical CDs after ripping them), digital files or streaming?

[GreatNorthernVK 183]

Streaming has its uses, but also plenty of limitations. Nothing more irritating than your internet buffering during a song, or your significant other hijacking Spotify to troll you with Backstreet Boys and Chumbawumba (true story).

 

I’ve decided to listen to most of my western music via Spotify, while keeping my storage for VK and other stuff that can’t be found on Spotify.

 

I have some CDs for collection purposes, but the only physical music I sit down and listen to is in LP format.

[secret_no_03 959]

14 minutes ago, GreatNorthernVK said:

Streaming has its uses, but also plenty of limitations. Nothing more irritating than your internet buffering during a song, or your significant other hijacking Spotify to troll you with Backstreet Boys and Chumbawumba (true story).

 

I’ve decided to listen to most of my western music via Spotify, while keeping my storage for VK and other stuff that can’t be found on Spotify.

 

I have some CDs for collection purposes, but the only physical music I sit down and listen to is in LP format.

I don't really listen to any western music, and I don't really buy LPs, but when I did I bought a vinyl to mp3 converter. 

[psychonnect_rozen 585]

All my western and metal music is on Spotify. My Visual Kei music is on my computer and on Apple Music. I put all my music files on there. 

[ShTon 268]

I mostly hoard mp3 files since most of the stuff I listen to is unavailable on streaming services. I use Spotify mostly when I don't know what to listen to so I let it surprise me with whatever it thinks fits with the music I already listened to there. I like having CDs in physical form though I get them only when I liked the release so much I need to own a physical copy of it.

[ghost 2687]

When it comes to physical music, if there is a vinyl copy available, most times I'll prefer listening to it on that format. That's only if the audio quality is better or on par to the digital version though. I've ran into some LP releases that sound very poor on vinyl and I'd rather have a CD version instead.

 

I really only like CDs now for music that is hard to find online or if I want to be able to rip music in case I lose the digital copies that I have. Otherwise, I never actually listen to the CDs after ripping them and they take up room in my shelf. If it's a band I really like I like collecting CDs for artwork and photos.

 

Which is why I actually like using streaming services because it allows me to listen to music in (depending on the streaming service) good quality and I don't have to worry about storage space or loading music on my player of choice manually. It's risky though since some day the streaming service can decide to pull some of your favorite releases off their platform and then you can't enjoy it that way. And when it comes to Japanese music, it can be difficult to find releases by vkei and indie artists.

 

On very rare occasions, I like collecting cassette tapes too and other less conventional mediums like floppy discs and 8-track tapes. But one thing I can't still get behind is a USB drive. It's just a boring medium to store and distribute music to me. 

 

Last.fm integration is also important to me as I like to keep track of my listening habits, so I also like to just listen to digital copies I own on either my phone or laptop most days (although, with the direction last.fm is going I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep that up haha)

[Kuro 45]

I never had a Spotify account or something the like. I dislike streaming. I'm still going by digital files from ripped CD's or sometimes digitally bought releases. I barely listen to any western music and when I do it's more for nostalgic reasons and there I'm back with ripped CD files.

[Bear 1817]

Vinyl, tapes, Spotify and youtube. Covers everything I listen to.

 

PS: All hail Spotify and western music!

[FOSCOR70 56]

spotify u no?

 

i'l buy physical copies of my fav albums when i grow up!

 

 

Edited August 1, 2019 by FOSCOR70

[spockitty 643]

Spotify, period. 

 

I pay for premium and haven't regretted it yet. It's perfect for discovering new music pretty hassle free. I do have unlimited data on my phone so that's not an issue, and when I travel abroad I just download playlists to listen offline. 

 

Now that I've gotten back into VK, I just load up local files and download stuff to my phone on a dedicated playlist. 

 

Also, build-in last.fm integration duh. 

 

Back in the day I used to actually listen to the CDs/tapes I bought on a discman/walkman lol, then an iPod classic (I still have that 4th generation dinosaur, it was the most annoying piece of hardware I've ever owned fucking hell)  

 

I don't mind streaming, but if I decide to buy a release, I don't think I'd even buy a digital release (unless it's the only one available). I buy CDs and then rip them. 

[CAT5 9075]

I've found spotify to be increasingly convenient, but I still prefer to have actual files on my computer, as I suppose I'm just stuck in my ways. Tho despite spotify's amazing catalog, there's still a lot of stuff (old and new) that's just not available there. So in light of that, I use google music to upload my own files for streaming too.

 

Whenever I buy CDs, I just rip them and then put them away.

 

 

[BrenGun 2261]

I use spotify to support an artist to play their songs, also It's usefull if I won't buy it on itunes.

 

spotify is useful to try a release before buying it.  And you can do that even without to install the spotify app to your pc.

 

I don't stream on my phone. not enough free data for it also it takes power for your phone. So I keep my dear mp3 player to play songs on the road.

 

 

Also, I don't download songs illigal anymore because of that reason.

if It's on spotify, I simply listen to it when I am home. 

I see no use anymore to share something to the public which can be listened for free anyway 😓

[Miku70 214]

I use Spotify ,I buy CDs and I buy few songs legally on Amazon Music for certain digital release.

 

Edited February 8, 2020 by Miku70

[seys 139]

I use Spotify, if the songs aren't available there I just download them and put them on Spotify. Really convenient that way. 

If I like an album/band enough I'll buy a physical copy.

[Cereal Killer 13 25]

I stream to discover new music but when I like stuff I buy it. People I really like I buy physicals (vinyl if available and CDs). 

[violetchain 912]

I like just playing files on my computer or iPod (I don't like using my phone for music since the battery runs out too fast, so I still just use a separate device) the best since access to the songs can't be revoked randomly if an artist gets into trouble with their label, stops paying to renew the service, etc., but I mostly use Spotify for new releases these days, as you can use it with a free account and at least that in some way contributes to the artists and shows them they have people listening to their new work.

 

I know some artists monitor their Spotify plays closely, so I like to think it's at least encouraging for them to see the numbers going up, even if it's not all that useful financially compared to an iTunes or CD purchase.

 

I will buy a CD if there is no digital release and I absolutely must have something, but there's usually only about 1~2 releases a year I want that badly that I can't download or stream.

[Ro plz 1290]

I've reduced my downloading habits by a lot. There really isn't much music to go through that effort for these days, even J-Rock/VK.

 

I much prefer Streaming, especially spotify because its more convenient and I'm always being introduced to new music.

 

 

[303iD 8]

I buy alot of mystuff from fellow collectors on discogs, of course I rip said cd and just enjoy on my phone.

[Total Saikou 735]

Mostly use Youtube because there's so much stuff on it. I love going down recommended video rabbit holes. I've discovered so many bands that way. I can watch the PVs too, which as they are with their degree of gaudiness and beautiful artistry, are a unique staple of VK. I find Spotify to flawed as all hell. Only a fraction of the artists I listen to are on it, so my favourites playlist always feels so empty. Even if I do add my own CD rips or gifted DLs to it, they are bound to my computer, which is the device I use Spotify the least on. I also find their recommendations to be complete shit. And I don't mean that they recommend only me bad stuff. One time, I shit you not and I wish I took a screenshot, they started recommending me Perfume (the Jpop group) after I listened to Dum Spiro Spero for the first time. I get Lil Pump recommendations IN 2020 because I listened to Tyga OVER FOUR YEARS AGO. I don't know why people praise the recommendation system of Spotify so much, it doesn't seem capable of recommending me anything resembling what I listen to. I prefer the Last.fm recommendation system by a wide margin.

 

Of course, I do my best to buy physical CDs of my favourite bands. There's just something special and intimate about sitting down, eyes closed, with milk and cookies (a weird tradition of mine when I get my new CDs), popping in a new CD from your favourite band and hearing your favourite song from them again or hearing a b-side you've been ignoring this whole time. I live for that experience, and sometimes I dust off the old collection and let one of my dearest favourites play that tune one more time, just to recapture the magic.

[colorful人生 2777]

 

Spoiler

digital (mainly 320 mp3s ripped from CD), spotify, and cassette (only for vaporwave, future funk, kayokyoku, and city pop.) not really a vinyl person, since they take up space and i'm not trying to chase some "endgame" audiophile gear. i would also probably burn a hole in my wallet in the process.

 

Edited April 17, 2020 by colorful人生

[NICKT 147]

 

6 hours ago, Kabukichoatmidnight said:

I'm all about the physical releases, I do have spotify for digital only stuff, stuff you can't really get on disc anymore and previewing otherwise interesting stuff. But yeah if I like something, will always buy it physically if possible. There are still a lot of people who like physicals, I know guys who literally have thousands of CDs or are vinyl only guys. But yeah, think it's slightly younger generations are consuming everything digitally these days. Or people who don't want their houses cluttered with thousands of CDs and Vinyls. But actually, I love looking through my CD racks looking for something to put on, sometimes you get that "man, haven't heard that in ages, will slap that on now!" have a look at the artwork and that, takes ya back. haha.

So this originated in a news post and I didn't want to respond there and then I figured that at one point we spoke about this in a general thread so here we are now.

I've never been physical CD listener of VK, the amount of music I listen to would amount to an insanely large assortment of jewel cases and it just was never a logical decision, especially considering shipping prices and it just became a joke. I started out originally having a collection on my computer and then would put my favourite few songs on my phone and then I upgraded to an MP3 player that housed my entire collection, removing everything off the computer. Though, the small size of this MP3 player and the following iPod forced me to instead of keeping entire albums to just quickly go through, find which songs I liked and then delete the rest.

I started being a shut-in and listening to music on the go wasn't necessary so I started keeping music on my PC again. I now also use Spotify because copying and pasting every new CD to an MP3 player was just excessive hassle and unnecessary wasting of time. 

I stuck with Windows Media Player for way too long before shortly moving to iTunes and now I'm stuck firmly in MusicBee. 

Now, I get the appeal of having CDs and a large physical collection for collection's sake but I can't fathom actually having it that way with function. Maybe I have music playing way too much compared to others or I spend too much time on the computer where my music's stored and easily accessed but having to deal with all the faff in regards to actually playing CDs, going from one artist to another artist or even from one album to another is just easier with a digital library.

With physical media you also don't get tags and metadata. For the past few years I've gotten stupid when it comes to my library and have begun tagging to all hell, trying to make things as organized as it can be. 



This is a screenshot of the first page of tags in MusicBee. If I wanted to listen to rock music then I'd go up to the top and type in rock, voila: automatically get a rock playlist. Release date isn't just by year but now includes month and day in the correct order(Lookin' at you, America) which means when artists are sorted by release then it's actually ordered properly. Composer credits so that if I found a song I liked I can find songs by the same song writer. The grouping section is home to my Visual Kei tag which makes it super easy to isolate just the Visual Kei parts of my collection.



Using both the artist and album artist tags I can have artists sorted alphabetically but still have them displayed with their Japanese names. I originally had both genres and composer/arranger credits listing using commas but that ran into issues when names kept reappearing because if you typed "Writer A, Writer B" and then "Writer B, Writer A" those two whole bands are two separate tags. With the semi-colon it actually stores each one separately.



So each genre will now properly list here isolated instead of being long chains of repeating genres.



This is page two of the Tags, this is Gackt's Ai Senshi, because it covers a lot of the unique tags. Original artist is for covers, it's an original tag for MusicBee and you can see my custom cover tag which I realized was superfluous. The tie-in tags are for when a song is used in a piece of media, it names the media and categorizes it along with it's usage. If you wanted to listen to anime openings then you could just go to the search bar, type in anime opening and voila. The language is self explanatory and it shocks me that it's not used officially. Romaji and translation are just for Japanese songs because I like having an song presented with it's proper title in Japanese characters but for searching it's hard if you don't remember the kanji, etc. I often see people have the song name in english with either the romaji or Japanese title in brackets and it just looks horrible, this way all that information is kept out of the way so you get a clean library but that information is still there if you need it.



This is my main page/layout for MusicBee when I'm using it day-to-day. The artist column is ridiculously wide because I hate how names display when they're longer than the column and you have to account for those stupidly long Visual Kei band names. Underneath the album art you can see it displays relevant information like genre, publisher/label and language along with release date and title of the disc. Composer and arranger credits are also visible to help you see which songs were by who. Here's another example with Dir en grey's GAUZE:



Another interesting thing can be done here using those tie-in tags and also the cover tags. MusicBee and I assume other programs have it too, but you can make automated playlists. The criteria which it can sort and filter by is amazing, so for covers I can just set it to look at the original artist tag and if it's not empty then it'll throw the song into the playlist. Same with the tie-in tag.



MusicBee allows you to have multiple tabs like a browser and in these I have different playlists open and locked, with these tabs you can even change the layout so in my cover tab for instance, I've taken out the composer and arranger credits and instead have the original artist tab displayed and then sorted it by said tab.



The anime tab is similar but instead of original artist I have the series name(which it's then sorted by) and usage displayed. This is great because despite songs for a show being from different artists this way it'll group them together and if you look above at the criteria screenshot there's a partially hidden checkbox that if you click filters out duplicate songs so if you have a song on a single and then the same song on an album it'll only keep one in the playlist.





(I'm a big fan of Gundam.)

So yeah, just the extent of what I can do with my collection digitally will never be even closely met by physical media, outside of novelty I just don't see the value in a physical collection. 

And yes, most of the reason why I posted all this is because I wanted people to see the effort and time I've wasted.

EDIT: Oh, I suppose adding this would be a nice way to cap this off:

Edited May 18, 2020 by NICKT

[hopefully_benign 56]

Just putting the albums on physically (most of the time), or downloads (less frequently because my computer doesn't have a good speaker setup and I don't always want headphones blaring in my ears). I would rather abandon worldly desires like consuming media and go farm goats on some mountain with no electricity than stream. Absolutely fuck streaming.

[Kabukichoatmidnight 269]

16 hours ago, NICKT said:

So yeah, just the extent of what I can do with my collection digitally will never be even closely met by physical media, outside of novelty I just don't see the value in a physical collection.

Wow you really aren't messing around when it comes to arranging your music. Funny though because I'm the same with my physicals just in a different way. I have all my stuff arranged in genre then alphabetically, so if I want a VK album, I got a VK section to look through, if I want a death metal album, I got a death metal section to look through and so on for each genre and finding stuff is never a pain because it's alphabetical by band which is then arranged in order of release. 😛 We're music dorks here right? haha.

 

I guess it depends what each person values about their music I suppose, like you mentioned metadata and all that, which personally I don't find any real value in myself. But what I get value from, from physical releases, is having the artwork and all the info such as who was in the band on that recording, the image they had for that era, the lyrics, who the guest musicians were and who produced it etc... this may be coming from me as a musician myself, but the artwork and presentation of the package beside the music is also a very big part of the overall release itself, like it can really express certain atmospheres and messages you may have missed without seeing them, which on the flip side may be good as you can build your own ideas from the images and such it creates for you. But anyhow, I feel that all helps you really understand the music itself and is all pretty much missed by buying digital albums. Guess you can that info can be looked up easily enough though, but yeah is easier for me to have it in just one package. And here comes the main thing I think, which plays a big factor in our differences, is that you have playlists of favourite songs, I often prefer to listen through whole albums at a time, again, the continuity, the themes throughout and such, the atmosphere of each song and the moods it contributes to the listening experience it all comes together as one whole piece rather than a selection of songs, if you get what I mean? So guess just the different way we approach listening to music and how we enjoy it is different so we get different value from it.

 

But talking of value, this is one reason I've never really gotten into digital music because it feels like you're paying for nothing really. I prefer to pay for an item, I can have and keep forever, not store on a computer that will get lost among the billion other albums in there. And in fairness, with digital releases, if you look you can find digital albums to download for free and you end up with the same thing (right?? As I'm not a big downloader myself you may be able to shed some light on the benefits of downloading releases over finding free versions) which is a handful of files on a computer, which to me are worthless, evidenced by the fact you can't really sell digital releases. Physical releases definitely have more monetary value and as for the collectors, some albums have very high values! I have albums myself that would go for over £100, and my mate has an album that typically is valued around £250 online.... So clearly there is a much higher value placed on the physical package than a handful of WAVs or whatever. But again a lot of people probably aren't bothered about that kind of thing these days.

[fruitfork 116]

On 5/18/2020 at 4:00 PM, NICKT said:

outside of novelty I just don't see the value in a physical collection. 

..Not very sentimental are you. I'm pretty much the same as you when it comes to organizing my  library but this take and your whole post is inducing schizophrenia so I am looking away

I use slsk and private trackers, before those I used to go through old blogspots for dls and still do occasionally, but more often than not I keep things I can't find immediately in my wishlist on slsk. I like collecting records and cassettes too.. does me going to shows count as consuming music..? I don't like the word consume used in this context.

I avoid spotify like the plague (as with most streaming) but I have a lot of music saved on there from over the years, as much as I'd like to never touch that app again I use it when I'm out in public or at work sometimes, but once I get an ad I usually close out >_>