When will streaming reach its peak in America?

[Sherane Lamar]

May 17, 2016 9:50:23 GMT -5 YourFaveIsAFlop said:

May 14, 2016 17:19:19 GMT -5 ilikemusic said:

Edit: Another possibility could entail them not necessarily removing the free streaming tier altogether, but making it extremely frustrating to use. For example, they could put 1 minute ads between each song and let the user only listen to 8-10 songs a day or something like that.

I think daily caps will be coming soon.

That would kill urban music on the charts again. 

[Sherane Lamar]

May 17, 2016 13:56:54 GMT -5 @antigonerising said:

May 14, 2016 17:19:19 GMT -5 ilikemusic said:

Edit: Another possibility could entail them not necessarily removing the free streaming tier altogether, but making it extremely frustrating to use. For example, they could put 1 minute ads between each song and let the user only listen to 8-10 songs a day or something like that.

It's been a long time since I've used Spotify for free, but they were kind of already doing the bolded anyway. The ads would come up up every after every second or third song and sometimes there would be multiple ads played in a row. It was annoying as hell...but I don't think that would drive your typical cheapskate to pay just to get rid of commercials. I'm not entirely sure a daily cap would either; if restricted too much, a person could just as easily turn to Pandora or similar internet radio service, and then they might not return to Spotify at all.

My sister still uses the freemium tier and she is always complaining about how ass Spotify's mobile and desktop apps are. I never have the problems she does and I have suggested to her that they're purposely making the free app difficult to work with precisely because it is the free tier, but I have no way of knowing if other free users have these same issues. And regardless, for her it only justifies her reasons for not paying. Who wants to cough up money for something that o her, has already shown itself to be a flawed product, you know.

Taking away the repeat button and/or the ability to save playlists might be the key - it's not a 'cap' per se and technically does not take away the on-demand aspect, but having to click the play button or hop from artist page to artist page whenever you want to listen to another song might be enough to encourage some people to pay up. I know when I was considering checking out other streaming services my biggest reservation was that I would have to rebuild all of my playlists, and I think that is something I saw come up when people were talking about whether or not they'd move to Apple Music. Even Prince, when he yanked his music from all but Tidal, alluded to this - people getting upset because they "lost" their playlists. They feel like they own the music even though they really don't.

It seems to me like there's a pair of advertisements every 10 minutes. But they also constantly ask if I want to watch a 15 second video in order to skip the ads for 30 minutes. That doesn't even make any sense to me because the 15 second ad is for Spotify Premium and is way shorter than their regular ads. 

All in all, pretty lax on the ads.

And you're right. If they ever capped how many times I could listen to a song in one day, I'd just open up another free music app (I already have both Spotify and Pandora downloaded onto my phone). Or, I could just log out and log back in on my other account, or on my girlfriend's account. 

[YourFaveIsAFlop]

Digital sales aren't going away any more than physical media are. Even as they shrink as a share of the market, they're going to keep selling them, especially since there is practically no overhead for them. They don't have to pay to manufacture something for each sale.

[Caviar]

The thought of hearing ads between songs is frightening. That's the very reason why I don't listen to the radio.

[jenglisbe]

It's hard to imagine what could replace streaming, but in the early 90s were people imagining mp3s? Were they imagining streaming?

[godjanny]

May 19, 2016 10:09:09 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

It's hard to imagine what could replace streaming, but in the early 90s were people imagining mp3s? Were they imagining streaming?

 I guess the next step would be projecting the music directly into your mind. That's still a form of streaming but it could replace streaming as we know it today.

[jenglisbe]

May 19, 2016 19:02:55 GMT -5 godjanny said:

May 19, 2016 10:09:09 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

It's hard to imagine what could replace streaming, but in the early 90s were people imagining mp3s? Were they imagining streaming?

 I guess the next step would be projecting the music directly into your mind. That's still a form of streaming but it could replace streaming as we know it today.

I'm imagining a bit of the Minority Report stuff where commercials/customer service pops up as holograms/screens when people enter stores and the like.

[jenglisbe]

Re: piracy:

The problem has gotten so bad that, in 2015, vinyl record sales generated more income for music creators than the billions of music streams on YouTube and its competitors.
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/opinion/do-you-love-music-silicon-valley-doesnt.html?_r=0

Wow. If that's true we could definitely be seeing a lot of changes where streaming is concerned.

[Linnethia Monique]

With streaming it's all going to come down to providers; Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FIOS, AT&T and others and how they want to deal with congestion on their networks when it comes to streaming. Cellphones companies are already scrabbling to grab up spectrum for this problem right now along with Netflix, Hulu, other various ways of streaming content since people are cutting the cord, like myself for over 2 years, and how it becomes an overuse issue. T-Mobile is battling it by allowing the majors to be unlimited but the larger corporations aren't agreeing to that just yet because overage charges are making a killing for them. I'm currently grandfathered on unlimited on AT&T and I average between 20 and 35 GBs of consumption on just Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube specifically and they've been unsuccessful in trying to get me on their data share plans with the threat of throttling. Vinyl has seen a great resurgence recently but that has to do with the cylindrical way of trends. Physical media altogether can see a revival like CDs but I don't see the MP3 ever dying. NYC and London are trying to provide cellphone coverage underground but without that and coverage being spotty, especially in rural areas, the days of a streaming only economy is far ahead of us.

The TL;DR (@antigonerising version ) is me saying it isn't up to the consumer or businesses but the providers of your data as to whether a streaming only model in the music business can be an actual thing. As of now that would be a no. If you were to stream for 4-8 hours a day off your data it would be around 250MB to 1 GB per day depending on if you are just streaming at medium quality.

[Deleted]

May 22, 2016 1:43:41 GMT -5 Linnethia Monique said:

With streaming it's all going to come down to providers; Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon FIOS, AT&T and others and how they want to deal with congestion on their networks when it comes to streaming. Cellphones companies are already scrabbling to grab up spectrum for this problem right now along with Netflix, Hulu, other various ways of streaming content since people are cutting the cord, like myself for over 2 years, and how it becomes an overuse issue. T-Mobile is battling it by allowing the majors to be unlimited but the larger corporations aren't agreeing to that just yet because overage charges are making a killing for them. I'm currently grandfathered on unlimited on AT&T and I average between 20 and 35 GBs of consumption on just Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube specifically and they've been unsuccessful in trying to get me on their data share plans with the threat of throttling. Vinyl has seen a great resurgence recently but that has to do with the cylindrical way of trends. Physical media altogether can see a revival like CDs but I don't see the MP3 ever dying. NYC and London are trying to provide cellphone coverage underground but without that and coverage being spotty, especially in rural areas, the days of a streaming only economy is far ahead of us.

The TL;DR (@antigonerising version ) is me saying it isn't up to the consumer or businesses but the providers of your data as to whether a streaming only model in the music business can be an actual thing. As of now that would be a no. If you were to stream for 4-8 hours a day off your data it would be around 250MB to 1 GB per day depending on if you are just streaming at medium quality.

Eff yo' couch ninja! It's late and I have nothing else to add to this except general agreement with your post.

[Future Captain]

Once streaming plateaued in America, China will probably start showing monster growth in term of music streaming.

[BDGeek]

Interesting, relevant Pitchfork article:
pitchfork.com/features/article/9896-is-the-era-of-free-streaming-music-coming-to-an-end/

[jenglisbe]

Not sure of the best thread to post this information, but the latest Ent Weekly has an interview with some songwriters that is really interested as it relates to streaming:

Savan Kotecha - "That's the scary thing about now. I would get album cuts and that would give me the finances to focus on my craft. Now, with streaming, it's become a hit game. You're paid so little from royalties. Even a big hit doesn't make you money. I had a song that was No. 1 for weeks on the U.S. charts. It was Maroon 5's "One More Night." But I got the numbers for what we made from streaming. It was $35,000.

In an age of streaming, is it possible to make a living as a writer?
Kotecha - Radio money is good.
J.R. Rotem - That's where the money is. Everything else is gone.

[jenglisbe]

To add to the discussion on how little artists/writers make from streaming, Rosanne Cash posted the income she earned over a three-month period from one of the largest music streaming services on her Twitter:
“This qtr’s songwriting royalty statement: for 45,000 streams of my song ‘Seven Year Ache’ on one Big Tech service: $3.13. @artistrightsnow“
That works out to 0.00696 cents per play. Yikes.

[HEADOFTHEPACK]

For what it's worth, this is how my consumption of music has gone since I started really getting into it c1995. Very roughly mind...

1995 - 2002
I bought or my parents bought CDs. Recorded the Top 40 using a tape player.

2003 - 2005
Limewire / random mp3 sites, really heavily for all sorts. Single tracks were much easier to find than full albums. If I REALLY couldn't find something, I'd download it from whatever paid service had it. Sometimes iTunes.
For my favorite albums though, I still bought CDs. Sometimes my Dad would pick up a few CDs for me from the supermarket, we would copy them, then return them!
I started making my own mixed CDs... effectively playlists.

2006 - 2008/9
Similar to above, but started using blogs to download new album release. Much less physical/paid downloads. Literally any new album I wanted, I googled it and found it for free.
Became much harder to fine standalone tracks - you either get the album and delete the rest or an iTunes rip / CD single rip.
Stopped buying physical altogether around 2009, apart from limited edition releases.

2009 - 2015
Mixture of Spotify and my personal library - pretty much full of illegal downloads.

2015 onwards
Mixture of Spotify and paid downloads - I get the vast majority of my music from iTunes. I'm on a higher salary so can afford to drop a tenner to buy what I want to.
For music I listen to less or couldn't care less about owning, I use Spotify.

--

Most of this is driven by ease and how much money I have to spend on music and I think people forget the latter when we're talking about millennials. I've gone right back around to buying/paying for music most of the time because it's just so much easier to click 'Buy Now' than it is to search for a zip file, as some of you are saying - plus I like the idea of supporting artists I enjoy listening to. My music library is split across Spotify/iTunes, like 80/20 in favor of iTunes.

As for the initial question... I think it will go how Au$tin said, unless there's a major industry shake-up. Single-platform exclusives will die off or reduce dramatically, they piss both consumer and labels off.

In the longer term future... I've seen articles that claim record labels are becoming obsolete etc etc etc and certain functions that they have now may be, but I don't think that will ever be true unless you're an artist like Frank Ocean that almost purely relies on social media to promote an album.

[YourFaveIsAFlop]

Sept 18, 2016 20:20:11 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

To add to the discussion on how little artists/writers make from streaming, Rosanne Cash posted the income she earned over a three-month period from one of the largest music streaming services on her Twitter:
“This qtr’s songwriting royalty statement: for 45,000 streams of my song ‘Seven Year Ache’ on one Big Tech service: $3.13. @artistrightsnow“
That works out to 0.00696 cents per play. Yikes.

That's probably about how much she made from iTunes sales too. Songwriter royalities for paid downloads are about 12-16 cents. Id be surprised if she moved more than a few dozen copies of a 35 year old country song on iTunes

[jenglisbe]

Sept 19, 2016 7:57:26 GMT -5 YourFaveIsAFlop said:

Sept 18, 2016 20:20:11 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

To add to the discussion on how little artists/writers make from streaming, Rosanne Cash posted the income she earned over a three-month period from one of the largest music streaming services on her Twitter:
“This qtr’s songwriting royalty statement: for 45,000 streams of my song ‘Seven Year Ache’ on one Big Tech service: $3.13. @artistrightsnow“
That works out to 0.00696 cents per play. Yikes.

That's probably about how much she made from iTunes sales too. Songwriter royalities for paid downloads are about 12-16 cents. Id be surprised if she moved more than a few dozen copies of a 35 year old country song on iTunes

The point isn't about the total, it's about how little per stream/purchase the artist/writer gets.

[YourFaveIsAFlop]

Sept 19, 2016 8:19:53 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

Sept 19, 2016 7:57:26 GMT -5 YourFaveIsAFlop said:

That's probably about how much she made from iTunes sales too. Songwriter royalities for paid downloads are about 12-16 cents. Id be surprised if she moved more than a few dozen copies of a 35 year old country song on iTunes

The point isn't about the total, it's about how little per stream/purchase the artist/writer gets.

That is the point though. Artists/Writers have never made huge profits selling their songs, unless they have a huge massive hit. This is exactly how the industry has always worked. For a $15 album, an artist gets about $1, and won't see a penny until their advance has been repaid.

[jenglisbe]

Sept 19, 2016 8:50:28 GMT -5 YourFaveIsAFlop said:

Sept 19, 2016 8:19:53 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

The point isn't about the total, it's about how little per stream/purchase the artist/writer gets.

That is the point though. Artists/Writers have never made huge profits selling their songs, unless they have a huge massive hit. This is exactly how the industry has always worked. For a $15 album, an artist gets about $1, and won't see a penny until their advance has been repaid.

And I see all of that as a problem.

[YourFaveIsAFlop]

Sept 19, 2016 9:57:22 GMT -5 jenglisbe said:

Sept 19, 2016 8:50:28 GMT -5 YourFaveIsAFlop said:

That is the point though. Artists/Writers have never made huge profits selling their songs, unless they have a huge massive hit. This is exactly how the industry has always worked. For a $15 album, an artist gets about $1, and won't see a penny until their advance has been repaid.

And I see all of that as a problem.

It is a problem, but that's why singling out streaming as being the source of all evils is disingenuous. These artists weren't making fortunes off their music before streaming along either. Their gripe shouldn't be with the technology, it should be with their label who pockets the vast majority of revenues and leaves them the scraps