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Music Streaming Services Like Spotify Now More Popular Than Video Sites

HobeSoundDarryl said:
Agreed. Apparently being freed of those boxes of CDs goes right along with being freed of the clutter of cash in his wallet for life.;)
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So you are saying people get those boxes of CDs for free? For life? When a new song or album comes out, those who only want CDs don't have to spend money? Only people who stream music have to pay?

Wow..... Didn't know that.
 
Videos are longer than songs, so of course there will be more streams because you can fit multiple songs into the time it takes for a video to play...
 
No, but what happens in reality is that music buyers build a collection of songs- hundreds or thousands of songs. Eventually they have several favorites playlists full of so many songs they like that they don't need to be constantly buying new music. They just shuffle and enjoy what they have... and it doesn't drain their wallets for those months or years they do that.

The renter has to pay every month. If he is not going to get to listen but for 10 minutes in one month, he has to pay. That's renting. Stop renting and you have nothing to show for all the rental fees you've paid from that point forward. Stop buying and the buyer still has all the music they've ever bought available to them.

And the economics being slung to make renting seem like such a bargain is laughable. What I do is buy new music I like, typically in the "used CD" bins on "greatest hits" CDs like the "Now that's what I call music" CDs. Those cost about $2-$4. I also am generally given iTunes gift cards as gifts here and there throughout the year, so some new song I must have right now can be "purchased" for free that way. I don't feel I miss anything but I also don't have the steady wallet drain in renting.

That's no poke at renting. If I had no accumulated collection of music- no playlists full of favorites fun to "just shuffle & enjoy", the rental price is cheap for what one gets. But I do have an accumulated collection of music, so all this "new music" that is "must have" is not some great volume of want in my own situation.

My situation is not everyone's but there's a vice versa to that too: a renters situation is also not everyones. Neither option is best for everyone... so it's good that both options are available.
 
Like others, comparing the two, one would need to clearly define a stream. Video and music streams are generally quite different. Maybe number of hours might be a better comparison?
 
John Mcgregor said:
Good for you, but i don't see how renting anything for life is a most sensible.
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It's more sensible for me because with a streaming subscription I listen to way more music and spend less money on music per month. I typically have a hard time buying music because I know I'll only listen to it for a little while before I get bored of it and go seeking something else. Streaming doesn't give me that buyers remorse, and it makes discovery far less expensive. So as the OP said, it's not for everybody, but for a lot of us it is more sensible.
 
Cuban Missles said:
When it comes to movies or tv shows, streaming makes sense. I just want to "rent it" and watch it once. I am not going to watch it over and over. And with services like Netflix which is still cheaper than music streaming, it really works well. For more recent stuff I will pay the on demand charge through Apple. For Music, I like to listen to music over and over. And over the years. I like to keep my music. Streaming just doesn't make sense for me. I already had a collection of CDs that I ripped into my digital library - well over 10k songs. And over the years accumulated additional songs that I purchased on line (no CD). Now I will occasionally hear new music and if I like it I will just buy it and add to my well over 20k song collection. Given where I am, spending on streaming is actually more expensive for me and gives me very little over what I already have. Obviously, this is not the case for many, but that is my use case. My biggest concern is that with much of the music going behind paywalls, it is becoming harder to listen to new music. But I find ways and I will buy a song or two every month or so and continue my slow increase to my music catalog.
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My situation as well - a large existing library to which I slowly add new songs (way less than $10/month).

The problem I have with these services is that you're locked in. With buying, you can decide to adjust your spending on music (either up or down) at any time with no ill effects. And indeed, there are times I buy more, and times i listen to my old collection without making any new purchases for months at a time.
 
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John Mcgregor said:
Good for you, but i don't see how renting anything for life is a most sensible.
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HobeSoundDarryl said:
Agreed. Apparently being freed of those boxes of CDs goes right along with being freed of the clutter of cash in his wallet for life.;)
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So you both buy every single show you watch on TV, or do you "rent" the shows by paying the cable/satellite company monthly to "stream" shows to you? Same with streaming music. I don't really see the difference. CD's are not convenient for most people with a dozen different playback devices (none of which have a CD reader).
 
Carlanga said:
Yeah, in part regional difference. But is more a gen thing TBH at moment of product launch, US is a more stable market than others in regards to stream quantity of products so you might get more for your money in sub fees. People in US are all about the instant satisfaction as well.
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Hmm. When you pay for streaming service, you instantly can listen to whatever you want, whatever you may like to listen to. Sounds pretty reasonable. This is also perfect for "fast food " style music creation, which new stuff periodically comes out and old one being discarded after a while.
 
dmylrea said:
So you both buy every single show you watch on TV, or do you "rent" the shows by paying the cable/satellite company monthly to "stream" shows to you? Same with streaming music. I don't really see the difference. CD's are not convenient for most people with a dozen different playback devices (none of which have a CD reader).
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Oh brother.:rolleyes:

So you rent every single thing that has a buy vs. rent option?

There is a big difference between video and music.

And buyers of music with a dozen different playback devices rip the music into a format(s) that works on a dozen different playback devices. Where were you when buying music from Apple was the ONLY way to get music on a dozen different playback devices? Certainly Apple was wrong for offering only the "buy" option back then.:rolleyes:
 
dmylrea said:
So you both buy every single show you watch on TV, or do you "rent" the shows by paying the cable/satellite company monthly to "stream" shows to you? Same with streaming music. I don't really see the difference.
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I think there are quite a few differences. First and foremost, how many times you replay it. I've probably never seen any episode of any tv show even as many as 10 times (maybe a classic Simpsons episode or two), and for the most part, very rarely more than 2 or 3. Tv shows are something I'm very happy to watch once and move on from. But the most played songs in my iTunes library have hundreds of plays each, and many of them are rips from CDs I bought 20 years ago and still listen to regularly.

Second, the size of high quality video files makes having a large number of them rather impractical for many users. Obviously much less of an issue with music.

Finally, the economics are different. Netflix is $8/month. That's two episodes on iTunes. Apple Music or Spotify is $10/month, which is 7-8 songs at $1.29.
 
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brendu said:
I don't know, I don't need boxes full of CDs most of which I will not listen to more than every once in awhile. With streaming I can listen to whatever I want, whenever I want without having boxes of CDs or hard drives full of music I will rarely listen to. Also, this way when my kids want to listen to some Disney song of the week I don't have to constantly buy new kids music. I get that streaming isn't for everyone but for many of us it's the most sensible.
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You can fit all the CDs you'll ever buy on a cheap HDD.
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Rihanna's 'Work' is the most-streamed song
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I love the sarcasm quotes around "work."
 
The main problem I see with "renting" one's music is that it leaves the consumer entirely open to the whims of the streaming services, labels, and artists.

When I purchase music, I have it for life. With streaming, I am always just renting it.

What if Spotify et al. suddenly raise their prices? Either I have to pay up to continue accessing my playlists, etc., or else I no longer have access to any of it, and the hundreds of dollars I've already paid is completely useless to me going forward.

What if streaming services decide to make tiers (you can listen to these artists for X amount of money, these additional artists for Y amount of money) or make you pay extra for certain artists/albums/content? I either have to pay up, leave the streaming service and start buying all the music I've been paying to listen to before, or purchase that content elsewhere (if it's even available for purchase) while still keeping my monthly rental fee.

What if Apple suddenly decides it won't let Spotify on iOS anymore, or Spotify decides it will no longer support iOS? What if an entire label decides it no longer is going to feature its content on one given or any streaming services for whatever reason? We've seen numerous instances of artists, labels, streaming services, and OS creators not getting along for one reason or another.

There are many other what-ifs like this. I understand the upsides of streaming (as a Spotify subscriber and someone with thousands of purchased songs as well), and I do realize that CDs and digital downloads are not 100% futureproof (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. could decide one day to no longer allow anything but streaming services, Sony et al. could stop making CD players, etc.)...

But the move to streaming seems to take control out of consumers' hands and put us increasingly at the whims of huge corporations. Instead of being able to buy a song for 99 cents and be fairly certain you would always own access to that song, now we're moving to a model of renting music for the rest of your life and no guarantee you can keep/access any of it in the future. I'm not sure this is progress...
 
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brendu said:
Yeah but that doesn't help me at all when 75% of the music I listen to is on my phone in the car or on the go.
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You'll be able to fit a huge amount of music, covering most of what you'd listen to, on an iPhone. Even easier on a cheap Android phone with removable media.

I'm surprised you can stream music on the go. I always drive through spots with the classic 5 bars of no service or go into some building with no service and no wifi.
 
autrefois said:
But the move to streaming seems to take control out of consumers' hands and put us increasingly at the whims of huge corporations. Instead of being able to buy a song for 99 cents and be fairly certain you would always own access to that song, now we're moving to a model of renting music for the rest of your life and no guarantee you can keep/access any of it in the future. I'm not sure this is progress...
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I think the reason this doesn't make sense to you is because you don't consume songs like you do TV shows. But there are some of us that do. I don't buy songs most of the time because I know I'll end up never listening to them again in a month because I'll have moved on to something else. So when that song vanishes in four years, I'll never notice. It's like a tv show on Netflix. Once I've consumed it, I'm usually done.

Now there are some songs/albums that I genuinely think "you know, I could listen to that over and over for years," and I'll buy them. But that is a very small minority of the thousands of songs I listen to in a month, so I get a huge pool of constantly varying music to discover for the cost of a couple of albums. It's a great deal, assuming you listen to music like I do.
 
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GeneralChang said:
I think the reason this doesn't make sense to you is because you don't consume songs like you do TV shows. But there are some of us that do. I don't buy songs most of the time because I know I'll end up never listening to them again in a month because I'll have moved on to something else. So when that song vanishes in four years, I'll never notice. It's like a tv show on Netflix. Once I've consumed it, I'm usually done.

Now there are some songs/albums that I genuinely think "you know, I could listen to that over and over for years," and I'll buy them. But that is a very small minority of the thousands of songs I listen to in a month, so I get a huge pool of constantly varying music to discover for the cost of a couple of albums. It's a great deal, assuming you listen to music like I do.
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Thank you for explaining your take on it. I hadn't really thought of it that way and I guess it does make sense from your perspective.

The comparison to Netflix was good; I am definitely more of a casual movie/TV watcher and this issue doesn't bother me as much about Netflix. There's very little in the way of TV shows or movies that I feel like I have to always have access to.

There have been movies in my list occasionally that have been pulled from Netflix (sometimes to reappear later). It was a little annoying, but not a huge deal to me like it would have been if it was an artist or album I like. I can and often do listen to a given track or album a lot over time.

I think in both cases (movies and music), steaming services leave the consumer with less certainty and likely more money spent in the long term, but I can see a little better now why the cons aren't as big a deal for some people since you get access to a lot more content overall.
 
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ArtOfWarfare said:
If you were talking about something like a house, where most people only have one, then yeah, renting it for life is dumb.

With music though, there's always new songs that are available. It's great that you bought an album a few weeks ago, but now a new album is available which you haven't bought yet, so you need to go buy that too.

If you're buying $150 worth of music per year, you'd be better off just paying $120/year to stream the music instead.

Also, you can have buyer's remorse when buying albums. You buy a crappy album. What now? You won't be able to sell it for anywhere near what you bought it for. You're not interested in listening to it. You're simply out that money. If you were using a streaming service instead, all you've lost is a few minutes worth of time where you listened to something you didn't enjoy.

I've discovered a lot of musical genres that it turns out I like that I wouldn't have ever risked before, because it would have cost money to buy their albums. Folk Metal is freaking amazing.
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I disagree on the house. You have to pay where you lay regardless. It's either in the form of taxes+payments+insurance or in the form of rent. Pick your poison. Unless you are in the Top 2% home ownership may not be the best option if mobility is a concern.
[doublepost=1467834502][/doublepost]Additionally, billboard said streaming is helping the industry stay afloat as a whole. Industry revenue is up while sales are way down this year.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/b...ic-mid-year-album-sales-sink-streaming-growth
 
Isn't it obvious that streaming music would eventually overtake streaming video? Music is accessed in so many more places than video. On a commute, at the gym, just hanging out, etc.
 
Bawstun said:
It didn't. Their growth will flatten out because their interface and business model suck. You'll see.
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Let's cross that bridge when we get to it but right now streaming is the reason music industry revenues are up.
 
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