Ten Dollars Is Not a Lot to Pay for All of the Music Ever

I find your tip of information useful and your article entertaining and the picture at the end abusive; and so a well rounded article. ;)

The problem with these services is that they are an extraordinarily bad deal for the recording artists. I have self published a couple of tunes digitally, and whilst I make around $0.70 from the sale of a track on iTunes or Amazon, I made just $0.10 from almost 100 plays on Spotify in January. I dare say that the likes of Lady Gaga and Madonna will still rake in mega bucks, but independent artists aren't going to make much.

There's another consideration as well. Assume for a moment that one keeps this subscription for 10 years. That amounts to $1200 in expenses. Each of us would need to consider "Would I spend that much on music if I were purchasing the tracks individually?"

Yes, initially, there might be a back-log of music if you haven't been keeping up with your favorites, but if you HAVE, would there be $1200 worth of NEW songs worth buying in a 10 year period? For some, yes, for others, maybe not.

The article expresses, "this year for the first time Americans are buying as much digital as physical music. Great!" Why is it "great"? According to its shills, technology's itnerest is the qualify of its offerings, not so much profit for questionable material. But, then, the article would emphasize how much digital music had improved. Instead, it describes as "great" only the fact that digital music is taking up a bigger share of the marketplace. Placing profit before the people! And, note, it doesn't mention whether that increase in purchases is due to quality or that digital suppliers made their material easier to obtain or even that they may have engineered that physical music sources be discontinued, forcing purchase of digital music! Certainly, the cheapness of digital music is played up by the article. Which can invoke images of days when it was claimed that nuclear power would be "too inexpensive even to meter". Then, when contracts were handed out, they let the electricity the plants supplied run up in price. It wouldn't be hard to see digital music soar in price once competition in the form of physical music disappears.

But, in fact, there are aspects of digitalization that many if not most ignore. The very issue of the emphasis on digital transmission is one such. Questions can be raised about the effects of digital sound transmission, but there certainly does seem to be an interest in acclimating the public to pictures broken into pixel elements, such as the gratuitous rendition at the end of the article. Even where it is incredibly unnecessary, television and other media make certain to depict the screen broken into pieces. Commercials for Kleenex, DitecTV, EWTN, Desperate Housewives, Bankruptcy Help Line, Starving Artists Group, Men's Wearhouse, Raymour & Flanigan, MSNBC's "Your Business", Xfinity, Comcast, Ringer; the ad for the movie "New Year"; backgrounds for shows from News12 to "Entertainment Tonight" to "Extra" to "Ellen"; iPad app screens. Coupled with the government literally strong-arming people into switching from analog transmission to digital suggests purpose. And it is not unlikely that part of that purpose may lay with the ability to hide subliminal messages in digital images in a way that can affect the gullible most strongly. Another part of the New World Order attempt to enslave humanity.

Unfortunately, even the best music service is more focused on pop and common titles, when it comes to eclectic tastes and genres of more complex structures, only the most basic selections are to be found. Only a couple of them have anything close to a decent library, and even then, there were gaping holes in artist collections. All the music ever? Hardly. In reality, it's just as many titles as are commonly available anywhere else.

Of course, selection isn't the only glaring issue with subscription service to a discerning ear. Compressed audio is a bunch of crap, but even worse is the fact that you just can't stream everywhere, all the time. Cell reception is not great at the lake, in the desert, Kansas, or pretty much anyplace that's not populated by 12,000 of your closest friends. I kinda like listening to music through Kansas, and Texas, definitely Texas on the 10 straight through. Yikes, can you imagine trying to make that drive on streaming music alone? Of course, these same areas will only have pop country and holy roller radio on tap to further the misery.

The final nail in subscription service, is the fact that data ain't free, people. Sure, on the way home from work or occasional listening is fine, but what about the audiophiles that that have music on 24/7? I've had 9 gig months over streaming before, I sure am glad that I got on board early with the unlimited plan, and, no, I have not noticed any throttling. Then again, I got bored pretty quick with these services, changed them as often as the oil in my car. Until I ran out of options and gave it up.

Artist compensation is another issue altogether. Artists are getting hosed, to be sure, but the industry is mostly to blame for that. Instead of embracing change, as it happened, they resisted is every way. All the inovative opportunities passed them by before they realized they were on the Sony side of the VHS/beta wars. It's pretty tough to regain that ground once lost, now they are almost broke so it might not happen for a while. I have higher hopes for an honest political party in our lifetime. Until then, I support the artists I enjoy by owning the recordings outright. They are mine, with multiple backups, I will have them forever, everywhere I go. As a bonus, I get to listen to everything I want, instead of whatever is commercially available.

Ten bucks for a radio app ain't bad for being able to listen to old or obscure music; especially music from old or deceased performers. Do the performers get their royalties? I sure would like to think so, but in the robber baron protection zone that is the U.S.A., I suspect that the paper trail for actual profits will be typically scummy and the performers-beneficiaries will be screwed; as usual. Our current practice of "Sue the high school kid for $100,000; but leave the real criminal that steals millions per year alone" will hold true.

I expect better analysis on a site related to science! The article does not consider many factors that contribute to the overall cost. It does not consider how many tracks (not albums - lot of folks don't want every track in an album) a consumer might buy in some period of time. It does not consider the cost of streaming data to mobile devices. Comparisons are made with costs of items unrelated to the topic. Not to mention the cheap concluding paragraph. This article is more suited for a college student's blog than on a science site.

Perhaps, but I still prefer having a physical copy of my music, because- unlike my digital collection on a harddrive that got fried- I know that it won't fuckup. I'm the only one who handles my discs, and my stereo system stays in my room.

Even if a disc gets scratched or the stereo kicks it, I still have my collection.

If the digital fucks up- it's ALL gone.

With several thousand songs, that's a tough blow.

That is a good thing about the physical version of music, but it is just as easy to keep your virtual music safe. All it takes is an external hard drive that you backup your music and information on. A friend of mine has had a 250GB external hard drive for years. Its almost full of crap that he thinks is worth keeping, but it still continues to work as expected.

@ Douglas; If I store my digital data, say songs, online as well as in my system, then I can reload any time I want. If your house burns or gets destroyed in a tornado, where's your music then? A thief hears about your vinyl record collection and comes visiting when you are out having tacos, and you are just plain out of luck; but if that same thief goes to a top university for the rest of his life just to learn a way to steal my stuff; all he'd find is that he'd have to damn near destroy the planet to be sure he actually even got to some of my data, and that he could NEVER be sure he got it all. While I certainly think that we are too dependent on tech, I would never say we don't get worthwhile uses out of it. Something I know about my computer hardware. It almost never just 'fucksup'. If I lose any data, it's probably because of something stupid that I did. Neither high tech nor lo-tech can save us from that.

Paying for a specific product/service vs paying a monthly fee to get unlimited access to a library of products/services are two fundamentally different methods of doing things. Although proponents of one method might deny this, both methods have their advantages.

An interesting paragraph from Brandon Sanderson's novel "Warbreaker" explores how the subscription model would feel like extended to all that one had:

"She didn’t own anything, yet could have whatever she wanted. Exotic foods, furniture, entertainers, books, art . . . she only needed ask. And yet, when she was finished, it was removed. She had everything and nothing at the same time."

While I personally prefer personal ownership over paying for a subscription service, I feel that the only thing we must avoid is the elimination of one model or the other. If music (or any other product/service) gets to the point that you cannot access it without applying for a subscription service, then we'll have a problem.

I like free down loads, dare I say it.;)