Is music streaming making us smarter or just more complacent? It’s a question we should be asking.
Streaming music services are damned cool. Ten years ago, the idea of being able to instantly summon any one of 40 million songs with a couple of pokes on a handheld device was the stuff of science fiction. Now we’re taking that ability for granted.
But like with any new distribution system, there’s a shift in consumer behaviour. Redbull.com asks if streaming is actually good for us–and for music.
In January 1993, Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) launched the very first free online musical archive. It was a platform utilised by unsigned artists to share their music and market themselves independently. Almost 10 years later, Last.fm was launched. Besides aggregating plays, it spat out music recommendations based on whichever artist you were listening to, or “scrobbling”, at the time. Soon after came the launch of Pandora, which bypassed Last.fm’s recommendation system with complex algorithms that developed highly curated radio stations for subscribers.
Music streaming services appeared to be a catch all solution to the industry’s problems. In 2007, tensions between record labels and musicians were at an all time high; issues with adequate pay were at the forefront of this discussion with artists resisting against restrictive contracts.
The “pay what you want” scheme of services like Bandcamp are what many artists opt for today, but back in 2007, Radiohead released the first major album whose price was determined by what individual consumers wanted to pay. This was followed shortly by the launch of SoundCloud, borne from that very same desire to bypass record labels and release music to an audience for free.
However, Spotify’s launch in 2008 and its subsequent launch in North America in 2011 saw a rise to a different model. Everything was integrated, from music saved on hard drives to a virtually infinite library of streamable songs; it appeared to be the solution to piracy, which had increasingly become a burgeoning threat on the music industry. And most importantly, Spotify paid artists — even if you didn’t pay for a premium account. It was a major win for consumers and apparently a bigger win for artists.
But over the years, streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google and the like have come against criticism for the realities of streaming — on average an artist will be paid $0.0038 per stream. Besides outliers like Taylor Swift, Drake and Ed Sheeran, that isn’t a lot of money.
