Also, there is a difference between on-demand playing a song that I have never heard of within 5 seconds and typical listening patterns (at least for me - YMMV).
I don't know. What does that have to do with the question at hand? My telling you "Play me 'Arms So Real' off the NMH 'Shannon House Tapes' within the next five seconds" isn't the music business. The music business in "Mine" by Taylor Swift.
Youtube, wait I will just search on google and I am sure i will get correct on 99.999999999% of times [even obscure songs in marathi] with first result being youtube.
Hmmm ... i just googled Britney Spears 3 . I then looked to see if Google Suggests, suggested Britney Spears 3 youtube.
Nope, because her demographic is not tech savvy enough to append Youtube to their search.
On the other hand if you do the same for Arcade Fire Wake Up ... google does suggest Arcade Fire Wake Up Youtube.
Thus YouTube is slowly becoming the go-to platform(as tech savvy/early adopters per google suggests are using youtube as such). Personally this is how i listen to songs I want to hear on my PC or on my iPhone. The Youtube iphone app is cool as it saves all songs(videos) you listened to under "history"
(Stupid anecdote but since the linked article provided no data, only opinion, I have no bad feelings about telling it here:) I like iTunes because it lets me actually own music and build my collection. Sure, I will head over to YouTube if someone tells me about an awesome song but if that song really is awesome I will just buy it. Free music I cannot own and which would be reliably available would be awesome but I still would buy music from iTunes. It wouldn’t matter.
The problem with 'music I own' is that then you have to organize and manage it. I have many multiple gigabytes of music on my hard drives, but I rarely bother with that anymore when I can just click open Pandora and it plays music I like without me having to think about it.
I haven't downloaded a single song in last 3 years!
and haven't bought one since last 10+ years (I am 22 years old. Why buy when you can listen for free on you tube!
I have spent that money wisely on lot of book and good food which is actually needed rather than mindless itunes spending.
I buy about three to five albums per month. Organizing that is no big deal. I just name it consistently (I have my own capitalization rules ;) after it finished downloading. That’s what, maybe two minutes per album? Doesn’t seem like work.
My issue isn't with the process of cataloging, but with deciding what music to play when it comes time to listen to music. Sure you can just pick some random albums from your collection and throw them on, but if you have a nontrivial number of albums, or a large collection of individual songs, then you quickly end up managing multiple playlists, skipping tracks you don't want to hear not because you don't like them but because you're just not in the mood, etc.
Alternatively, I can just turn on Pandora and it plays music I like. It's literally a one click solution.
It makes better playlists than I could if I spent 2 hours a day perfecting my own. It also goes out and finds new music that I haven't even heard yet, but because Pandora knows more about the music I like than I do, there's a pretty damn good chance it will be right.
In the time since I've started using Pandora I've discovered more new music that I like than I ever did when I was buying individual albums or songs off of iTunes or whatever. Not only that, but I actually buy more CDs because I've heard all the songs on Pandora and I can buy the CDs with confidence, rather than wonder whether I'm going to waste another $15 on crappy music. Although, I was mostly buying CDs to play in my car, but soon I'll be getting a Droid, and then I can just play Pandora directly in my car so CDs might get obsoleted.
Sorry to barrage you with self-links, but I felt the same thing recently and I've started working on an (open-source) tool for addressing exactly that: organizing my music collection correctly and painlessly (i.e., as automatically as possible).
It's called beets and the idea is this: just throw new albums at it; they get tagged correctly (from MusicBrainz), copied into a directory structure you specify, and catalogged in an sqlite database. Let me know what you think: http://beets.radbox.org/
Sigh... I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell & back for saying this on HN, but...
I own a Zune, and I like it.
Egads, I know, right!? The thing is: for $15/mo I can legally download almost as much as I want to multiple Zunes (one for myself, one for my wife) and we get $10/mo in credits to buy songs we are otherwise renting. Sure, everything is still locked down with draconian DRM (which is rather easily circumvented) but for my use cases of just being able to pop a few songs over onto one of our portables, or play songs from multiple computers (up to 5), or stream songs from my XBox - well, I just don't care about the DRM that much.
My wife & I both have iPhones and would gladly switch back to iTunes, if only Apple would offer a subscription service (cold day in hell and all that, I know).
(No idea why you should be downvoted for owning a Zune. Seems like an awesome product.)
There are subscription people and there are download people (and there are no doubt people who are both for different kinds of music). There is more than enough space for both models of listening to music. Just cause’ many people like subscriptions doesn’t mean that buying and downloading music and in particular iTunes are dead.
I’m not saying that buying and downloading music is the only true way, everyone who does anything else is a heretic and all subscriptions platforms are doomed.
Isn't everything DRM free on iTunes? Maybe you bought it before it happened.. is it possible to download the DRM free version from iTunes if you owned the DRM version from a few years ago?
All the music in the iTunes store is drm free now. If you would rather have an mp3 than an AAC version of the file, you can use iTunes itself to do the conversion.
Spotify’s got it right. A perfect interface with free streaming and a paid for mobile app that allows thousands of tracks to live on your handset as if you owned them.
Wrong. As if I owned something isn't good enough for many people. It's the same problem as streaming. If I stop paying you a monthly fee I don't own them anymore.
Spotify does allow you to buy DRM free downloads. But there's not a huge difference in price between that and any other service as far as I'm aware. Spotify hasn't really changed the long term situation. Music is still seen as more financially valuable by sellers than by buyers. While the difference in price between legal and free (illegitimately) is still perceived as too high, "piracy" will continue.
(And yes, the quote marks there are a mark of disdain for that term. If I were to call parking infringements "illegal land invasions" I'd be a laughing stock. If you can't make your case with emotive terminology, improve your case)
Frankly I never understood why people actually buy music in first place and not just listen on Youtube????
First you pay 20$ per month for the expensive 3G service and then waste a dollar per song WTF?
I wouldn't be surprised if these are the same people who took million $ mortgages and 100k$ + debt for a degree in communications and marketing.
No doubt these people require advice from people such as ramit sethi et.al.
Note: I am an FOB Indian who studies CS at a very good school, so maybe I overestimating intelligence of average Americans.
Because you don't want to deal with ads. You want to listen to music away from your computer. You don't want to use up your Internet cap re-streaming the same content over and over again. Maybe you occasionally have some times in your life where you don't have Internet access 24x7. Maybe you want higher quality audio. Maybe you like albums and don't want to live in a single shuffle world. Maybe you have exotic tastes in music and these services don't offer you the content you like.
Is there anyone here who gets Spotify where it's available? I wonder if you could relate your experience and if it's changed your attitude towards music and particularly iTunes and downloading music.
I ask because people don't seem to have a problem borrowing books from a public library but never buying them after reading. So why is music different?
I've been using a normal, free account on Spotify for about a year. The quick summary:
The upsides: fast, and free - and I don't mind the occasional "radio ad" being played.
The downsides: not everything I like can be found there as the assortment is heavily geared towards contemporary popular mainstream music, and there is no guarantee that something you find will stay - it has happened plenty of times that a single track has been pulled from an album on Spotify, as well as an entire album being pulled from a represented artist's selection.
I consider the product genial, but as long as the assortment isn't complete (nor guaranteed), I will keep downloading (as well as buying).
I'm enjoying the comments about the lack of data in the linked article. As a tech person who works in the music industry, I've stopped reading most music business centric news as there always seems to be a lack of data driven analysis. So much of the music business is driven by a "vibe" or a "feeling" which can be great for deciding which artists to be in business with, but pretty terrible for most other important decisions.
Considering how many iPods the iTunes Music Store helped sell, I'm not sure it can be referred to as a failure. Perhaps it's a failure for the major music companies in terms of the revenue it drives for THEM (and I assume this is what Lefsetz is saying), but that wasn't the reason for creating the ITMS any more than the reason Apple launched the App Store was to drive revenue for App Developers.
My current source of choice for finding music I like is Time-Warner cable's music channels. I usually have something like "Singers and Swing", "Jazz", "Blues", or "Classical" playing. When I hear something I really like, I look it up in Google or in Amazon and see where it is and what people think.
I prefer to buy a CD from Amazon and rip it (at 256 kb) unless the MP3 is significantly cheaper. It then it in iTunes (on my MacBook Pro) and then onto my iPod Classic (160 GB is nice).
I sometimes but rarely buy from the iTunes store. I do subscribe to more podcasts than I can keep up with, but WTH.
35 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 74.5 ms ] threadAnd I'd probably open Spotify for a song.
Also, there is a difference between on-demand playing a song that I have never heard of within 5 seconds and typical listening patterns (at least for me - YMMV).
Nope, because her demographic is not tech savvy enough to append Youtube to their search.
On the other hand if you do the same for Arcade Fire Wake Up ... google does suggest Arcade Fire Wake Up Youtube.
Thus YouTube is slowly becoming the go-to platform(as tech savvy/early adopters per google suggests are using youtube as such). Personally this is how i listen to songs I want to hear on my PC or on my iPhone. The Youtube iphone app is cool as it saves all songs(videos) you listened to under "history"
I'm no musician, but I love music and the people who spend 100% of their time creating it.
Saying music should be free is like saying the work of a graphic designer, visual artist, or other artist should be free too.
It's easy to sit in front of your pc and spout off about music being free when you don't value the work of artists.
I have spent that money wisely on lot of book and good food which is actually needed rather than mindless itunes spending.
Alternatively, I can just turn on Pandora and it plays music I like. It's literally a one click solution.
It makes better playlists than I could if I spent 2 hours a day perfecting my own. It also goes out and finds new music that I haven't even heard yet, but because Pandora knows more about the music I like than I do, there's a pretty damn good chance it will be right.
In the time since I've started using Pandora I've discovered more new music that I like than I ever did when I was buying individual albums or songs off of iTunes or whatever. Not only that, but I actually buy more CDs because I've heard all the songs on Pandora and I can buy the CDs with confidence, rather than wonder whether I'm going to waste another $15 on crappy music. Although, I was mostly buying CDs to play in my car, but soon I'll be getting a Droid, and then I can just play Pandora directly in my car so CDs might get obsoleted.
We're still improving it, so if you have any feedback, shoot me an email.
It's called beets and the idea is this: just throw new albums at it; they get tagged correctly (from MusicBrainz), copied into a directory structure you specify, and catalogged in an sqlite database. Let me know what you think: http://beets.radbox.org/
I own a Zune, and I like it.
Egads, I know, right!? The thing is: for $15/mo I can legally download almost as much as I want to multiple Zunes (one for myself, one for my wife) and we get $10/mo in credits to buy songs we are otherwise renting. Sure, everything is still locked down with draconian DRM (which is rather easily circumvented) but for my use cases of just being able to pop a few songs over onto one of our portables, or play songs from multiple computers (up to 5), or stream songs from my XBox - well, I just don't care about the DRM that much.
My wife & I both have iPhones and would gladly switch back to iTunes, if only Apple would offer a subscription service (cold day in hell and all that, I know).
There are subscription people and there are download people (and there are no doubt people who are both for different kinds of music). There is more than enough space for both models of listening to music. Just cause’ many people like subscriptions doesn’t mean that buying and downloading music and in particular iTunes are dead.
I’m not saying that buying and downloading music is the only true way, everyone who does anything else is a heretic and all subscriptions platforms are doomed.
Then I got a new laptop and installed Linux on it - now all that music I brought on iTunes is locked and I can't use it.
So take that "ownership" with a big helping of NaCL.
FAAD2 is an open source MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 AAC decoder, it is licensed under the GPLv2 license.
It's been much longer than a few months since iTunes sold DRM music.
Wrong. As if I owned something isn't good enough for many people. It's the same problem as streaming. If I stop paying you a monthly fee I don't own them anymore.
Spotify does allow you to buy DRM free downloads. But there's not a huge difference in price between that and any other service as far as I'm aware. Spotify hasn't really changed the long term situation. Music is still seen as more financially valuable by sellers than by buyers. While the difference in price between legal and free (illegitimately) is still perceived as too high, "piracy" will continue.
(And yes, the quote marks there are a mark of disdain for that term. If I were to call parking infringements "illegal land invasions" I'd be a laughing stock. If you can't make your case with emotive terminology, improve your case)
I wouldn't be surprised if these are the same people who took million $ mortgages and 100k$ + debt for a degree in communications and marketing.
No doubt these people require advice from people such as ramit sethi et.al.
Note: I am an FOB Indian who studies CS at a very good school, so maybe I overestimating intelligence of average Americans.
Because you don't want to deal with ads. You want to listen to music away from your computer. You don't want to use up your Internet cap re-streaming the same content over and over again. Maybe you occasionally have some times in your life where you don't have Internet access 24x7. Maybe you want higher quality audio. Maybe you like albums and don't want to live in a single shuffle world. Maybe you have exotic tastes in music and these services don't offer you the content you like.
I ask because people don't seem to have a problem borrowing books from a public library but never buying them after reading. So why is music different?
The upsides: fast, and free - and I don't mind the occasional "radio ad" being played. The downsides: not everything I like can be found there as the assortment is heavily geared towards contemporary popular mainstream music, and there is no guarantee that something you find will stay - it has happened plenty of times that a single track has been pulled from an album on Spotify, as well as an entire album being pulled from a represented artist's selection.
I consider the product genial, but as long as the assortment isn't complete (nor guaranteed), I will keep downloading (as well as buying).
Considering how many iPods the iTunes Music Store helped sell, I'm not sure it can be referred to as a failure. Perhaps it's a failure for the major music companies in terms of the revenue it drives for THEM (and I assume this is what Lefsetz is saying), but that wasn't the reason for creating the ITMS any more than the reason Apple launched the App Store was to drive revenue for App Developers.
I prefer to buy a CD from Amazon and rip it (at 256 kb) unless the MP3 is significantly cheaper. It then it in iTunes (on my MacBook Pro) and then onto my iPod Classic (160 GB is nice).
I sometimes but rarely buy from the iTunes store. I do subscribe to more podcasts than I can keep up with, but WTH.