Music streaming is one of the greatest things to ever happen to the music industry. There’s no way that I would have contributed so much to an artist's personal wealth had music streaming never existed. I grew up through a time where piracy was an everyday thing, done by every single person I knew. One time, in my biology class in high school, this girl got an iTunes gift card for her birthday and the guy I was sitting next to looked at her like she had just said she was the anti-Christ. “You buy music?” he said with the most confused tone of voice I had ever heard. I swear radical, hardcore Christian parents who can’t quite understand their child coming out of the closet will never be as confused as this kid. He shook his head for the next five minutes in disbelief, thinking he had imagined the whole interaction. Which meant he kept asking her the same question, eyebrows furrowed, trying to understand the words coming out of her mouth, “You buy music?”
There was no way anyone still dished out cash to the huge music labels that we eventually learned that artists hated. It’s no secret that some musicians despise the contract they signed, always rebelling against the corporation and releasing whatever kind of music they feel artistically inclined to; if they didn’t and agreed to whatever the label told them, they sold out and lost their fanbase entirely. The music business is a brutal industry, where any person can get sucked up into the glamor and glory and get spit out chewed up and dripping in the saliva of whatever label they got in with.
I’m not saying labels are the devil, it’s rough peddling mixtapes downtown and trying to get popular off of YouTube hits. They do a great service in distributing the music of artists who deserve to be heard. But the thing is, in this new age of the complete connectivity, music is so accessible it’s ridiculous. I love the Internet, it’s a beautiful thing, with music blogs and direct access to the artists with Twitter and Facebook and such. And then there’s Soundcloud. Oh, I love Soundcloud. If you’re not on there, you need to be, it’s the future of the music industry. The musical equivalent of Darwinism at its finest, with the greatest releases gaining enough traction eventually through shares and listens.
Music streaming is the greatest thing to happen for people like me. I have rarely paid to listen to an album, and with the opportunity to at least give something, anything, to the artists that have put their heart and soul into the track I’m gobbling up over the course of a few minutes, I can finally stop feeling guilty about loving music. As a result, I feel way too privileged. I always listen to the ads on Spotify with a big appreciation and feeling like “Yes, I AM paying this artist what they deserve.” But when the third ad pops up, I’m always really pissed off, groaning all the time during it, thinking “Alright! My time isn’t worth it… I’d MUCH rather rip these off of the internet! They're not even that good..” And then I read an article about how streaming pays very little to all of the musicians in the world but at least it’s more than nothing and I feel guilty. Then rinse and repeat. But I’ve ultimately come to the realization that streaming is the next big step in music.
Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music and whatever other streaming services out there have given the opportunity for the everyday person to finally enjoy music without the guilt that comes with the need to search in the backwoods of the internet and download it to put on their iPod for whatever driving trip comes up next. Apple Music will eventually dominate the service because Apple over everything. And if you disagree Steve Jobs will laugh at you when he turns you away from the pearly gates of heaven, because you know he’s the newly appointed CEO of that whole operation.
Music streaming will be going through whatever weird evolution process all of these new industries go through, but in the end, it will be the savior of music. As much as I love vinyl, I can’t come close to being able to afford buying whatever new album I’m interested in on it. Hats off to you, the ‘70s, because you worked all week to be able to get that latest Chic album. I’ll gladly work for a few hours a month to afford the $10 to get unlimited access to the entire music catalog and not feel guilty about ripping off the talented people who made it. With this new technological step in music, we can all finally appreciate music together and make sure those people who work so hard to make that music will get at least something in the end.
