Against Streaming

Several months ago, a young undergrad looked at me quizzically when I mentioned off-hand a CD I had just bought.  "Wait, you buy CDs?" she asked in disbelief, "You mean you don't just stream Spotify through your smartphone?"  When I protested that I downloaded music onto my iPod, she said, "Wow, that's like hipster status right there!"  I was about to guffaw that iPods hardly qualify as vintage tech, but then I realized that iPods are now 10 years old.  Oh, man.  That's where we are now, folks.

I worried that my general ambivalence about Streaming services signaled the early-onset of premature, get-off-my-lawn old-man crotchetiness; but then I thought about it for 10 minutes and promptly snapped out of it.  For what I quickly realized is this:

If you're gonna get all your music from the internet, then just download it illegally and be done with it--at least then you'll be an honest thief.  Serious, Streaming services notoriously only pay the artists (i.e. the only reason you're on Pandora or Spotify in the first place) fractions of a cent per play--not dollars, not even pennies, but fractions of pennies!  You know, the denominations so small and worthless that there are movements to get rid of them altogether.  Indeed, even thousands of plays on a Streaming site can net an artist less than one whole dollar (as illustrated in this illuminating article by Galaxy 500's Damon Krukowski).  Statistically speaking, file sharing rips off the artist no more than paying the monthly fee to Pandora or Spotify.

In effect, all you are paying for with Streaming is yet another middle-man to rip off the artist for you--as though we didn't already have labels and venues and all the internet to do that!  Really, Streaming services are the music-equivalent of shopping at Whole Foods--just another luxury charge to soothe your worried conscience, to add a veneer of legality and respectability to these whole sordid proceedings, while you continue complicit in the same exploitative practices that troubled it in the first place.  If you're gonna screw over an artist, at least have the decency to own up to it and just file share.

What's more, in file sharing you can at least keep the music!  You are no longer reliant upon the whims of labels, contracts, artists, or others as to whether you will be allowed to pay someone else to hear their music (being able to control what I listen to is a huge reason why I finally quit listening to the radio years ago, too--and I will be cursed before I let another corporation control what I can listen to under the false guise of "better serving" me).  Moreover, with Streaming, if your internet or phone service is spotty (as it is in many rural areas, or on long road trips), or shoot, if we're just hit by the EMP pulse of some unusually large solar flare, then Amen to your grand internet library!  The Library of Alexandria burned longer than it would take for you to lose all your music. 

Or, you know, you could actually buy your favorite artists' music, and compensate them directly for goods and services rendered.  What a novel idea.