Go Buy Some Music You Deadbeat Streamers!

Really interesting article, and thanks for sharing. Yeppers, the ones who are being left out in this move to streaming overall are the musicians themselves in terms of revenue. And that makes sense, as individual contracts with recording companies have absolutely changed and became ‘watered down’ and ‘spread wide’ with the advent of streaming services today, and probably downloads before that.
Interesting to see how things have changed, ebbed and flowed, since the 70’s, but pretty much on par as what I would have guessed.Streaming services though, dang, a huge chunk today with physical medium almost non-existent in the grand picture.


Oh well, I’ll keep purchasing physical formats; problem for the artists is 99.99% of my purchases are used old recordings, and will probably remain that way for years to come (good for the small and larger resellers though). But when I think of it, many of my vinyl LP’s were purchased in the 70-80’s were used as well in the same kind of shops that have reemerged today...but, At least they had to have been purchased new at one time. Most my cassettes and CD’s on the other hand were purchased new.

I enjoy YouTube. Had a Tidal subscription but the SQ was not cutting it for me at all. Access to a large catalog was fun but much missing. I tend to buy the LP of artists I listen to a lot online. Ultimately, old analog recordings are my favorite and sound the best.

The amount of money artists make from streaming is a big problem. I don’t know how it can be solved. The boomers are on their way out. Younger generations feel that music is free (many of them, not all).

There is still a lot of money being spent on recorded music, including streaming, the artists have to band together and demand a reasonable share of it from the record companies.

The artists contribute to this problem by releasing really bad sounding music on physical formats. Many albums are poorly recorded and dynamically squashed. I listen to them through streaming and decide that I don’t want a physical copy. I won’t listen to it.

I don’t think it’s really hard to make a good sounding album, you just have to care.

It used to be the artists had to tour to promote their albums to make money.  Now (COVID crisis aside) they have to record albums to promote their tours - which is how they now make money.  

I guess I am in the 10% minority with my recent purchase of 4 CDs by artist Marcus King, a very good younger soul, southern rock, and blues guitarist/songwriter.
Those CDs were immediately ripped to my Antipodes server and then good to go for playing in my vehicle.
However, these days, like the trend, I purchase much, much less physical media.  Except for the music I ripped to my server from my moderately large collection of formerly purchased CDs, I mostly listen to stuff available on Tidal.