The streaming revolution.

I’ve slowly been increasing my streaming .  I also play many files burned to my NAS.  One advantage of streaming is switching between these files and Qobuz relatively seamlessly.

  The plethora of choice does come with decreased attention span.  Since it is so easy to change recordings, and there is so much choice, one does develop some ADD in their listening habits.

  In my genre of choice there tends to be a high deletion rate.  Many recordings disappear from  streaming services after the run of reissues in physical media have stopped.  This might be less of an issue if one’s listening is mainstream pop/rock.

At first, I was a bit of a skeptic about streaming, but I have jumped in and have found ti to be wonderful.  A wide choice of music in all genres; I can even get George Szell and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven symphonies in HD--Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra was one of the first two LPs I owned in the late 1950s, the other being Tommy Dorsey with Frank Sinatra!  I bought an Innuos Stream 1 with LPS1 power supply and the Phoenix USB module, and I have played CDs only once or twice in the past six months.  And, I am checking out new performers as well as old favorites.  All that for an entire month for about the price of a sandwich, fries, and a drink at Chik FIl A.

In related news, Spotify pays artists a lavish one-third to one-half of a US cent per stream, although musicians in this Reddit thread say it is often even less:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/13djsl9/how_much_do_artists_make_on_spotify_case_studies/

In contrast, Tidal pays around 1.5 cent and Qobuz 2 cents per stream (5 times more!).

You have to be fair, though: somebody has to pay for Spotify CEO Daniel Eck's 600 million euro investment in a German war drone manufacturer, of which he is also chairman.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-investment-in-defense-startup-helsing.html

Factor in Spotify's legendary garbage sound quality, and it's a mystery why any sane person still patronizes Spotify.

While I do utilize streaming, it is more for discovery and convenience than sound quality.  I have enjoyed the ability to listen to new music in the genre that I prefer at the time, this gives me new options to explore.  When I do find an artist or album that I like, I most likely buy the CD, then immediately rip it to my NAS.  Most of my listening time is directed to my own music on the NAS, while I keep all of my CD's in safe storage.  There's something about "owning" the music and providing a decent payback to the artist.

While I find being able to listen to almost any album that I want to hear on demand from Qobuz a massive advantage, I don’t listen to it as much as I might. That despite it being incredibly useful for trying out new music or exploring a favoured artist’s catelogue.

One reason for my failure to fully exploit Qobuz is that I have more than enough ripped CDs, etc. in the local library and albums on vinyl, so I don’t have time for listening to Qobuz. Up to now, my listening has been skewed towards vinyl as sound quality was so much better.

That has changed during an enforced rest from vinyl due to a faulty phono stage. I have found the sound of Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC with dBpoweramp Asset UPnP on my headless and fanless NUC and internal 4TB DSD so much more satisfying than Roon ROCK on the same hardware. A victory for the lighter processing of the UPnP approach. This way the Qobuz data skips the NUC and RAAT altogether. Asset can lighten the load on the streamer by unpacking FLAC files to WAV.

The downside of this is the loss of Roon integration of Qobuz with the local library. That integration and Roon Radio encouraged me to listen to Qobuz more. Without it, Qobuz lives in its own rarely visited ghetto.

The saving grace is that I can run Roon on the Windows server along side Asset UPnP. So I am now at a crossroads where I have to weigh up the relative merits of the sound quality and functionality of Asset UPnP and Roon. Unfortunately, jPlay for iOS isn’t a practical option for me. Sound quality is paramount, but the Roon and Qobuz combination is capable of expanding my musical horizons.