Sunday 29 November 2015

Will Streaming Take Over?

Patrick Burkart’s book, “Pirate Politics” addresses the use of piracy within society. In his introduction, Burkart addresses The Pirate Bay as one of the world’s most famous piracy sites, where users are able to download almost any song, movie or game, with the risk of course, of downloading a virus. With the rise of piracy, and the decrease in purchased music, we have recently seen an increase of free music streaming sites, for example, Grooveshark and Spotify. Spotify is a means of listening to music for free, and legally.


Ironically enough, similarly to The Pirate Bay, Spotify is also Swedish and was introduced in 2006. It hasn’t become popular until recently. Spotify offers users a free way to enjoy their favourite songs without downloading illegally. I personally am not a huge fan of the site because I prefer to have actual downloads of songs, which enables me to avoid advertisements. This does come with the risk of downloading a virus to my computer, however I have been lucky enough to be able to avoid any since downloading. I also find that having hard copies of songs on my phone or iPod means I can access any song at any time rather than having to rely on Internet. Do you stream, download, or purchase your music? Why?

With the rise of Spotify, there have been various artists, namely Taylor Swift, who has chosen to pull the rights to all her songs on the Spotify site. This means that users can no longer access her music on the site, creating more limiations for the success of the site and giving users more reasons to download illegally.

Do you think that streaming sites such as Spotify will ever represent the most popular way of listening to music? Do you think that more artists will continue to pull their support for free streaming sites such as Spotify at the risk of listeners downloading the music for free elsewhere?

5 comments:

  1. I do all three! I have a subscription to Apple Music right now which is my current favourite way to listen to music. It's very conducive to the way I listen to music in that my tastes and favourite songs or artists change all the time, which means that I don't have to feel bad about not listening to a song anymore or deleting it from my library since I didn't pay $1.29 for it. Unlike illegal downloads, finding a song on Apple Music is effortless and unlike other streaming services it lets me download songs so I can play them without wifi.

    I do think that streaming sites are the way that the consumption of music is headed. I'm pretty sure that even if music is bought, artists are receiving very little money from royalties. I think the artists have accepted that the way they have to make money is through mercy and live performances, and thusly allowing their music to stream for free affords them the opportunity to gain popularity.

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  2. I also download my music, as I prefer to have actual downloads of songs so that I can play them on my phone or iPod with the click of a button, rather than having to type in an search for a song on the Spotify app. I use YouTube and the YouTube converter to find and download the music that I want, which puts me at a lower risk of attracting viruses, or so I have been told. However I do tend to use Spotify on occasion for songs that have not yet come out on YouTube. The negative aspect is that, like you said, this comes with advertisements which you cannot avoid unless you want to mute it whilst the ad is playing, which I sometimes do, as I have found that they play the same ads over and over – this can definitely get annoying! On the other hand, I do purchase some of my music from iTunes, for higher quality songs. After reading Nicole’s comment above, I’m definitely going to consider using Apple Music now.

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  3. There are so many way to rip music from the internet or access music relatively easily. Nicole I also use Apple music and it is probably one of the best music services around. No longer do you have to worry about finding your song, and constantly paying to download the highest quality version from the artist. Instead apple music offers an infinite library that users subscribe to in order to have access to the content. Artists licence their music to apple and are compensated. Due to the low pricing of Apple music and the amount of content that a user has access too it is the most convenient way to access music, no wait times for downloads and users do not have to pay for each song, if they were going to pay in the first place. Personally I used to download music like Brittany, but now I strictly use Apple music as it offer instant easy access to anything I want to listen to.

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