Skip to main content

The Diffusion of Music Streaming

 

Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash

 

For the last hundred or so years, give or take, $10 has just about always bought a single album. $10 vinyl records, $10 cassette tapes, and though CDs became a bit more expensive, iTunes eventually returned to a $10 average offering for their novel service. Now, for the same price, I get access to just about every song ever published, whenever I want. How did we get here?

 

When Spotify first arrived on the scene offering a service to stream your favorite songs from the internet, it felt like a weird, impractical way to pay for your music. I have to keep paying? And never actually own it? Yeah, I think I’ll pass. And I wasn’t alone – it took Spotify more than two years after launch to convince any A series investors that the music business could be fruitful.

 

However, being the grubby little new-tech-lover I was, it wasn’t long before I found myself asking for a Spotify subscription for Christmas. Once I adopted it – and before the advent of competitors like Apple Music – I remember having to actively convince friends and family to give streaming their music a shot. “I can find all kinds of new music,” I would tell them, “Look at the social features!” At that point, I only knew a handful of other users, but people were starting to take interest. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was an early adopter, actively advocating for the platform to the extent that Spotify themselves took notice, inviting me to their “Rock Star Program” (too much free time on my hands, I suppose).

 

Before long, I was calling it the “Spotify revolution,” labeling Apple Music-users blasphemers by association. Friends were increasingly opting to stream their music, though with the new wave of adopters being largely limited to younger folk, the app’s “diffusion” was still in its relative infancy compared to today. Nevertheless, this was without a doubt the “early majority” of users.

 

Image courtesy of the Military Families Learning Network.

 

In recent years, however, I’ve seen what I believe to be the 4th wave of late adopters. Groups like my parents and teachers have started to migrate over to streaming, though I’d say we’re still very much still in the midst of experiencing the shift. 

 

I believe we are nearing the plateau of innovation for music streaming. Spotify is now available in most countries across the world and the vast majority of modern devices. While I don’t see my grandparents joining Spotify anytime soon, music streaming has become mainstream enough that it’s spreading without needing to advertise to new customers. 

 

Really the only remaining question is where the industry goes from this point. Although the service has found explosive levels of success in recent years, each headline seems to bring more and more heat to the company, especially when it comes to properly compensating the artists. It’s entirely possible that – with the proper social awareness and lobbying – streaming services may be forced to rework their model. For now, however, the new way of listening has taken the world by storm, with no signs of slowing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Growing Dangers of Media Consolidation

  Every week we see a new headline highlighting a new deal, acquisition, or merger of some big-name media companies. It’s nearly impossible to pin down an accurate map of these ownerships, as new deals are so frequently changing the corporate media landscape. Sometimes, especially in the short-term, these deals can appear to work out well for the consumer. More often, however, they can prevent innovation and competition at best, while outright undermining our democracy at worst.     http://frankwbaker.com/The%20big%20picture.jpg   There really is no more exemplary candidate than AT&T. I would wager that most people my age are unaware that AT&T was founded by none other than Alexander Graham Bell, originally being called the Bell Telephone Company. Bell gradually accrued market dominance by either  refusing to work with and/or buying out competitors , eventually rebranding to the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Even after the formation of the Federal Communications C
Post a Comment
Read more

Where did the Anti-War movement go?

Photo by  Stijn Swinnen  on  Unsplash   Being born in the year 2000 gives me an interesting, warped perspective on U.S. foreign occupancy and the concept of “war” in general.    Without a doubt, both the World Wars and the Vietnam War seem like some of the most hellish, gut-wrenching low points in human history. It’s really hard to overstate how disturbing it was learning about the conditions of these conflicts.  Operation Wandering Soul  was infamously used by the U.S. as a tactic of psychological warfare; content warning, listening to the “ ghost tapes ” can be genuinely disturbing. If you’ve got the time, here’s a captivating clip of a Vietnam vet recounting his experience oversees, and specifically how it differed from the narrative Americans were being fed back home:   In my mind, it’s quite understandable that such conflicts were met with passionate anti-war movements. When I look around now, however, there’s nearly  no  discussion of the concept. How did we get here? Where did a
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rise of the Mixtape

  Engineer Lou Ottens. Image courtesy of  AD.nl   When the compact cassette first debuted, it wasn’t an entirely novel innovation. As its name might suggest, Lou Ottens sought to improve upon the bulky, often unreliable 1958 tape cassette system from RCA.     The inspiration for innovation came from perhaps the most human desire of all: convenience.  Phillips was interested in a potential market for a portable tape recorder, and after the speaker and batteries, the decreased dimensions hardly left room for the tape itself: a mere 2 x 4.5 inch space. To match the volumetric capacity of vinyl records, designers chose to, in the most analog way possible, compress the audio data in their novel tapes. By opting for a smaller stretch of tape per second of audio – 2 inches of tape compared to the then studio-standard 15 inches – the compact cassette traded some audio quality for the boost in portability.   Under pressure from Sony, Phillips allowed the Japanese tech giant license to produce h
Post a Comment
Read more