Streaming Music Still Sucks
Deep breath. About three years ago, I wrote a little something about how streaming music wasn’t ready for primetime. When I re-read that post, I realized how so much has changed and so much has stayed the same. I desperately want to ditch iTunes and hook-up with a streaming service. But I still can’t.
Right now, I’m subscribed to the three big ones in the US. Beats Music, Spotify, and Rdio. So you’re probably asking yourself (especially if you’re my wife), why are you subscribed to three different services? The answer is two-parted. First of all, each one has a feature or two that I really appreciate. For example, I really enjoy how liking a song on Spotify adds that song to a special playlist. I love Beats Music’s curated playlists but their mobile app is a total shitbox and their only desktop interface is browser-based. I’m probably the minority here but I really love Rdio’s iOS app design enough to make me forget about the hangs and crashes.
The second part is much more frustrating. Not a single one of them has all the songs that I listen to on a regular basis. Even combined, I can’t queue up every song that I have in my iTunes library. It’s crazy considering my library isn’t that big and I don’t have any super-hard-to-find tracks. The worst part is the constant adding and removing of tracks. Right now, in my most listened-to playlist on Rdio, I have almost a dozen songs that I used to be able to listen to but can’t now because the artist (or artist’s label) decided that it no longer makes financial sense to allow access to aforementioned tracks. Now this might be a feature but when a song is no longer available to stream, Rdio doesn’t remove it from my collection, it simply grays it out and places a nice little “UNAVAILABLE” tag next to it. So all the removed songs are a constant reminder that streaming music still sucks.
Streaming music is complicated because of how the licensing and royalties work. Basically, artists get paid a fraction of a cent per stream. In theory, if you’re a popular artist and your music is on all the big streaming services, you could have millions of people listening to your music and those little fractions add up.
If you choose to be a little more old school, you can just opt to sell your music outright. Either on the iTunes Store on on a physical disc (yeah, sure). The bottom line is that streaming music services walk the very fine line between making sure starving artists can eat and charging consumers a rate that makes more sense than just pirating the music they want.
Cautious Optimism #
Rumors have been heating up that Apple is going to take Beats Music and somehow roll it into iTunes or just rebrand it altogether. This could go one of two ways. Apple could really shake up the streaming music industry or they could maintain the status quo. If they decide they want to shake it up, this is how I’d do it. To put it simply: one library that includes your streaming service and music that you’ve bought.
You have an app. Just picture the current Music app that’s baked into iOS. You launch and log in. You’re greeted with a couple of options.
- Free: This would be akin to the current iTunes Radio service or Songza or Pandora etc.
- Paid: Pay $9.99/month and you’ve instantly got access to a library of 20 million+ tracks and professionally curated playlists along with top-notch discovery tools. But here’s where it gets cool. You would see EVERY track that’s digitally available. If Taylor Swift decides she wants to pull her music from streaming services, fine. You still see her music with a little “buy” button next to her catalog. You can instantly buy the rights to her music just like you would if you were buying from iTunes. The only difference is it’s all integrated into one app experience. Her music becomes instantly unlocked and you can add to playlists and mix with the other tracks that are normally available along with your streaming service.
Done. It’s so simple and it would provide the best possible experience for all parties. Taylor doesn’t have to feel like she’s getting the shaft from the Spotifys of the world and the consumer doesn’t have to worry about launching their music app only to find that some of their favorite tracks have been pulled. Hopefully it’ll happen and I can stop writing about how shitty streaming music is.