Thoughts on Streaming Music
Before you read, you might want to familiarize yourself with streaming music. In short, streaming music refers to a subscription based service where you stream music over a data connection from a company’s servers. The thought is that for a monthly fee, you can have access to entire libraries of music without actually having to store them on a hard drive. Feel free to check out the Rdio and Spotify pages for more info. Below, I’ve detailed why I just don’t get the streaming music model and why it’s not for me.
Why?
I ask “why?” about a lot of things. When something new comes out, I usually ask myself why I would need it or want to use it. If it doesn’t fill a need or if I don’t have a burning desire to use it, why would I invest the time and/or money? When it comes to streaming music, I haven’t been able to answer that simple question. On the surface, it sounds great. For $9.99 a month, I can have access to over fifteen million songs?! Sign me up! Ok, so now you’re shelling out ten bucks a month for the ability to stream music anywhere you have a 3G or Wi-Fi data connection. You can buy a smaller capacity iPhone because you no longer have to use your precious hard drive space for all that music. Life is good. One small problem…the carriers. Unless you’re on a Wi-Fi connection all the time, you have to rely on a cellular signal to get your music. This creates two more problems. The first is coverage. Anyone with AT&T knows how hard it is to have a complete conversation while traveling around town. Ever tried to stream music on that same tired network? It’s not the best user experience in the world. Invariably, the signal fades just as you’re about to belt out your favorite chorus at the stoplight. Bummer. The next problem you face is the proliferation of tiered data plans from the mobile carriers. The sun is quickly setting on the day of unlimited data. If you thought hard drive space was expensive, take a gander at data rates these days. By AT&T’s own data calculator, if you stream just half an hour of music a day, you’ve already priced yourself out of the basic 200 MB plan. You have to move up to the DataPro 2 GB plan for $25.99 a month. In all fairness, this is probably the one you would want to go with anyway, but this is assuming that you stay within the allotted data allowance. If you want to use your iPhone on a regular basis and stream approximately an hour of music a day, you’re likely to go over your 2 GB allowance and get another 1 GB of data tacked on to your account for an additional Alexander Hamilton. Another 1 GB, another Hamilton. So now you’re paying for the most expensive iPhone data plan AT&T has which runs you $45.00 per month. On top of your voice and text messaging plans. Now which looks cheaper? The 32 GB iPhone for a hundred bucks more than the 16 GB or an additional $20 per month for extra data for the life of your iPhone relationship? Data rates these days make hard drive capacity look downright cheap. Now, if you did your homework, you probably read about offline mode. This lets you sync your favorite tracks to your device and listen to them even when you have no data connection. If you still have to sync your music to your device, you’re right back to where you started except now you’re paying a monthly fee for 14,994,000 tracks that you’ll probably never listen to.
What do I do with all the music I already own?
I grew up before Internet as we know it today. My family’s first computer was a Gateway that had a built-in modem just in case we ever decided we needed to access the Internet. I cut my teeth on AOL and CompuServe which charged you per MINUTE of Internet usage. As a result, I own several thousand tracks already, most of which I imported from CDs. What am I supposed to do with those? If I’m streaming everything, why am I taking up close to 30 GB on my desktop? Do I just put all that music on a hard drive and store it somewhere? I’m not really OK with that. You see, I own a bunch of stuff that’s not available from any of the streamers. So I still have to sync my devices to get the tracks that I can’t get from Spotify or Rdio. Seems like a bunch of extra work to me.
So, I’m paying these guys for music. Do I own any of this music?
Short answer: no. You’re basically leasing your music from a third party. You don’t own any files and to my knowledge, you can’t burn CDs with the music that you put into playlists. Anyone remember lala? That was the popular streaming music platform that Apple bought up a couple of years ago. If you had a lala account, you paid them every month for however long you were a member and then, nothing. If you didn’t have it linked to your iTunes account, all of “your” music was gone. Just like that, you no longer had access to the music you had been paying for. Music is like a warm blanket to me. I don’t listen to everything that I have but I like knowing that I OWN it. I can listen to it whenever, wherever I like. If I want to make my wife a bitchin’ mix-tape, I can do just that.
What about my iPod classic or the iPod Nano I use for the gym?
SOL. You can’t use them. If you don’t have any kind of data connection in your device, you can’t use a streaming music service.
Conclusion.
Listen, I’m not saying that nobody can benefit from these serivces. I’m just saying I dont think they’re for me. All of this is disappointing because given all the hype Spotify generated when it came to the U.S., I so desperately wanted to use it and like it. I tried it out for a month and it just didn’t fit in with how I listen to and manage my music.