With The Age Of The Music Collection Almost At An End, Now Even The Download Has A Competitor.

Freddie Matthews writes from London: What was the first album you ever bought? Mine was the Adam And The Ants 2^ndalbum, Prince Charming, bought on a cold December afternoon. I remember it all even though I was just 9 years old at the time.

It was the beginning of a love of music that eventually led me to working in the industry for over 22 years to date. To this very day I still own that very same record in my vinyl collection and I’m very proud to say so. That love went from vinyl to CD when they became available in 1982-3, although it took many years before I owned my own CD player, as they were expensive, but I can still remember seeing and hearing one for the first time, in my home town of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1984. As I became more and more obsessive about music my CD collection grew larger by the day, I only stopped collecting them when I ran out of storage space with over 3,000+ CDs.

What I’m getting at is, whether you love many music genres or just like the odd album, up until recently we’ve all had some form of music collection but the kids of today will never need to buy a physical album, to hold, or even download ever again.

How so? It’s a sad state of affairs but we’re on the edge of a streaming music revolution, as the streaming of music is on track to take over from the download.

I know plenty of people who are yet to achieve their first music download (come on we’re no longer in the Dark Ages) yet Strategy Analytics report that globally the music download is decreasing, while the streaming of music is on the increase and fast.

The way we access our music is also changing, as mobile downloading and streaming services become the present and not just a thing of the future. I suppose that was always going to happen thanks to the power of the Smart Phone. Like a tiny laptop conveniently in your pocket, it’s all about accessibility and availability and it couldn’t be easier to utilise your own device with ‘cloud’ technology by way of storage. Although downloads still account for over 80 per cent of online music revenues worldwide, with music streaming companies like Spotify and Deezer there will be a shift in this balance over the next 5 years. Even a cynic like me agrees that it actually makes sense. For example:

• If a kid has £10 to spend, at best that’s about 15 individual downloads or one and a half albums.
• With a music streaming service for £10 you can have 1 month of unlimited music streaming to any device, which means listening to as much music as you possibly can during that month without any interruptions, adverts or any limit to what you listen to and when.

It really is the future and I totally get and hate it all in one, but the downside is that your music will never again be from your own personal collection. Never again will a teenager be able to invite a prospective girl or boyfriend back to their bedroom to ‘look’ at their CD collection. It will never be something to be proud of when your friends come round for dinner. You’ll not be able to hold it, smell it, or remember which shop you bought it from and how you were feeling the day you got the bus into town, with your pocket money and couldn’t afford lunch because you wanted the new The Smiths album so much, that your only focus was to have it at any cost.

What concerns me most is that we now have less and less reason to actually get our potentially lazy butts off the sofa and one more reason not to really doesn’t help. Of course we’ll always find different things to collect but it will be a very sad day when the music collection is no longer one of them. For now and until the day I die I’ll be keeping mine, including my Prince Charming original album. Thank you.

–End–

3 Comments

1. Pawprint says:

   August 21, 2012 at 11:17 am

   Very good article and I agree with the vast majority of what you say, however I don’t think streaming music is poised to take off in the mainstream just yet.

   My main reasoning for this supports what you say about music collections; based on most people I know (young and old), I’d say it’s human nature to want to physically own something we have paid for wherever we can. It’s taken a while for people to come round to the idea of digital downloads – particularly regarding books – but we’re pretty much there; even my 62 year old dad sings the praises of his Kindle. It would seem we’re starting to get our heads around the idea of not having a physical DVD, CD, song or book that we can manipulate – although I still miss a good CD booklet, or gatefold album!

   The problem I have with streaming something is that I don’t physically own it; cloud-based storage is great (for me certainly), because I still physically own the album/song/film, and it’s there for me to pull down onto my device as I require it. Once it’s on my device, it’s there as long as I need or want it, instantly accessible once downloaded, and I have the option to banish it back to the cloud when I don’t need or want it.

   This brings me to what I think is the other barrier to music streaming – the technological infrastructure (certainly here in the UK). Although 3G and wifi hotspots are becoming more and more available and stable, they are not reliable or widespread enough to make music streaming viable at present, in my opinion. Certainly in my neck of the woods, the only place I would be able to reliably stream music within approximately a 4 mile radius of my house, would actually BE my house, and be totally reliant on wifi! Going for a run and streaming music over 3G to my iPhone would be completely out of the question, regardless of which carrier I was with.

   Streaming music whilst on a train, or in a car on a long journey would currently be hit and miss anywhere in the country at present, I’d suggest, judging by the amount of 3G ‘dead spots’ I routinely encounter during my travels.

   So the big question is, are people willing to pay for a service where they do not physically own the ‘product’, and are currently limited to where they can reliably access it? For me, the answer would be no. Film/TV streaming services like ‘Netflix’ may indirectly help to change this mindset eventually, even though the way which we consume films differs from that of music; a good film I can watch a few times every so often – a good song, I will hammer over and over any chance I get!

   I agree with Freddie Matthews – I think my music collection (vinyl, CD and, yes, digital) is still safe for now, and I’d hazard the foreseeable future too.
2. Steve says:

   August 29, 2012 at 10:11 pm

   But as the quality of music is also decreasing, why would anyone WANT to own a collection of it? It’s all becoming bland, generic, derivative and repetitive… perhaps one big streaming station where each track blends into the next is the ideal way to make people realise how dull music has become.
3. Josh says:

   September 6, 2012 at 10:12 pm

   ^ Steve, that is simply not true. That’s just the effect of nostalgia. The music that you liked when you were younger and all this newfangled sound is of course bland. You’ve managed to faze out all of the dreadful music that was forgotten about from every era.
   There’s plenty of fantastic music about now, much of it simply just isn’t mainstream.