My Obsession with Music Streaming Now Involves Poodles, Bartenders, and Vladimir Putin

[Anderton]

So there's a new Beyond 11 article...

 

http://www.harmonycentral.com/beyond-11-the-future-of-music-streamingpoodles-bartenders-and-vladimir-putin

 

Dendy said he's going to ask HR on my behalf about what benefits Gibson offers with respect to mental health. But I'm fine, really I am. And all my imaginary friends think so, too.

 

[Dendy Jarrett]

Should I be concerned?

Craig is wearing a curly haired Ushanka Hat and there is a sheared poodle curled up in the corner of his office!

[Notes_Norton]

Nicely done.

 

It reminds me of the early days of Cable TV.

 

I worked 3 days a week as a CATV Engineer (gigging on the weekends) in my second attempt to see what working in the normal world was like. Like the first attempt, it didn't agree with me.

 

Anyway, I got free Cable TV because as an engineer for the manufacturer, I could report to the local CATV company any problems. A trained eye could see the patterns in the picture that meant trouble was just starting to happen, and notify the company before it became a dreaded outage.

 

But I'm drifting.

 

In the early days HBO, Showtime and later Cinemax all would 'stream' the same movies (we didn't call it streaming yet). One company would get a month or two lead on the others. So you only needed one premium service. This wasn't quite as profitable as things could be.

 

So HBO started getting exclusive distribution of some blockbusters. Showtime wouldn't get them. And since HBO owned Cinemax, it would put one exclusive on HBO and another on Cinemax. Now you need two - double the money - double the profits. It was only a matter of months before Showtime started bargaining for exclusives. Now you need three to see them all.

 

Aside: We called Cinemax "Cinema X" for the fun of it.

 

Well how does this relate to your column?

 

Streaming company A develops and signs "The Bartenders".

 

Streaming company B sees a loss in revenue so they develop the "Snot Puppies".

 

Now the company needs two streaming services.

 

Streaming company C observes the profits A and B are making, so they develop "Lounge Lizzies", now you need three.

 

And the production companies, in order to discourage indies hire a group of pseudo-gangsters called "The Webwork" as promo people. The Webwork charges big bucks that the indies can't afford just to get their music on the playlists at the streaming services. But The Webwork gets all to powerful and sucks the profits out of the streamers.

 

Before the crash of The Bartenders, people realize they are spending much more than they want to just to hear their three favorite artists, so they quit the subscriptions altogether, and go to the usenet groups to pirate their recordings and nobody makes any money. Which of course ruins the incentive to develop any new groups, and no new music is heard anywhere except YouTube, and the majority of the new music there is low audio quality and not really worth it anyway.

 

Isn't that what happened to the record companies and radio streaming?

 

Insights and incites by Notes

[Phil O'Keefe]

You left out the part about the several kilos of Ovaltine... now that I know about that, it all makes perfect sense!

[gubu]

Nobody is going to pay for more than one premium rate streaming service. Or next-to-nobody, at any rate.

 

I see it getting to where all we'll need to have is Spotify premium and free-to-air youtube for general streaming/discovery/casual use, and we can still buy mp3's from online stores, for tracks and albums that we absolutely must have access to at all times, regardless of data availability and which service they can be streamed from.

 

Actually, this is the way most people do it already, isn't it?

 

Fwiw, Bandcamp is looking like one of the best indie stores again, since they got their tech issues sorted out.