Maybe Video Killed the Radio Star, but Not the Streaming One

[Anderton]

Very interesting article in Music Business Worldwide that says YouTube is no longer the dominant source for those who stream music. Both YouTube and Vevo are lagging behind Spotify and Apple Music, which are growing at a much faster pace.

 

It seems we've seen this before, when the novelty of music videos on MTV wore off and MTV went off in a different direction. Since getting Chromecast I've been watching a lot of Vevo, and I have to say, it does wear thin after a while. Although it's great if you're into soft core p*rn, audio is the theater of the mind...and the theater of the video director isn't necessarily better. In some cases it even clashes, like when you have certain associations with songs and when you see the video, you didn't really realize it was about goats having sex with vintage cars or whatever.

 

The whole topic of how people "consume" music these days fascinates me. Maybe someday we'll return to the concept of people "listening" to music instead of "consuming" it, which always sounded kind of cheap to me.

 

 

 

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

The main advantages of YouTube streaming IMHO have always been that 1) it's free, and 2) dang near any and everything is available there. The images are nearly always irrelevant to me. And as far as audio, Spotify often has better quality. YouTube is all over the place in that respect.

 

Streaming is not the future - it's the present. Those who are concerned about sales-related charts, download counts and retail sales of physical "product" are living in the past.

 

[MikeRivers]

When I search for a song by title, I'm often surprised to find it on YouTube and nowhere else on the web. But then I don't search for the newest music, I'm looking for the words to a song I remember from 30 or 40 75 years ago. Stuff that you couldn't upload to Spotify or Apple Music.