In a class today, my professor discussed the changing patterns of music consumption. This got me thinking – I know, a dangerous habit – what are the actual effects and benefits of these different forms of consumption of music. These days there are dozens of different methods. There’s radio, the time-honored method for artists to get their music out in to the world where the millions could listen to and come to love their work. These people then go to buy their albums. In the olden days, by which I mean the dawn of the twentieth century to just ten years ago, this meant actually buying the record at a brick-and-mortar store. The record went from many different forms through vinyl, cassettes, eight-tracks, before finally reaching compact disks, or CDs. In the 21st century came the dawn of the digital download method of getting and consuming music, which began a whole host of ethical and legal problems centered around file-sharing and other now illegal means of receiving and giving music. iTunes somewhat successfully made digital downloads a feasible revenue source for the music publishing companies yet the problems with piracy still remain in the digital sector.

Recently, a new trend has surfaced, one that involves not even buying actual albums or songs. This trend is online streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. I use Spotify. I love it’s near endless selection of music from both major record companies and smaller independent labels. With a small monthly fee, I can listen to just about any band I can think of, but this isn’t a Spotify commercial. My point is that I increasingly see young people gravitate toward such streaming sites as Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora. I predict that this form of music consumption will eventually become the norm, although I also predict that prices for this service will rise slowly just as Netflix’s subscription price and services changed as the studios began to fight for more fees from Netflix to display their work.

The effect of digital downloads has been well-documented, but how does streaming support the artists/music publishers, and does it do enough? What I’ve found is that largely the answer is no. While I can find dozens of unknown-to-me artists, this ability to listen to music either supported by ads or my subscription payment does not effectively support the artist – at least, not yet. I found a lot of information on this subject in an article by Scottish musician David Byrne. In Sweden, the birthplace of Spotify, a country whose main music source is streaming, it turns out that while music recording companies do just fine, the artists often fail to get a decent cut. In America, where streaming is far less common, streaming gives barely a trickle to the artists. As it is music streaming needs to and probably will change in the future to better support the artists, and this has as much to do with the record labels as it does the Spotify system. As things are, even Spotify struggles to make a profit, and these businesses need to be reshaped if streaming and the artists who provide the content will survive and thrive. (Source)

This weekend I will take a step outside my comfort zone and enter the world of Praise and Worship music by attending Franciscan’s Festival of Praise. I will write a story on this.