Streaming and the Future of the "Record Library"

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The parallel with concert going is apposite. Yes, we can still witness well attended evenings, but the pool of people that these attendances is drawn from is rapidly shrinking.

Without wishing to sound complacent, this is what people of our age have always said - they looked at me when I was 14 and worried that I was the only one of my age group going to Classical Music concerts; how would Classical concerts survive in twenty or thirty years? This repertoire seems to be one that many people "get into" more after they've retired.

OK - that does "sound complacent", and new measures are needed to ensure that young people (in particular) are made aware of the existence of non-mainstream Musics of all sorts; that's also said by a couple of contributors in the article (which I see now is two years old - does anyone know how well Apple Streaming is doing?): if the classical industry is to survive long term then it needs to find some fresh customers fast. But they also say that Anecdotally also, classical music appears to no longer be the no-go area for young people that it once was. Lukas Krohn-Grimberghe is the director of Grammofy, a new classical-only streaming service specialising in curated playlists covering ‘classical's hidden and famous’, with high-end audio and a distinctly cool look. ‘We had a chance to talk to a group of students in Germany aged between 18 and 21,’ he says, ‘and the interesting thing was that they were saying classical music was neither positive or negative for them. It didn't even have the aura of being something that their parents listened to, which means that you can try to get people interested in classical music without any pre-existing prejudice. It's a clean sheet of paper.

Thirty-plus years working with teenagers and young adults has made me more optimistic about their abilities to make their own choices, and their intelligence to make good choices. That the way of doing things (concert-going, accessing recorded Music) will be very different from how they are and have been I take as given. But I'm not negative about either their ability to embrace good Music(s), nor the resilience of younger performers to make the most of the exciting opportunities that new technologies offer them to present and experience these Musics ... nor the ways that Businesses create opportunities to make money out of them.

Nor am I worried about my own Library of CDs. Even if manufacture of new CDs ends this year, I still have getting on for thousands of discs that will give me hours of fulfilment over the (I hope) many and (I fervently hope) healthy years left to me. (And second-hand discs will be on sale for many years even if new ones do cease to appear.) I don't think there's anything to be particularly worried about.

[jayne lee wilson]

It is a bit of a hot issue isn't it?
Since I wrote this....http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...ming+revisited

My own behaviour has changed, (as I suggested it might...), insofar as I've come to use Qobuz HiFi more and more as a listening source, more akin to a radio station and a library, less as a buyers' guide and more as a listening pleasure. Especially since I love to explore whatever I'm into, so - with Chamber Music from Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn et al, it has been marvellous to roam about listening to so many different recordings for sheer musical pleasure, irrespective of potential purchase. I couldn't live without it now. But finally I did still want to buy some of them... which I did - mostly on 2ndhand CDs. But my actual purchases, whether of CDs or downloads, have certainly reduced because of the quality of Qobuz lossless streaming. (A good example would be the Marc Mellits String Quartets 3-5, which I enjoyed listening to very much, but not enough to spend more on buying them.. thanks to HQ streaming, I have listened to them now - and closely. Same story with the Haydn Op.20 from the Chiaroscuros...).
So of course I can easily conceive the possibility of falling in love with a newly discovered work or recording, but now, not feeling any compulsion to buy or own it. Which I probably wouldn't have said back in December.

Of course I already have a "Record Library" running to 1000s of CDs and 100s of downloads, so I can (emotionally) afford to feel very relaxed about "acquisition" or "library-building" now... and with Qobuz Discover for New Releases, you can listen instantly to almost anything which comes out, putting them into "favourites" for leisured contemplation, without agonising over "should I buy it?"

***

It would be fascinating to hear from more young(er) listeners, classical- art- avantgarde- music obsessives (if such animals still exist) about how they view the "classical catalogue" of recordings stetching back to the 1930s or earlier... if it really were all (or mostly) available to stream, would purchasing or ownership (and the concomitant emotional investment) simply become obsolete? Many of us here are very attached to our shelves of discs, our carefully-curated downloads catalogued within dedicated MusicPlaying software.
All of these things may soon seem outdated. (There are many people for whom a CD is already a strange, rarely encountered object, and for whom "sound quality" appertaining to such is almost inconceivable).
Music-playing software and streamers are becoming similar to "tuners"... insofar as a given listener may subscribe to various streams and servers (Qobuz, Spotify, Tidal, Berlin DCH etc.), all accessible via any UPnP-compatible device, moving between them at the flick of a switch.
Even for audiophiles, if streaming can truly match CD or Hi-res sound quality (which they don't quite, not yet), would there be any need for catalogued files? It may be a very generational phenomenon.

***
Technology is changing human behaviour (as you see everywhere, all the time, with handsets clamped to heads and thumbs on keypads, the swipe-down & pull-to-refresh), almost certainly changing human beings, ourselves. Changing the very shape of what we know - or what we think we know.

***

On the other hand it is easy to see a nostalgia developing for the silver disc whether CD or SACD, parallel to that for Vinyl. Whatever the merits of downloads, they aren't very collectable...
I think part of my own evolution this year has involved a bypass of downloads, as I move between streaming and CDs themselves. Part of that is due to my own perception of the sonic superiority of the CD over its streamed lossless equivalent (narrow, but infinitely variable of course, due to software and hardware quality - a well-built, well-maintained vintage CD-transport is a treasurable item), part - perhaps - due to the older pleasure of the held, owned, physical object. (Not to mention that longed-for, deleted-release, inconceivably-cheap package arriving par avion form Berlin, Paris, New York, Tokyo, or...)

But all of this may change, and change again so (musically)...hang loose.... go with the flow....

[teamsaint]

There's no doubt as Jayne says,that behaviour is changing as technology changes, and the industry, ( and we) respond.

In terms of how the market will develop though, nobody knows, not even those in the industry. There are obvious parrallels with book publishing, where the death of the paper book was predicted, but the e -book turned out to be just life changing, rather than the end. What is useful there is to look at the patterns. One of the patterns that has emerged is for paper books to flourish in certain categories. Kids, specialist ( EG heavy duty transport, military) etc, and for book sellers and many publishers to join what somebody called a " flight to quality".
Ebooks, and online services like Kindle unlimited are here to stay, and are a critical part of the revenue stream for many publishers, but paper book sales are in a reasonably healthy state , with volumes and selling prices quite robust, and that looks set to continue for a while yet.
In music, the Hyperion model is the one that interests me. Their decision to avoid streaming must be based on substantial confidence in their product and market, and that must be really rather a numerically small market . If I had to guess, I'd think that small record labels will tend to follow suit, and also move more towards crowdfunding type models for new releases. Bigger labels will likely rely on the power that they have in the market, search engine optimisation and the like to exploit their huge backlists , to grab a big slice of the streaming market, and their marketing and financial clout to buy up the hottest properties to keep market share, in whatever format. And I would expect that to include CDs, since CDs give them an extra share of the market ( where a competitor may have a similar new disc for example), there are different channels for sales, and because modern production techniques mean that you don't have to produce 10's of thousands of copies to get good cost prices. The major costs are likely in the production, rather than listing on Amazon etc which enables you to grab another chunk of sales.

( Worth looking also at the Amazon Print On Demand model, where they take publishers' book files and print to order. Not my favourite thing in the world, but it works.......)

[kea]

As a young(er) listener I almost never buy CDs simply because I don't have the space or the money. The main exception is when I come across a CD that's cheaper than the download, e.g. some Hyperion titles that went for sale at my local record shop for $10 where the lossless downloads come out to approximately $16. But the list price is $35 which is simply not worth it.

I do prefer having a collection because I also live in an area where I don't have the most reliable internet service (it's actually been either down or extremely slow most of this past week+) and understand that streaming isn't always going to be an option. It's a collection of digital files on a hard drive though. I also uh... rely a lot on less-than-legal acquisition methods (such as burning library CDs and scanning the liner notes) which I have no real excuse for apart from just not having enough cash left over at the end of the month. That said ownership is never going to become obsolete for me simply because I've never been wealthy enough to take internet access for granted, nor naïve enough to take the continued availability of something on a streaming platform for granted. For the same reason I also don't buy any software based on a subscription model.

If I lived somewhere that used CDs could be obtained very inexpensively (eg those sold for £0.01+shipping on amazon UK) I would probably have a lot more of them but not necessarily use them, since my computer doesn't have a built in CD drive and nor do I have room for the kind of stereo system that would play CDs back. My hearing is not good enough to tell apart a lossless 16-bit/44.1khz file from a CD recording—it's not even good enough to tell apart a lossless 16-bit/44.1khz file from a 320kbps MP3 file. Or maybe that's not so much a hearing problem as a "£10 USB speakers/$70 Klipsch earbuds" problem.