The state of Record Labels these days (or how do you listen to music)

Cafe Society
1

I ran across a cool record cover the other day, online. I really wanted to buy it (for the art and the music) but I have no record player. But it made me start thinking, how do record companies primarily sell music these days?

I realize that record labels find and recruit new talent, and record and promote musicians. But as far as selling physical units, I’m not sure how it works anymore. Especially with indie labels.

I have a CD player but it’s in the back of a closet. I haven’t ran it in years. Heck, my car doesn’t even have one. There is probably $15 in my iTunes account that’s been setting there (unused) for two years.

I primarily listen to Pandora and Spotify for most of my music, from my phone to my car’s Bluetooth.

So how do indie labels sell most of their music and how do you listen to music?

2

As for how I listen to music:

It’s almost all streaming today. I’m a music buff and have collected LPs and then CDs all my life, still have all of them, but about 12 years ago I switched to streaming, first for economical reasons and then for the convenience. If you had told my 18 year old self that I’d get access to almost all ever recorded music for € 10 a month, I would have subscribed. Heck, I used to buy records for € 100 a month for years of my life.

As for how music is distributed and marketed today:

I don’t have much insight, but the game has totally changed in the last 20 years or so. One thing is obvious: physical media doesn’t play a big role anymore.

3

This chart (PDF) from the RIAA shows that, in 2021, streaming services accounted for 84% of music industry sales. Of the remaining shares, physical media (vinyl, CD, etc.) was 10%, digital downloads (e.g., purchasing the song on iTunes, etc.) was 5%, and “sync” (which I think is sales of rights to use the music in TV, video games, etc.) is 2%.

The lion’s share of streaming sales/revenue is in paid subscription services (Spotify, Apple Music, SiriusXM, etc.) In physical media, vinyl now accounts for over 2/3 of sales.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwio1IHAp872AhWTCjQIHfwNBHkQFnoECAMQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.riaa.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F09%2FMid-Year-2021-RIAA-Music-Revenue-Report.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1Y44IPjrVPezfQXeeIgqeT

4

At one live event recently, the not-cheap ticket price included a copy of the headliners’ latest album on LP. No CD. Your guess if it is only meant as a collector’s or promotional item; obviously all that content is also available on Youtube and so on.

5

I long ago used iTunes to rip around 80-90% of my music to MP3, roughly 30G worth. I keep it on both my PC, my Plex server and my phone. When I want something less planned, amazon prime music is most of my streaming.

When I buy new music it’s more commonly singles from Amazon, or rarely (normally best of releases) on CD with Amazon’s autorip. Or if no autorip, then it goes into iTunes for manual encoding and onto the same storage systems.

So I have my music library with me everywhere I go.

I guess with the pervasiveness of unlimited cellular data and the relatively low usage for ‘normal’ streaming quality, I could move to all remote with no local storage at all, but it’s not much of an issue with modern phone storage (now that I’m going back to a 128G phone that is).

6

I listen to streaming (Spotify) and, if I like a song enough, will get it on Mp3 to keep on a USB drive and PC. I do that in case I ever can’t stream for whatever reason and because I have some PC games that are “Play your music” things and it’s easier to just have it all hosted locally.

7

Streaming is unappealing to me for several reasons:

I have eclectic enough tastes that I doubt any streaming service out there will have all of my top fave artists or their entire discographies.

I have a “top 125” or so cuts which constitute my Pantheon, songs which are deeply meaningful to me on many levels that I never get sick of, ones which I have accumulated over my entire lifetime. If a site were to delete any of these cuts its use to me would immediately drop to zero (assuming they have them all in the first place as said).

I have custom playlists for almost every occasion. Yes streaming sites also let you do that, but again see the last two paragraphs.

Lyrics are thus vital to me-turns out that the Sony software and hardware I use can display lyrics, so I’ve edited them for the 6K or so cuts I have. I also have selected custom art for many of the individual songs (Dead Can Dance’s Opium, for example, has a pic of a hawk in a rainstorm, directly echoing the core themes of the song), and would also lose that angle on a streaming service.

Accessibility is also vital; I often travel to roads and places off the beaten path which have little to no cell coverage; loathe the thought of one of my top cuts blasting out as some amazing scenery flies by my car outside, only to have it cut out as it starts buffering.

The vast majority of my stuff is now in FLAC format (when I can get either the CD to rip or the file online somewhere), with high-end equipment where you can indeed notice the difference; I know some sites now have lossless formats, but not most.

Now. I am well aware that these sites can recommend new music based on songs or albums that you can use as “seeds” for custom stations, playing similar stuff. I may avail myself of that at some point, but often what I’ll find is, if I build a station around say Dead Can Dance, that I’ll get some DCD stuff-and a bunch of stuff which isn’t anywhere near as good as them.

Yes, I can occ. find that gem in the rough, but an algorithm somewhere isn’t really going to grasp why I like a given band/album/song, and will typically feed me things which are superficially similar, but inferior. Plus I am massively turned off by just about anything made in the last 20 years, with a few exceptions here and there. But I may still give it a shot.

8

I buy some music on Amazon. They usually allow purchasing individual tracks or I can buy the entire album.

I have considered Amazon unlimited music. It’s 3.99 a month.

I also buy cd’s of Music that I really love. I like ripping them to Flac.

It’s my understanding that streaming is always heavily compressed?

9

I buy all my music on iTunes, still. With rare exceptions which aren’t available in this country, so I still import CDs (mainly Japanese music nowadays).

I’m tempted to switch to using a streaming service, since I think it would be cheaper, but there are things I fundamentally don’t understand about them. Mainly: How do you listen to all your songs (I have about 8000 on my device right now) when you don’t have any internet?

I’m also concerned that streaming services don’t carry all the songs I want, and even worse, they can remove songs from their catalog at any time.

10

I looked it up but I’m still not sure I understand how Flac works

11

I’m 100% streaming right now using Apple Music set to ‘lossless’. The caveat being that I then download everything recently added or on a number of key playlists so I can be sure to have a selection when on a plane or in one of the many cellular dead zones up in the mountains.

I have a pretty eclectic taste in music, with a strong bias this month towards not-very-popular British noise rock bands mixed with current Pitchfork and Stereogum faves along with a smattering of weird shit from my college radio DJ days in the 80s and 90s. There’s not much I want that I can’t find, and in the rare case that does happen, what I want is usually difficult to buy in physical media as well so I run up the flag with the skull and crossbones.

One of the biggest benefits to me of streaming is the ease in which my hyper-aware friends can share playlists with me. A large part of my new (and old, TBH) music discover comes from curated playlists.

Also, there’s a lot of stuff from the 80s and 90s underground that I simply can’t find on physical media but that someone has remembered to add to Apple Music and Spotify, more so than the other way around.

On my new iPhone, I have about 10,000 tracks downloaded, a total of about 80gb. I don’t put a huge amount of care into it.

12

Could someone please respond to this question? I’ve been wondering, too, and, probably like a few others upthread, I don’t really understand everything about the word streaming. My only experience is with YouTube (if that’s even streaming), and I think everything there is compressed and doesn’t sound as good as the original recordings that I remember. Obviously, my hearing must have deteriorated some in the 30 or 40 years that have passed, but I’m pretty sure everything on YouTube is of lower audio quality than the original recordings I remember.

13

It really depends on the service you’re using and your internet connection. Also most platforms allow downloading of songs at the quality of your choice. Spotify goes all the way from 24 kbps to 320 kbps.

14

Apple added lossless streaming as an option last year. On my phone, I can differentiate what quality I get based on my connection type as well. So for example, I get lossless streams on Wifi and lossless quality for my local downloads, but on cellular I leave it on 256kbps AAC compression.

If I really had better hearing, I could also select hi-res lossless, which would quadruple the sampling rate and give me 24bit sampling.

Apple Music now offers lossless streaming at no additional charge to its subscribers. The lossless streams will offer quality at least as good as you hear from CDs, and they can do even better. The digital audio on CDs is sampled 44,100 times per second, which is generally considered adequate to cover the full range of human hearing, up to about 20,000 vibrations per second (or hertz). But most lossless streaming services can carry high-resolution audio sampled up to 192,000 times per second, enough to reproduce frequencies as high as 96,000 Hz. That difference may be audible to bats and dogs, but scientific tests—such as a 2010 study by researchers at McGill University—show that to humans, the differences are at most “very subtle and difficult to detect.” Likewise, CD-quality streams use 16-bit samples, enough to cover the range of sound from a pin being dropped to a jackhammer operating at close range, but most high-resolution streams use 24-bit audio, which gets you from pin-drop levels to the volume of a shotgun being fired right next to your ear. Of course, that’s a range far beyond what’s needed to reproduce music, and no conventional speakers or headphones can play anywhere near that loud, anyway.

15

I haven’t found a bit rate setting on Amazon. All my music is mp3 in my Amazon library.

I need to check out spotify.

16

Looks like Spotify varies. Free mobile users get 96kbps, free desktop users get 160kbps but Premium (subscribers) get 320kbps. Supposedly they have a special “HiFi” tier with 1,411kbps but I haven’t heard of it (or would pay for it, really)

You can download music locally from some/most of them so you can listen without internet. I believe the app will need to ping the service every X many days to confirm that you’re still a subscriber and have authorized access to the tracks.

Streaming is either (a) for people who don’t really care about “owning” music or (b) supplemental for people who DO care about ownership but find streaming to be a good way to find new music or just have a majority of their favorites available on the go without worrying about local files/CDs/etc. I own a collection of music I’m particularly invested in but use Spotify to find new music or to just say “Hey, play XYZ and stuff like XYZ” as driving or working background music. And that’s honestly what I’m doing 90% of the time there’s music playing. If I mainly experienced music by sitting in a darkened room with a snifter of brandy and $15,000 speakers, I would feel differently.

17

This. My PC has a folder stuffed with music I ripped from vinyl and CD, bought from iTunes, and (only at the utmost end of need) ripped out of Youtube videos. For current acts I’ll buy MP3s from sites like BandCamp, or from the band’s website directly if they offer.

I have no fondness for the scratch, pop, and skip augmentations offered by vinyl ; nor the hyperdelicate surface of a CD which can render the entire album unplayable with a slight scuff in just the wrong spot ; nor the caprice of streaming services who can make unavailable music I think I’ve already paid for. Stuff gets loaded onto my phone from the PC, and I’m set. Nothing but “good” music, no commercials, no unwanted “Oh, you’re gonna LOVE this” band that wouldn’t exist without some megavinyl label’s songwriters, producers, hairdressers, PR staff, and promoters.

18

I almost have too much music on my phone. I sometimes forget to play some artists.

Flac’s can vary in quality. Most are typically between 820 to 950 kbps and 20mb.

I did find some flac that Explorer says is 2784kbps and 51mb. I guess they’re 24bit. I need to get an App that gives audio specs. My hearing can’t tell much difference.

They’re so unusal that I did a screen cap.

Press to open larger window

19

I still like to purchase CDs, at least for my top artists. The ritual of heading down to the record store and leafing through the stacks until I locate my treasure continues to be important to me. And having a physical copy ensures that I won’t be vulnerable to losing those tracks to, say, a fried computer or iTunes revoking my access to the songs I’ve bought. Although iTunes has been useful over the years for grabbing this or that stray track, I don’t buy much off it anymore and will probably stop entirely once the gift card that my parents got me ages ago is finally exhausted. As for streaming, it rarely enters my mind as an option.

20

I currently subscribe to Apple Music and Tidal, plus I have a rather large local library of FLACS, MP3s, and AAC files I’ve collected through the years. I have a Plex server, so I can easily listen to them at home or even stream them.

If there is something not on AM or Tidal, I’ll try to find it on Bandcamp or buy the CD.

I used Spotify for several years, but I was getting fed up with the podcast thing even before the Joe Rogan crap. Plus, I get Tidal cheap because I’m retired military.