Opinion: Class of Music Servers

[Snowmonkey]

The streaming vs collecting question has an an ancient analogy in the area of (paper) books. How many people here have walls full of dust-catching, smelly old books which they have read only once (or even two or three times) in a lifetime? Almost all those books could have been "streamed" by borrowing them from a library. There's something in the human psyche that seems to put a premium on ownership.

 

Personally, I enjoy using Spotify to check out popular music, but if I find that if I grow to love an album, I tend to purchase it as an act of gratitude and support for the artist.

 

The other issue for me is that I love classical music, country blues and traditional Indian and Gamelan music, which are not easily accessed on the services available to me at this point.

[Paul R]

I voted for this because it's the closest I could see to my opinion, but I often wonder if it's not ownership that is wanted, as such, but more of a strong way to indicate personal curation. "This is my music collection".

 

Wow really good points in your post, ElviaCaprice's post, and OldListener's post.

 

I think for me, "owning" the music means I can listen to it again, even years from now, with no worry of it going "missing." Also, my personal collection reflects my choices and likes as well. All of that together.

 

Availability of a title in the streaming world is not something I can directly effect though - someone else may decide that performers I like are not longer PC, and thus they may become unavailable. Or licensing rights may expire, or any of a dozen other things.

[cjf]

For me, I much prefer to own the music I listen to. I've tried Streaming for awhile and while it was very cool in terms of the music collection I had at my disposal I couldn't get past the less than ideal sound of the Redbook audio they were sending my way. This was even true of the local Cached copy of the album that I would download for off line use.

 

Clearly there is still some work to do with the technology until it can really sound identical to a ripped hard copy of the same album and I think a previous poster hit the nail on the head about the lack of provenance on the copy they are streaming. I suspect this may have more to do with why they sound very different from the hard copies of the same album because in theory, if enough of the song is cached before playback to eliminate network lag they "should" sound the same assuming all compared versions of the album are the same.

 

I wont write off streaming completely though as I do enjoy my Sirius XM radio in the car or when working on the car in the garage but when I'm at home listening to music on my main system I don't want to hear a sub-par sounding album from my listening chair if its something I am paying a premium for.