What we Gave up When we Chose Streaming
Music ownership is gone in the name of convenience
A few days before Christmas, I stumbled across a Twitter thread by John Darnielle (also known by the name of his band, the Mountain Goats). Although I already knew Darnielle as an incredible songwriter, his series of tweets about music and how we experience it now really stuck with me.
Darnielle said about streaming (and Apple), “Should market share tell us anything, at all, about how we listen to music? I propose that one answer to that question is ‘no.’ So, if we say that a paradigm shift took place when Apple killed off the iPod, I want to ask whether the paradigm in question involved unhealthy learned consumer behaviors and that music is worth more than “we listen to to this way now because the companies with the biggest market share like it when we do it that way.”
Darnielle wrote these tweets about Apple’s stranglehold on the music industry before streaming and how streaming has changed the way people listen to music even further. And I want to dive into the ramifications of music streaming just a little more, because I’m still coming to grips with some of them. The original iPod itself sent shockwaves through the industry, all those years ago, but I think it’s now pretty obvious that the advent of Spotify and Apple Music was even more transformational. And, crucially, I think giving up any claims to owning the music we listen to is a pretty high toll for the convenience we enjoy today.
Music streaming was the death knell for the original iPod, or really any dedicated music player. I still remember my first iPod Nano — I got it when I was 14 and it was my introduction to iTunes, playlists, and the world of music as a whole. That device became my constant companion on family road trips, to school in the mornings, and nearly everywhere else I went. I eventually upgraded to a video version a few years later, then finally to an iPod touch, but each of those new devices was merely a slight improvement to how I enjoyed my personal music library.
Apple rarely makes poor design choices — from its original computers to the latest iPhones — and the UI of the mid-2000s iPod models is no exception. I still remember using the click wheel to navigate through my artists and albums. There was something that felt so special to my teenage self about pulling up my iPod and instantly thumbing through hundreds of songs. Even now, I look back on those experiences with fond memories.
As I kept using and upgrading my iPod(s) — as I continued to grow up — my personal iTunes library became one of my most treasured possessions. I discovered music while CDs were still sold in stores, so I built that library through a mixture of disks, iTunes purchases, and daily deals from Amazon’s mp3 store (remember that?). I cared so much about my library that I would even delete artists I didn’t think were worthy of being there. I was a gatekeeper unto myself.
Perhaps most importantly, I felt a lot of accomplishment over the time and energy I spent. I think that’s a fair feeling, too, since I spent so much time finding the best music I could. The pinnacle of these searches was when I found a new artist that none of my friends knew about. It’s a feeling many music lovers know and cherish: even though I didn’t actually write or play any of the music, I still felt pride over my discovery. And as I carefully cobbled together playlists and new albums, I felt a powerful sense of ownership about my taste and choices.
Compare all of this — personal music players, iTunes libraries accumulated over years, songs and albums shared between friends — to the streaming landscape of 2020. Now, my music exists in an Apple Music account (albeit most of it still downloaded on my phone) and my last iPod has been gathering dust for nearly a decade. The only iPod model that Apple still sells is the iPod touch, essentially a lite version of their phones. It’s still technically viable to built an iTunes library, but doing so today feels like building a new shelf for a DVD collection. It feels old-fashioned.
A few years ago, I chose to make my phone my primary music player and Apple Music my music subscription because the benefits were impossible to ignore. A whole wide world of music at my fingertips is still an incredible promise, especially because I spent well over $10 a month at the height of my music-gathering days. Like any adult, I have to have my phone on me at all times, so why not play all my music there?
To consume my playlists and albums any other way, I’d have to eschew my Apple Music library and/or find a dedicated music player (which at this point would have to be of the non-Apple variety). Like so many other staples of modern technology (watching movies on Netflix, storing pictures in the cloud), I listen to music this way because it just makes the most sense.
But Darnielle’s Twitter thread reminded me about a lot of things I used to love about my music library. I shaped my music tastes while I built my iTunes collection, and I’m still a little sad that I left it behind in favor of the convenience and freedom of streaming. I could go back — most of my old songs still live on in my laptop’s hard drive — but I’d be saying goodbye to a lot of albums from 2016 and onward if I cancelled my Apple Music subscription tomorrow. I’d have to spend so much time rebuying music that it wouldn’t even come close to making financial sense.
Streaming, regardless of media type, is always the most convenient option and is usually the most cost-effective one, too. We can access almost any movie, tv show, or song we want, but that means throwing all claims of ownership out the window. If I ever stop paying the monthly fee, all my music is gone. There’s a similar tension with ebooks, video games, and many other forms of entertainment — we may own the experience or the memories of playing a game or reading a novel, but the actual media itself is becoming increasingly harder to hold on to. I don’t feel nearly the sense of ownership or accomplishment about my Apple Music collection that I had about my old iTunes library, and for good reason. It isn’t really mine.
So was this tradeoff worth it? Was it really a good idea to trade my iPod and my unique music library for a sampling of what I download to my phone from Apple Music? In the long run, probably. The cost of Apple Music isn’t ridiculous, and it’s nice to access all the songs I like from pretty much anywhere. But change nearly always means losing something. And for me, the days of my once-prized music collection are long gone.
We gave up all our ownership when we switched to music streaming services. We also stopped financially supporting artists as much as we had before, but that’s another story and one that’s been well-documented by others. The convenience factor is real, and it may even be worth signing away consumer music ownership over. But I can’t help but wonder if I’d appreciate music the way I do today without that first iPod and without building the best iTunes library I could. Those experiences shaped my adolescence, and I don’t think they’re possible in 2020.
The views expressed are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer or any other person or organization.
