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Tidal will be similar to Spotify, but more expensive and with better audio quality.
Although its established rival is popular, only a minority of its customers are actually paid subscribers – 15 million out of a total of 60 million as many people have started to see music as a ‘free commodity’.
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I pay for spotify, and if I really need high, high quality, I try to track down a CD/or digital lossless file. Downloaded my current favourite record of all time recently, of any genre: The ridiculously high quality remastering of the recording of Beethoven 3 conducted by Furtwangler in Vienna in 1944, released by Tahra records. I later found out it’s regarded as the greatest recording of a symphony ever(!) by many many critics – won the diaspon d’or of the century in France. Downloadable – fourth record down – here: http://tahra.com/liste_product.php?attr=2&vattr=104&lang=en
After downloading from certain sites for years, I took the plunge last year and paid for spotify, mostly because it was a great service but the ease on my conscience helped too. Now I’m being told it’s not enough and I need to pay more. I’m sorry but the days of €15 CD’s are over and they are never coming back.
I’ve always wondered why ISP’s are been forced to police what goes up on the Internet, aren’t they just like a telephone or mobile phone network you pay for their service after that what your customer decides to do with that service should not be their responsibility?.
If someone telephones a person and verbally abuses them do you blame the telephone network or does the person on the end of the abuse just call the police?, or if someone on a mobile phone spreads naked pictures without the permission of the individual to other mobile network users do you blame the mobile network provider or do you just call the police?.
@William Boyd @ Just readin – look at it this way. A street with houses has a gate at each end. Robbers pay off the person who has the key to the gates in order to gain access to all the houses on the street, and then can break in at will to those houses and take what they want. Isps are playing the same role as the gatekeepers in that they are enabling this theft.
Sorry Dude, I’m having trouble with your analogy – are we paying the gatekeepers to protect our houses or are the manufacturers of the goods paying the gatekeepers to protect our houses?
If the gatekeepers are giving the keys away to robbers – surely the gatekeepers are required to protect the rest of our stuff too – i.e. the ISP’s should be liable for any security breach on their networks?
Nah that analogy is all over the place it’s as if your saying they are allowing access that wouldn’t exist to areas otherwise.
It’s more like they are a toll operator on a bridge they have built. you pay to have access/cross that bridge. They can’t be held liable for what you do when you cross it !!
Dude how are ISP’s suppose to know what is copyrighted material uploaded or downloaded on to the WWW?.
I can understand requests from the corporates to a certain degree for ISP’s to block infringing sites but why should they have to police the individual?, as in the case of the Irish judge insisting that UPC terminate an individuals internet access after 3 infringements of copyright (3 strike rule) is not only bad for business but infringing on the individuals right to internet access.
As far as I’m concerned copyright infringement should be dealt with by the copyright holders not by an ISP.
Policing the internet seems to be a complicated thing, some judges in various countries have not found ISP’s libel when brought to court by the corporates, but other judges do?.
Doesn’t seem to be any hard and fast rules and if I was UPC and other service providers I’d fight this to the bitter end and bring it in front of the European courts.
That is crazy and another example of the justice and political systems accommodating big business and lobby groups like the RIAA.
For example, If I walk into Argos and buy a kitchen knife and then on my way home, I decide to use that knife to commit a robbery from a newsagents. Is that the fault of Argos for selling me the knife or is it my fault for using the knife to commit a crime?
Then should the newsagent lobby the government to make sure that Argos polices everybody that buys kitchen knives from their store and also force Argos to pay for this.
Exactly Peter hard to beat such corporate punching power as if they give two hoots about intellectual property rights, profit profit and more profit the name of their game, oh I’m sure Taylor Swift Rihanna, Beyonce etc are close to poverty from online piracy?, even the Rolling Stones are still raking it in.
I question the qualifications of some of these judges to adjudicate in these cases, a lot of them are either old or late middle aged with little or no knowledge of how the internet works, but once the corporates say jump how high?.
I love listening to the radio which is free, but I’ll buy albums. Just because an artist is wealthy doesn’t mean they don’t deserve payment for their work.
It’s a simple equation . If you loved, love , and intend to go on loving music you must pay a small amount for the pleasure . It’s a livelihood .musicians need to survive . We need to pay . Every argument to the contrary can’t change that simple fact .
Unless they publish the music themselves musicians get a tiny percentage of the value of music sales. If you want to support musicians then you have to go to their gigs, otherwise you are just supporting record labels. Every argument to the contrary can’t change that simple fact.
Serious hi-fi fans want to collect music complete with artwork.
Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl with a proper turntable. Fantastic.
But nothing beats live.
Yeah I miss the artwork that comes with vinyl. Record covers were a genuine art form back in the day ( look at jim Fitzpatrick’s Thin Lizzy covers. I still have most of the old stuff in vinyl format but newer stuff I buy on cd, partly to do with storage reasons as much as anything else. Vinyl has a unique sound all it’s own
More recent vinyl albums come with the digital version too which is a nice combination. The black Friday sale in hmv last year was a great chance to pick up some great goldie oldies, and a chance to listen to something different.
If more recent artists went to the effort of creating albums with such artistic quality as those albums like those you mentioned I would happily pay for them.
If Music companies want me to buy an album for 15 – 20 euro Id like to have something extra with it. Like studio samples or a bonus music.
SO TRUE. What was that Beethoven fellah up to getting loads of musicians playing different lines? Sure someone could’ve just got up on stage and said “It goes like this – da-da-da-dummmmmmmmm….da-da-da-dummmmmmmm”. Same thing, right?
I’ve heard some unscrupulous people install Adblock Plus on their browser and listen to spotify through play.spotify.com, apparently blocks all the ads, works on youtube as well……really are some monsters out there!!
If you subscribe to Google Play Music (their Spotify equivalent) ads do not appear on Youtube music videos. It also lets you upload your own MP3s to stream along with their own catalog.
I pay when I really like a song so that I can have it in my computer/car/phone, whatever. I pay so I don’t have to worry about tapping ten times in some weird app to play it. I pay so my family can listen to it too without having to go through hoops either.
I also would like to pay to support the artist, but I know instead I am mostly supporting the recording and marketing industry, but that’s another story.
What I find hard to see is pay for an album when I only like one or two songs out of it.
Not really. Some artists have made it due to piracy. For example, the new generation of pop stars. They share a risqué image around the time of a new album release. That results in downloads and purchases and publicity. Then they make their money from gigs now as opposed to record sales. Just take note of the amount of album ‘leaks’.
Pay 9.99 for spotify per month.
The big artists go on as if they make little or no money off streaming but they definitely do.
Kendrick Lamar made 1 million within a day or 2 when his new album came out on spotify.
Times have changed artists need to move on.
Call me old fashioned but I still don’t see the ownership in downloading, even though I do it for the odd song.
I’ve been buying & collecting music for years & have an insanely large CD collection along with numerous cassette tapes (even though a 10 year old niece recently asked me ‘what’s a cassette tape?’…:-D…..)
So I have no hesitation in going out & buying a new CD released by a band I like.
I would imagine I’m one of a dying breed there though
If you’re listening to music with ads, it’s a form of paying too. Like free spotify, or the radio. Pirating is so damaging to artists. Unless you are an artist, you wouldn’t understand how frustrating it is to spend a year or even two on something and then have people say it’s worth nothing to them. They like it, they want it, but don’t see any financial value in the work put in. The work is worth nothing.
If someone can’t have a plumber come to repair something and send them away with no payment, then why should they feel entitled to free music, movies, books, and such? Fair enough if the artists want to offer it free, it’s their choice. Just like if the plumber wants to do a free job. If every job was free, he wouldn’t be long about going bankrupt. Likewise if the plumber earned huge money from his worldwide business, it wouldn’t be expected that he stop charging.
Pirating has seen shows cancelled, book series cancelled, movie series cancelled, band break up before they even get going. And artists stop sharing their art or stop making it because they have to find an alternative source of income.
If you love something, it’s worth paying for. Even if it’s a small fee. Not every musician on streaming sites is earning like Jay-Z.
I buy CDs for the sound quality, occasionally I use to spotify, just to check out new stuff before I buy it. I sometimes download some older stuff from iTunes, albums I might have had in vinyl back in the day. Guess I’m just old fashioned
Has anyone used Deezer? It’s absolutely brilliant. I’d used Spotify for a while but the interface on Deezer is so much better. (I dont work for Deezer)
Using Napster and Limewire since I was 10, even as a toddler I remember being shown how to put selotape over cassettes and use them to record songs off the radio. Definitely grew up seeing music as something accessible and not something to be paid for though the free access introduced me to a lot of bands and types of music Irish radio and MTV didn’t cover which I wound up paying for merchandise and live music.
Same here Darren. I remember a party I went to last year. All music was just people lining up videos on Youtube. Worked out great and sound was fairly decent.
Used to pay (cassettes back in the day, star records in galway! Then CDs, vinyl, mp3 etc). Jumped on the torrent thing in a big way when it came along, but now I have google all access.
3months free with a Chromecast means the Chromecast basically cost a fiver. Great value. The music app seems great too. I’m discovering and listening to way more music than I ever did when I was downloading from torrents. Definitely the way to go.
Surely it’s a mixture of both jimbo. Except at the very large end of the scale music promoters and record labels are not the fat cat enemy . They are needed .
The distribution network of intellectual property has changed dramatically over the last decade, but copyright holders are very slow to adapt and accept it. People are no longer willing to pay for every single individual product, but for the service of accessing of that product.
The customer to producers is now those service providers, who in turn provide that product to the consumer in a vast library format which is categorised and instantly accessible.
Netflix is the obvious example and I suppose Spotify is the Netflix of music, however I don’t pay for it and tolerate the ads instead.
The industry needs to adjust to the evolving consumer expectations. It’s not as profitable, so they’re fighting it tooth and nail, but bookstores, video shops, HMVs etc. – they’re going extinct if they’re not already. The tiny few that remain will be novelty / specialist stores for the small demand for physical product that will remain, but certainly no longer main stream. Technology changes everything.
I buy CDs, and sometimes buy a song directly on iTunes. On few occasions I use spotify, for example if I want to check out an album before buying it.
I doubt that this Tidal thing will work simply because they want like 12€ a month for it. That’s ridiculous. I pay 12€ a month for Netflix and get practically infinite films and tvshows. Months and years of entertainment. Plus it’s still only streaming, so if you aren’t in a wifi zone then you can forget about listening to music. Waste your 3G on top of the monthly price if you want to listen to music on the road. You can pay less than that for spotify premium and download playlists for use without the internet. It’s not going to work.
I pay for Deezer Premium to discover new music and to listen to chart music sometimes (e.g. For my kids).
For music that I like, I buy the CD so I can listen in the car, rip it to iTunes in full lossless CD quality so I can listen at home and also on my iPod and iPhone.
I’m not into vinyl – I like the convenience of digital music and the sound quality is as good or even better.
I also buy the odd 24 bit download – better than CD quality – if the price is right.
I just feel that music should be appreciated in very high quality where possible and like the permanence of owning it and not just renting.
As for Spotify free – couldn’t put up with all the ads.
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