Luke Dearnley, a live sound engineer and one half of 90s Sydney music duo Sub Bass Snarl, likens scrolling through iTunes to flipping through a record shelf. The sheer intensity and pure joy of the experience was imprinted in the songs and playing them back created such woeful dissonance on a morning commute – or anywhere – that I put it away almost for good. I couldn’t listen to the 1999 Chemical Brothers album Surrender for more than a decade after I saw their set at the 2000 Sydney Big Day Out. When people build up music collections over decades, specific songs, artists and albums become connected to certain periods of life, capturing memories as effectively as polaroids. Streaming platforms offer convenience and variety, but they don’t always give us the latest album from the hottest artist of the decade – or the 1992 Vampire Mix of A Tribe Called Quest’s I Left My Wallet in El Segundo. Remember when you couldn’t stream Beyoncé’s Lemonade album anywhere but Tidal for the first three years after its release, thanks to an exclusive deal designed to lure fans to the platform owned by her husband? Not having a CD I can get the files back from feels unsafe, but not having the files at all seems absolutely bonkers Luke Dearnley Shame on me and my ignorance.- French Toast Advocate June 6, 2016Īpple also has a tendency to substitute explicit versions of tracks with tamer counterparts, or replace beloved remixes of favourite songs with different versions.Īnd while streaming services appear to offer infinite variety, music licensing deals and the whims of musicians mean you can’t always find your favourite artists. Even worse, if you unsubscribed without re-downloading – as I did – you could find your whole library gone.Īpple Music deleted my physical songs.
ONLINE MUSIC STREAMING ETUNES FREE
If you allowed the service to upload your library to the cloud and wipe the files off your device to free up storage space, suddenly you couldn’t play tracks when you went through a train tunnel. When Apple Music launched, there were teething problems. Now all you need is a playback device and an internet connection.īut the shift to streaming comes with trade-offs. Previously, people maintained access by owning records, cassette tapes, CDs or, more recently, digital files. “You never really own music, because it’s temporal, so what you own is access to it at a time of your choosing,” says Yanto Browning, a music lecturer at QUT. Ownership and access are not exactly binary opposites. Will those of us who aren’t quite ready to let go eventually have to move on too? The problem with streaming But the announcement is the latest signal that the company that taught us to organise our musical lives around digital downloads is moving on. The recent changes to iTunes are largely cosmetic, so if you have spent years building up a music library, it’s not going anywhere at the moment. While streaming services are now the norm, these platforms can feel disconcertingly ephemeral to people who are used to the sense of control and emotional connection that comes with having a physical copy of a song. And I’m not the only one.Īpple’s announcement late last year of the end of iTunes as we have known it is a symbolic bookend to the “ownership” era. Since then I’ve been operating in the musical wilderness, unable to trust streaming services and unhappy with my unrecognisable iTunes library, which I managed to partially resurrect from a backup hard drive stored at my parents’ house a year after the calamitous event.Īfter consulting widely I have realised I’m caught in the shift from a music model based on “ownership” to one based on “access”.
0 kommentar(er)
