To Stream or Not to Stream

Wow, how the mighty have fallen.  Streaming, or rental music as I call it, has won the day here at last.  Well, you stream, I stream...we all...you get it.  It's convenient.  Its cheap. It sounds as good or better than whatever that was we were doing for the past 100 years.  Good riddance to that.  And don't ask me which platform I stream from because who cares?  Like, is there  really a  quality issue between them? Really?   But who am I to say.  Maybe we're not headed towards being OCD about which digital platform the unwashed ignorantly chose: "Oh..Tidal, are you still using that?"  Crazy, I thought we were not just consumers of music but archivists, preservationists and curators of rare physical antiquities.  No?  You mean everyone, anyone, now has everything at the tips of their fingers? A phone. A dac. Some ear-bud-thingies.  Good to go.  But there's a book (remember those?): "Dust and Grooves".  Inside are photos and stories of who we are, or were.   It's not just about the vinyl (although I personally drool over it), and not just about the music, but about the people who are the keepers of the flame, so to speak.  Get the book and take a long last look at what very well may be the last of us.  

sns850, I haven’t looked into yet, but I’ll wager that like today, people in the 30’s and 40’s received radio and its broadcasts of music as a godsend of convenience and economy, compared with having to physically go to concerts or buy music to play at home,(sheets, rolls, 78’s, etc). The world of music was laid at the feet of the hoi polloi, and it no longer only belonged to the rich. That new massification of music, back then, ushered in a tidal wave (pun intended) of new consumers of music. Great, a further democratization of art. Let me just say this: today when audiophiles seek out and treasure whatever can be recovered from the physical collections of those times, I rarely hear someone pine for the radio broadcasts. Why, well maybe because the great majority of it was used primarily to sell soap, and was made unlistenable by growing and annoying commercialization. So, do you want to guess at what eventually happens with streaming? Don’t think they’ll do that? Don’t think they’ll demand more and more to consume their product? Those music files you cherish are commodities you don’t actually possess. In the long run the music and its delivery system are just conduits that can and will be leveraged to harvest more compliant consumers. I’m not naive. We audiophiles already are big consumers, some of the biggest. Records, CDs, expensive electronic equipment, rooms to correct, construct and display our "stuff". We have bathed in the consumptive pool. But the difference is we possess, own, collect, trade, borrow, swap and archive these consumables. In effect, we have remade their products, we have remade them in own images, expressions, and presentations to others. It’s no crime, or bad per se, that thanks to streaming music is now as ubiquitous as it is, that more people can more easily and, for now, somewhat cheaply, enjoy it in the highest quality. No, I’m not down on the merits of streaming high quality music. Like you, I want the music first. The "but" my friend, is when you leave behind the physical archiving of your physical collection, you’ll be leaving a tradition and nature of collecting in a unusual way: a rite of human selection, curiosity and creativity in the acquisition of the best examples of human musical endeavors, the work of audiophilia, that circumvents the purely commercial aspect of the experience. That’s what will disappear when everyone, I mean everyone, is just sitting in front of nothing but sound emanating from God knows where.