Tocky on 12/4/2021 at 01:17
Am I the only one who finds something they like from forums or youtube and buys the download from Amazon then? I put it in my computer library and burn mix CD's for my ride, though it would be a memory stick, if the sound system were up to date. I get the songs I like put in an order I like. I support exactly what I like that way. It would be nice if there were radio stations which played a range of things and were more experimental in their choices but that is no longer an option so I can no longer just chance upon a song there the way I once could.
Never been to bandcamp. Is that a good way to chance on music?
Briareos H on 12/4/2021 at 06:37
I haven't found it very practical for discovering new music, it is more powerful for the artists you already follow.
Bandcamp is my main source for digital music and the only digital model that I want to support for the time being: you get to download mp3 or flac or stream from their app. You can pay more than the base price if you want. You can order physical releases and immediately get the digital version added to your library, I do this a lot with vinyl records since I like collecting them and CD cases have never felt right to the touch to me. You can get merch. You can subscribe to labels and get all their releases automatically. You can configure notifications for new releases from artists you follow. The purchase process is so streamlined that even a baby could do it.
As a business, they have repeatedly put the needs of the artists at the top of their priorities e.g. with (
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays-2021) monthly Fridays where they've waived their share since the pandemic hit.
I was reading (
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/apr/10/music-streaming-debate-what-songwriter-artist-and-industry-insider-say-publication-parliamentary-report) this dumb article from the Guardian and was shocked not to see it mentioned even once.
As far as I'm concerned the only benefit I get from commercial streaming is AI-driven recommendations, and I can get that for free out of YouTube which has an amazing engine. But that's because I've got my own self-hosted streaming infrastructure (+ Bandcamp app) to then play what I buy/rip/pirate so I don't need additional services. And with that said, fuck Spotify.
heywood on 12/4/2021 at 14:19
Quote Posted by Cipheron
@Pyrian, @ heywood
While it's not *exactly* the same, the psychology angle is still there.
While you say you doubt it, wouldn't you equally doubt the actual findings from the research in the video? I'm sure if the scenario *just happened* to be the exact scenario from the video and I said removing that option would change people spending patterns, you've have doubted that *and for the same reasons*. What does that suggest?
The video example is just an *example* of a situation where that occurs. If you see the rest of the video they were able to engineer the same type of thing in a variety of domains, quite flexibly. So it's reproducible and the exact specifics aren't that important: pairing an option with a slightly worse version of itself makes that option look better, not just against the "worse" option, but against unrelated options.
In this case, the "option" that it's competing with is *literally anything else* you could spend that same money on:
Option 1: buy something else entirely
Option 2: digital only (say $15)
Option 3: digital plus physical (say $14)
So Option 2 is still the "slightly worse option" here. Making it cost a dollar more instead of the same price hasn't changed that, in fact, the fact that it's stealing a dollar from you makes it more effective in making Option 3 look like a better bargain: you get a free CD PLUS a free dollar by picking Option 3.
And unlike the constrained options in the study, an "Option 1" always exists in the real world, since you can decide to buy something else, so that's always an implicit Option 1.
The research findings you posted apply to a different sales strategy in which the consumer is up-sold into a higher-priced offering that they wouldn't have otherwise chosen. That's different from what I'm doing.
I'll give you a recent example. My wife has been revisiting 80s pop and decided she wanted to buy a-ha's original hit album
Hunting High and Low. So I did what I usually do and searched for a digital download version that wasn't lossy compressed. I found it on hdtracks.com for $16. Then I looked on Amazon. They had an MP3 download for $9.50. But they also had multiple 3rd party sellers offering the CD for $7.50. So I bought the CD and ripped it to FLAC.
I think I know the reason why lossless downloads cost more than CDs. They are catering to the instant gratification market, people who want to listen right now and don't want to wait for the CD in the mail. But it generates a lot of waste when people like me buy the CDs just for the files.
Quote Posted by Kolya
I buy FLAC files, mostly of bandcamp. Mere access to music, especially in an inferior quality like Spotify streaming, is worthless.
What I care about is selection, quality and support. 99% of all music is shit. So I spend a lot of time to select music and when I find an artist that clicks with me, I want to support them so they make more good music. And I want excellent quality at my pleasure.
Spotify can't help me, because I can already listen to more than I could ever consume, access ain't the problem. It can't help with selection either, I tried that. And it will not help with supporting musicians.
Finding good music these days is work. You either do the work or you listen to old stuff and get sad or to the inoffensive shit list everyone else listens to and get emotionally numbed.
+1
Quote Posted by Briareos H
As far as I'm concerned the only benefit I get from commercial streaming is AI-driven recommendations, and I can get that for free out of YouTube which has an amazing engine. But that's because I've got my own self-hosted streaming infrastructure (+ Bandcamp app) to then play what I buy/rip/pirate so I don't need additional services. And with that said, fuck Spotify.
I do too, and I agree that YouTube is great for discovering music through their recommendations.
Anarchic Fox on 12/4/2021 at 14:38
Quote Posted by Tocky
It would be nice if there were radio stations which played a range of things and were more experimental in their choices but that is no longer an option so I can no longer just chance upon a song there the way I once could.
Oddly enough, Dallas now has a non-commercial, ad-free radio station which plays a wide variety of music, which uses the same funding model as NPR. It launched in 2009. I wonder how common such stations are, now that the economics of radio have changed so drastically. I did find a (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-profit_radio_stations_in_the_United_States) list of non-commercial stations, but it doesn't specify which ones are music only.
Jason Moyer on 12/4/2021 at 15:52
I'm probably spoiled by being near Pittsburgh, but we have 2 relatively decent public radio stations (QED and YEP) and, more importantly, RCT which is CMU's radio station and tends to have adventurous programming.
Personally, I never really found 'new' music through the radio and generally find more stuff by playing the "influenced by/similar to/influenced" game on Allmusic or seeing what Spotify does if I create a playlist using an obscure band I really like. Actually, nowadays I mostly just buy a bottle of whiskey and spend a few days using google to explore old genres I never got into deeply for one reason or another.
Starker on 12/4/2021 at 17:38
Quote Posted by heywood
Regarding the discussion of file degradation/corruption, anybody who has anything they don't want to lose on their computer should be backing it up regularly. If you're like me and you store important things like family photos & videos, tax forms and other important records, save files from your first time playing SS2 :) etc. then you really should consider having an off-site backup too in case of a fire.
As the saying goes, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who back up their data and those who will back up their data.
Cipheron on 13/4/2021 at 21:24
Quote Posted by heywood
The research findings you posted apply to a different sales strategy in which the consumer is up-sold into a higher-priced offering that they wouldn't have otherwise chosen. That's different from what I'm doing.
I'll give you a recent example. My wife has been revisiting 80s pop and decided she wanted to buy a-ha's original hit album
Hunting High and Low. So I did what I usually do and searched for a digital download version that wasn't lossy compressed. I found it on hdtracks.com for $16. Then I looked on Amazon. They had an MP3 download for $9.50. But they also had multiple 3rd party sellers offering the CD for $7.50. So I bought the CD and ripped it to FLAC.
I think I know the reason why lossless downloads cost more than CDs. They are catering to the instant gratification market, people who want to listen right now and don't want to wait for the CD in the mail. But it generates a lot of waste when people like me buy the CDs just for the files.
It is basic economics. We still have the bias that physical things are "worth more" economically, but that's only an assumption, and assumptions need to be tested against reality. One factor is that many people don't actually have a CD device anymore, so they can only choose to buy the digital version. So that drives differential demand higher for the digital version.
However there's the other factor, which is the labor theory of value. Almost nobody gets the CD for actual playing now, it's almost always to convert them to something else. So there is specialized labor needed to get that into a usable form. That labor adds value, so people have naturally come to add a premium onto having the music already in the ideal form, and the labor-costs includes gaining the knowledge needed to do the task, not just the time to do the task itself. This just boils down to classical specialization of labor.
But back to the research topic. You're talking about "shopping around" here. But the scenario we were discussing was about differing prices on the SAME site. You hadn't actually mentioned that the prices were on different retailers until just now, so that's changing the scenario that we were discussing.
hdtracks.com can probably charge extra due to being a premium service. Many people are time-poor as much as they are money-poor. Say you're not sure what album to get, so you go on Amazon, search albums, but you also have to filter through various formats, qualities, CD vs digital etc, and hope that the album you searched for is available in high quality. That's a lot more irrelevant stuff to sort through. How often are you in some form of online shopping only to find that the stuff you're searching through isn't in the right format or some other issue? It makes it very difficult to compare options if many of them turn out not to be suitable once you click on them. Or you could go on hdtracks.com, search for a specific artists or genre, and you know that everything you browse is in a *consistent* quality. This would make it easy to assess the value of options quickly. hdtracks.com isn't just high quality tracks, it's curated for you. That's the service you're paying extra for.