[whichfawkes]

I'd be perfectly happy to pay for music streaming like I pay for Netflix: unlimited access for a flat monthly fee. However, I'm not willing to pay for a monthly service from every individual record label I want to listen to, and still miss out on content I want.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's very likely that a paid service which behaves in a more legitimate way than Grooveshark can really have all of the content in one place, because of all of the agreements necessary.

For some reason I don't mind Netflix having only a subset of TV shows and movies, but I would mind a music service that doesn't have a nearly-complete catalog of everything I might want. I don't want to have to care what label owns the tracks. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by having Grooveshark for so long.

[tptacek]

Isn't that a weird thing to say? You pay for Netflix. Far more so than for Spotify or Rdio, you miss tons of content, so much so that there are regular columns on Slate about what good movies are coming and going from the service every month. Netflix has extraordinarily spotty coverage; it's like a version of Spotify where they have Pixies albums, but only every other song from the albums.

The difference in entitlement (I don't mean that as a loaded term) between music and video services is interesting to me.

[whichfawkes]

I know exactly what you mean.

Perhaps it has something to do with decades of TV being available over the air, and over different varying cable packages. People are used to the idea that if you don't pay for cable you can watch a subset of TV shows, and if you do pay for cable, you're only buying a subset of the channels.

Music has always been free on the radio, but it works differently. Multiple radio stations might play the same song if it's within their genre. This is in contrast to multiple TV stations which own non-overlapping programming. You can't find ABC programming on CBS, but you can hear the Pixies on multiple radio stations.

To rephrase a little: Television content distribution has always been linked to the owner of the content. The networks that buy the programs distribute them exclusively. Music distribution is often separate from the ownership, and is based on royalties. Anyone can play any music, as long as they pay the royalties. As such, nobody is used to having to think about who owns the work of a certain artist they want to listen to.

[mechanical_fish]

My theory continues to be that the music industry is just unlucky. They entered the internet era with a product that was perfectly positioned to be annihilated by Napster, iTunes, and YouTube.

The pop single was a great product in its day. The recording industry invented pop singles and then spent fifty years perfecting the machine to market them.

To focus the marketing, singles were released a few at a time, and radio stations were encouraged [1] to play the same small playlists relentlessly, over and over, day and night. We all got used to the fact that there were only a few hundred songs on the radio and that they weren't merely free, but inescapable.

To further focus the marketing, the audience was relentlessly diced into genres, and high walls were built between the genres. Sorry, no hip-hop here, this is a rock station; Sorry, no zydeco here, this is a country station. We all got used to the fact that each of our local radio stations had a sound that never changed, and that you could name the songs that would be playing in a bar before you walked in. (Hint: Hotel California.)

For a while there, bands would release carefully-crafted albums that were designed to be listened to in a sitting, but the radio would never play whole albums except on very special occasions. Also, long songs would generally be abridged or avoided. We all got used to the fact that music came in randomly-shuffled three-minute chunks, which just happen to be really quick to download and easy to stuff onto USB sticks.

Then Mephistopheles appeared, holding the first compact disc, and the industry's doom was sealed as it realized that it could make an easy fortune by selling the baby boomers' music to them over again in a new format. And, indeed, that fortune was made. The industry's focus shifted to the past, and parked there. They made a lot of money selling copies of Rumours and Dark Side of the Moon to multiple generations of listeners, and they invested in branding juggernauts like Madonna and Michael Jackson that promised to sell albums for the next fifty years, and we all got used to the fact that one could pick up a copy of Rolling Stone and have difficulty figuring out which year it was from.

Plenty of people complained about this system at the time, but it did make money. Until Napster and Apple came along and said "Hey, your entire musical universe fits inside a small box like this, would you like one? It won't take more than a week to build a collection that is better than the radio." And then, whoops, the meteor hit the dinosaur right between the eyes.

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[1] This kind of encouragement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola .

[tptacek]

It's "Rumours". If you're going to make a mom-rock jab at Fleetwood Mac, get the spelling right. :P

[mechanical_fish]

Fixed.

Don't get me wrong, I own and rather like Rumours, though I cannot spell it. It helps that, after spending a decade mostly not listening to classic-rock radio, I can hear the thing with fresher ears.