MediaCrash Blog

It seems as if new technologies quickly supplant the old; that’s the nature of innovation. But sometimes tech is supplanted even when it has definite advantages over the newer, flashier idea.

In the music industry, eight-tracks supplanted vinyl, cassettes replaced them and soon after, it was CDs and DVDs that became the industry standard.

And here we are now, with streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, and Disney + dominating the entertainment and visual media landscape.

And when it comes to music, Spotify might be the undisputed champion. But are there problems with streaming all your music? Are there advantages to downloads? I think there are, and here are some of the best reasons to keep your music collection on your own hard drive, at your own place, rather than in the cloud.

1. Streaming files are compressed.

If you’re listening to streaming music from Spotify, Pandora or most other streaming services, the files that you’re listening to have been compressed, usually in a lossy format like MP3, OGG, AAC or WMA.

This means that some of the information that was in the original recording has been lost, resulting in a degradation in sound quality.

If you really want to listen to music with the best audio quality, you should buy it in a high quality, lossless format like FLAC, WAV, or even AIFF. For a good breakdown of all these different audio files, here is a great article on WhatHiFi.com.

2. Streaming relies on your Internet connection.

This one is pretty obvious. In order to stream, you have to be connected to the Internet. In the case of a lost connection, your ability to listen to music is gone. Also, the quality of the experience can be a function of your connection speed.

If you have a spotty or slow connection in the location where you’re likely to listen to music, you’ll definitely benefit by having your music files stored locally.

3. Big Internet companies don’t care about you.

This is more than just me ranting about our ‘corporate overlords’, this is based on witnessing a lot of things go down on the Internet over the years.

There have been a number of instance where files that were stored in the cloud were suddenly unavailable to the original purchaser. This has happened with Ebooks that were stored in customers Amazon Kindle accounts, saved Spotify music playlists, etc.

You can never be sure that your account on some remote company’s server is always going to be in good standing. Your information could be corrupted, your account could be hacked, the company could go out of business, or they could just make a change in policy that results in your songs not being there when you want them. Even though they’re not music companies, the recent password sharing policy change at Netflix and the whole train-wreck over at Twitter since Elon Musk bought it just goes to show how unstable your account can be at some tech company.

If you want to be able to listen to your music when you want to, don’t trust Big Tech with your song files (or any other important data for that matter).

4. Streaming often pays artists horribly.

Streaming services argued that they were a solution to online piracy. There was a period where everyone was just torrenting music and no money was going to musicians. I know, I was on both sides of the argument. Streaming would supposedly make it so that music fans wouldn’t need to pirate files anymore, because signing up to a streaming service was so inexpensive and convenient.

It worked (sort of). Streaming became so popular, first with movie streaming services like Netflix, then music services like Spotify, that online piracy really dropped off. Why take the risk of getting in trouble with the Feds and your ISP, when you could stream easily and cheaply, right?

The problem is that the royalty rates that the streamers pay out to musicians are paltry at best. Although most of these companies make huge profits, the majority of artists that fill the playlists earn fractions of pennies on each stream. True, the big, mainstream artists like Taylor Swift and Drake make bank, but underground artists? Not so much.

According to Firmbiz, in 2022 it took 314 streams on Spotify for an artist to earn $1.00. One dollar! It’s even worse on YouTube Music and Pandora. To put it in perspective, here’s a quote from that Firmbiz article:

“If your favorite artist’s next hit song reaches 10,000 plays on Spotify, they will receive roughly $40 in streaming royalties.”

Seriously, fuck that noise. Generally if you’re buying from underground labels, the artists get a much greater cut from downloads than they’ll ever get from a large streaming service. If you actually care about supporting independent musicians, read this article from NPR to get even more insight into the streaming mess.

5. You control the format.

Because you have the files on your local device, you can always convert those files if you need to. So, if you buy a different device that uses a better sounding format, or doesn’t have the space, you can make different copies of the original files. Options, options, options!

There are obvious advantages to streaming, such as saving space on your drive, having many tracks available instantly and so on. But it’s not always worth it when you really want the ownership of the files you paid for. In my case, I do both. I stream lots of stuff (when I don’t really care about listening to it often), and I have local copies of the albums and songs that I just can’t live without and want to hear with quality audio.

To tell you the truth, while I was doing the research for this post, I found a ton of comments online where people were outlining the benefits of physical media, like CDs and vinyl. I’m not going to get into that whole discussion here, but it’s certainly relevant, so I might write another post just about that.

So, in conclusion, make sure that you take control of the music that you pay for. Don’t just assume that some large company will have your best interests in mind, or that they were ever concerned about your best interests at all.

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