‘Like A Rolling Stone’: Facing the Future of Music

More than 16 years ago, two teenagers launched an online music platform that enabled users to swap songs. It was called Napster.

To some, its creators were heroes, opening up a world of free music for anyone to share and explore. To others, they were thieves, villains even. A lawsuit forced the free service to shut down, but as technology advanced, online music sharing and streaming only continued to grow.

People have worried about how technology will affect music for over a century, said Sarai Brinker, an instructor of music history in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. As an example, she offered famed composer John Philip Sousa’s skepticism of the phonograph.

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Weston Davis, a junior electronic media and communications major, has a tape player in his truck. He likes to make mix tapes to listen to while he drives. Nicole Crites/The Hub@TTU

“He’s looking at the phonograph and is saying, ‘This is going to kill music, people are going to stop making music, this is going to completely change how we experience music,’” she said. “So, you can see it was kind of the same conversation we are having today with mp3 and with Spotify.”

Nielsen’s fourth annual study shows 75 percent of U.S. music audience members reported listening to music online in a typical week, up 12 percent from 2014. At the same, both CD sales and track downloads decreased by 10 percent from last year.

To further illustrate the digital music boom, Next Big Sound, a Pandora branch specializing in online music analytics, reports there were more than a trillion online plays during the first half of 2015. The estimate includes plays from multiple streaming services, including YouTube, Vevo, Vimeo, Spotify, Rdio, SoundCloud and Pandora.

“I definitely think the way that it’s going is ad-free, subscription streaming,” Brinker said. “We are already seeing it in places like Sweden.”

In 2013, in Sweden a/k/a the birthplace of Spotify, subscription services accounted for 94 percent of the digital market.

statistic_id244995_number-of-paying-spotify-subscribers-worldwide-2010-2015

Number of paying Spotify subscribers worldwide from 2010 to 2015.

Spotify has certainly become mainstream outside of Sweden as well, growing from  500,000 paying subscribers worldwide in July 2010 to 20 million in June 2015.

We Rock Your Web named Spotify the Best Music Streaming Service of 2015 because of its large library (featuring more than 30 million songs), good user interface, wide support of devices and helpful features.

Music accessibility is increasingly important because consumption often happens on the go. According to Nielsen’s report, 44 percent of U.S. music listeners report using smartphones to listen to music in a typical week — a 7-percent increase over last year.

Peyton Johnson, a senior psychology major at Tech, said he likes Spotify because of its wide array of music choices and new releases, which makes it easy to discover new music.

“It’s convenient,”  said. “I can use it on my phone, so it makes it easier to use at the gym or when I’m driving.”

Brinker said the service’s music recommendations based on an user’s patterns of listening “can kind of lead you into this rabbit hole of exploration of new music.”

Another unique aspect of Spotify is its integration with social media. Subscribers can link their accounts to their Facebook profiles, giving them the option to follow other users, share what they are listening to and send songs to friends, which Johnson said he does frequently.

“It’s an easy way to spread music around,” he said.

Untitled InfographicSocial media’s prevalence is another trend that affects music. As of January 2014, 74 percent of adults with online access used social networking sites, and in August 2015, Facebook had nearly 1.5 billion users worldwide.

For celebrities and musicians, these networks offer an instantaneous connection to millions of fans.

“I think music is about building a community, so it gives an opportunity for the listeners to have sometimes more of a personal relationship with the artist,” Brinker said.

The Next Big Sound’s summer 2015 report suggests that because social media use is “growing like a weed,” the music industry should start focusing more on maximizing revenue from streaming and interactions with fans.

“We tracked close to 14 billion new followers, page likes, and stations added in the first half of the year, already more than three quarters of the total from last year,” the report said.

However, some artists and music labels still see the decline in CD sales and track downloads as a legitimate threat to the industry.

In November 2014, Taylor Swift took a strong stance against streaming, abruptly removing all her music from Spotify. In a statement, the streaming service pleaded with Swift to change her mind for the more than 40 million users who listened to her music.

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Davis prefers to have something physical, like a CD, rather than a music download. Nicole Crites/The Hub@TTU

In an interview with Yahoo, Swift explained her decision, describing Spotify as a grand experiment: “I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.”

Swift is one of the artists who have most recently criticized new technologies’ effect on music, Brinker said, but the music industry is just going to keep evolving with the times.

“I do think the business, in particular, how artists are paid, needs to be addressed because they get paid so little per play,” Brinker said. “So I think there’s some things that need to be worked out with that, but I think that’s the general direction that it’s going in.”

Despite the the music industry’s online shift, there will always be those who choose hold-in-your-hand albums over downloading or streaming.

Weston Davis, a junior electronic media and communications major, said he has always preferred buying CDs. He tried using Pandora’s radio stations, but decided it was not for him.

“The ads got to me, and I’m too cheap to buy it, so I just decided I would buy CDs,” Davis said.

Davis said he enjoys listening to his favorite artists’ albums in full, from finish to end, rather than jumping from one single to another — a habit that Brinker agrees can cause fragmentation.

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Ann Kapusta, a graduate student, listens to music while waiting for class. Nicole Crites/The Hub@TTU

“The analogy would be reading a chapter out of a book,” she said. “If you are trying to create something that speaks to a greater truth or element of human experience  and you only hear chapter five, then you don’t get the full picture.”

Disconnectedness is another downside to this brave new world of digital music.

“Music used to give people an opportunity to come together and to build community and to create something and experience something together as a whole,” Brinker said. “So when you put your headphones in, you’re almost isolating yourself. ”

The silver lining, she said, is the ease of breaking free from boredom and unpleasant surroundings.

Added Brinker: “You can put in your headphones and escape to the most transcendent sounds that the greatest minds in history have been able to establish.”

About Nicole Crites

Entertainment Director - Senior journalism major from Fort Worth, TX