Part I: The Wishlist

It would be foolish to claim that there has ever been a better way to listen to music than what we have with streaming today. The combination of immediate availability and incredibly low cost is unprecedented in history. Some may long for the simpler times of vinyl records, but when confronted with reality, they quickly realize that using any sort of physical media soon becomes a pain once the initial charm wears off. I say this as someone with a collection of vinyl records I barely play because streaming is simply more convenient, and a CD collection I never play because I have no means to do so. That said, I still don’t think music streaming services are perfect.

In fact, I know this because I’ve tried them all—or at least all available in my region—and after short periods, I always return to Spotify, as the differences between them are mainly cosmetic. Across the board, I see issues which, if resolved, would create a brilliant experience for me and possibly many other like-minded “serious” music lovers. Below is an outline of the major improvements I would like to see, which would easily motivate me to make a switch.

Ia: Less Emphasis on Generated Content and Other Irrelevant Features

I am an “album” person. I don’t like singles, I don’t like playlists, and I don’t care about music videos. What I want is direct access to a catalog of full-length albums exactly as intended to be listened to by the artists. This is something streaming services already provide and is where their immense value to a music lover like me lies. However, it is also the least profitable part of the service and, as such, is under constant attack. When I open any streaming service, I’m likely to see a barrage of automatically generated playlists, followed by a list of irrelevant podcasts, forcing me to dig deep into individual artist pages just to find the full-length albums I’m there for.

Playlists are how most people listen to music nowadays, and it’s easy to see the appeal. They offer a radio-like experience for those who want to feel in control of their listening and occasionally skip a track or two. For streaming services, playlists are an easy source of revenue, as they can sell prime spots in top playlists to the highest bidders. Personally, I don’t want any of this. The only time I listen to playlists is when exploring genres I know nothing about and don’t want to spend time researching—but that accounts for only 0.1% of my listening time. Yet, playlists are the number one feature pushed in my face every time I open a music streaming app.

Podcasts are another unwelcome addition. They provide a cheap way to generate content for which streaming services don’t have to pay significant royalties, so they push them heavily. Yet, I’ve found the experience to be completely subpar compared to dedicated podcast apps. Wonderful open-source apps like AntennaPod provide a much better solution for my podcast listening needs. As such, I see zero reason for music streaming services to integrate podcasts. Apart from both using sound waves, they are entirely different media forms.

Then there are a ton of features that, frankly, make no difference to me—such as the inclusion of music videos, which, due to the decline of music TV channels, have become a lost art form. Likewise, many social and “party” features are completely irrelevant, though at least these can usually be disabled after the initial setup. I imagine there must be an audience for such features, but personally, I find they clutter the UI and slow down the app. I’d be happier without them.

Ib: Tools for Music Collectors

The difference between collecting music and streaming it is not insignificant. It’s similar to the difference between a microwaved meal and a five-course menu in a luxury restaurant. For some one may be unacceptable and the other desirable—yet both share the same core principle: the need to ingest calories. Similarly, collecting vinyl records, playing them on a high-end turntable, and enjoying them in a quiet, relaxing environment is a different experience from streaming music on mediocre earbuds while commuting. Yet both share the same core—the music.

It’s a shame that music streaming services don’t go the extra mile to create a “connoisseur” experience where they easily could. These services gather an incredible amount of data about the music they provide, yet they never share it with users. I can easily search through my MP3 collection in Foobar2000 and filter for records released in 1973 or only progressive rock albums—or even combine both criteria. Streaming services have this data and much more, yet they don’t let users access it. What a joy it would be to list all albums from my favorite artists released in a certain year or tagged with a certain genre. I could use this for a research and exploration. This would be especially useful when I have a general idea of what I want to listen to but don’t know which album to pick. Sadly, none of this is possible.

The cataloging options are also very limited. The only thing I can do with an album is to “favorite” it, which places it in a potentially massive list of other albums. As someone who discovers and listens to at least two new albums daily, I find it impossible to keep my favorite album list organized. If I could at least create collections of albums, navigation would be much simpler than having one unwieldy list with hundreds of albums that I’m planning to listen to or am actively listening to.

Ic: Actually Working New Release Notifications

So far, I have not encountered a music streaming service with reliable notifications for new releases from artists I follow. Services tend to be much better at notifying me about artists I don’t care about while completely failing at the simple task of listing all new albums from the ones I do. I imagine this as a primitive timeline—an RSS feed-like experience showing everything newly added from my followed artists, with an optional toggle to display only full-length albums. Yes, all services have their various “new music” playlists, but these tend to focus on singles, requiring me to check each new song to determine whether it’s part of an album or just a standalone single. Third-party services like Crabhands do slightly better, but even they aren’t ideal. A simple feed of new music seems like the easiest thing to implement, yet I regularly discover that my favorite bands released a new album six months ago without me noticing.

Id: Offline Means Offline

This is a minor gripe, but one I’ve noticed across multiple services. You can, of course, download music for offline listening, but unless you’re 100% offline (in airplane mode), the apps still attempt to connect to the internet. This can cause significant lag if there’s a server issue (which happens more often than one would expect) or if your internet connection is poor. A common scenario for me is starting to play downloaded music while leaving home or the office WiFi. When the phone takes a few seconds to switch from WiFi to mobile data, the app gets confused, refuses to start playback (of downloaded music!), and remains stuck even after data is restored. Not even killing the app helps—the only solution seems to be temporarily enabling airplane mode, starting playback, and then restoring the connection. Clearly, this “ping” to the servers could happen in the background while the music is playing.

Ie: Rate Your Music Integration

A niche request, certainly, but one that would be much more useful than many existing features. Like many music fans, I use Rate Your Music to, well, rate my music. When I save an album for later listening, I usually keep it saved until I know it well enough to rate it. However, the extra step of opening Rate Your Music, finding the album, and rating it often causes me to forget, leaving albums saved forever despite not listening to them much anymore. A one-click integration with Rate Your Music would make this workflow much smoother for me (and many others).

If: Pay Per Stream

The monetization model of streaming services is obscure but most likely works as follows: The user pays a flat monthly fee, part of which is distributed to the artists. This distribution method is likely based on a share of the total number of streams on the service and does not provide a direct link between the user’s money and the artist’s pocket. Simply put, when I pay Spotify, most of my money goes to artists I never listen to—those whose popularity places them at the top of the pile. Furthermore, I suspect that deals between record labels and streaming services inevitably result in an imbalance, where a single stream of a song by an artist under a major label is worth more than that of an independent artist. This happens because large record labels have much greater leverage when negotiating rates (threatening to withdraw The Beatles’ catalog surely gives them a strong negotiating position). On the other hand, independent artists have no choice but to participate in the streaming business to remain relevant, making streaming services gatekeepers with non-negotiable rules.

In a perfect music streaming service, the money I pay would be distributed transparently and fairly based on minutes of playtime1. The process would be simple: take all the money I contribute to the streaming service, deduct a reasonable fee for operating costs, and divide the rest among the artists I actually listen to. Given the current price of streaming services—roughly €10 per month—and assuming a 30% margin for the service provider, I would have €7 per month to distribute. If I listen to music for approximately four hours per day, that amounts to 7,200 minutes of monthly playtime, translating to a rate of €0.001 per minute of listening.2 While this isn’t much—essentially nothing—it would at least establish a clear link between my listening habits and the artists’ earnings. This model could be further improved by allowing users to tip their favorite artists or purchase direct downloads of MP3 files for perpetual ownership at an additional fee within the app.

Part II: All That Is Right

As much as this may sound like a long list of complaints, these are, in the broader context, only minor annoyances. The combination of low cost, unlimited access, vast libraries, and unrivaled convenience makes music streaming services the best way to listen to music today—a must for anyone with even a slight interest in music. We have never lived in an age of such abundance and availability, and streaming services deserve a big thank-you from us users—even if we must also acknowledge that this luxury comes at the expense of artists. Artists simply get paid less, must seek alternative sources of revenue, or sacrifice their artistic integrity to make a decent living. However, this issue is not unique to the streaming era and, in some ways, can be seen as an opportunity for direct market access that was previously unavailable.

Part III: All That Cannot Be Fixed

There are flaws inherent in the business model of streaming services that cannot be fixed, yet should not be ignored. One such flaw is the impermanence of the available music. Users are never guaranteed that the music they love today will still be available tomorrow. This can be due to something as simple as rights issues with certain recordings or more complex and morally ambiguous situations when artists turn out to be problematic individuals.

As a teenager, I enjoyed the music of the UK rock band Lostprophets. Years later, their singer was convicted and sentenced to prison for the rape of a minor. As a result, Lostprophets’ music simply disappeared, as if it had never existed. Similarly, I fell in love with the music of the Ukrainian black metal band Nokturnal Mortum without initially knowing about their (alleged) support of Nazism. Their music is also unavailable on streaming services.

Despite knowing about these controversies, I do not consider listening to their music an endorsement of the personal beliefs or actions of some band members. Had I purchased their albums before learning about these issues, I could still listen to them with a clear conscience. However, if this music remained on streaming services, every stream would actively contribute to the financial support of individuals whose values I oppose. I imagine this is why their music is unavailable—streaming platforms likely prefer not to pay royalties to convicted criminals.

Moral dilemmas aside, access to music is never guaranteed. The only way for those who want to ensure continued access to their favorite music is to pay twice: once for the convenience of streaming and discovery, and again for physical media or digital files that will outlast any future “blacklisting”—whatever the reason may be.

Part IV: Why Bandcamp Is Only Half the Answer

This raises an obvious question with an obvious answer: Bandcamp is often seen as the “good guy” and the only real alternative for musicians and listeners. Especially in niche subgenres and for less popular artists, Bandcamp is as important—if not more so—than streaming services. As a “musician” (quotation marks very much intentional), I have made infinitely more money on Bandcamp than I have from streaming services3, and I suspect the same is true for many artists whose stream counts fall below the critical threshold. However, for listeners, there is one key difference—Bandcamp is not a streaming service in the traditional sense. Yes, it has an app that allows music streaming, but only for music that the listener has purchased for perpetual ownership. This makes it no different from the classic iTunes model, aside from being more artist-friendly. Bandcamp is essentially a digital music store, and users can download purchased files and play them with any software or app they choose. This is something I highly recommend, as Bandcamp’s listening experience is even more rudimentary compared to mainstream streaming services.

Either way, Bandcamp plays a completely different game, and its business model would likely suffer if it adopted a streaming approach with a flat monthly fee for general access.

Part V: So Close to Perfection

In summary, streaming services are the best thing that has happened to music listeners in the past 50 years. They provide a simple way for anyone to access a vast collection of music for a ridiculously small fee. On the artist’s side, despite their obvious limitations, they have enabled global market access in a way that would have been impossible in the pre-internet era. Coupled with the declining cost of recording equipment, streaming services have given musicians from every corner of the world the opportunity to achieve mass success. For more engaged listeners, streaming services do have limitations, as outlined above, and I will remain in search of a service that fully meets my needs. However, despite these shortcomings, there is more to praise than to criticize—a rare occurrence in any era, regardless.

Footnotes

  1. As a fan of music where songs often reach a duration of twenty minutes, I don’t find it fair to reward the artists per song. I don’t think a twenty minute suite of multiple movements deserves to get paid by the same amount as a “verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus” three minute radio single. ↩

  2. Coincidentally, this nicely correlates with the $0.00318 payout per stream for Spotify mentioned in this article for an average 3 minute track. ↩

  3. Since “almost no money” I raised through Bandcamp is infinitely more money than “no money” I got from all streaming services combined. ↩