Music Streaming and Piracy

Among the music industry streaming is the hottest topic of 2015. With companies like Pandora, Tidal, Spotify and now Apple Music coming into play, streaming is not going away anytime soon. I was very skeptical of streaming for a while especially because I wanted to own my music. I didn’t want to rely on having an Internet connection to play my favorite artists. But after becoming a subscriber of Spotify in mid 2014 and now testing the viability of Apple Music, it became very apparent that the convenience out weighed my intolerance to change with the industry.

As a consumer it seems like streaming is the best strategy against piracy to date. In the past 15 years, piracy has severely altered the landscape of the music industry and music corporations have been trying to find a solution to combat this problem. In the days of Napster, the solution was to fight back with high profile lawsuits and jail time for offenders. Companies used ads to discourage piracy and to associate stealing music as the same crime of stealing a car. But all of the doors that P2P technology opened didn’t seem to deter or slow down piracy, especially when it came to music. As a result the music industry arguably needed to change with the technology instead of attacking its consumers.

Today streaming has provided a service that has overruled the convenience of piracy. While Spotify offers its service for free to subscribers with limitation and advertisement, Apple Music has offered all of its subscribers a 3 months trial period. These freemium-marketing strategies have proven to be an effective way of building a healthy list of paying subscribers. As of June 2015, Spotify has ranked in an impressive 20 million paying subscribers with a total of 75 million active users. And in just 5 weeks Apple Music has managed to build a list of 11 million subscribers. However we won’t know how many will decide to stay with Apple once the three month window expires. While there still is a lot of debate on whether artists are getting paid enough by these streaming models, it certainly is better then the alternative. As far as my concerns are with “owning” the music I purchase and/or pay for, I found that when it comes to the digital format of consuming music, streaming is the way to go while I can still get my ownership fix by building a vinyl collection.