innerspaceboy

Whoa, I never said anything about buying. (See below).

I concur wholeheartedly!

Hear hear!

This is true. However, the tactic still doesn’t resolve the issue of abysmally poor content selection.



The thread subject is “Unpopular Music Opinions” so I’ll make my own firm, albeit unpopular case in favor of "other methods" over streaming services.

My listening style is contextual – when exploring new musical territories I prefer to experience an artist's body of work as a complete chronology. I begin with their albums, then their demos, followed by singles and b-sides, prototypes and outtakes, DJ mixes (in the case of electronic music), live albums, soundtrack contributions, side projects, and finally solo efforts. This process makes filesharing the unequivocally superior method for surveying a composer's catalog.

Similarly, I enjoy exploring niche record label's libraries and their development over time. For labels such as Blue Note, Deutsche Grammophon, FAX +49-69/450464, 4AD, Obscure, Ohr, Brain, ECM, Nonesuch, and NinjaTune, a listener can develop a far more cohesive understanding of a genre by exploring the refinement of its sound over a span of decades. This task is preposterously difficult to perform via a streaming service, most of whom fail to even incorporate label searches into their user interface. Filesharing wins again.

There is also the matter of sound quality. The archival FLAC libraries of the better private trackers rival the lossy bitrates of streaming services and are ideal for cultural custodians like yours truly.

Cost, as others have mentioned, is most certainly a factor. The cost of 13,000+ albums would be astronomical in a physical format, to say nothing of the international shipping expense to import all of the records from their nations of origin. Streaming, in this case, is entirely ruled out as the majority of these albums are not available to stream from any service. The superior method is to begin exploring a genre or artist via torrent, develop an educated perspective, read all related literature to develop a cohesive and contextual understanding of the work's cultural significance, and then finally, make informed purchasing decisions for the crème de la crème selections for the listener’s vinyl library.

Accessibility is another major contributor to such a methodology. By building a massive personal archive and hosting it on a private server, a listener can instantaneously access any discographic library or personally-crafted playlist from any web-enabled device, lossless and commercial-free.

This leaves the looming moral factor, for which the rationale is purely mathematical. Statista reports that the U.S. average consumer spending on music was $48. I spend on average $1200 annually on vinyl directly as a result of my listening methodology – 25 times that of the national average. And the most valuable 25% of my vinyl catalog is currently appraised at between $10-$20,000. And I am not alone. Statistically speaking, filesharers are not the people the music industry have to blame for their perceived sales losses.

And on a final more personal note - I am a sorting-and-tagging fetishist. I absolutely love the management of metadata, folder structures, and data visualizations. Large library management is a personal passion and a delightful advantage for those who maintain their own music libraries instead of streaming.

I understand that I am of a particular minority when it comes to media consumption. But entire nations have come to embrace the social value of file sharing, and their numbers continue to grow every day. Streaming may satisfy passive listeners and casual consumers, but for serious connoisseurs of sound art there are far superior alternatives to the stream.

/soapbox

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