Music Streaming
Before Streaming Music.
Way back in time in 2004 Pandora Internet Radio opened up a whole bunch of musicians to my ears. Put in an artist and suddenly there was another musician who, not only was as good as the one you had been listening to forever, but was better. And you had never heard of them. And on top of it all, they were really famous. So you listened to all these radio streams until one day in 2007 Pandora pulled the plug and cut off vast parts of the world, or at least they did in Australia, where I was at the time.
So we bumbled along trying either to not download too many iTunes songs and blowing up your credit card, or, as Napster and been hung out to dry many years before, trying not to download too many other mp3 files from where we were not supposed to. We also paid, yes we did. Anyone remember Amie Street Music? Great site and idea, and cool place to discover new music. Founded in 2006, then gobbled up by Amazon 2010 and closed down. You paid for the music on a bidding system, so the artists got their dues and a fair price.
Spotify and Compression.
Fast forward to 2014 and I decided to stop being a cheapskate and sign up for a Spotify Premium account. By this time compression techniques had made big advances in the quality of the songs streamed and the Spotify recommendation algorithms had really started to ramp up.
By the way, the debate around streaming quality and is long and very boring. I see really no interest in discussing the sound quality merits of vinyl vis streaming vis CD's vis tapes or vis a vis anything else. I mean, if you really want to get great quality, buy a concert ticket and watch your band play; as long as you know who to go to listen to.
So here I was, sort of back to Pandora days discovering new songs and artists, with easy ways via the artist profile section to find who they were, where they came from and maybe where they were going.
Streamusque.
But you know what? A lot of those personal Spotify recommendations were, to put it polity, not great. As were lots of suggestions from the other music discovery sites, such as Deezer, and Soundcloud and others. Or they were for me.
So I started pulling out the songs and artists I liked into my play lists. Cool. The only problem with that it was too easy: click like, click save to play list, click: OMG, there's over 200 songs in that play list! And I only created it one month ago! It sort of defeated the purpose of the whole thing.
So I started a blog, originally selected songs that had been released on the Friday Spotify new release song dump. The selection criteria was, and is an entirely personal choice. A song that I thought had merit. There were not more than 2 or 3 selections per week, and if no songs made the grade for the week, then none did.