Are streaming subs a necessary part of music consumption?

My Spotify subscription is worth every penny.

No. I only buy CDs, rip them, and use YouTube and Bandcamp. Right now I only spend 20 bucks every few months instead of 20 a month on music I will never listen to again. It adds up.

My Tidal subscription is worth its weight in gold. With the world of radio sinking lower and lower having the ability to sample just about anything at no additional cost has led to the discovery so much music that is new to me. I know Apple also recently added this feature, but having it switch to a playlist after what ever I’m listening to is done is my favorite driving feature.

At home I run an Apple TV 4K HDMI into a Digital Audio extractor to The MYTEK Brooklyn DAC+ using Airplay the IPad makes the perfect remote.

My only gripe is there always have been obscure Albums I love that are not any service, for years it was most of the Tim Finn catalog, Now I’m missing a ton of Richard Thompson.

I just wish there was a way for artists to make a living off of streaming. It’s funny I was in a argument about minimum wage a couple of weeks ago and I listed streaming payment structure as one of the ways we exempt people from the minimum wage just like contract labor , restaurant workers and farm labor.

The fact that they’re generally run by amoral robber barons aside, streaming services are where the majority of the content is these days, and are second only to the golden age of music blogs in terms of their ability to help most end-user listeners to find more music relevant to their own tastes. I find Spotify only useful if you’re into more mainstream and contemporary music, so my personal preference leans toward the ever-so-slightly more democratic YouTube, whose suggestive algorithms seem to be superior as well, even with esoteric and rare stuff. I have a room full of relatively-cheap vinyl to cover the easily-sourced stuff. That said, I still generally recommend my clients publish to all available services.

But having said all that, local record stores are still (or at least, were, pre-runaway pandemic) the very best place for diehards and fanatics (i.e., probably not most listeners) to find new and relevant music. The personal, human touch of a record store owner that loves their business is a powerful force in terms of spreading the good music gospel.

edit: plus, and more relevant to our end of the production chain, I’ve had clients make appreciable revenue via physical albums while making virtually nothing via streaming. That revenue in turn can fund more people like us...

Exactly!!

It is so easy to distribute music to streaming services that there is just a TON of independent artists and small type labels. I've found WAY more music than I ever would have before through spotify. And a vast majority of it is not "mainstream" music. It's really nice and fun.

That was my experience at least, my wife on the other hand swears by it and clearly gets good results. I think a factor is that the majority of the music I want to hear is either on labels that Spotify doesn’t seem to be in business with, old back-catalogue stuff held by inattentive copyright owners, or is non-English language music, which Spotify doesn’t handle well. YouTube consistently hooks up the goods for me, though, and while the quality is deplorable, especially to someone who cares about that sort of thing, some of the material is only available there or for outrageous prices on discogs.

This is also where Bandcamp's "pay what you want to pay" or Patreon's support model can come into play. You can look and see if the band(s) you want to support have a Patreon or you can pay them $50 for their latest single on Bandcamp.