What’s the point?
With music coming out at such a rampant pace, it’s hard to keep up everything. I’ll be the first to admit it. Who really has time to sit there and listen to every artist that every website and blog posts anyway? It’s much easier to throw on some shit that you are already familiar with, like a 2pac album, and call it a day. Even if it’s the 10000th time you’ve listened to Me Against The World.
The thing is, if you don’t have time to listen to the music, how could you ever find the hours to download it all? Trust me, I came from the Internet era where forum dudes had terabytes upon terabytes of movies, albums, TV shows, music videos and everything in between. Some cats were straight up hoarders of any file with an extension.
Yeah, I was like that too at one point. That was until shaky hard drives failed and took all their memory with them or laptops overheated and everything with it went too.
Nowadays, I find myself dreading every time I have to put new music on my phone.
The process itself takes so much time. It’s not like you can just sit there and add mad music. You have to find it. You have to listen to it. You have to play it again to make sure it’s even worthy of making the playlist for the car. You have to find links for it (if any). If there isn’t any, you have to find a Soundcloud link and rip that. Then you have to drag and drop on your phone SD card or iTunes. And if you’re OCD about how organized your music is, you’re adding all artist names, song titles, album titles, artwork and details like who produced the song to the filenames, off top. If that doesn’t sound exhausting to you, then thank the heavens for your energy and resilience.
Maybe I’m getting too old to exert that much effort into adding music to my phone. Maybe the methods of downloading music have become so tedious because the industry fought long and hard to stop it, that it’s finally working and people are getting too lazy to download. Maybe the music got so trash that people won’t even spend the hard drive space to bootleg certain artists (you know an artist has to be pure struggle if a person won’t even stream their record, let alone download it, especially when they can find it for free).
It’s not like I’m the only one either. It’s become a trend. Downloading is just not cool anymore. Wouldn’t you rather half-listen to an artist to make sure it’s good enough to download, then bypass the “downloading” part of the process because it’s more convenient to go to whatever site is streaming it without spending time finding links?
That’s the shortcut that’s made life so much easier.
Why download a song, when I can press “Like” on Soundcloud or save it in my Spotify library and come back to it whenever I want to listen to that song or album? Between those two apps, you have 90% of the game covered. Because if it isn’t on Soundcloud or Spotify, does it even exist?
One thing that might have decimated the downloading trend and actually turned the tide was the shutdown of Megaupload. Who knows how many files were gone after that happened in 2012. Sharing almost ceased to exist for a short fraction of time after that. It was a shock to the Internet community. Immediately following that incident, sites stopped service in fear of the same fate. Some sprung up to compete with the wide open lane. But when it was all said and done, that move shook everyone that it came in contact with. It sent ripple effects we still feel to this day.
Now you have mixtape sites putting up dozens of titles any given week, but how many do you download? How many projects this year did you stream numerous times, rather than waste time and hard drive space you may or may not have on a computer or tablet?
Much like everything, the window for trends closes. After watching the Napster report yesterday, I realized that I have dedicated so much time to downloading music over the years. But like life, you have to adapt to new methods instead of hanging on to old ones. That may be the hardest part for some people. Who likes change anyways? It’s a lot easier to stick to what you know and are comfortable with. We had the same dilemma when everything was merging from CD’s to mp3s.
The future has been streaming for at least a year or two (probably even more) and it’s not going away any time soon. Almost 40 million people will pay for music subscriptions in 2014. Even if you don’t, you’ll find ways to stream what you want to hear for free. Whether that be Youtube (oh, they have a music app in the works too), Soundcloud, Pandora, a mixtape site, Beats Music or whatever other service offers it. Mobile carriers like T-Mobile are already going as far as implementing plans so streaming doesn’t count against your monthly cap. It can’t get any easier than now.
So in this era of transition, I ask you, do you even download music anymore?