If 2016 is remembered for anything, aside of course
from the great music released, it will be the year that music distribution and
consumption changed forever. Streaming has pretty much overtaken CD’s and digital
downloads in terms of how we consume our music and also how artists release
their music. More and more artists are turning to streaming platforms to
release their music, including many with exclusive releases on particular
platforms. I am thinking Beyonce and Kanye on Tidal, and when, and if it is
released Frank Ocean’s latest album “Boys Don’t Cry”. With this, many are also
bypassing the physical release including Kanye who thinks the album is dead,
and Chance the Rapper, the mixtape master whose latest release “Coloring Book”
is only available online. The rise of streaming also comes with the news that
Apple supposedly will phase out their digital download iTunes store in a few
years choosing instead to invest all their effort into ensuring the success of
Apple Music and Beats 1 Radio.
The smaller artists are also staying online when it
comes to releasing their work. Bandcamp and SoundCloud every year seem to
become bigger and bigger with artists releasing more of their work through
these sites and regularly to. Take Auckland’s Grow Room, a music collective
based on Karangahape Road. They have a Bandcamp page where they drop their
official releases, while the artists involved also have their own individual
SoundCloud pages where they drop beats and unreleased tracks every week it
seems. This avalanche of new music makes it very hard to keep up at times with
their being too much music and not enough time to digest it all. You get round
to familiarizing yourself with an artist’s latest E.P. or mixtape and then they
drop something else.
So what does this mean? Well, the idea of music
ownership is slowly disappearing. Yes CD’s and digital downloads are not done
yet, people still want to own their music, while the vinyl revival won’t die
any time soon. But with the prominence of subscription-based streaming platforms
and artists taking control over how and when they release their music, it won’t
be too long before the idea of owning “most” of your music will become a
foreign concept for most. With streaming you are paying a company which allows
you access to their collection, while previously when you bought a CD or paid
for a download you then had ownership of that product. As someone who grew up
during both the CD boom and the high-water mark of the digital download, as
well as a person who has embraced streaming, I am still coming to terms with
this idea as music ownership is still a concept that means something to me. I
don’t think I will be able to let go of my CD’s, of my downloads, of my iTunes
collection as I have spent ten years building my collection and curating it
within the knowledge that something like a music stream was never going to
become as big as it has done. I love streaming, Spotify has changed the way I
consume music, but I am not 100% supportive of the idea that I have to use an
online platform to listen to my music, and that the music I am listening does
not come in a physical form whether mp3, tape, record or CD.
With changes in the way we consume music, we are also seeing
artists become more inventive when it comes to how they release music. Now I am
not saying inventive releases have never happened before, but it seems to
becoming the norm for artists to keep audiences guessing when it comes to
release dates, and indeed how their music drops. This year alone, Beyonce
dropped her release “Lemonade” out of the blue with an accompanying film,
Radiohead teased fans with snippets from their music video for “Burn The Witch”
before dropping the song and then the album, while David Bowie released his
record “Blackstar” several days before he tragically passed away. Then, there
was Kanye. There was an expected release date for “The Life Of Pablo” under a
different name, then the name changed again, then the album was pushed back,
then it was released exclusively on Tidal and then he continued to update it
even after it was released. Has thing ever happened before? An artist making
changes to their music even after the release of the record. And if you thought
Kanye playing with people was big, what about Frank Ocean. His second studio
release is one of the most anticipated in recent years, but after two rumored
release dates which had the effect of whipping social media into frenzies we
are still waiting. Ocean updated his website with a mysterious library card
showing possible release dates, while just last week a stream appeared that
suggested the album was near and would be exclusive to Apple Music. After
questions around the survival of the album, 2016 has seen the album release as
an event return, something that had not really been the case since the 1990s.
With interest high and hype through the roof for albums such as “A Moon Shaped
Pool”, “The Life of Pablo”, and “Boys Don’t Cry”, one thing is for certain,
people might not be buying albums as much as they used to, but the interest is
still there for the long player. Testament to this is how album releases or indeed
non-releases have been received in 2016 so far. .
In concluding this piece, we are living in changing,
but interesting times when it comes to music consumption and distribution. No
one quite knows what is going to happen next, or indeed which direction the
industry is going in. But, one thing is sure, things are moving quickly and everyone
is watching each other carefully. With this the case, as a keen observer of the industry it keeps me
hooked on the goings on knowing that we really are living in a revolutionary
time for music.
- Sam
