Icono-Curmudgeon-Clast - Loring Wirbel's Rants: The Allure of Listening, Chapter 13

Streaming arrives with all the subtlety of a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet. Do independent musicians benefit, or does the infinite-playlist scroll mean a lot of vomiting? 2006-2011

The launch of iTunes in 2003-04 gave the music industry the first monetizable download market, but downloaded files had the shortest market dominance history in recorded music. While files still were downloaded in the 2020s, the era of market peak lasted only from 2003 to about 2008 or 2010. Opponents of streaming figured that even those customers who were short on space for physical objects would prefer downloaded files to streaming music, because there was a local instantiation of the music somewhere within the client’s control.

But it turned out very few people cared if the piece of music was in “the cloud” or on a local disc. This may have been misplaced trust, since eventually Apple, Amazon Web Services and Google not only claimed to hold ultimate rights to music the consumer had downloaded from the streaming provider, they even claimed special rights to the consumer’s own music – if users uploaded their own music from local storage to the cloud, the cloud owners claimed the right to modify, control, or delete that music supposedly owned by the consumer. The curmudgeon might grumble that “the cloud is never your friend,” but few people were listening, hence the short history of the dominance of downloads.

The arrival of ubiquitous desktop broadband services and 4G/5G wireless services arrived at about the same time as Spotify’s 2011 launch. Download revenue fell at a rate of 3 percent per year from then on, estimated at $1.4 billion in 2023 and $1.23 billion by 2027. By the pandemic period, downloads already counted for less than either vinyl or CD sales. But here’s a funny thing: By 2005, vinyl LPs were making a return, even among people who did not own a turntable, because they were valued as objets d’art for the music collector to keep. In the mid-2000s, many were predicting that CDs would enjoy a similar renaissance, because lossless compression made for better audio quality than either downloads or streaming. But the latter didn’t happen. Indeed, by the mid-2020s, independent musicians were trying to scrape up the money for vinyl pressings, while distributing cassettes, Bandcamp links, links to direct file downloads, or ads for Spotify availability, because no one seemed to want the lowly CD.

The CD’s failure to rebound was one of the only anomalies in the 20-year period from 2005 to 2025, when consumers were offered a potlatch of potential platforms and audio qualities to hear their music precisely as they wanted it. It helps to remember in the years prior to Facebook that many bands like Arctic Monkeys and Be Your Own Pet had their careers launched by the nearly-forgotten MySpace. But of all online environments, mobile streaming was the biggest winner. CDs were lagging so badly by 2015, most automobile manufacturers already had removed CD players as available options in new cars. Nevertheless, the audio industry seemed to care more about backward compatibility than the computer industry, where varieties of storage choices seemed to be made obsolete every few years. At the turn of the millenium, stacks of LPs in second-hand stores seemed as useless as VHS tapes. Twenty years later, the LPs were commanding top dollar, while VHSs (and DVDs) were just as useless as they had been in 2000.

But did the format matter to most consumers? It depends on the habits they brought. I was one of the traditionalists who liked to arrange the spines of LPs and CDs alphabetically by artist, with works from different eras arranged chronologically. I carried that habit into folder groupings on my computer for music I had downloaded, though I tended to keep downloading to a minimum. Many consumers of streaming music on mobile media enjoyed the recommendations of services like Pandora, and the clever playlists developed by Apple and Spotify. Smaller independent artists complained that streaming was unprofitable, and this mattered to some of their fans – though far fewer people than the artists hoped. I developed a “guilt ratio” assessment for using streaming when it was necessary, but only as a last resort. I was in a tiny minority who even pretended to feel guilty about streaming.

Meanwhile, the vinyl LP was becoming a fetish for a growing number of consumers. Before the first Record Store Day in 2007, broad-based retail outlets like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Urban Outfitters added LP sections, and even Walmart was not far behind. Record Store Day, intended to support independent record stores, was popular from its first nascent two or three years of existence, but it became apparent almost immediately that shoppers looking for rarities, particularly younger shoppers, had no turntables and no intention of purchasing such. The album was seen as a collectible. RSD in its early years could provide genuine collectibles, such as live sets and outtakes from studio recording sessions, but by the 2020s the new lists were dominated by reissues from legacy artists.

There were many unique aspects of the new dominance of women in the charts in mid-decade. First, pop performers started dabbling in feminism, as evidenced by Lily Allen, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morisette, and particularly Pink. They not only made up for the lackluster showings of many male artists, but women pop artists would grow increasingly adventurous to where they almost substituted for the waning of experimental noise as the decade ended. It wasn’t that all female pop artists were experimental (though Beyonce’s sister Solange Knowles and newcomer sci-fi artist Janelle Monae certainly proved that case), it was more that experimentation in the years after 2005-6 came more and more from the pop community than from rock, and particularly from women’s pop. Some women like Inca Ore were direct participants in the noise genre, and 2006’s three-disc Women Take Back the Noise compilation proved that case.

It seemed almost inevitable that the mortgage liquidity crisis of 2007 and the heavy recession that followed would lead to a sparser music release environment in those years, and sheer volumes of new artists indeed took a hit, but the degree of buzz created by rising superstars like Taylor Swift, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Coldplay made it seem less severe than it may otherwise have been. What seemed more important from a political perspective was the number of musicians ready to speak out during the 2008 elections. Denver’s Flobots had set the tone with the powerful Fight With Tools album, and the reconstituted Rage Against the Machine, as well as Ted Leo and other performers, performed benefits for activists.

This brief flurry of activism hit its stride in the summer of 2008 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, when Flobots, RATM, Jello Biafra, and Wayne Kramer of MC5 took the lead in planning many demonstrations to influence policy platforms. While the nationwide series of actions led to some great one-off concerts, the activities were not sustained through the end of the year, and were largely forgotten in the aftermath of the far-bigger Occupy movement of 2011. Barack Obama’s inaugural concert had the broadest array of pop performers to date or since, but it didn’t translate to music-based social action, as Obama quickly found himself mired in the twin crises of TARP and Iraq.

One victim of post-recession austerity seemed to be experimental and improvisational music. The death in 2007 of Sun City Girls founder Charles Gocher led to the demise of the band two years later, and suddenly the spigots turned off for constant new releases from the likes of Starving Weirdos, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Certainly, the cost of physical production of CDs or LPs was a factor in the waning of noise, but there seemed to be a global lack of energy as well. What was unexpected was the simultaneous expansion of sound experimentation in both pop and hip-hop fields, particularly among women artists (hip-hop had always been in the forefront of sampling both spoken word and other musicians’ works, but now this expanded to additional musical instruments and found sounds from nature). Notably absent in the race to get weird was mainstream rock. There were plenty of indie rock artists that proved exceptions to the rule, but mainstream rock acts were so late boarding the experimental sounds train, the genre could be considered the most conservative musical style out there by the 2020s.

Social media in the Bush era, at least as far as musicians were concerned, centered largely on MySpace, though the rudimentary state of streaming pre-2010 made the network mostly a vehicle for connecting fans with bands’ pictures, tour schedules, videos, and links to purchase physical CDs or LPs. The arrival of Facebook and Twitter in the latter part of the 2000s eventually spelled the end of MySpace, though only due to laws of monopoly market dominance – neither Facebook nor Twitter really coalesced into centers for musician-artist connections. But Bandcamp and SoundCloud both were launched in 2007, and took the place of MySpace, even if both of the music hosting sites were designed less as central hubs with a common look and feel, and more for the musician to design and manage in a way they saw fit. Slowly over the course of a decade, the two sites expanded technology potentials to connect fans to unique music online, until the pandemic of the early 2020s made the hosting of remote live concerts seem a normal extension of this trend. (Apple expanded its iTunes and Apple Music services in similar ways, though in a manner that always served Apple’s proprietary interests more than the community at large.)

Some subgenres were specific to a single online platform. Early proponents of “mumble rap,” such as Gucci Mane, Lil’ B, and Young Thug, were so specific to the SoundCloud environment, they became known as “SoundCloud rappers.” Obviously, with fame came a wider spread of platform, but many musicians from a variety of genres felt it necessary to show a little loyalty to their SoundCloud or Bandcamp roots.

The arrival of streaming services at the turn of the decade fundamentally changed the way popularity was determined, in ways that were both democratic and overwhelming, particularly for smaller artists. First came the satellite radio services of Sirius and XM, which merged in 2008 to form a unified playlist-defined listener experience. Spotify was launched as an independent streaming company, while Pandora was acquired by SiriusXM in order to give the company a unique recommendation service using rudimentary AI features to determine what listeners might enjoy given their past listening preferences. The playlist compilation services of Spotify, Apple, and SiriusXM could genuinely be touted as making the listener more sophisticated in driving future choices, though it equally could be seen as driving listeners further into pre-defined boxes, where they seldom would listen to something outside the box.

Hip-hop defined the million-seller side of the decade, as Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye and Nas helped create a new megastar category where the artists achieved the type of fame earlier seen by Madonna and Whitney Houston. Regional hip-hop markets, particularly Atlanta with crunk and snap, became big sellers in their own right. It is no accident that hip-hop artists were the first to move away from all physical forms of music – the CD already was waning when the megastars emerged in mid-decade, and those same artists would not move to LPs until the very late 2010s. Kanye West was the first to say “No physical products” with Life of Pablo, but Chance the Rapper and others were right behind him.

At the end of 2010, Billboard changed the way it compiled its Top 100 that further aided the streaming model. Instead of record labels and A&R executives pushing singles into the Billboard “New This Week” category, major artists such as David Cook, Taylor Swift, David Guetta, BoB, and the cast of Glee, would release new albums and have all the tracks from that album enter the “New This Week” category simultaneously. In theory, this allowed the listener to choose the best tracks to move up the charts into the Top 10. In practice, the vote-by-streaming method tended to favor the larger artist, as a newcomer had even less chance to break into the “New This Week” chart. It also meant that listeners had fewer filters imposed by music elites, which proved much more of a double-edged sword than most realized. This part of the streaming argument seemed to preview the debate between populism and elitism that took place in politics in the 2020s: Yes, the decision-making process of the elites had always been unfair, but without it, consumers faced a massive repository of streamed music that grew bigger every year. By the 2020s, everyone complained that drinking from such a firehose was virtually impossible. The environment for the music listener was bigger than ever, but the guides for knowing how to listen intelligently failed to emerge, which meant that hyper-democracy often equaled chaos.

Because the vast bulk of listeners were casual in the ways they consumed music, the arrival of streaming led to a rapid decline in CD sales. The LP only survived through its art-object status. Since a USB or Bluetooth connection from a smartphone to a car was so easy to implement, CD players within automobiles began to be phased out by mid-decade. Since iPods had displaced Walkmans much earlier, very few portable players required anything more than streaming (or the arcane presence of a downloaded MP3 file). The number of consumers with audio component systems at home dwindled to a lonely few serious music wonks. Sure, mini-systems with powerful small Bose speakers remained popular, but they usually were used for streaming services. A few high-end audio component specialists survived, but dealt as much in Dolby 11.2 home theater systems as they did in audio-centric components. And as an ironic footnote for the home listener, preamp manufacturers who promoted dual-channel analog/digital preamps, dedicated the analog channel to a turntable, while the digital channel was for a streaming input, because “obviously, no one listened to CDs any more.”

Coming in three weeks (October 11) - Chapter 13, The Spread of Woke Arts in Unwoke Times - Was the supposed corporate fealty to DEI just a joke in the Trump era?