Buy or Rent - music ?

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I realized I don't really own a lot of music. I gave away my vinyl before I knew better. I have some iTunes stuff but not a lot. I have a pile of CDs but they don't get used much. I listen a lot to FM and surprisingly I like to use You Tube because it's easy to find stuff I don't have.

So I need to widen my choice of music for when the FM isn't doing what I want. I could go out and buy a lot of music and store it on a hard drive. Or I could sign up for one of those internet streaming services where I simply play what I want without owning it. I have fast internet but no outboard DAC as yet.

I do want good quality - MP3 doesn't cut it for me, CD through a YBA player does. FM radio is variable, some stations are good, most are poor.

It seems to me that I would be better off with a subscription service rather than buying more music.

This was a surprising conclusion for me, I had not considered any of these 'modern' services until today.

Thoughts / advice ??
 
Try the local Public Library...mine gets about $300 per year of my property tax dollars and has a surprisingly good CD collection, so it seems fair usage to me! Most of the pop stuff is in rough shape but, as you might expect the jazz and classical collections are pristine. I can browse the collection from my chair, reserve a set of discs online and they are bundled ready on the shelf when I arrive.
 
Check out Spotify. If you have their paid plan, you can store music locally on your computer/mobile device and don't need to be connected online to play it. Also higher bit rate 320Khz I think, ogg vorbis.

If you're an Amazon Prime member, you also have music... and movies... and free 2 day shipping.
 
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Check out Spotify. If you have their paid plan, you can store music locally on your computer/mobile device and don't need to be connected online to play it. Also higher bit rate 320Khz I think, ogg vorbis.

If you're an Amazon Prime member, you also have music... and movies... and free 2 day shipping.

I'll second Spotify, try the free version. You'll be surprised how much they have for free.
 
As someone that's been collecting music for many years I use several formats. Vinyl, CD, RTR tape and downloaded files. I have somewhere between 1500 and 1800 vinyl records including direct to disc, half speed masters, and other audiophile labels mixed in. But I hardly play them anymore because I find CDs much more convenient.

For my favorite artists I enjoy having the hard copy with the artwork be it CD or vinyl. And I have varied tastes in music as many do. Mine runs from classical, jazz, gypsy jazz to female singers and even J-pop. This partly helps determine the format. The Japanese release music differently then other countries. First out is a limited edition CD called a first press which may have extra cuts, a DVD and/or different artwork. These are followed by the regular edition at a lower price. So there is a "collection factor" with these.

I haven't started yet with high res music files. But I do have some MP3 stuff because the music isn't available any other way. MP3's run hot and cold. Most of them come from the free download sites and "listen to youtube" dot com.
 
well, until you decide on the final solution to your sourcing needs, there's a tonne of decent web streaming radio stations - since you're paying for the internets, I guess it's "rental"? ;)

KPLU -Seattle Tacoma - Jazz, and weekend evenings a very eclectic selection of Blues from the earliest til today - tonight's current playlist (around 9:30 Pacific Time) is pretty damn cool - within the past 20 min Mud Morganfield, John Scofield & John Mayer, McKinley Morganfield, and as I'm typing this , Blind Boys of Alabama

not a bad way to waste a few hours on a weekend evening

cheers
 
HiFimeDIY Sabre U2 Asynchronous USB DAC This is supposed to be good and its asynchronous taking the timing away from the PC. (From HIFIMEDIY website - Asynchronous transfer means that the timing of the data flow is controlled from the device (DAC) instead of from the computer. Computers are not the best to keep a steady clock so it is much preferred to use an external master clock. The Hifimediy Sabre U2 is clocked by a 27Mhz oscillator which is buffered by a low jitter PLL1705 as the master clock source).

Musical Fidelity's V-DAC is very nice from personal experiance, and again is asynchronous
 
Hi Bigun, I don't know if you like classical but if you do and for all those classical lovers deutsche grammophon has brought out an app for ipad android etc. the quality is pritty good but not vinyl. I've really been enjoying the huge library they offer as it is easier to find classical music I enjoy and may latter purchase on vinyl. My two cents cheers.
 
Well I've taken the first step in my explorations. I signed up for Spotify. It seems that it only recently available in Canada ? - anyhow, now playing with the 'free' account to see if it has stuff I like. So far so good. But without a proper DAC I can't judge the quality too well.

Not sure about DAC yet. I do see a lot of folk saying good things about Sabre and Asynchronous but I'm getting the feeling that profit margins on these things are rather high.
 
A few months ago I acquired a Topping D20 for a 3rd system- with USB as well as Coax and Toslink, it's proving to be quite flexible, and sounds pretty damned decent for the price. I think Bob uses the same model in his system.

If I had the budget, I'd really like to try the Cambridge Audio SuperDac Plus - uses 2 Wolfson chips- some things I just don't want to try to DIY anymore
 
I did a very simple comparison. I chose perhaps a rather undemanding song, I picked 'wishing well' by Black Sabbath. I listened to it on Spotify and on YouTube.

The sound quality is better on Spotify, it makes YouTube sound pretty mediocre. Perhaps there are some 'settings' I need to look at on YouTube.

I also went looking for some other tracks/songs that I like on both of them. From a little playing around it with their search engines it seems that YouTube wins out on both 'database size' and search engine performance.
 
From an artist/producers standpoint the shift from iTunes (pay per track downloads) to streaming via spotify, pandora, rdio, amazon prime, etc, is a losing proposition. The mechanical royalties paid per play are extremely low, on the order of $0.0009 for spotify. IOW, to buy your favorite artist a beer requires 10,000 plays. In the iTunes model you could own the music and play it 80x that year and accomplish treating your artist to a beer or perhaps he has other needs and isn't an alcoholic.

Smart artists are starting to recognize this issue and sorting out ways to use streaming like they would FM radio 10-20 years ago (e.g. releasing singles).

From the artist/label standpoint youtube provides a promotional service that allows visual impression go along with the music *and* there is no social expectation that all songs be available by all artists, so again it can be leveraged in the old FM radio context. (monetization through overlay of adverts on video's is pretty dismal below 1mil views).

But what really separates these two systems (streaming mp3's vs playing user uploaded video's) is social expectation and the results of not being present at the party... Youtube is understandably free and advertising driven while spotify/etc are subscription services so there is this concept that the artists are being paid. Artists/Labels who choose not to participate end up invisible. I'm not complaining, merely illustrating how the system works at present and encouraging patronage of artists through direct transactions of some sort... Bitcoin is promising in this way as well as other crypto-currencies in that they have no central clearing authority skimming money off the top so tipping your favorite artist a penny per play is feasible.

The consumer should be empowered to choose who their money goes to. I won't even go into how American royalties collections agencies work which essentially creates a pop pyramid scheme with characters like Bono and Sting earning money from other peoples plays because of a model that invalidates playcounts below ~10,000 and lumps them into a purse which gets divided by the top earners. (I'm not 100% clear on how this works internally). Royalties collections agencies in other countries like GEMA in Germany are much better about getting their artists paid fairly.

I'm optimistic about technology and democratization of artist-listener interactions, but feel there should be some awareness of how artists get paid as the emerging model encourages artists to debase their content for LCD appeal in order to survive... Yes and?
 
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