A STREAMING CONVERT

It’s not just the convenience — it’s the combination of choice and quality, explains Geoff Forgie.

Geoff Forgie explains why he’s now spending more time streaming than listening to his extensive collection of physical media.

Yes, it has happened — I now listen to more music via the internet than on physical media. And it’s not just me. The latest figures show digital sales now exceeding sales of CDs, while in terms of income for the record companies, streaming completely dominates ownership (see panel opposite). Of course, I’m not about to ditch a large collection of LPs or CDs (I’m still buying!), but there are good reasons why my listening habits have changed.

From a stream to a flood

I keep reading how nobody predicted the rise of streaming music. But it was always out there just beyond the horizon from the late 1980s if you thought about it, which I did, being a retailer of vinyl and CD from 1988 to 1999. Indeed, by the late 1990s we were being told by one distributor that the pieces were in place for kiosk installations in record stores that would burn an album to CD-R on demand and print the label for you there and then. It didn’t turn out that way.

Meanwhile some people seemed blind to the approaching storm. I remember a conversation in 1999 with the owner of a chain of record stores, with a view to me managing his proposed new shop, which was to have all mod cons, specialising in classical, in a very busy location. He wanted an estimate from me as to the turnover we could expect, and being careful not to over-promise, I suggested something under a million per annum. He wanted over a million, so it didn’t proceed. But secondly, I asked him if he had any fears of the internet stealing trade from record shops, something I felt was imminent. But no, he had no such fears, he said (as we drove away from that shopping centre in his posh car).

Rather than rehash the entire history from that point on, which includes the Napster saga, then Rhapsody, with Spotify following and taking a strong position, I’ll cut to the chase. As things stand today, I certainly still play vinyl LPs and the silver CD (I appreciate all the joys of physical media, from the physical tactility to the reliability of the signal path). But I have undergone a gradual conversion from playing physical media to streaming. As for many people, Sonos played a role in this, although the foundations had been laid playing music via the PC and a good attached sound system.

Finding the music

Remember how we used to find new music recommendations? Your preferred musical style or styles will have determined whether you’d take clues about what to buy next from friends, or from radio. For a long time my interest in classical was fed by ABC Classic FM, which provided endless exposure to composers from Early Music through to contemporary. In the dimmer darker past I was, like all other teenagers, getting music via pop radio stations, eventually that new one called 2JJ which morphed into Triple J. Among my early LP purchases were

Led Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane, the ubiquitous ‘Rumours’ by Fleetwood Mac, while my path into jazz was initially via friends with records by George Benson, Lee Ritenour, Al Di Meola, Chick Corea and various ‘fusion’ artists like them. There was no radio station catering to that sort of thing, and while I did find some records by artists like Oscar Peterson very acceptable, a full sortie into jazz had to wait quite a long time.

Jumping forward a bit, my education was accelerated by becoming a dealer in LPs and CDs in the late 1980s through the 1990s. We stocked all the ‘classical’ styles, early music, folk and ethnic, and jazz — everything except popular, which was sufficiently well catered for by others.

Then came the leap to hyperspace, with the nascent internet poised to deliver whole swathes of recorded legacy, traded between ever larger holding companies, while some enterprises disappeared into black holes. Streaming became possible, notably the new so-called internet radio stations. Instead of searching a catalogue, this was a return to curation, allowing someone to serve you a playlist of music which might appeal.

And if it didn’t, you could go elsewhere. This was when I was finding my favourite stations through my PC and playing through a pretty good compact separate component set-up. Then came Sonos, so I could do it in any room.

The whole world of music

So why am I a convert to streaming? It’s not, like the mountaineer, simply “because it’s there”. Streaming provides me with a huge resource that I can tap into any time, and in two important ways.

Firstly, I have a set of internet radio stations which feed my enjoyment of jazz. These streams have track lists that are so well curated or compiled that I’m often sent off chasing after a new name. My mecca here is the JazzRadio.com site, with its 30 separate streams of jazz. I can play these any day of the week, and if I start to find one stream repetitive I can switch to another. They offer streams with many flavours: Guitar Jazz, Gypsy Jazz, Piano Trios, Mellow Jazz, Vocal Legends, and so on.

Secondly, there’s the huge library of music under the Spotify banner. You might have another preferred site, and there’s a new classical site opening up soon. (I’m leaving aside the free ones, because to get something convincingly close to CD quality you have to go to the ‘premium’ offerings at 256kbps or 320kbps or higher.)

Spotify has so much of everything that only a rival service with a better indexing system would lure me away. When I hear one of those new names on JazzRadio.com, I go to Spotify and search for more, and often check out the whole CD to see if it’s all as good as the track that I heard. (It’s quite often not the case, which underlines how choosy the people curating JazzRadio.com are.)

For classical I can find all sorts of things on Spotify too — their library is vast. Complete symphonies and/or string quartets by any composer? No problem. Here things really could be better indexed, as a pop-orientated artist/album/track approach doesn’t work well for classical.

Both of these services have a Premium paid subscription offer, which both removes ads and provides a higher quality stream than the free option. I listen to these streams on some well-above average gear, and they sound damned good. (While I’m not really an ‘audiophile’ as such, I’m a music addict from way back, lucky enough to have a wide range of equipment, and I can step it up to a high standard as required.)

And that combination of quality and availability is the clincher. There are so many riches in the musical world to enjoy now that the entire Aladdin’s cave of the world’s recorded music legacy is there for all of us to explore, via streaming. Geoff Forgie