How many streaming subscriptions is too many?
It may have been buried by the din surrounding the launch of Apple Music, but a muted and fractured rebellion appears to be unfolding in some corners of the web.
Apple’s entry into the streaming fray certainly provides a convenient prism through which to pose this question: How many entertainment subscriptions do we want to deal with, or even have to consider, before we just can’t be bothered anymore?
“The death-by-1,000-mini-subscriptions phenomenon” is what the Wall Street Journal calls it, and it’s already well on the way to becoming an issue for what we used to think of purely as television content.
While having too much quality content may seem enviable, having to subscribe to half a dozen services to see everything you want to see is not. In fact, posits Bloomberg Businessweek, the situation is likely to be the death of TV’s new golden age.
Music could soon face the same problem. Once Apple, Spotify, Rdio, Deezer and Pandora start signing exclusives, fans will either have to sign up for multiple subscriptions or, more likely, succumb to selection fatigue.
Even now, that malady can occur with just one streaming subscription. “I used to cherish my music collection,” writes tech reporter Jared Newman on fastcompany.com. “Now I can barely keep track of what’s in it.”
And while American singer and composer Trent Reznor, who collaborated with Apple on its new Apple Music app and Beats 1 streaming service, released this week, told Entertainment Weekly that Apple Music is “kind of like a record shop: when you don’t feel like thinking, there’s a place to have a lean-back experience,” not all streaming-music fans feel that way.
“What something like a Spotify needs to know is why people get hungry and what is it that they are hungry for,” musician and entrepreneur John Pointer told thestreet. com. “But instead, all they really are doing is selling this mindless buffet.”
And it’s not even a buffet that varies from restaurant to restaurant.
“The most striking feature that differentiates music services,” cracks David Touve on Rockonomic, “is whether the application has a white or a black background.”
It’s tempting to trace a lot of this back to Netflix. But while that service’s rapid growth rate must appear impossibly seductive to any entrant on the music-streaming side, it may also explain some of the brewing dissatisfaction on the consumer side.
With Netflix, you don’t watch stuff over and over. You see it once, it’s done, you move on to something else. With music, you find something, explore it, listen to it again and again.
At least that’s how it used to be. Music services all tout the size of their catalogues — tens of millions of songs — as though that was an irresistible advantage rather than an invitation to flit endlessly from one song or album to the next.
“I worry I’m hiking into an unhappy valley of music streaming, where I like more, but love less,” personal-tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler writes in the Wall Street Journal.
“It is possible to form a relationship with an album or artist on a streaming service — but you may have a hard time finding it again in the sea of other things
you’ve also marked Favourite.” Vinyl countdown: Though they appear to have imploded yet again, the Replacements will at least reassert their presence on vinyl next month.
A four-LP set, The Twin/Tone Years, will bring together the band’s entire output for the beloved Minneapolis label, their home from 1981 to ’84: Sorry, Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash; the Stink EP; Hootenanny, and the mighty Let It Be. There are no bonus tracks. It’s due out Aug. 11.
Meanwhile, the specialty site modern-vinyl.com is reporting that a box set of the band’s subsequent output on Sire is also on the way.
New Order is going all out for its first new studio album in a decade. Along with the usual CD and down- load formats, Music Complete will be released in a limited-edition clearvinyl version as well as an eight-disc, coloured-vinyl package that includes extended versions of all 11 tracks.
Here are two names you’d never expect to hear together: jazz giant Duke Ellington and krautrock pioneer Conny Plank.
Nevertheless, July 17 will bring us The Conny Plank Session, including six unreleased recordings — three takes each of “Alerado” and “Afrique” — recorded in a German studio in 1970.
Around that same time, Plank, who died in 1987, was working with trailblazing electronic acts such as Kraftwerk, Neu! and Cluster.
Long considered a goth classic, the 1985 debut of the Sisters of Mercy, First and Last and Always, is getting beefed up into a four-disc vinyl package July 24.
Packaged together with a remastered version of the original album will be three 12-inch EPs: Body and Soul, Walk Away and No Time to Cry.
There’s no equivalent release on CD, but Rhino says the set will also be available as a download. Retro/active: A mere five weeks after performing the entire Sticky Fingers album at a small venue in L.A., the Rolling Stones have released that part of the concert — digitally, at least — as Sticky Fingers Live.
Made available last week to stream on Apple Music or to download through iTunes, the album so far has no physical counterpart, though it’s not hard to imagine the full show, which included six non- Sticky Fingers songs, surfacing on CD and video at some point.
The concert makes for an interesting companion to the just-released The Marquee — Live in 1971, a CD/ video recorded about a month before the release of Sticky Fingers and containing performances of the then-unfamiliar songs “Dead Flowers,” “Bitch” and “Brown Sugar.” jsakamoto@thestar.ca