The Greatness of Music Streaming

When it comes to getting your “fix,” if you’re anything like me, you are a huge music lover. Music can help us escape our daily lives, and may help calm us down or make us feel better when we are down. That has never changed, and it likely never will. What has changed though is how we enjoy music. Gone are the days of radio, records, or even CDs - streaming is now the norm.

Music streaming is the newest way in which we enjoy our daily tunes. No matter how old or young you are, I am willing to bet that if you are reading this right now, you either use a music streaming service or are subscribed to one.

Not too long ago, my sister and I would beg our parents to buy us an iTunes gift card so we could buy some music for our iPods. I would buy songs individually for $0.99 to $1.29. If I was ever feeling really crazy, I would spend about $9.99 on an album. This was the way things worked back then, and we all thought it to be completely normal.

I can still remember when Apple Music launched, and I thought it was silly. Why change what already works? I thought it would never last, but before I knew it, its popularity skyrocketed. Everyone was talking about it.

Eventually I gave into the pressure and decided to follow suit. I got myself an Apple Music account and began downloading dozens of songs every week. Instead of buying them individually for a dollar, I was paying a monthly subscription of $9.99. That was it. It was not until then that I realized how much money I was saving by doing this.

Music streaming services like Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music have taken the world by a storm. They all work in relatively the same way; you have unlimited choices in what music or podcasts you want to listen to or download, and all you have to do is pay a monthly subscription. There are family plans that hold four to six users, and those are typically around $14.99/month. There are also individual plans that are around $9.99/month. If you happen to be a college student like myself, there are student plans that are around $4.99/month. Many services like Amazon and Spotify even offer a free trial run, so you can see how you like it for a month or two before you are charged. Many streaming sites also offer a free version of their apps. For example, Spotify and Pandora offer a free version of their services to users, the only penalties being that there are unskippable ads, and you only get a certain amount of “skips” a day. This means that if you dislike a song that comes on in your playlist, you are not permitted to skip it if you have used all your skips for the day.

Some streaming services, like Spotify, have features that are tailored to you. Spotify will notice what kind of music you like and listen to the most, and then make a playlist for you based on this data. They do this almost weekly. In addition to this, at the end of each year, Spotify will give each of its users a “wrapped” playlist. This playlist is filled with the 100 songs each user listened to the most that year.

To me, this is genius. Why? Well, each year everyone loves to post their “Spotify Wrapped” on all their social media sites, mainly Instagram. As annoying as it is to go on Instagram the whole month of December and see at least five people’s Spotify wrapped playlists every time you log on, it is a brilliant marketing tactic on Spotify’s part. They have found a way to gain exposure in the space of social media, and everyone knows Spotify because of this feature. Each year they do this, their subscriber number jumps dramatically towards the end of the year when the Wrapped Playlists come out to their current subscribers.

Whether you decide to go with Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, or any other form of streaming, you are further contributing to the death of the “iTunes store.” Everything is changing all the time, and I do not doubt that in ten years, we will have a new way of enjoying music. However, as I said before, we will never stop enjoying our favorite artists, and I think it will always provide an escape for all of us.