Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and
Speaker 1: how the tech are you. It's time for a text
Speaker 1: of Tidbits, and today I wanted to do a Tidbits
Speaker 1: episode about music streaming. Now, first off, music streaming is
Speaker 1: a huge topic. I could, I could, and I likely
Speaker 1: will do at least one full episode devoted to it,
Speaker 1: but I thought it would do kind of a very
Speaker 1: high level discussion of music streaming and its history. Now, this,
Speaker 1: by the way, was prompted by the recent news that
Speaker 1: fans of certain artists on the death Row music label
Speaker 1: discovered that some of their favorite albums and songs seemed
Speaker 1: to be disappearing from popular music streaming services like Spotify.
Speaker 1: And this coincides with Snoop Dogg's announcement that he wants
Speaker 1: to turn death Row Records into the first major music
Speaker 1: label in the metaverse and is turning it into an
Speaker 1: n f T based music label. What all that means
Speaker 1: is a matter for another episode, but let's talk about
Speaker 1: what streaming is first. Essentially, it's all about accessing media
Speaker 1: in real time. And you know, we could pick some
Speaker 1: knits here about that definition and the use of the
Speaker 1: phrase real time, but it gets across my meaning. So
Speaker 1: rather than say downloading a song to a device so
Speaker 1: that you can listen to it whenever you like, you
Speaker 1: use some sort of service. It might be an app,
Speaker 1: it might be built into a browser based service, and
Speaker 1: you use that to listen to music streaming from a
Speaker 1: web server somewhere out there to your local device. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like radio, but it's typically on demand and
Speaker 1: without using traditional over the air broadcast signals. Now, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different places where we could start
Speaker 1: the history of this. For example, way back in which
Speaker 1: is when a lot of the population still didn't really
Speaker 1: understand what the heck the Internet was. I mean, the
Speaker 1: the World Wide Web was brand new. Well back then
Speaker 1: you had the Internet Underground Music Archive or i u
Speaker 1: m A. Some students at the University of California, Santa
Speaker 1: Cruz launched this organization to create essentially a database where
Speaker 1: independent artists could upload their music and get that music
Speaker 1: out to fans who otherwise might never discover those artists.
Speaker 1: So this was one of those very early demonstrations of
Speaker 1: how the Internet can democratize content distribution and by pass
Speaker 1: the traditional model which has massive media accompany's gate keeping
Speaker 1: the whole thing. I I acknowledge that as the employee
Speaker 1: of a massive media company, I I recognized the irony here.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like you know that it's hard to get
Speaker 1: discovered if you're a musician, particularly if you're independent. Um
Speaker 1: it's one thing just to get discovered enough for a
Speaker 1: record label to be interested in you, but it's very
Speaker 1: hard to get your music out there. And a lot
Speaker 1: of independent artists didn't want to go the route of
Speaker 1: seeking out a record label or putting themselves out there
Speaker 1: again and again in the hopes that at one of
Speaker 1: their shows someone from some record label happens to be
Speaker 1: there and they get whisked off and discovered, because that
Speaker 1: happens to such a tiny fraction of all the musicians
Speaker 1: out there. The Internet suddenly gave the potential for an
Speaker 1: artist to reach an audience without having to go through
Speaker 1: that other pathway. They wouldn't have to hope that some
Speaker 1: rep was in the audience and that that rep thought
Speaker 1: that the show was good. I mean, maybe it would
Speaker 1: be a bad show that night, and that could totally
Speaker 1: scuttle your dreams. The Internet represented a different way. That's
Speaker 1: what these students were trying to do. They were trying
Speaker 1: to create this opportunity for independent musicians. And I actually
Speaker 1: find the whole thing particularly impressive because this was way
Speaker 1: before the MP three format had really taken off. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was in development around that time, but it had
Speaker 1: not become the sort of default audio file format for
Speaker 1: Internet transfers. So we're talking about some files that were
Speaker 1: in other formats like wave files or ai f F files.
Speaker 1: Those can be huge, Like those are really big files,
Speaker 1: typically at least much larger than say MP three files.
Speaker 1: So you also have to remember this was back in
Speaker 1: the day when folks were using dial up internet. You know,
Speaker 1: it was very slow or very narrow bandwidth if you prefer. So. Again,
Speaker 1: this was not streaming. This was all about downloading files. However,
Speaker 1: it was a stepping stone toward the environment we find
Speaker 1: ourselves in today. Another big stepping stone was the development
Speaker 1: of Napster. In fact, a later service with the name
Speaker 1: of Napster would be associated with a streaming music service,
Speaker 1: but the original incarnation of Napster, which debuted in was
Speaker 1: that of a peer to peer file sharing network with
Speaker 1: a focus on sharing music files, not exclusively, but primarily.
Speaker 1: Now by this time, the MP three format was pretty
Speaker 1: firmly established, which was great because it allowed users to
Speaker 1: compress audio files down to a fraction of their raw size.
Speaker 1: That made it much easier to transfer those files over networks.
Speaker 1: Plus they didn't take up as much space when you
Speaker 1: were storing them on like a hard drive. Of course,
Speaker 1: it would also potentially affect the sound quality depending upon
Speaker 1: the encoding settings you were using when you were encoding
Speaker 1: into MP three. If you were being particularly aggressive, then
Speaker 1: the sound file you got would sound pretty crappy. So anyway,
Speaker 1: that's something I've covered in other episodes, so we'll dwell
Speaker 1: on it here. So peer to peer systems are not
Speaker 1: inherently wrong or illegal, but it was impossible to deny
Speaker 1: the fact that the majority of the file transfer traffic
Speaker 1: across Napster was with copyrighted music files. Folks might use
Speaker 1: a computer to rip music files directly from a CD,
Speaker 1: so they might go to their CD collection, put the
Speaker 1: CDs into their optical drive on their computer, rip the
Speaker 1: music files off, and then convert them to MP three,
Speaker 1: store them on their computer, then move those music files
Speaker 1: into a Napster full or and make it available share
Speaker 1: able so that others on the Napster peer to peer
Speaker 1: network can download them simultaneously. Those users might be seeking
Speaker 1: out other music that's available on the Napster platform, you know,
Speaker 1: albums that they don't actually own. So Napster became a
Speaker 1: haven of music trading and theft. In some cases, folks
Speaker 1: were using it to find songs that you just couldn't
Speaker 1: easily find in other places, like bootleg albums or live
Speaker 1: recordings that were never you know, officially pressed, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. But a lot of people did it too,
Speaker 1: you know, get hold of songs or albums or an
Speaker 1: entire library without having to pay for it. And this
Speaker 1: happened to coincide with a dip in music sales, and
Speaker 1: that sent the recording industry in general into a frothy rage.
Speaker 1: Soon Napster was the target of multiple lawsuits, some of
Speaker 1: which alleged that the platform had caused massive revenue losses. Now,
Speaker 1: I would say that is an argument that's really impossible
Speaker 1: to support in any quantifiable way. Uh. I mean, it
Speaker 1: does make common sense that folks getting free access to
Speaker 1: music would hurt music sales like that seems to follow,
Speaker 1: but I argue it's impossible to actually put a number
Speaker 1: on that you can't definitively say because of this, we
Speaker 1: missed out on X million dollars of revenue, because you
Speaker 1: have no way of knowing how many of those people
Speaker 1: who stole music would have actually bought an album or
Speaker 1: single in the first place. I mean, they might have
Speaker 1: just gone without. However, this was plenty enough for the
Speaker 1: music industry to go nuclear, not just Napster, but other
Speaker 1: services that offered similar features as Napster, stuff like Kazan
Speaker 1: and lime Wire, and also folks who had been identified
Speaker 1: as using those services like Sweet Little Grandmas and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the music industry started filing these massive lawsuits, like seeking
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of dollars and damages against like people
Speaker 1: that were very easy to sympathize with. So the music
Speaker 1: industry did not win over many fans during this era
Speaker 1: where it was just going into berserker rage mode and
Speaker 1: it was really really ugly stuff. Now, Napster itself, at
Speaker 1: least in its original form, shut down by two thousand one,
Speaker 1: So the brightest stars burned out the fastest. I guess anyway,
Speaker 1: Napster is going to come back into this a little bit.
Speaker 1: So in the early two thousand's we saw the first
Speaker 1: emergence of legitimate digital music stores. Uh these were mostly
Speaker 1: operated by the individual music labels, which was kind of
Speaker 1: a hassle, like you had to you know, hunt around
Speaker 1: to find digital downloads. Labels were more interested in still
Speaker 1: selling physical copies of media, so primarily c d s
Speaker 1: like the cassette days were gone. Vinyl was pretty much extinct,
Speaker 1: like it was very rare for people to produce music
Speaker 1: on vinyl during this era. That has changed, like we've
Speaker 1: seen vinyl make a comeback over recent years, but in
Speaker 1: this early two thousands era, it was pretty much CDs
Speaker 1: that were the focus, and it would take a couple
Speaker 1: more years before we got the iTunes music store that
Speaker 1: didn't launch until two thousand three. We had iTunes earlier,
Speaker 1: but the original version of iTunes wasn't a store. It
Speaker 1: was a way for you to be able to rip
Speaker 1: music from c ds and then transfer music to an iPod.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a way to buy music. It was
Speaker 1: a way to get music from one medium onto another.
Speaker 1: Um And honestly, the the digital stores and the rise
Speaker 1: of iTunes music in particular was really a response to
Speaker 1: the problems that the industry had seen with services like Napster.
Speaker 1: It was saying, you know, part of the reason why
Speaker 1: this happened is because we don't have a legal, legitimate
Speaker 1: way for people to get hold of digital music. Now,
Speaker 1: initially those stores didn't offer any streaming capabilities either. Customers
Speaker 1: would go to the stores, they would purchase specific songs
Speaker 1: or albums, then they would download those files to their
Speaker 1: computer and later other devices. But in the early days
Speaker 1: it was pretty much computers, and then you would use
Speaker 1: an actual physical cable to connect an MP three player
Speaker 1: like an iPod to your computer, So you have a
Speaker 1: physical cable that would go between them and you would
Speaker 1: transfer music over that way, which sounds like I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the Stone Age these days. All Right, we've got
Speaker 1: more to say, but before we get to that, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. Okay, let's get back into it. So,
Speaker 1: as digital music stores were taking shape, you had a
Speaker 1: few different groups working on pieces of tech that collectively
Speaker 1: would allow for music streaming and uh more advanced features.
Speaker 1: One group created a dreaming Audio technology. Essentially, they created
Speaker 1: the protocols that would allow to stream music from one
Speaker 1: source out to you know, clients as in computers or
Speaker 1: other devices. They incorporated this technology into a music service
Speaker 1: called tune to. That's t o tune to dot com,
Speaker 1: which was an online radio service. Meanwhile, they were also
Speaker 1: working on kind of an internal project that would allow
Speaker 1: for on demand streaming audio with a concept they called Aladdin.
Speaker 1: This would be more like a jukebox where you have
Speaker 1: a library of music on a digital service somewhere that
Speaker 1: you could access street and stream it directly. Instead of
Speaker 1: like listening to a radio station, you're listening to a
Speaker 1: playlist of of music that you've curated. Now, in two
Speaker 1: thousand one, a company called Listen dot Com purchased tune
Speaker 1: to dot com, and Listen dot Com meanwhile also happened
Speaker 1: to own an online music directory that was fairly large,
Speaker 1: didn't have the major labels attached to it, but a
Speaker 1: couple of independent labels and such. So, pairing that Aladdin
Speaker 1: concept with the large music database, Listen dot Com created
Speaker 1: a new service that they called Rhapsody, and this would
Speaker 1: be the first streaming music service and it launched very
Speaker 1: late in two thousand one. So to listen to Rhapsody,
Speaker 1: customers would have to fork over a monthly subscription fee,
Speaker 1: and over the following year, Rhapsody would build out their
Speaker 1: library further by making deals with major music labels. Now
Speaker 1: the company Real Networks would then go on to acquire
Speaker 1: Listen dot Com. This stuff happens a lot in tech,
Speaker 1: by the way, particularly during the early two thousand's, You
Speaker 1: could go with the phantom menace approach of saying there's
Speaker 1: always a bigger fish. Now. Rhapsody was acquired by Real
Speaker 1: Networks right around the time that the iTunes music store
Speaker 1: officially launched, and just to bring Napster back into this
Speaker 1: much later, in two thousand sixteen, Rhapsody, which at that
Speaker 1: point was an independent company no longer was owned by
Speaker 1: Real Networks, would rebrand itself as Napster. There was no
Speaker 1: real connection to the peer to peer network from one,
Speaker 1: but it did use the same name because the name
Speaker 1: had a lot of brand recognition power to it even
Speaker 1: a decade later, so actually a decade and a half later,
Speaker 1: so we could say that streaming really got started in
Speaker 1: late two thousand one early two thousand two. Also in
Speaker 1: two thousand two, last Fm would introduce a feature that
Speaker 1: would become important for later streaming services like Pandora, and
Speaker 1: that feature would a would track user activity, so what
Speaker 1: songs are the users gravitating towards, like what what kind
Speaker 1: of stuff are you listening to? And then this feature
Speaker 1: would then use that information to make recommendations of other
Speaker 1: music that that listener might not be aware of but
Speaker 1: could potentially really like based upon their musical tendencies. Now,
Speaker 1: Pandora would take that concept and push it much harder,
Speaker 1: growing out of something that was called the Music Genome Project.
Speaker 1: And you probably heard me talk about metadata in the past.
Speaker 1: Metadata is information about information, and it's typically used so
Speaker 1: that machine systems can sort information more efficiently. For example,
Speaker 1: for every episode of tech Stuff, I create metadata, and
Speaker 1: that includes stuff like a brief description of the episode
Speaker 1: as well as a list of keywords that relate to
Speaker 1: the subject matter. And metadata helps computers contextualized content in
Speaker 1: some way. So if you go searching in the text
Speaker 1: of archives for something specific, as long as I did
Speaker 1: my job correctly, the appropriate uh query results will pop up.
Speaker 1: So with songs, the Music Genome Project would break down
Speaker 1: a lot of the basic components of music in order
Speaker 1: to quote unquote understand what that music was made up of.
Speaker 1: And it was actual human beings that were doing this work.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like artificial intelligence listening to music. It was
Speaker 1: real people, and so they would listen to music and
Speaker 1: they would start tagging songs. So you might tag a
Speaker 1: song with tags like female vocalist or up tempo beat
Speaker 1: or long guitar solo or whatever, and you might use
Speaker 1: as many tags as you can possibly think of that
Speaker 1: helps describe the music. The Pandora service would later use
Speaker 1: this to create dynamic playlists of music for listeners based
Speaker 1: on a seed song or artist. So you would go
Speaker 1: to Pandora, you would put in something to start off
Speaker 1: your station. You might use a specific song, or you
Speaker 1: might use a specific artist or musical group, and the
Speaker 1: Music Genome Project says, Okay, what are some of the
Speaker 1: characteristics of that song or that particular artist that you
Speaker 1: know they typically use, and what similar artists and songs
Speaker 1: can I draw from to create a playlist that fits
Speaker 1: that same sort of model. It was and is pretty
Speaker 1: darn cool anyway. These features and similar ones designed to
Speaker 1: do pretty much the same thing, created the backbone for
Speaker 1: many streaming services. Of course, not all streaming services are
Speaker 1: dynamic playlists. Some follow more of a broadcast model. For example,
Speaker 1: I listened to the I Heart Radio broadway station a lot.
Speaker 1: I know I worked for I Heart Radio, but I
Speaker 1: also legitimately listened to that station, And that one is
Speaker 1: more like a streaming radio station, right, Like they have
Speaker 1: curated that on the back end. It's not dynamic, it's
Speaker 1: not switching things up just for me. But if I
Speaker 1: listen to something like my Pandora musical stationed and I'm
Speaker 1: hearing music that is at least in part curated based
Speaker 1: upon whatever I used to seed that station. Of course,
Speaker 1: the tech side of streaming is just one tiny part
Speaker 1: of this. There's also the business side that gets way
Speaker 1: more complicated. Like, as complex as the tech is, it
Speaker 1: doesn't even scratch the surface of the finance side. Generally speaking,
Speaker 1: there are a few different ways that artists make money
Speaker 1: through their music. UM. But let's think about artists getting
Speaker 1: paid through streaming media. Well, that's usually handled through royalties. UM.
Speaker 1: Royalties are essentially a payment made to the rights owner
Speaker 1: of a particular work for the licensed use of that work.
Speaker 1: So you can get royalties from all sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: like albums. Sales can be lumped in with royalties. Radio airplay,
Speaker 1: the use of a song in television or movies or
Speaker 1: professional wrestler entrances, um, and you get paid based on
Speaker 1: that a certain amount. Honestly, the way it really works
Speaker 1: is that the record label gets paid and then you
Speaker 1: get a percentage as an artist based upon your contract
Speaker 1: with that record label, and so it's just a fraction
Speaker 1: of the amount that's paid to the label itself. Let's
Speaker 1: say you get yourself an album. That album is available
Speaker 1: on Spotify. Well, first, Spotify generates revenue through subscriptions and such,
Speaker 1: and it takes a significant chunk out of that incoming
Speaker 1: revenue around thirty So the sev's left over, it goes
Speaker 1: into a pool that then gets divided up into all
Speaker 1: the other parties that are involved in getting your music
Speaker 1: out into the world, and that includes record labels and
Speaker 1: music publishers and ultimately you. And what this means is
Speaker 1: that by the time everyone else has taken their cut,
Speaker 1: there's very little left that's actually going to the artist.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of artists out there, you know,
Speaker 1: if they're not in the top top top tier, like
Speaker 1: if they're not mega superstars like Beyonce, they're getting paid
Speaker 1: pennies for their music being played. Um, you know, and
Speaker 1: you could argue, well, they're getting a lot of recognition,
Speaker 1: but recognition don't pay the rent. And then a world
Speaker 1: where live performance is still pretty rare because of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and you know places are just now starting to change that,
Speaker 1: it's really tough for the vast majority of musical artists
Speaker 1: out there. Um So streaming is one of those things
Speaker 1: that's potentially very good for the customer in the short term,
Speaker 1: possibly bad for the long term, just because the effect
Speaker 1: it actually has on artists, right Like, if it gets
Speaker 1: to a point where artists have no financial interest in
Speaker 1: pursuing a career in music, you don't get art because
Speaker 1: people gotta eat. So there's there's good and bad to streaming.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of calls for streaming to change
Speaker 1: dramatically in an effort to be more sustainable on the
Speaker 1: artist side, and we're also seeing slow upticks in the
Speaker 1: adoption of physical media. Vinyl has made a pretty big comeback,
Speaker 1: and again I think that's partly to create a connection
Speaker 1: between the listener and the artist, but we're also seeing
Speaker 1: that with c ds these days. Whether or not that
Speaker 1: becomes a trend remains to be seen. I'm a little
Speaker 1: skeptical of that. But yeah, that's that's kind of the quick,
Speaker 1: dirty version of what streaming is all about. Like I said,
Speaker 1: I'll have to do a full episode dedicated to the
Speaker 1: topic in the future, probably probably a couple like one
Speaker 1: maybe really focusing on the tech and one may be
Speaker 1: really focusing on the business side and its implications and
Speaker 1: how that's shaping the way we consume media and music.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to get that kind of out there
Speaker 1: simply because the snoop Dog story really got me thinking
Speaker 1: about it. Um and I haven't even touched on stuff
Speaker 1: like the web three point oh metaverse or inn f
Speaker 1: t side of the music industry, which is also something
Speaker 1: I'll have to cover in a future episode. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for topics I should tackle in either a
Speaker 1: tidbits episode or a full episode anything like that. Any
Speaker 1: suggestions for people I should have on the show, anything
Speaker 1: along those lines, let me know. The best way to
Speaker 1: let me know is over on Twitter. The handle for
Speaker 1: the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
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