Tuesday, May 1, 2018

To Stream or Not To Stream...

I have never been a fan of streaming music. I don't like the payment that streaming music offers to artists. None of them are great and the worst is YouTube, but as I said none are very good. I am a Mac guy so it made sense to go with Apple Music. I have been keeping track of the pluses and minuses of it over the past month. I love the fact that I have access to well...everything. I have been trying the game of stump Apple Music all month and I've been pretty impressed with the breadth of the catalogue. I have two kids on my plan, so I have to play it safe with my data use. If there is something I want on my phone I just download it and there it is. Pretty convenient. The sound quality using Apple AirPods is pretty good, but not great. I use Audirvana Plus to bump up the quality of my downloads. It doesn't work with music downloaded from Apple Music. That said, I can still use it with my original uncompressed sound files. I consider the fact that I can't use Apple Music and Audirvana Plus to be a minus. No pun intended. So, score a point for convenience and take it away for quality of sound. Price is really not a factor. We pay $14.99 a month for the family plan but I was spending at least that much every month on downloads. Here's what prompted all of this...I am hearing that Apple and iTunes is considering doing away with downloads. I want to be prepared for that eventuality. I am still concerned that artists aren't being paid enough money for their art. If Apple decides to stick with downloads I will likely abandon streaming. So I guess what I'm say is that I will buy into streaming if it is my only option. By the way, my 20 year old son uses Apple Music and he thinks I'm nuts.