Why Streamusique?

Before Streaming Music.

Way back in time in 2004 Pandora Internet Radio opened up a whole bunch of musicians to my ears. Put in an artist and suddenly there was another musician who, not only was as good as the one you had been listening to forever, but was better. And you had never heard of them. And on top of it all, they were really famous. So you listened to all these radio streams until one day in 2007 Pandora pulled the plug and cut off vast parts of the world, or at least they did in Australia, where I used to live.

So we bumbled along trying either to not download too many iTunes songs and blowing up your credit card, or, as Napster had been hung out to dry many years before, trying not to download too many other mp3 files from where we were not supposed to and risk getting sued by the Music Intellectual Property (IP) police, sorry, lawyers.

We also paid, yes we did.

Anyone remembers Amie Street Music?

You paid for the music on a bidding system, so the artists got their dues and a fair price. Great site and idea, and cool place to discover new music. Founded in 2006, then gobbled up by Amazon in 2010 and closed down. Right.

Fast-forward to 2014, and I decided to stop being a cheapskate and sign up for a Spotify Premium account. By this time compression techniques had made big advances in the quality of the songs streamed and the Spotify recommendation algorithms had really started to ramp up.

By the way, the debate around streaming quality and is long and very boring. I see really no interest in discussing the sound quality merits of vinyl vis streaming vis CD's vis tapes or vis a vis anything else. I mean, if you really want to get great quality, buy a concert ticket and watch your band play.

So here I was, sort of back to Pandora days discovering new songs and artists, with easy ways via the artist profile section to find who they were, where they came from and maybe where they were going.

Streamusque.

But you know what? A lot of those personal Spotify recommendations were, to put it politely, not great. As were lots of suggestions from the other music discovery sites, such as Deezer, and SoundCloud and others. Or they weren't for me.

So I started pulling out the songs and artists I liked into my play lists. Cool. The only problem with that it was too easy: click like, click save to play list, click: OMG, there's over 200 songs in that play list!

And I only created it one month ago!

It sort of defeated the purpose of the whole thing.

So I started a blog, originally selected songs that had been released on the Friday Spotify new release song dump. The selection criteria was, and still is, an entirely personal choice: songs that I thought had merit.

Not more than 2 or 3 selections per week, and if no songs made the grade for the week, then none do.

                                                                                             >>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<

OpenAI, in response to "What is streaming music, and how does it work? " - generated on 10 January 2023 at 14.42 CET:

"Streaming music is a method of listening to music over the internet. Instead of downloading and storing music files onto a device, streaming allows users to listen to music directly from the internet. This is done by connecting to a streaming service, such as Spotify or Apple Music, and playing songs or albums from their library. The streaming service then sends the audio data to the user's device, where it is played back in real-time. This allows users to access a large library of music without needing to store the files on their device."

And for an update (this time via BingAI, since I've used up all my OpenAi credits) in response to the exact same question, generated on 9 May 2023, at 16.33 CET:

"Streaming music is a method of feeding audio content to your device directly, without requiring you to download files from the internet. Music services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music use this method to deliver songs you can enjoy on all types of devices1. Streaming works by sending information from a server to an individual player. The actual song exists on the server as a raw file. Raw files are huge and detailed, so they have to be compressed in order to travel over the internet instantaneously. When you stream video and audio, information travels in a stream of data from a server."

Well, doh!

                                 


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