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