“High-rez music streaming is one of the finest developments in the history of hi-fi,” writes Jim Austin over at Stereophile. There are no serious downsides, he adds. So embrace it:
If you care about musician incomes, the best thing you can do is subscribe to a music streaming service, or more than one, and listen. The logic is air-tight: Streaming is taking over music distribution—whether we want it to or not—and the more money streaming services make, the more money musicians make from streaming.
Now I know it’s not technically high-rez, but one thing I’ve experienced since subscribing to Apple Music is the joy of a month’s worth of nearly unfettered discovery for the cost of a single album. And yet I still buy physical copies of the stuff I really dig. So there are benefits even with the lower-quality services.
Case in point: A friend recently introduced me to the Danish band Heilung. Thirty seconds later, I’d downloaded all three of their albums and started listening. This would have taken months back in the days when I was swapping cassette tapes through the mail.
Like I said a couple of days ago, we truly live in the best of times.
