Music Streaming, Licensing, and Piracy

by Rian

As a fan, part of the fun in classical music is to listen to the same score performed by different artists: their different interpretations, changes in styles as the time goes by, and in more recent years, enlightening interviews and tidbits behind performances, performers, the music, and the composers, and etc. I’ve really come to appreciate what internet has enabled classical music as the community. If I’m interested, I can actually learn more what was the story behind the music, lyrics sung in foreign language, and the important ‘why’ factor behind the performer’s choice of interpretation. Until the licensing falls apart.

It inevitably happens more often with classical and soundtracks, where there are more than one interested party (i.e. rights holder) to the music in question. One of my favorite soundtrack is Dark Souls III, and the entire album was taken down from the US region after it had been on the platform for some time. I haven’t tested all the popular streaming services, but I believe there is a point to be made. Of those people who have lost access to the music they had been listening on the platform, how many of them will subscribe to another streaming service where they can use to listen to that one album, how many of them would be willing to even partake in the search of another service to begin with, and if the album is taken down from all streaming services, how many of them would be willing to pay for a physical album?

One of the bizarre design decision on Apple Music is the separation between iTunes Store and the streaming platform. iTunes Store, as an online music store, is quite abandoned at the moment with its listings show only lossy quality, not to mention most of the artists who delist music from Apple Music often do the same to iTunes Store. There isn’t the instant gratification we are expecting of modern music platforms in physical media. Again, this raises the same question —how many of them would subscribe to another streaming service just for few songs or buy physical copies for the first time in this decade? I suspect many of them would start saying “Arrr”.