After years of streaming music, I realized it’s not my favorite way to listen to music. To me, the best way to listen to music is offline, through physical media like CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records, or by buying digital tracks and albums to listen to offline. Here are some reasons I prefer to keep my music listening offline.
1 If I Buy the Music, I Own It
The age of streaming, while convenient, brought with it the issue of licensing. Music on streaming services has to be licensed in order to be available on the streaming service. So if for some reason the streaming service is unable to acquire or renew that license, or it’s revoked by the artist or label, you simply won’t be able to listen to it.
But if you buy a CD, a vinyl record, or purchase your own digital copy of the album or song, that music can’t be taken away from you. Licensing issues can cause media to be lost if it’s only ever available online. Therefore, having physical media or files stored locally ensure that you can always have access to music you love. Plus, CDs can last for a really long time, making them a great medium to collect.
Making money as an artist has become more difficult in the age of streaming. Artists used to make significant revenue off of album sales, but fewer people are buying albums and are instead streaming music. According to Spotify, it doesn’t pay artists directly per stream, but instead pay rightsholders according to specific agreements and streamshare. Rightsholders then pay out individual artists according to contracts with them, and it’s estimated that this comes out to about $0.003 to $0.005 per stream.
This means that smaller artists often won’t make a lot of money from streams, and considering streaming has largely replaced listening to physical albums, they aren’t making money as easily as they used to. So if you want to support artists more directly, buying CDs and vinyl records gives them more money upfront, rather than slowly accumulating it from streams.
3 A Limited Personal Catalog Feels More Intentional
Streaming services give you access to millions of tracks immediately. All you need to do is just search for an artist, album, or song, and it’s there. While this is convenient, the sheer amount of choices can be overwhelming. Additionally, it eliminates the idea of intentionally curating music in the way people had to do before the streaming era.
I personally get a lot out of actively curating music by seeking out CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records, or by purchasing tracks online and building playlists on personal audio device like an MP3 player. It’s not as easy as building a Spotify playlist, but that’s the point. Curation requires going a bit slower, and being more intentional. It’s a lot more fulfilling to put in the bit of extra work, in my opinion.
4 Less Data for Companies to Collect About Me
Tyler Hayes / How-To Geek
We all know by now that companies are collecting our data when we use their websites or software. They collect this data in order to improve user experience, but also to be able to serve you more tailored advertising. As an example, Spotify’s privacy policy lays out all the ways in which they use your personal data collected by the app.
If it makes you nervous when companies collect this much data on you, you’re certainly not alone. The only real way to ensure your data isn’t being monitored and collected is to not use services that collect that data. On the internet, that’s basically impossible. But if you decide to listen to physical media like CDs, cassettes, and vinyl records, since none of that is being done online, your data can’t be collected. As a person on the internet, you’re never going to fully escape data collection, but changing the way you listen to music does at least reduce the amount of companies collecting your data.
5 Listening to Physical Formats Can Aid in Reducing Screen Time
We live in a world where we all have our phone on us at all times, a lot of us use computers to do our jobs, and screens seem inescapable. While it’s nice that our phones and computers allow us to use streaming services to listen to music whenever we want, it does make it harder to unplug when we’re trying to relax. I know this would happen to me a lot: I’d be reading and listening to music, I’d go to change the track on Spotify, see a notification from another app, and then get distracted and sucked in by my phone.
By deciding to listen to music on formats that don’t require my phone, like using a CD player or a record player, I avoid getting sucked into a social media rabbit hole. It’s liberating to not feel so attached to my phone. So if you’re struggling to stay off your phone, want to have a break from the screens, but still want music, physical media might be the way to go.
6 I Have More Control Over the Quality of My Music
Even though more streaming services are beginning to have varying levels of music quality to choose from, it can still be limiting. Spotify has been planning on rolling out a lossless tier for years, and on services that do have lossless options, not every track is going to have it, or have the highest quality option possible.
If that’s something that matters a lot to you, you are a lot more in control of music quality when you just buy the music yourself, knowing the bitrate of the track or album from the outset. When you buy a CD, you know you’re getting CD-quality music. When you buy a record, you know you’re getting that classic warm sound vinyl is known for. Now, not everyone is going to care or notice a difference when it comes to higher quality music. But if it’s something that interests you, your offline listening options allow for a lot of control.
Streaming music is convenient for sure. However, I find the benefits of listening to music offline, either through physical media or files I buy myself, to be preferable in enough ways to outweigh it. If you want to have more control of your music, stay off your phone, and pay artists more, consider keeping it old school.
