Someone shared this pretty interesting interview with Steven Wilson about his now allowing streaming of his catalog. It's on Facebook, so here's the link:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/steve...0792253941035/
I'll see if I can post it all here, but it will probably take multiple posts.
Some interesting things, especially him saying this:
"A lot of people think that the main reason that artists such as myself object to streaming is because we don’t make much money from it. I really don’t care too much about that, because I believe that the majority of people that are going to listen to the music on streaming services would never have bought it, or perhaps even have come across it. It simply wouldn’t exist for them."
Which I think applies to "illegal" downloading. After all, IMO streaming services are practically free. I mean, if you're going to rely on a streaming service for all your music, a streaming service costs like .50 per day. There's a huge difference between someone who's getting all there music for free, and...well...most of us.
Anyway, it's an interesting interview.
Pt I
Steven Wilson talks streaming
STEVEN WILSON·WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 2016
In 2009, a fan approached Steven Wilson before a show in Portland, Oregon, with an unusual request. The fan, in his early twenties, handed Steven a hammer and his iPod and asked the musician to smash the device to pieces. By then, of course, Steven was something of an expert in such matters. The documentary Insurgentes included scenes of the songwriter using a shotgun, a blowtorch and a car to destroy Apple’s digital music player. It was a playful protest against the poor sound quality of MP3s, the shift away from physical records, and the way that iPods encouraged listeners to place less importance on the album format. Before Steven wielded the hammer, he wryly told the fan, “I’m going to strike a blow for music today.”
Seven years later, Steven’s views on those subjects haven’t changed. Yet he has decided to release his solo catalog to the music streaming services that have largely usurped the iPod and downloadable MP3s. On 17th June, Steven is releasing Insurgentes, Grace for Drowning, The Raven that Refused to Sing (and Other Stories), Hand.Cannot.Erase, 4½ and Cover Version to the following services: Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play, Napster, Spotify and TIDAL.
What prompted the move? Discussing it with him it’s clear that he still believes streaming is a flawed model that in many respects goes against the art of listening, but just as Steven made concessions to the iPod era by making his music available to digital retailers, he’s responding to his deepest artistic impulse: to share his music with as many people as possible.
“I’ve always said that I would rather that you hear my music by any means, rather than not hear it at all,” says Steven. “The reality is that in the past two or three years, the signs suggest that the number one method and means that people engage with music these days is through streaming services.”
An ardent fan of physical albums and their artwork, Steven believes that you’ll still enjoy a better listening experience with your HiFi than your WiFi. But in many ways, streaming services go a long way to ameliorate some of the issues he had with the iPod era, including sound quality and the primacy of the album format. Steven sat down to talk about the pros and cons of streaming media, the role that streaming media plays in marketing music, and the challenges of fully engaging with music in the modern world.
The iTunes era allowed listeners to cherry pick songs from albums and create their own portable jukeboxes. Streaming services similarly allow listeners to listen to single songs and create their own playlists, but could streaming services also encourage people to listen to albums again? I say that because a streaming subscription allows you an unlimited buffet of music. You’re not paying for each song. It doesn’t cost you anything more to listen to the entire album.
The first question I asked my manager and my label when I started to find out about streaming was, “Will people be encouraged to listen to the album in sequence by the way the music is presented on the services?” The answer is yes. That isn’t necessarily true of iTunes, which did encourage cherry picking. Now, because people pay the same price, and aren’t paying on a per-track basis, they are much more inclined to just put the album on, let it flow and listen to it in sequence. My records are designed to be experienced in the form of a continuum, the way that a movie or a novel are supposed to be experienced. The record was sequenced to be listened to in a certain way. In that sense, that is a positive change to the way that music is being experienced. It can once again be about the album. I do know that people are encouraged to create their own playlists in Spotify, but when I was a kid, I used to make mix tapes and there is something fun about making mix tapes and creating a sequence, whether it’s for a friend or whether it’s for yourself. As long as the option is always there to listen to the album, and it’s understood that’s how the artist intended it.
Was there a tipping point that made you decide to stream your music?
I’ll tell you what really brought it home to me. When Prince passed away, I was in Vienna that night with my band. We heard he died about a half hour before we went on stage. I was very affected by that, because Prince for most of the ’80s was my number one musical hero. I still maintain he was the most naturally talented individual artist the pop music world has ever produced. That night, I tried to do a little bit of a tribute to Prince. I remember introducing the song and it became obvious to me that about 50% of the audience didn’t really know who Prince was, maybe they heard the name and a couple of hits, but that was about it. I asked myself how could that be?
Well, for most of the last 20 years of his life, Prince went out of his way to have his music removed from YouTube and streaming services. I think that affected his mainstream profile. That’s why a lot of young people didn’t really know too much about who Prince was. If you hadn’t seen a Prince show there wasn’t really any way to see footage of Prince live outside of purchasing a DVD. Most of his videos were removed from YouTube and other video services. Most of his music was unavailable. But as soon as he died, there was a massive surge of people uploading all this incredible material like live shows and live videos. Like many people, I spent a lot of time in the following weeks watching all the stuff. I was blown away by the talent of this guy. But I thought to myself, “If you weren’t someone who was aware of Prince at his peak in the ’80s and early ’90s, then maybe you would be unaware of this musical genius.” Being available on the streaming services is a way to expand your audience and expand awareness of what you do. Conversely, to be absent from them is almost to write yourself out of history.
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