They have made better by democratizing it and making more kinds of music accessible to more people on demand.

It‘s worse because music can be produced and uploaded by, at best, mediocre talent, and artists get paid a pittance. For every hundred songs, 3-5 might be “ok” and one or two are “keepers” if you’re lucky.

Gone are the days where bands have a string of bangers and albums loaded with great songs. A lot of music just seems to be thrown at the wall to see what sticks. There were a lot of downsides to major label controlled music industry, but they also made some great bands.

This is a weird take.....as someone who is a Indy artist who makes mediocre music I HARDLY "get paid". The amount I get paid doesn't even cover my yearly sub to distrokid...and I don't ever plan on making "hundreds" of songs. Like what??

That would be the “pittance” part. This is about a hundred random songs not a single artist.

This isn’t about you.

Streaming is crap, I collect albums instead. Nobody but burglars can limit my access to my music collection.

I will take the glut of mediocre talent over the glut of equally mediocre talent but slickly produced corporate payola slop any day.

Nobody but burglars can limit my access to my music collection.

Or anything that forces you to leave home

i buy music, never spent a dollar on streaming

You take it with you like the good old days

Early walkmans were quite unwieldy

I don't see it that way. To me, it seems that there is a lot more great music available, and it takes much less effort to find it. Mass-market music is lowest-common-denominator crap, but that became the case somewhere in the 90s and hasn't changed since.

The sweet spot is to find artists who are popular on streaming services, but not nearly as popular as the heavily-marketed acts that fill stadiums. Then branch out from there. Maybe check out community playlists that don't contain big name acts and add anything that resonates to your own lists to get started?

The major playlists are still payola, just by a different name

No actually I can carry all the music I want in the storage of my phone. It's nice to have unlimited access to it even when there is no cellular data or wifi available. Sometimes I go fully out of range of all Internets but I still have music.

I'm the kind of person who is very particular about the music I listen to, the wrong music is over stimulating - so I love streaming in that I can curate my playlist and have new music recommended to me based on what I like. I honestly don't know how I would find new artists if it wasn't for streaming - not like there's an indie folk radio station I can just listen to..

I feel bad that the artists don't get paid much though and I was considering switching to buying albums again, but I think that might make it so I support a few artists more but a lot of artists I like would consequently be supported less.

That's nice for small collection, but I don't want to buy a 2 TB SD card for my phone that I then have to keep in sync, so streaming from my home server is a far better option.

And with a music play with a cache, you can still listen to your regular playlists while offline.

I had a Sony CD walkman, a later model with read ahead buffer. It did OK for normal walking.

Streaming service is good for me because I access a much wider spectrum of music that I could possibly buy one by one.

It may be unfair or badly managed fpr artists remuneration, but usually they are paid on gigs not on royalties.