The technology for listening to music has not stood still. Over the last ten years alone, the whole ‘accessing your chosen audio’ has leapt from one tech to another as the (main)stream has changed course. I enjoy DAB and streaming services (even though the latter blates rip off the musicians, financially speaking). I enjoy listening to audio on my super-duper Bose noise-cancelling earbuds. Inevitably I’m listening to one of my Spotify playlists (I do buy the work of the artists that I swipe right on, so I don’t feel bad about Spotifying them). I miss my iPod but the main reason for missing it is the access the iPod gave me to my personal music library, the physical music that I had converted into digital in iTunes and saved onto the NAS (for reasons of resilience and redundancy).
However, this evening has been a brilliant technical and musical revelation and a time of great joy! I’ve learnt how to stream my music library from the NAS to the Sonos One. As a result of this technological interfacing I am listening to artists I haven’t heard for years (since my last iPod died). Why haven’t I Spotified some/many/all of the artists that lurked, digitally, in my music library before now? That would be because the vast majority of the tens of thousands of tracks were performed/recorded/produced by unsigned artists – musicians whose work (for various reasons) does not and will never appear on Spotify.
I’ve listened, with a large smile, to some brilliant work by some terrific musicians this evening. And I shall continue to smile. But it just makes me a little sad that the creativity and effort (and money!) that these folk put into their art will remain, largely, hidden.
We used to have a family account with Google Music. I never used it.
When Google closed the service down, a couple of years back, Mrs M set up a family account with Spotify instead.
The kids use it continuously, via their phones.
Mrs M uses it a lot, via the Sonos.
Again, I have never used it.
But, when I do fancy a bit of music (admittedly, fairly rarely), I too stream it from the NAS into the Sonos.
It used to be a very fiddly thing to set up, but the Sonos app has improved greatly in the past few years and it’s much easier now.
You’re right Young Masher. When I last looked at hooking my NAS into the Sonos it wasn’t a straightforward process. But somewhen in the last few years Sonos seems to have updated its app (and its tech), to make such a thing very straightforward. There is also a method of hooking up the Alexa app to the music library on the NAS; I shall be reading up on that next!
I wonder if those unsigned artists are on Apple Music? Certainly I have found many of those I used to know from podcasting days, but then perhaps those I have found do have a label in the mix. As far as I know, however, anyone can put a song on Apple Music.
Regarding streaming services ripping off artists, that’s undeniably true, however, they are just the latest to join in that game. A friend has helped out a few local musicians (they stay at his house when in town, so he knows them well) and he told me a while back what one ‘struggling’ artist got from the sale of each CD. I don’t remember the numbers, but I remember being shocked.
The worst thing ever for the “music industry” has, in fact, been the “music industry”.
Aye, the music industry hasn’t exactly been a force for good