Brocofly Entertainment

iTunes is allowing people to stream the entire new album by The Fray for the week leading up to the album’s release.  As someone who is an obsessive new music listener, i love this.  But will it increase sales?

I’d be curious to know how mp3 sales are doing in general in the past 3-4 months with the influx of streaming services like Spotify and Rdio.  Personally, I used to be one of the record labels’ best customers.  I’d often buy a few new albums a week.  But about 8 or 10 months ago I picked up a $5/month subscription to Rdio, allowing me to stream pretty much any album that I want for free.  And if I ever actually get a new radio in my car that allows me to hook up my phone, i’ll switch to the $10/month plan that allows for mobile streaming.

What does this mean for me?  I have bought about 2 albums in the past 6 months and they just happened to be albums that I had a huge urge to listen to on my iPod shuffle while on a long run.

So how many people are going to stream The Fray’s new album and then drop $10 for the mp3′s next week?  What does it even mean to “own” music anymore?  People used to purchase records, tapes, or cd’s because it was the only way to listen to your favorite music on demand.  There was always radio, there were always clubs and there were always friends, but if you wanted something on demand, you had to own it.  Your collection of music was a wall of things that you could conjure up at any moment to put you in the right mood.  Showing your friends the 600 albums that you owned was a way of bragging that you had access to an incredible amount of great sounds, all at your fingertips at anytime of day.

But now we all have that.  it’s called the internet and it exists for almost all forms of entertainment, but particularly easy for music since the files are small and people have great speakers of $300 headphones attached to their computers.

So if we all have access to every song on the planet for a subscription fee of just $60/year, what does it mean to own music?

I’m not a huge fan of The Fray.  This album is nice, but I probably wouldn’t have bought it even if we weren’t living in the digital age.  But at this point, I don’t even buy albums from my favorite bands.  What’s the point?  I have no need to “save” my mp3s for my kids to listen to.  I no longer have the urge to feel special with my collection of 1,000′s of songs like we all did when iTunes first became a phenomenon.  We all own millions of songs.  We collectively own them and they are stored on a server that is much safer than the harddrive on my iMac.

Is this just a step into iTunes streaming all albums for a subscription fee?  I hope it is.  I love Rdio, but I have no doubt that Apple could do a better job.  I might even pay $6/month for Apple’s streaming services.