EPISODE · Nov 17, 2021 · 34 MIN

23 Points About Streaming: Part 2

from Ongoing History of New Music · host Curiouscast

Once upon a time many centuries ago, someone came up with the idea of taking all the world’s available knowledge and storing it one place…that way everyone who had questions had somewhere to go to get the answers…and thus the concept of the library was born… Considerably later, this same concept was applied to recorded music and governments, public broadcasters and companies began collecting together as much of humankind’s recorded audio as they could… The BBC famously has hundreds of kilometers of shelving for physical media…there’s a guy in Brazil named Zero Freitas who is on a quest to create a private collection of all the records ever made…he has at least 8 million records and more than 100,000 compact discs… Nice…but this still doesn’t cover everything… In the 80s, some people started to conceive of a giant computer somewhere that could hold humanity’s music in digital form…if you needed a song—any song—it would be available from that computer instantly… In 1994, a law professor named Paul Goldstein popularized the term “celestial jukebox”…in his mind, this would be networked database available to anyone with a connection or this thing called the “internet”… Five years later, napster went online...suddenly, it seemed that you could download any song you wanted—however illegal that might be… Then, in 2003, came the iTunes music store…starting with several hundred thousand songs, it has since expanded to about 60 million tracks that are all for sale…but that still doesn’t quite cut it because it still involved buying this music… Today, we have streaming…all the platforms draw from a digital music library that contains at least 75 million songs—and more are being added every day…and we can access this music anytime we want, from wherever we are, using whatever device we happen to have…and the price?...given what we’re able to do, it’s negligible…in fact, it can even be totally free… Think about that: we can listen to virtually any song ever recorded in seconds and pay nothing…we now have theoretical celestial jukebox, something that was considered science fiction not that long ago…question: how well do you know how all this works?...this is 23 points you might not know about streaming, part 2”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices