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I saw an article in the paper this week about free streaming vs downloads vs CDs and it got me thinking, how do you guys listen to music? Do you use free streaming services like Spotify or Blinkbox, or do you use YouTube? Do you buy cd s or downloads, or do you not buy stuff anymore?

Personally, I use a mix. My iPod is rarely more than a few feet from me, and my iTunes library is approaching 40gb. At home, I play CDs a lot as well. I only recently discovered Spotify, but it has fast become my go-to for times when I can access the Internet, simply due to the huge variety. Before that, I used YouTube a lot, but the quality varies on there.


So how do you listen to music?

Because Im mostly on the Computer youtube.

I mainly listen to my iTunes on my computer along with my vinyl collection.

When it comes to preference, I prefer my vinyl (I have a set of vintage Advent floor speakers that belonged to my dad) over anything but I listen to music on computer more often just because it's easier if I am doing an extended paint session and my selection of music is much larger compared to my vinyl collection. I used to listen to CDs a lot but I have since transfer my hundreds of CDs to my computer so they don't see the light of day very often.

I happy to say that my young daughters enjoy coming down in to the basement and spinning a record on the turntable, even if they don't really enjoy the music. They seem to really enjoy the mechanical nature of how the turntable operates, which is pretty awesome.

You're missing two options.

1. Illegal download/file sharing services
2. The freaking radio!

YouTube.

We also have a huge pool of music with a big group of friends where everyone uploads his music to and shares it with each other. Non-public of course. It's really awesome =)

YouTube, Grooveshark and CD, part of me wants to start a vinyl collection as they generally have better sound quality but unfortunately they're quite awkward, expensive and fiddly.

I make sure that the sounds are picked up by my ears.....

It depends on where I am and what I am doing. Mainly CD's MP3's/downloads on my phone Or I just find a radio site on-line when when I am working/surfing the net.

I try to buy my music digitally. If I can't get it on my go-to site, 7digital, I'll do a little bit of searching. If after one or two searches on google I can't find a legal way to buy the album in a digital format, I'll typically resort to other means...

My point is, it shouldn't be more work to buy something legally than it is to download it illegally.

 Fafnir wrote:
My point is, it shouldn't be more work to buy something legally than it is to download it illegally.

Every criminal in every prison ever is throwing up their hands going, "I've been saying!"

Mostly I listen to music when I am painting, and mostly when I'm painting I'm at work, and so I listen to Pandora. I've got some issues with Pandora - for example, I put in "Katy Perry radio", lets say, because I like Katy Perry, don't judge me - and inevitable, for some reason, the genre shifts to, like.. classic rock, I guess you'd call it? Queen, AC\DC, Boston, GnR, stuff like that. I'm not sure why that keeps happening but it's definitely a thing. Perhaps it's from what I'm thumbing up. I might try Spotify today after reading this thread, I never have before. It's not that I dislike classic rock; I like those bands in some cases a lot, but it bugs me that it's not quite working correctly. It always starts with Kesha and Lady Gaga and other correct stuff and then it's "Carry On My Wayward Son" all of a sudden, and then boom, it stays there.

In the car I listen to MP3's from my car radio's USB drive. I have never really listened to conventional radio, even pre-internets.

At home, when I am painting (which is pretty rare these days, I try to do "stuff I can only do at home" at home and "stuff I can do at work" at work), I listen to MP3's off my server upstairs.

 Fafnir wrote:
My point is, it shouldn't be more work to buy something legally than it is to download it illegally.

In my experience, it no longer is.

I will sometimes listen to (my own) music from Amazon's cloud player. Amazon keeps giving me promotional credits over and over again for some reason, so now I have a small library of legally owned music. You click buy, it's one click (in my case it's usually $0.00 because of the credits, but I did buy the last Garbage album on there) and it gives you a download link. It also adds it to the cloud, so you can listen to it everywhere. I think it's actually more convenient than torrenting because of the listen-anywhere aspect - previously I had to run a service on my server to do that, and sometimes the service would die, and sometimes the firewall where I am would block it.... the current Amazon method is a lot easier and cleaner.

 Paradigm wrote:


So how do you listen to music?

With my ears.

 Ouze wrote:
Mostly I listen to music when I am painting, and mostly when I'm painting I'm at work, and so I listen to Pandora. I've got some issues with Pandora - for example, I put in "Katy Perry radio, lets say, because I like Katy Perry, don't judge me - and inevitable, for some reason, the genre shifts to, like.. classic rock, I guess you'd call it? Queen, AC\DC, Boston, GnR, stuff like that. I'm not sure why that keeps happening but it's definitely a thing. Perhaps it's from what I'm thumbing up. I might try Spotify today after reading this thread, I never have before.

In the car I listen to MP3's from my car radio's USB drive. I have never really listened to conventional radio, even pre-internets.

Obviously, it's trying to convince you to like good music. Those are all great bands it keeps trying to play you.

Spotify is pretty great, almost anything is on there and it's free. There are adverts (that you can skip if you pay the $10 a month, I think, which also gives you the ability to download songs to play offline), but as it's every 6-8 songs rather than by time, you can still get a good 20-30 minutes of uninterrupted listening depending on song length and how many you skip. To be honest, that's a fair price for having access to millions of songs in good quality for free.

I find the amazon cloud handy, particularly the auto-rip that gives you a download when you buy the physical copy, but I tend to download the tracks to my itunes/Ipod rather than play online.

Well, it's a bit of a mix. Generally, I listen to music on my iPod. I have a reasonable amount of *ahem* downloaded songs in my iTunes library, but I have just as many that I've ripped from CDs. If I download a song/album and really like it, I'll buy the CD, because it's much easier to listen to CDs in the car.

Basically, if I'm going to pay for something, I want a physical copy. I don't like buying just a digital file, hence I have a growing collection of DVDs and CDs.

By imagining awesome montages

None of the above.

Whilst I have CDs, most were ripped to the computer (there are some I have that were gifts that I have listened to once or twice and then never again, though) and then ported to my mp3 player of choice.

Like Shrike, if I like a song, I might buy the CD. I like physical product. I prefer a physical book to an ebook. While yes, there are times when ebooks are more space efficient, books feel more comforting. It's probably something in the spine glues. Or mould spores in the paper.

Local radio is crap. I don't have a fast enough internet where youtube is anything but a stuttering hell (buffer buffer buffer, play 5 seconds, rinse and repeat) and don't use a music pay for download service, either (couldn't PAY me to use itunes, as a former Apple employee).

I listen to it on itunes.


And I buy vinyl, I love my vinyl more than anything. I have Dream Theater's Metropolis Part 2 on vinyl. Will cost a bomb in twenty years.

 Ouze wrote:
I put in "Katy Perry radio", lets say, because I like Katy Perry, don't judge me

I don't judge.

I have all of her albums on my iPod and I'm not ashamed of it at all. I also took my wife and nephew to see her on the California Dreams Tour in 2011 when she came to Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland... it was phenomenal.

I use YouTube and ITunes. I'd learn about a new band and whether or not I'd like their music through YouTube. If I like it, I would buy it on ITunes.
I panic too much about exceeding bandwidth to be constantly listening to it through YouTube.

For video game music, if it was impossible for me to buy the music, I'd YouTube it and save it as a voice recording on an IPod or MP3 player. The quality was awful, but I could still hear it. I stopped doing that after hearing it was illegal.

I have ripped all my CDs to my computer, and together with the other MP3s that I've "collected", I have enough music to last about 2 months (non-stop 24-7), that's a better selection of music, without adverts and no repeats than any radio station.

They play from my PC through a 5.1 system. Occasionally I will play an actual CD for the better quality sound though.

Like others have said, I prefer to pay for a physical object and not just some data, so my CD collection is ever growing and replacing the stuff that I only have as MP3s.

Generally Youtube, I still listen to the occasional CD and I listen to the radio a lot as well but that's obviously quite generic.

My approach is:

1) Youtube - for obscure stuff that never makes it to CD or just general finding of new music

2) CDs - I far prefer buying physical disks over account based downloads. I also have a hatred of iTunes software because of how automatic heavy it is - my experiences of it were just frustrating. Great software for those who don't think, a nightmare for anyone else.

3) LastFM - I find this fantastic for finding new groups to listen to - plug in what I like and listen to the "Radio" for that group and see what comes up. I've found several new groups to listen to through that; its quick, painless and generally works well.

 chromedog wrote:
Like Shrike, if I like a song, I might buy the CD. I like physical product. I prefer a physical book to an ebook. While yes, there are times when ebooks are more space efficient, books feel more comforting. It's probably something in the spine glues. Or mould spores in the paper.

I agree with you on books. I have both a kindle and a kindle fire, I have ebooks, and greatly prefer paper books. The Kindles are handy for taking on trips where I have limited room, and yeah having a built in backlight is nice, but, as you say, there is something substantially more satisfying about a book, so much so that it's really not even comparable to me.

That being said, that does not extend into what is essentially just data to me. I have a fairly large DVD collection from many years ago when they first came out, and I now consider it to be nothing more than a big waste of space that I probably should get rid of. All these little plastic discs... many years ago I went over to a RAID array and then unraid. I've got thousands of movies, and I don't feel I've lost anything of value by just keeping them on the server instead of putting a disc in a tray. I can play them on my laptop or on my TV via either my HTPC or my WD Live, and the digital files are never going to skip or oxidize or break.

The same goes with music. I have a pile of CD's rotting somewhere in the basement. They contribute nothing to me except clutter.

That being said, there are two exceptions that I can see:

1.) Sound quality. I am no audiophile and do not have sensitive enough ears to detect any difference in audio quality in a 160kbps mp3. I believe people when they say they can hear a difference, I simply cannot. Even then it's a weak argument since you can just get FLAC's.

2.) Vinyl. No argument here, Vinyl is cool. I don't have it but I had some records when I was a kid and I thought they were awesome. There is just something about vinyl that is sort of magical, in a way. It's more intimate, and it just feels neater. That might be sentimental, of course, since when I was a teenager record stores still existed, and for me, they were.... I dunno. Record stores where a place you could go and feel cool even if you weren't cool. Some of that will always remain in vinyl for me.

I get every "free" download from iTunes as soon as it is available so I've got a lot of... junk on my iPod. I also will get a CD if I really love the music (and it isn't pop/top 40) and want to be able to re-rip at a later date. And then there is Youtube.

Amazon mp3 is wonderful. Reasonable prices, decent selection, no DRM, unlimited downloads.

That (combined with a desire to turn moral on such things) was what finally killed my desire to pirate music. It's literally easier to get it legally now.

Alternatively I listen to lots of covers or original mix stuff that I find on Youtube.

Youtube mostly. I listen to a lot of Eletronic music. My favorite Music Label Monstercat offers many free releases and things on the sort. I was one of the people who got Monstercat 016 free for example. I've got a few *Cough* "Free" songs on an old Ipod of my brothers that we listen to when we play 40k.

Albums that I've actually purchased myself are mainly cheap ones, $10 bucks on a Skillet Album here, NPC's Critical hits there, that sorta thing. The last music I paid money for must have been... Hmmm... I can't actually remember. Might have been that NPC album.

Vinyl was the only one that I didn't select.

I don't know how the bloody savages of Europe do it, but here in America, we use our ears, the way God intended.

P2P file-sharing, IRC networking for the rare stuff/dubplates/unreleased, and occasionally YouTube when I want to preview stuff really quickly.

 Ouze wrote:

 Fafnir wrote:
My point is, it shouldn't be more work to buy something legally than it is to download it illegally.

In my experience, it no longer is.

I will sometimes listen to (my own) music from Amazon's cloud player. Amazon keeps giving me promotional credits over and over again for some reason, so now I have a small library of legally owned music. You click buy, it's one click (in my case it's usually $0.00 because of the credits, but I did buy the last Garbage album on there) and it gives you a download link. It also adds it to the cloud, so you can listen to it everywhere. I think it's actually more convenient than torrenting because of the listen-anywhere aspect - previously I had to run a service on my server to do that, and sometimes the service would die, and sometimes the firewall where I am would block it.... the current Amazon method is a lot easier and cleaner.

For a lot of music, that tends to be the case. But for a lot of the less popular music I listen to, especially stuff from outside America/UK, it's an absolute nightmare. And then there are albums that are only available digitally through through the iTunes virus.

Generally I use youtube or Grooveshark (Which is Spotify without ads and with AC/DC)