By Derek Swartzlander
How do you listen to your music?
  • Do you have a large stack of CDs?
  • How about a crate of old records?
  • Maybe you even have a dusty collection of 8-tracks or an iPod full of mp3 files.

These are what you probably think of when you want to listen to music, however, one of the fastest growing formats for music is streaming.

Streaming is the use of a computer, cell phone, or other technology to have music (or other media, such as movies) delivered to your device.

The major benefit of streaming is that it provides a large amount of music at little-to-no cost. These services can offer features such as computer-generated playlists, which picks out music based on songs you like, or the ability to be notified of an artist’s new release.

There are many different services for streaming, with the most popular being Spotify, Pandora, and Apple Music.

These apps often have a “free” mode, where users can pick a musician or band, and listen to a playlist of their songs, as well as music by similar artists.

For example, if you choose to listen to the Beatles, the first song would be a Beatles song, which could be followed by the Who, then the Rolling Stones, and so on.

The drawback with this free mode is that the user often does not have the ability to choose the specific songs they want to listen to. There will also be advertisements between songs. This form of streaming is similar to the radio in these aspects.

Streaming apps will also have a paid-subscription service. For a monthly fee, users can choose to listen to any song of their choosing. The fee will also remove the advertisements that play between songs. This allows for a great deal of freedom for the listener, giving users the ability to choose from thousands of songs.

The invention of streaming has also given musicians the ability to share their music without having to press vinyl or print CDs. Services such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud have led to an explosion of new artists because anyone can upload music to these services.

There is some criticism of streaming. Some people claim that the sound is inferior to CD and vinyl (Neil Young is particularly notable for his criticism of the sound quality of streaming).

Others complain that musicians are underpaid by streaming services, leading artists such as Taylor Swift and Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead) to temporarily remove their music from Spotify.

Like any medium, music streaming has its pros and cons. Ultimately, we can decide how we would like to listen to our music.

Thankfully, music isn’t going away anytime soon.

Derek Swartzlander, Bluffton High School graduate, is a student at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He is studying English and accounting. He is in the Xavier Jazz Orchestra and Xavier Singers and plays sousaphone in the Xavier pep band. He is also an Icon columnist who interviews recent BHS grads for our 15 minutes column.