This month in digital music libraries - January 2025
January 31, 2025 in digital music by Dan Gravell
It’s a New Year, and digital audio and music seems to be carrying on in the same vein as the past year. There are concerns about AI and old catalogue music dominating newer music. More commonly, opinion pieces, if not usage figures, reflect a growing reaction to streaming services’ misaligned incentives in promoting attention rather than deep listening.
But there remain positive stories for the music-attentive intentional-listener.
This month we’ve seen articles about streaming services and the various ways they engage and embed themselves into our everyday lives, some end-of-year musical analysis stuff and a great resource for free music.
Streaming and engagement
Streaming music is as much about building a dependency into people’s lives as it is intentionally listening to music.
How Spotify has loaded its popular playlists with cheap content. "Spotify’s [...] research showed that many users were not coming [...] to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days " https://buff.ly/41FnIIr Thanks @lizpelly.bsky.social
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 27 December 2024 at 16:00
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Part of this engagement is the now embedded ritual of yearly “wraps” where some stats about your use of a service are combined in some coffee-table visualisations for your dopamine-delight. I’ve even received them from my grocery store this year! Apparently I’m the 17th highest buyer of Piatnica cottage cheese in the East Midlands (UK).
But there are alternatives to music wraps - you can hook your music players to services like Last.fm or ListenBrainz to control where your data flows.
@Lastfm is also source-agnostic - you can connect it to wherever you get your music from https://buff.ly/3VAk66I Thanks @laurasnapes
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 17 December 2024 at 16:00
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To be fair, the sharing of these wraps (which is all part of the streaming service’s marketing strategy) can also be used for quite humorous purposes:
This is a cool use of your Spotify Wrapped link - AI roasts!
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 6 December 2024 at 17:00
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As an aside, the alternatives of downloading music, rather than hooking into a streaming service and renting music, are still to be enjoyed:
I'm a bit late to this but @junodownload.bsky.social is another music download store offering #FLAC downloads https://buff.ly/4fmoe1h (part of @junorecords)
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 19 December 2024 at 16:00
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Music analysis
AOTY assembled all the album of the year lists, to make your New Year back-catalogue filling easier:
Work out how to backfill your library with @aoty.org 's end-of-year list-of-lists.
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 11 December 2024 at 16:00
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More specifically, a new study (someone must’ve paid for this) looked into relative perceptions by fans and critics of artists’ albums-over-time.
Turns out the "difficult second album" is more of a critic thing than a listener thing: https://buff.ly/3BdoCRJ "Fans show no evidence of a sophomore slump bias" - but wouldn't this be expected more than for critics?
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 13 December 2024 at 16:00
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Focus on
A change of tack… A New Year, with New Year’s resolutions… to write that book you always wanted to write… try focusing with some sitar music.
Indian classical music for focus... worth a try
— bliss - automated music library management (@blisshq.com) 24 January 2025 at 16:00
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See you next month!
Photo by Bruno Bučar on Unsplash
