Arts & Culture
COLLINS | I (Streamed) it First
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By SHAY COLLINS
Over the past few years, it has become accepted wisdom that you cannot write comprehensively about music listening without writing about streaming services. According to Digital Media Ramblings’s statistics report from May, more than 350 million people use streaming services, and almost 200 million use the big three — Pandora, Spotify and iHeart Radio. The numbers do not include multiple service users (myself included, as a patron of Spotify, Pandora and 8tracks), but the point remains — people stream music a whole lot. The streaming coin has two faces. Artists and cynics allege that, as music becomes hyper-accessible, listeners’ appreciation of the musicians plummets.