It goes without saying that the old institutions of the music business world—record stores, radio charts, vinyl, cassettes, and CDs—are fading into obscurity. In their place are bizarrely named streaming services that, increasingly, are how we find and share new music: Spotify, Pandora, Songza, Google Play, Apple's impending Beats platform, YouTube's freshly-announced Key Music.These sites and apps are great for users, who get to listen to gigantic libraries of tracks without (in most cases) paying very much for the privilege. But critics say that artists barely earn anything from their songs being streamed; Taylor Swift famously pulled her music from Spotify this year because she felt it wasn't being valued when it was just part of the streaming library. Other artists probably feel the same way, though they may not have Swift's luxury of selling a million albums with or without Spotify.
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But there are plenty of questions about how all this will work—for starters, any band who takes advantage of this will have to already have fans willing to fork over some cash every month for the promise of new music, messages, and pics."It doesn't seem like something that will serve any type of new or up-and-coming artist, but it will serve the artist that already has a huge following and who doesn't necessarily need this boost in digital sales," said Jake Acosta, the owner and founder of the Chicago-based independent record label Lake Paradise, who told me he didn't use any digital music service besides Bandcamp. "I guess I don't see it as very groundbreaking."Ric Leichtung, co-founder of music site AdHoc, said that fans and artists could have a lot to gain through a service like this, but questioned whether bands would release enough good songs to make it worthwhile for their subscribers."There's no doubt that Bandcamp is capable of building a great platform for self-publishers, but the question that remains to be seen is if they'll use it properly," he told me over email. "Releasing quality content over a consistent period of time is hard, and it's a very real possibility that the bulk of the material released via subscription will be subpar, which will alienate potential patrons from using the service altogether."
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