I suppose that it had to happen The Beatles are now available on Spotify and other streaming services. I sometimes use Spotify and at one time I subscribed to their full service which you can receive without adverts. Millions of tracks are available and Spotify caters for all musical tastes. Similar services are also available on-line.
The sound reproduction is very good if you feed the stream from your computer to an external DAC and use a decent amplifier and speakers. Listening through headphones on a tablet computer or a portable phone is not such a good experience. Amplifying the headphone output of a phone or tablet is also not perfect.
If you want really good sound reproduction you are better off listening to a decent hi-fi in a quiet room through speakers without the sound of traffic whooshing past or the "clickety clack" of a railway carriage.
With streaming services you don't need a hard drive or vinyl LPs and most of your favourite music is instantly at your disposal; and you are the DJ to play whatever music you like in any order that you like. The music is de-materialised and this is part of a hi-fi future that CDs and LPs will not be able to compete with. Of course, some people will hang onto their beloved hard copies and will sit down and enjoy their music in the living room without other distractions.
I remember realising a couple of years ago that because the Beatles were not on Spotify, they were gradually fading out of my consciousness - or words to that effect. I am sure the record label made more money in the short run from restricting them to CDs, but all the time they did this, the 'brand' was disappearing inexorably from the 'zeitgeist'.
ReplyDeleteYou are exactly right. Lots of young people have never heard of The Beatles -maybe some of them will now.
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