On streaming services, I’m a bit out of the loop, because it’s been a while since I did a group test. But, in all honesty, Amazon was the worst of them last time I did—and the now-dead Google Music was also pretty poor. My favourites were—and remain—Spotify and Apple Music. Both have solid user interfaces and are great for discovery. The engines that drive them are much better at getting new and interesting music to your lug-holes, versus Amazon’s tendency towards “more of the same”. (Spotify beats Apple for general catalogue layout by some stretch, if that’s your bag. But I prize Apple Music’s For You feed over basically everything else, hence sticking with that service for now.)
As for the deals artists get from streaming, I agree with that too. But then that all comes down to the same thing: support what you love, because if you don’t it will disappear. So if you love a band, buy the album—even digitally—so they’ll get a few quid, rather than the fractions of a penny they might get from streaming. (I don’t know how many people realise that even multiple plays of a thing you like make little difference with streaming. Income isn’t carved up in a representative fashion.)
“On the subject of CDs, if hipsters can make cassettes cool again then I'm confident that CDs will have their turn one day.”
Probably. Honestly, I get vinyl fetishism, although I don’t share it. Records are big and bold, and the cover art can be amazing. That notion of settling down to listen to a record has appeal, even if the sound quality does not. But tapes were always shit. I hated the things growing up (same for video cassettes). That they now find a market genuinely baffles me. CDs are something of a halfway house. For me, they were exciting for a number of reasons: you could skip to the track you wanted; CDR was fast and simple when it arrived; loads of impossible to find stuff rocked up on archival CDs, introducing me to loads of new bands; they were quite often cheap, like when HMV London did massive stock dumps. That said, I don’t really care about my collection, which has basically turned into a dust-trap in our living room, and is currently added to at the rate of perhaps two or three CDs per year.
