So, I still buy albums (mostly from prestomusic, in case someone wants to know).

> the sector is only surviving thanks to public and private subsidies.

That could never change. Streaming will make it worse, though.

I buy my classical music from Presto Music, too. The purchase process is easy, and maybe the performers get a bit more than from streaming.

I suspect that purchasing music files to own will seem increasingly strange and inconvenient to younger people, though.

It'll be interesting to see what happens.

As a fan of blues, I've noticed that there are a lot of grey songs in my Spotify playlists. There's just no practical way to be able to listen to the music I want to hear besides owning it (Youtube is hit-or-miss as well).

For people who want to listen to pop, they're probably fine. But anything that's even a little niche is trouble. Or that's my experience, anyhow.

O what happened to the idea of the “long tail”, eh?

I guess the truth was that it didn’t scale.

IMO, that's not a great point. The music is already made - that's the hard part. It just needs to be licensed.

Maybe there are other channels that are more profitable than streaming, but I'm guessing that a lot of older/niche music is just locked away for no good reason.

At a certain point, I have to imagine that most artists would prefer their music be listened to if they aren't going to make money either way.

In no particular order:

* Will Wilde

* Sugarray Rayford

* Smokehouse

* Etta James

* Gordon Webster

* The Blue Vipers of Brooklyn

* Tin Pan

* Asylum Street Spankers

* Hugh Laurie

* Legendary Rhythm and Blues Revue

* Preservation Hall Jazz Band

* The Marsalis Family

* Katie Webster

* John Lee Hooker

* Keb Mo

* Son House

* Joe Bonamassa

* ZZ Ward

* Kevin Selfe

* Allen Toussaint

* Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

* Bill Withers

* Nina Simone

* Buddy Guy

* Lightning Hopkins

* Howlin' Wolf

* Brother Yusef

There's probably a whole lot more - these are just the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. You probably know a lot of them, but I didn't want to guess which ones you know, so I just wrote out a bunch of people I like.

Trying to revert that situtation was my bet.

The 20th century was a golden age for recorded music. Maybe there is no coming back but I don't think (or I didn't think then) that streaming services are in a very strong position in the long run: consumers like them because the current deal is that you pay a single subscription and you have access to basically all the music (a very nice proposition indeed). But the streaming services own no content, the day the content owners find a more lucrative way to sell music they will move part of their catalog out of the streaming services and at the same time, make the product less and less attractive. At least, that was the theory.

Now, I think Spotify in particular, has built a strong moat due to their ubiquity (all devices support Spotify). It's getting late for pop music. For Classical, I don't know but 6 years ago, I was convinced there was still a strong possibility to save the old model since it was still making money on the traditional channels.

> Streaming will make it worse, though.

It has been the case for a while now.

Paul Baxter from Delphian Records said it best years ago:

"There's no way that a record company could operate on the fees from streaming alone. It's absolutely impossible. There are too many zeros in front of the amount-per-stream figure."

The advantage of a single streaming service with all the songs is also much greater than one with all the shows or movies. Nobody puts Netflix on "shuffle" or lets it play random episodes based on what they've watched in the past, but those are some of Spotify's biggest features. Its user shareable playlists also increase lock-in, along with other network effects. It's such a huge advantage to be able to play anything (or almost anything), I don't see how a service with a limited selection could compete.

I don't see any way for the labels to get out of the streaming age beyond serious anticompetitive collusion, and even then people would go back to piracy. Frankly, it couldn't happen to a nicer group of folks.

But I don't think that the moat could never be broken. You have many people that consume music as background noises. But you also have many people that are passionate about the music they listen to and would like to have another way to support their artist of choices other than going to concerts (see vinyl revival etc).

My recipe to break the moat:

- choose a genre some people care strongly about (for me, that was classical)

- make a platform that offer a better UX for that genre, and have them pay for their music (those consumer are happy because better UX and they feel they actually support the artist they like)

- progressively signup labels by showing there is more money on your platform than on streaming services, they will progressively remove more and more of their catalog from streaming services if they were on them.

- once the model is proven on that genre, move to another (jazz, serious pop etc)

- as time goes by, the value of your service increase and while the value of the streaming services is lowered due to their catalog shrinking.

While this might be a fantasy, the truth is that today system continue to reward popular artists only, niche genre artists can't make a living from streaming. If a solution arises for them, they will come progressively, and over time it will weaken the streaming service moat.

Why would consumers not just pay for physical media like CDs/Vinyl/etc. if they prefer owning things?

I could definitely see streaming wars in music happening like they are in video, although so far the music labels are content to watch the video labels hurt each other. But consider: Spotify's payouts are infamously low, lower than Google's or Apple's and I can imagine some labels deciding they can do better by providing their own streaming app. Since it's only a few labels, each will believe they have enough of a library to draw subscribers, and away we'll go.

But still: aside from the margins and market share concerns, what delivers a steadier income than streaming?

Streaming doesn't mean they can't experiment with additional revenue streams, including physical media sales and licensing opportunities, but it's hard to imagine something displacing streaming as a concept to the degree which streaming has displaced physical media sales.

I personally, want a lossless version that I can archive, have on my offline portable music player, stream to my phone, and stream through jellyfin to my stereo.

That fits better to the style of music I listen to, and how _I_ listen to music (I don't shuffle and listen to full albums only)

The idea was to create a true streaming service in term of UX. All the same features as you are used to, except you start with the empty catalog and you purchase individual albums and you get the streaming service for free forever (no subscription). The service operating cost being funded by newer purchase. That's why I'm talking about Steam as the model, it's how they operate: you have access to your library forever even if you only pay for games once. (And mostly, you never play much to most of your purchases).

The steady income of subscription service is nice for the streaming platform but it's not nice for the classical music artists: they receive nothing.

> Nobody puts Netflix on "shuffle" or lets it play random episodes based on what they've watched in the past

Not convinced. People used to watch TV the way they listened to the radio - turn it on to whatever's on and mostly ignore it. It's not the current dynamic but I don't think that's an immutable law of nature.

With AI generated music on the horizon I think we have definitely peaked.

https://www.youtube.com/user/KuhlauDilfeng2/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/robt0007/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9g5M2trqPDiGn5fC_dl63g/pla... https://www.youtube.com/user/hrSinfonieorchester https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwbbr8FKVrWLF8T81RI7Lxg/vid... https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPfJe8fU94SE8CjtKOf-zxQ https://www.youtube.com/user/ElbphilharmonieHH https://www.youtube.com/c/AVROTROSKlassiek

A bunch of names (with the letter A): Eugen d'Albert, Franco Alfano, Flor Alpaerts, Volkmar Andreae, Malcolm Arnold, Kurt Atterberg, Georges Auric.

Beethoven famously ushered in a new era with his 5th symphony when he secured am advance from the bank to produce it, being the first large work to be produced through commercial investment.

Individual patronage continued through the 19th century with notable examples like Tchaikovsky, though increasingly commercial aspects were present.

Coming the 20th century funding for academia became the norm. Older composers became teachers and younger composers secured funding for their thesis compositions.

At the same time the recording industry exploded. Even avant garde cumposers could make good money by starting their own companies to press and publish their records.

Over time interest in orchestral music has plummeted. I guess there's a mix of reasons for this. But today it will prove very difficult to gather the funds for a large scale composition, preformance or recording, never mind all three.

This would I think be a lot more common were it not such a niche interest. Even the composers I mention support themselves primarily through orchestration of video game music and the like, using that to subsidize their original work.

I'm not too proud to admit I enjoy the video game stuff, too; I'm no less susceptible to nostalgia than anyone, or maybe somewhat more so. But my point is that, while the technical bar appears fairly high, it is currently within the possible for a composer also to provide the orchestra. It seems likely the technical bar could be lowered, or for that matter that a new production industry could develop in support of those not able to access the more traditional one.

The stigma against video game music can’t go away soon enough! Composers are creating some really amazing stuff for video games and gamers themselves are an enormous audience for the wider classical music industry to draw upon.

To their credit, a lot of orchestras have recognized this and have been performing video game music for years. Along with film scores (a trend started by John Williams), video game music has breathed an incredible amount of new life into an industry that might otherwise be in far worse shape now.

2. Clear an hour off your schedule, close your eyes and listen.

Edit: On second thought, keep your eyes open and enjoy the beautiful artwork by Matt Nava (taken from his book on Journey) as well as a selection of fan art which is equally stunning considering most of the people are probably not professional graphic designers.

Fuck...it's so good it makes me emotional just typing this sentence.

Also worthy of note: Tan Dun and Yo Yo Ma's recording of the Crouching Tiger soundtrack and his recordings of the Bach solos.

Alas, I must end with the complaint that the current recordings of the original Star Wars soundtracks use track listings that are out of order with their "appearances" in the films.

This is not accceptable.

I think I played the game a long time ago but I believe I was visiting a friend (who had already played through it) at the time and I wasn't in the right frame of mind to experience it. Now I want to track down a PS4 and play it again.

This reminded me of another score I love: Endless Legend by Arnaud Roy. Similar instrumentation to Journey (albeit with lots of human voices). It has a different feel though, for a radically different game (a turn-based strategy game).

This is also a case of good old AI automating things that a great many humans enjoy doing saving us from the drudgery of human expression.

Just for a single example-- the count who funded the Mannheim school got musical rockets in return, ones that became the envy of all of Europe. Of course orchestral developments were happening in other locations as well; in general this set off a kind of orchestral space race. You can track it through history all the way to Bayreuth and beyond.

Hell, there's probably a line from those orchestral crescendos to the "orchestra hit" General MIDI instrument.

At the height of all that orchestral fervor you've got, for example, an opera composer as a member of Italy's first parliament. How many people on HN can even name a living composer?

Now imagine $living_orchestral_composer at the helm of a nationalist movement in the U.S.

I've read the preceding sentence three times and brain just outright refuses to come up with imagery for that.

So while I guess you can squint and see the historical funding of orchestras as "essentially donations," there's a big difference between donating to a historical society and donating to the red cross. The 19th century funding of orchestras was much more like the latter-- funding for something that is essential to living (or at least in the U.S., essentially to being taken seriously by Europe). Today it's like building model trains for your ears.

Bet $100 that all classical music will be AI generated (synthesized and composed) in just three years. Supply side will be infinite.

ALL classical music, in just 3 years. I'm perfectly willing to put my entire net worth on the line for this one.

No one with enough bored capital to patronize the arts is going to go to see and be seen at a performance of a synthetic symphony - or not more than once or twice, anyway, for the sake of the thing. Philharmonics need not fear for their concert halls, or not at least for this reason.

I'd pay good money to see Antheil's "Ballet Mécanique", which requires 16 synchronized player pianos...

But yes, I'm not sure I'd be interested in whatever ChatGPT threw out.

And it won't just be classical, it will be all genres and all creative media. And it will probably take longer than three years. But it will happen.

Ever been to a craft show? An artist can sell a handmade bowl for $100 even though you can find an identical manufactured one at Target for $1.

Other examples: Chick-Fil-A markets their milkshakes as “hand spun”. Or when Dreamweaver started automating the layout of webpages, web devs started calling their websites “handmade”. It’s been possible to automate call centers for a long time now, but companies advertise the ability to speak to a human representative as a differentiating feature of their business.

There is value in having humans in the loop, despite automation. People just don’t trust robots.

Apparently there's something about his work that's seen [2] as uniquely susceptible to automation, and I suppose I can see where the irritation would come from. Doesn't bother me any, but then I've always preferred Beethoven anyway.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/google-doodle-bach-ai-m...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach...

Isn't that exactly how music is consumed nowadays by most people? They put something when driving, cooking, doing homework, etc. It's used mainly for mood/focus and they're not exactly paying close attention to it the same way one would to a audiobook of, say, an abstract algebra textbook. Especially considering how cheap and easy it is to steam music nowadays. I suspect focused, attentive listening only makes up a small minority of the total streams.

The inverse is likely true with the classical audience. Just like with jazz, although there will be a small portion of users seeking “vibey jazz” sort of playlists to use in the background while working, the majority of jazz fans consume jazz as albums and still concerned with things like personnel and liner notes, perhaps even who mastered this recording. Classical fans are similar except I would say even more picky IME (worked in a jazz and classical CD store/venue for a number of years)

The same may be true for Jazz, though in that genre there may be a bit more of a separation between jazzy background mood music and jazz as consumed by fans. There are some overlaps ("The Girl from Ipanema", "Take Five", etc), but they may not be quite as central to the canon as their classical counterparts.

You haven't justified your assertion of the dichotomy between pure blind consumption and active, focussed listening. You must actually argue that the negation of one implies the other. Your comment is totally meaningless as it stands

Or, just keep your pacifier, baby ;)

I've chosen to think of art in terms of products I consume, and less as admiration of artists, though of course I do some of the latter too.

I would think they would want to listen to it for the same reason they listen to human generated music.

Is your thought here that AI generated art is not art? Is it the nature of the creator that determines the listeners enjoyment? If the music generated by a computer is indistinguishable from human made music, how can this be possible? Moreover, at what point would the computer generation be sufficient to shift it from art to “screensaver”? Would it be one simulated member of an otherwise human orchestra? Would it take 50%. If you can’t draw a line, doesn’t that further indicate it’s irrelevant?

If you want a quick example of what I'm saying, look online for Music for Installations by Brian Eno. It's a "almost-generative-but-not-really" music album made for audiovisual installations. It's... kinda nice but it's 6 hours long and literally gets boring after less than 30 minutes.

I can't imagine listening to something even more abstracted from a human composer for more than 20 minutes. I mean, I'm pretty sure you can generate something even quite pleasant with AIs. Most people will just listen for 15 min, say "uh, cool", and go back to regular music.

And if that does happen, expect a far more exciting backlash movement, like alternative rock in the 90s was to garbage excesses of the 80s.

It already exists, and is known as elevator music or muzak. I can certainly see the value in generating endless copyright-free background music, because so many human effort has been put into composing it already.

The same reason anyone does anything. Because they like it.

There’s no way you’d be able to tell.

Uh, have you actually listened to any of it? At all?

There are some non-Western traditional types of music I'd agree can have a level of complexity not usually encountered within the Western classical or jazz genres, but it's fair to say all over forms of Western music are vastly simpler in terms of harmonic language, tonality, form/ structure, instrumentation etc. None of which I believe would make it harder for AIs to generate, as computers can manage complexity rather well. What I expect AIs to not be good at is to conjure a truly original and distinct sound world significantly different to anything that's come before, but that still captivates audiences. Which is arguably what the greatest human composers & musicians have generally achieved, in any genre.

AI would need to be able to do something like create The Bad Plus in 1995. That's an even bigger mountain to climb.

People will still want to create their sound, and that'll lead to new music over time that isn't just imitation.

Have you ever heard of Ella Fitzgerald?

EG: Read something like George Russell's "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization" (the basis from which modal jazz sprung, which includes one of the most famous jazz albums of all time, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"). Now add to the theory the ability to improvise around it as good as a Miles Davis level jazz performer can. It's not technically easy at all.

Even if other music genres are much technically easier, so much of music is the social experience anyways.

Take punk music. Though some parts got more technical later, much of it (particularly the late 1970s / early 1980s stuff) is, in my opinion, very technically easy; not too challenging to play, with very basic music structure (which was half the point, a return to rock's garage roots).

I'm guessing an AI can probably be developed (especially with today's fairly realistic sounding guitar VSTs) to make some "technically correct" old school punk rock, certainly much easier than it can be programmed to make "technically correct" modal jazz. An AI, however, cannot replicate the human parts, eg the social or community aspects of a music scene. Which with a lot of music is a huge portion of the point (certainly for punk it was).

The truth is that classical music fan are very very picky about what they like.

Computers have been "better" musician than human for a long time: a midi file is always played "perfectly". Yet it's sounds horrible, mechanised to our ears. The controlled imperfection of a real human musician is what makes the music beautiful.

I don't see any computer composing anything worth listening to in the foreseeable future (and I'm bullish on generative ai).

This is why the act of playing music by a human is called a "performance", an "interpretation" in some languages. The musician is not just playing a score exactly as it is written, the musician gives a part of his/her into the act and make the music his/her own to make art.

- the instrument

- the room or hall

- their personal experiences

- their personal philosophy of music (e.g., Gould and his anti-hedonistic philosophy)

- cultural norms and explicit respect paid thereof (e.g., in the interpretation of a Chopin mazurka)

- available recording technology and expertise

- available audio engineering technology and expertise

- what emotion they want to invoke or evoke to contextualize the music

- their patience

- their willingness to experiment

- etc.

It is not at all farfetched that a performer is taking most of these into account, directly or indirectly, to render a live or recorded performance.

It's not as if there's just this tradition of unwritten rules about interpreting a score that music students learn from their teachers, rather, it's that an interpretation is an amalgamation of experience, context, and on-the-spot reactive decision-making.

For an AI to successfully achieve this, they'll need the same variety of inputs and contexts to learn from.

I feel grateful that I heard the Mahler symphonies before the great flood of AI content, at least I will always have that. But perhaps AI could complete his 10th symphony…

Maybe there’s more to art than business though. I bet there will still be a market for unique and novel interpretations of classical works played by real humans capable of being moved by the compositions they’re playing.

You could make the argument that charting pop music will be AI generated, or Spotify will be pushing AI generated music through all their popular playlists to avoid paying music royalties - these don't seem to be too far from what happens currently.

But to bet that some of the fussiest and most discerning music listeners would prefer this seems foolish.

But even that gets tricky, as she is not the performer for any of the recordings.

It's a strange world though, when so many people focus on centuries-old music by dead German men, that's going to be harder to market. My first glance at Apple Classical a few weeks ago suggests that it's trying to cater to that crowd.

Bandcamp is better for living composers (and preforming musicians) than a lot of other traditional options. For example, if you have a successful performance is a piece, Parma Records will reach out to you and offer to do a "professional" recording. They'll ask for $20,000 and you'll get a box of CDs (not sure if they do that last part anymore but I would not be surprised). A surprising amount of musicians go this route, because they don't know any better.

Anyway, point is, Bandcamp is awesome.

I think I see what you mean in relation to what audiences Apple is presumably trying to cater to, though I have no market knowledge as to how “classical“ music audiences truly segment. Apple Classical becomes similar to Apple Music a way to (re-) discover both old catalog and new releases. Listening to Toscanini this morning, the performance and music sounds as fresh in 2022 as it always did.

Could you expand on this a bit?

I am very much a track oriented person. Why do you think it would be better to force/encourage people to buy albums?

Another problem is that the way classical music is divided into tracks is sometimes not universal. For example, there are some recordings of Mahler's Symphony No. 5 that are divided into five separate tracks (one for each movement) while others divide it into just two tracks (one for the first three movements and another for the final two movements).

While there are many modern music albums that were intended to be listened to as full albums (e.g. "The Wall", "American Idiot" or "To Pimp a Butterfly"), I guess the track-based listening experience just won over in that part of the music world. That said, people often also just listen to a single sonata, aria, etc. in classical music too, of course, instead of always going for the 2 hour experience.

There are gaps between the tracks.

Sigh. Gapless playback should be a hard default.

OTOH maybe it would work. The Moonlight sonata underwent this, and the first track of the album is well-known and iconic, the third track is also widely recognized, but the second track is much more obscure.

The idea was to make the product "the album" again. In the past, the buying experience of a physical product was important to make it a powerful and personal experience: you had nice artwork, leaflet with information about the music you bought, bio of the performers etc. I wanted to try to recover some of that.

I suppose something like that would be possible with NFC (with write durability improvements). The NFC holds a token allowing for the play of a particular album. For each non-cached play, a new token is generated and sent to the NFC. The album represented by the NFC can then be loaned or resold like the old way of physical media. Maybe even let the NFCs go bad after a few thousand token rewrites just like how vinyl and tapes wear out. It would have no improvement over old media other than having a large and fragile IT infrastructure.

Vinyl record sales outperformed CDs in the US for the first time since 1987, according to a new report. Just over 41 million vinyl records were sold in 2022, to the tune of $1.2bn (£.99bn). Only 33 million CDs were sold, amounting to $483m.

https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126.amp

Edit/PS: It really feels strange arguing for an idea, I've given up on so long ago...

It's nice to get a cd or a cassette, with some fancy holofoil cover on it, a little artifact of a band I like, and still have it on my phone, in my browser, whenever I want to listen to it. I could dig out the actual equipment to play those things directly, but usually that's a pain, and I just want to have them as a totem or something.

It is sadly true however that the West increasingly appears to have no interest in maintaining its own culture.

Just like vinyl, I don't think the solution is digital!

The day the content owner stop wanting to license their catalog, the platforms die. The majors let themselves go into that trap because they failed at finding a viable digital model and the streaming platform showed them a way to keep making some money. Show them a better model that works and they will follow the money.

In 2017, the classical music market was shrinking but still worth half a billion a year with 50% of that still being physical sales. I'm still convinced there was a market to capture.

For classical, streaming is not an option: most content on streaming services are old (albeit often great) records from the past coming from the majors catalog (which they don't care much about). That's 4 or 5 catalog. All the independents rejected the model because they can't make any money there.

Streaming is the death of the classical recording industry. Simply. There is no money in streaming. The sad part is that the average classical music consumer has generally a lot of disposable income available but no way to spend it on a good modern product, in a way that support that industry.

I don't know much about it, but it's probably true of Jazz too.

Outside the classical world, if you look at a site like Bandcamp, that idea seems core. The business model also seems exactly like what you are talking about, both for performers and for the site. I see a lot of very obscure, niche electronic stuff that is supported by hundreds of people. That may only be thousands of dollars, not tens of thousands. However, it’s an economy. And compare earning $10 for the sale of a single album to the number of streams you need to earn that much revenue. We are talking orders of magnitude difference.

Basically, a platform for musicians to produce music (and associated videos, artworks, etc), managing their assets securely, sharing and collaborating; then engagement with fans, promotion, merch, and touring support; and finally a simple platform for sales (streaming, downloads, and physical good) where the store takes a reasonable fee, but the bulk of the revenue goes to the creator.

I was kinda hoping Bandcamp would evolve in this direction, but I think that's not likely now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9dHygbi0kI

> Streaming is the death of the classical recording industry.

Apple seems to disagree, so I guess we'll see. It clear that the best days are behind us, at any rate.

Bottom line: you might have been right that there was still a market to capture in 2017, but YC was also right to see that it was a shrinking market, not exactly the sort of thing in which they're most interested. It's hard to imagine a world in which the market for classical music is bigger today than it was in 2017, regardless of how well you--or anyone else--executed.

As an end consumer of classical music, a streaming app like this one or the two I named make discoverability much easier in a way that is very appealing compared to direct sales. Even if there is a smaller total library available to me, I am much more easily able to explore that library and build my tastes. I think ideally, I would want an app that allows me to explore the streaming catalog of classical music in a discoverable, personalizable way, but that offers a way to buy these direct sale-exclusive recordings you're talking about once I'm confident about what I might enjoy. My Berlin Phil membership completely changed my understanding of classical, because it was so easy to just give something a try and the performances are so well-curated, often with a spoken introduction for context.

I'm a big jazz fan, and I know that Blue Note for instance seems to have done very well selling a lot of physical media with their vinyl series, including newly recorded albums. I've probably heard as much recently recorded jazz music on vinyl as on digital - and now that I think of it, there's a discoverability element there: if Blue Note bothers to press it to wax, it's probably pretty good. Most of the newly composed jazz I hear is performed live, though, and that seems to be the best way for most performers in the genre to make some income from it.

I can't comment too much on their content as I haven't tried any of them. You make want to check them out though.

But commercially, it's mostly about 2 of the most recognizable names in the classical industry leveraging their notoriety. It's good for them but it won't really help the industry thrive again. The Berliner Philharmoniker or DG would be the last ones to struggle, premium subscription service or not.

I don't think a service will make a dent in the industry woes unless it becomes an industry standard. That's why my target business model was Steam and video games and not any music service.

1/ It's hit or miss whether the major labels will put all their content on streaming platforms. Sure, you can find the most popular classic recordings, but more obscure stuff isn't there.

2/ A lot of classical music is still listened to on CD format, and some of the streaming stuff is clearly CD quality audio.

3/ I also scrobble all my music via Lastfm. But the problem with doing that with classical as opposed to pop formats is that so often the album art just isn't there. Apparently the company that sources the album art doesn't care about classical music.

I think people listen to classical a LOT, when watching movies.

could it be like "poetry" which is dying... but might just be off-stage doing song lyrics?

I blame the nature of digital assets for this; all we gotta do is keep copying all those files into brand new digital media and we can listen to what's been already recorded forever.