2011 was a good year. I also listened to a lot of new stuff, so something good out of 140 albums had to come out! A quick list (in alphabetical order) of what I liked the most:

Austra - Feel It Break: a dark version of Karin Dreijer, with a great voice and haunting, complex choruses.

Autre Ne Veut - Body EP: Incredible music, synth-soul or something like that, from this new band. Outstanding male vocals, looking forward to hear anything these guys will put out.

Blood Orange - Coastal Grooves: a weird, fascinating mix of 80s pop, funk and indie. For sure one of the newest sounds I heard.

Brent Cash - How Strange It Seems: a last minute recommendation, I cannot do much but pass it along, especially if you like Divine Comedy and orchestral pop.

Cat’s Eyes - Cold Cave: nice indie pop surprise (male-female duo), that reminds the best moments of I Monster.

Cold Cave - Cherish The Light Years: not as good as the debut, but pretty awesome still. Emo-synth.

The Drums - Portamento: great, mature records from this Brooklyn guys that sound like a happy, garage version of the Joy Division. Don’t miss this record.

GusGus - Arabian Horse: a work that transcends the boundaries between house and techno, and probably the masterpiece of this great band

Jeremy Jay - Dream Diary: this guy has been releasing good dreamy pop tunes for a while now, and this is particularly sophisticated version.

John Maus - We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves: John Maus is a genius, I love his lo-fi synth stye, his creepy crooning and his crazy lyrics.

Metronomy - The English Riviera: hands-down the best pop record of the year. If only the world knew.

Sandro Perri - Impossible Spaces: a unique, experimental indie record from this obscure canadian composer. Never heard anything like that.

Soft Powers - Outlandish Scandals: I don’t usually like this post-rockish sounds, but this album is so good that just blew me away. Kind of like Broken Social Scene.

Toro Y Moi - Underneath The Pine: I didn’t even like Toro Y Moi before this record, outstanding hypnagogic indie.

Widowspeak - Widowspeak: a great debut from this Brooklyn band, that picks up where Beach House and The XX left off last year. 

If you don’t have patience for whole albums, here’s a playlist with all the good songs that this year gave to us.

Complete list of records I’ve listened to:

1,2,3 - New Heaven

Acid House Kings - Music Sounds Better With You

Adventure - Lesser Known

André & Gildas - Kitsuné Parisien

The Antlers - Burst Apart

Apparat - The Devil’s Walk

Archers Of Loaf - Icky Mettle (Reissue)

Austra - Feel It Break

Autre Ne Veut - Body EP

The Babies - s/t

The Beach Boys - The Smile Sessions

Beirut - The Rip Tide

Bibio - Mind Bokeh

Big Spider’s Back - Memory Man

Black Devil Disco Club - Circus

Blood Orange- Coastal Grooves

Blouse - Blouse

Bon Iver - s/t

Brunori Sas - Poveri Cristi

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow

Anna Calvi - s/t

Martial Canterel - You Today

Brent Cash - How Strange It Seems

Cassettes Won’t Listen - EVISPACEY

Cat’s Eyes - s/t

Cass McCombs - Wit’s End

Cass McCombs - Humor Risk

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - Hysterical

Class Actress - Rapproacher

Cold Cave - Cherish The Light Years

Com Truise - Galactic Melt

The Cool Kids - When Fish Ride Bicycles

Cornershop - Cornershop & The Double Groove “O”

Cults - s/t

Cut Copy - Zonoscope

Daedalus - Bespoke

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi - Rome

Death In Vegas - Trans-Love Energies

Dente - Io Tra Di Noi

Destroyer - Kaputt

Dirty Beaches - Badlands

DJ Shadow - The Less You Know, The Better

Dream Diary - You Are The Beat

The Drums - Portamento

The Horrors - Skying

How To Dress Well - Just Once EP

Jane & Jeff Hudson - Flesh (Reissue)

The Human League - Credo

EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints

Dominik Eulberg - Diorama

Lupe Fiasco - Lasers

The Field - Looping State Of Mind

Fitness Forever - Con Fitness Forever En La Playa

Fleet Foxes - Helplnessness Blues

Ford & Lopatin - Channel Pressure

Foster The People - Torches

John Foxx & The Maths - Interplay

Gang Gang  Dance - Eye Contact

Gardens & Villa - s/t

Gazelle Twin - The Entire City

Jef Gilson - s/t

Givers - In Light

Grouper - AIA : Alien Observer

Grouplove - s/t

GusGus - Arabian Horse

I Break Horses - Hearts

Marketa Irglova - Anar

Nicolas Jaar-  Space Is Only Noise

Jay Z - Watch The Throne

Jenniferever - Silesia

Jeremy Jay - Dream diary

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar

Junior Boys - It’s All True

Philip Laurent - Hot-Bip

Little Dragon - Ritual Union

Lonely Dear - Hall Music

The Lonely Island - Turtleneck & Chain

Low - C’mon

John Maus - We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves

Megafaun - s/t

Memory Tapes - Player Piano

Stephin Merritt - Obscurities

Metronomy - The English Riviera

Mirrors - Lights And Offerings

Moonface - Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I’d Hoped

Mux Mool - Drum EP 2

Nouvelle Vague - The Singers

Nurses - Dracula

Connan Mockasin - Forever Dolphin Love

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

Pale Sketcher - Seventh Heaven EP

Peaking Lights - 936

Pendentif - EP

Sandro Perri - Impossible Spaces

Jeff Phelps - Magnetic Eyes

Planningtorock - W

The Rapture - In The Grace Of Your Love

R.E.M. - Collapse Into Now

The Sandwitches - Mrs. Jones Cookies

S.C.U.M. - Again Into Eyes

Soft Powers - Outlandish Scandals

Sepalcure - s/t

Mike Simonetti - Capricorn Rising

Sleep ~ Over - Forever

Snowman - ABSENCE

Soft Metals - s/t

The Sound of Arrows - Voyage

Staccato Du Mal - Sin Destino

The Strokes - Angles

Tarwater - Inside The Ships

Sebastien Tellier - Love Songs

Thee Oh Sees - Castlemania

Timber Timbre - Creep On Creepin’ On

Toro Y Moi - Underneath The Pine

Tune-Yards - WHOKILL

Tunnels - The Blackout

Twin Sister - Bad Street

Ty Segall - Ty Rex

Vladislav Delay Quartet - s/t

Washed Out - Within And Without

Ben Westbeech - There’s More To Life Than This

When Saints  Go Machine - Konkylie

William Elliott Whitmore - Field Songs

Widowspeak - s/t

Wilco - The Whole Love

Wild Beasts - Smother

The Wombats - The Wombats proudly present…This Modern Glitch

Robag Wruhme - Thora Vukk

WU LYF - Go Tell Fire To The Mountain

Wye Oak - Civilian

Xeno & Oaklander - Sets & Lights

YACHT - Shangri-La

Yelle - Safari Disco Club

VVAA - Istanbul 70: Psych Disco Folk Edits by Baris K Vol 1

VVAA- Horse Meat Disco III

VVAA - Kitsuné Maison Compilation Vol 11

VVAA - Back And 4th

VVAA - We Were So Turned On: A Tribute To David Bowie

VVAA - Johnny Boy Would Love this… A Tribute To John Martyn

Emusic recently commissioned a survey to find out consumers preferences around music. The general question was: do you prefer owning music or streaming music?

Pretty straightforward. Yet, I have some trouble understanding the findings of this survey.

First, the problem presented is terribly misleading. First of all, these methods of consuming music are not mutually exclusive. Actually, they do not even accomplish the same thing. I might want to stream some music that I would never buy, according to a reasonable “try before you buy” principle.

The publicized results are particularly revelatory.

91% prefer to own music because it allows them to listen as many times as they want

This answer clearly assumes that music streaming services limit listening time. This is true only for free streaming services, and not for the streaming model in general. For example, a lot of artists allow full streaming of their single from a website, unlimited times. Not to mention YouTube.

In the best case scenario, there is a preconception in the mind of surveyed consumers, although most streaming services actually stress the “unlimited music” message in their marketing efforts. In the worst case scenario, consumers have been misled by the survey (who knows what the other answers were!). In the most probable scenario, they identify streaming with non-interactive services like Pandora, who have to strictly limit the number of songs from the same artist/albums played.

89% prefer to own the music they like, rather than stream it

Again, at what conditions? In conditions of equality, the answer is quite obvious: if I give you an item for free, do you prefer to keep it forever or to borrow it? Also, who said that all music is only one product? I might prefer to own my favorite record, and at the same time want to just stream the playlist of the month, as confirmed by another question:

76% use streaming to discover music that is new to them, before they decide whether or not to buy

It gets worse.

86% feel that ownership gives them security that their files will not disappear

Fear. An empowering tool for the corporation marketing team. Fear always originates from ignorance, and Emusic fueled this feeling for its own benefit. Emusic has an hybrid business model: it are able to sell music at discounted price because the charge a subscription fee on top of that. The downside is that if you cancel your subscription, you lose all the files you paid for. I don’t want to question their lock-in mechanism right now. I just want to point out that, as a fact, the music hosted online has much less probability to “disappear” that the one hosted on a private hard drive. Hard disks get old and die. That’s why we have back-up, cloud services, “lockers”, etc.. Streaming services are nothing more that a cloud for music, thus much more secure than downloads.

74% will stream music for free, but wouldn’t pay to stream

…And in fact, most streaming services switched to a freemium model, but it hard to see how is this relevant for the streaming vs downloading race.

Only 13% pay to stream music online; 84% of consumers who pay to stream also purchase digital music files

This answer is useless unless we know how many people download music. Maybe people just rip their CDs. Even better, how many people actually pay for downloads? The question ignores the role of illegal downloads. About those 84% of people who pay for both services, of course these can come from all sorts of situations: they can be Emusic users, who by definition both pay for downloads and streams, or simply people who happen to like music not available for streaming.

79% do not think they will ever give up owning music and just stream it online

Nobody ever made this case in the real world. It’s like imagining an evil dictator ruling the world and banning property. Note that “owning music” is a larger concept than “downloading music”, which in turn is a larger concept than “downloading music for money”. The least relevant result of the survey.

39% will store digital music files they own in a cloud-digital locker, so that they can listen to them anywhere

Let’s back down a little. First, they tell us 91% of people are scared to lose the music if they don’t “own” some sort of product. Then, we know 89% of them (almost the same) are also very concerned by the possibility of being limited in listening to their favorite songs. Nevertheless, a good amount of these people are happy to put their stuff on a server (for free? Too much to ask). Availability is traded with security that easily? So what about the streaming services that allow you to download songs for offline use? Why those can’t offset the security/limitation issue as well, in the opposite direction?

Only 14% will increase their use of paid streaming services

Maybe they should have also asked: who will increase paid downloads? That would be an interesting figure to compare.

The whole study is not available. The data excerpts are taken from Digital Music News and Billboard. Apparently, 1000 people were surveyed, including “some” Emusic users. I don’t even want to investigate sample size problems here, it’s already pretty bad.

Or maybe I just don’t understand surveys.

Digital players killed the stop button. It does not exist anymore. A little history and a little eulogy.

Do you remember what was the difference between stop and pause? I do:

• In the Vinyl Era, stop meant telling the needle to lift up and go back in rest position. Pause button did not even exist: you could lift the needle manually and hold it there while the record kept spinning.
• In the Tape Era, the pause button was born. Stop would kill the whole engine, releasing the tape so that you could safely eject it. Pause allowed you for the first time to keep the tape locked for few seconds, pausing the reproduction. It was great for recording and illegally copying mixtapes: you could perfectly synch two tapes without losing precious starting seconds.
• In the CD Era, the pause button kept its importance, as the first CD players started the song all over again if stopped. When the technology updated and the player “remembered” the point where you left off, pause button started its decline. You could still save those couple seconds needed to start spinning the CD, but the advantage was offset by the need to save battery if you had a portable device, a “discman”.
• In the Streaming Era, stop and pause do exactly the same thing. The first mp3 players kept both buttons for the sake of familiarity, but the strive for mini-devices and the iPod revolutionary design decided that the stop button was a waste of space. 

Why the stop button, one may ask? Why not the pause, which was clearly less used ? Why the old square had to go and not vice versa? The only answer I’ve found is that the enhanced speed of replay embedded in the “pause concept” was worth more to marketers than the centenary “stop” tradition. While CD players proceed toward extinction, the stop button will follow.

This is a symptom of something bigger that button space in a device. The concept of “stopping” the music is changing. The music never stops. Sound and noise are the standard. It’s always floating around the internet, you just have to grab it, pressing play in that cute embedded player. 

Internet is making music unstoppable. That’s pretty powerful. Now decide if you like it.