One complaint that artists have about the availability of free access to their music is that this discourages people from buying their other content like physical CDs or online copies of music.  This is their main source of income and cutting into this can seriously hurt them.  While for big time artists who receive the highest amount of streams the royalties for the song use off set the lost revenue, the smaller artists take more of a hit.  Their lower stream count can not make up for the dent to their revenue from the accessibility of their music for free.  According to Nguyen’s study, the presence of an online streaming services lowered the probability of an individual to buy a physical copy of the same piece of music (Nguyen).  the study also admits that this only accounts of for large artists, and that smaller artists can yield very different results.  This could mean that the revenue from royalties does not actually offset the lost income from music copies.

          An argument for the online music streaming service is that it discourages music piracy.  Piracy, or illegally downloading music or other content from he internet, is a much more serious problem and cause of lost revenue to artists.  When somebody illegally downloads a song off the internet, the artist gets absolutely nothing from it effectively stealing the music from them.  Not to mention this activity is illegal and can cause the music listener to get into big trouble.  This is part of the reason why Spotify was created and a major attribute of its success.  Daniel Ek wanted system to counter act the piracy of music (Swanson).  He made the streaming service to give people the option for a free and legal way to listen to their favorite artists while still being able to support them in the process.  While some would argue that the service is still unfair to artists, it is still a better deal than people just stealing the music from them without any reimbursement.  In Gary Sinclair’s article he states that “The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reports that piracy has led to a 31 per cent decline in recorded music sales between 2004 and 2010 and a potential retail loss of 240 billion euros from 2008 to 2015 in Europe” (Sinclair).  This loss of revenue is huge and many people including some artists have praised the service for giving people a better option than resorting to illegal activities.  With sales being hurt so much from piracy, giving people other options that atlas give something back to the artists is still a better option than leaving creators’ content out to be stolen.  We can see how much a problem piracy actually is by looking at Weijters’ article where it says that with the increase of internet use, the amount of piracy that happens also increases (Weijters).  It seems that each new generation becomes more likely to pirate music, cutting into legal sales even more.  According to this same article, “Results show that consumers of all ages clearly and consistently prefer legal and ethical options if available, but favor different ways of making this economically viable. Youngsters and young adults are more open to advertising, while middle-aged adults are more often willing to pay for advertising-free platforms”.  This hints that the streaming businesses really do discourage artists from getting their music stolen from them.

          Since the rise of online music streaming, there has been a rise in how much data there is on listening habits of consumers.  This is due to online sources ability to easily record how many times consumers access a certain product as well as what other products they consume.  The article “Sony, Spotify and the Statistical Symphony” argues that through this there is enough data to predict how a particular group of consumers will react to a product.  In other words based on a consumer’s past likes and interests one can reasonably assume whether they will be more inclined to consume a new product even before it is released.  Artists could possibly use this to gauge how an upcoming album might do in terms of bringing in revenue or what audience they should be focusing their efforts on catering to.  This is an interesting point that is seldom  looked at when discussing the value of online streaming.    I seems to greatly raise the benefit of having these services because of greater accuracy of results for specific songs opposed to album CD sales.  If possible this could be very beneficial artists to look into and while it will definitely not guarantee favorable results and success due to music being about people’s personal taste, it could very well be a useful tool to look at before dropping new content.

          Another large benefit that is often overlooked about the online streaming services is how they are built in advertisement for the music available.  This is especially true for the smaller artists as someone stumbling across their songs on the website can help spread their work across friend groups.  A person would be more willing to listen to new music for the first time if it available to them for free over having to risk paying for a song they may not like.  This takes out any risk or potential loss from the consumer’s standpoint and should increase the likelihood of new songs being heard.  Because of the difference in the amount of listeners between large and small artists, the increase of just a handful of listeners would benefit a smaller artists more.  Some of these services also actively help to raise awareness of songs that an individual might not listen to on the regular.  For example, Spotify gives the option for listeners to follow one of it’s own playlists called Discover Weekly.  This playlist looks at the songs that a person has been listening to and finds new ones from varying artists that are similar to artists that person already likes.  This benefits the people by exposing them to new music that is similar to music they like, helping to broaden their music libraries if they find any new music that suites their tastes.  This playlist updates every week so the types of songs on the list can change, helping spread awareness of even more songs to the consumers.  This kind of advertisement benefits the artists much more than conventional forms. Instead of the artist or band paying to make posters or buying ad time on the T.V. or radio, they can actually get paid while new listeners join the ranks of their fans each week.  This system is even more efficient than older methods because instead of just trying to inform everyone and hoping someone who would be interested, the people who would be most likely to enjoy that particular music are targeted based on their previous listening partners increasing the probability of new listeners for a specific artist.  This has great implications than just adding more streams for an artist’s work available on the streaming service.  It also can drive up revenue for their other sources of income as well.  More people listening to their music means that more people are likely to buy their music on CD’s, purchase apparel, attend lives shows, and even spread the news of their music with their circles.

          One source makes a very interesting claim about the survivability of the older local retail stores in this time of internet dominance.  In Kjus’ article it states that certain stores can maintain their business through evolving to compete in the changed world. This source tells how despite the huge uprising of online competitors, local retailers in the music business are still surviving.  This article describes how some smaller distributors are keeping themselves alive by changing and being a reliable source from both the artists and the consumers in the music industry.  The information in this source is unique from most of the other ones out there because while the others explain how online services are rising to control the market, this one relays that the older forms of distribution are not ready to go away just yet.  The physical distributors offer something that more dedicated listeners value and that online sources struggle to provide, customer interaction.  This is not as important for everyone, it mainly caters to tighter local communities that form around music have success in this way.

          Overall it seems that the presence of the online music streaming services is more beneficial to the consumers than any other party involved.  The availability of all those songs at little to no charge is hard to pass up.  Smaller artists seem to receive the hardest time competing when it comes to these online resources with their amount of streams competing with their other sources of revenue while big time artists seem to thrive under the online music streams.  These services provide many benefits such as easier access to music for consumers, discouragement of piracy to potential criminals, and built in advertisement for the artists featured on theses sites but they also could prove to be harmful and unfair to those that make these things possible, the artists.