Graphic by Bryce Owen ’17 – Many students use various streaming services to listen to music.

By Sam Romero ’17
THE ROUNDUP

In this day and age, music has never been so accessible to the world, and people get their music from a variety of music streaming services, many for free.

From iTunes, Spotify and Pandora, to Tidal, everyone has their favorites.

Brendan Burg ’17 said that he uses iTunes the most rather than streaming services.

“I like it because it has most of the big name artists and I think Apple is super trustworthy,” Burg said.

iTunes is one of the first music services and revolutionized how people listen to and buy music.

“I’ve been using it since my iPod shuffle in 5th grade,” Burg said.

Not all agree with Burg that iTunes is the best way to listen to music and some prefer Spotify.
“It is a much more cost efficient music device compared to iTunes,” said Ryan Desanto ’17.
Desanto said he has been using Spotify to listen to music for over a year.
“The best feature of Spotify is that you can track the music that your friends listen to and find music that you otherwise would not have discovered,” Desanto said.
Burg said he keeps listening to iTunes because you can keep adding songs.
“You have a massive collection of new stuff, but also some throwback jams when you’re in the mood,” Burg said.

Mr. Austin Pidgeon ’08 said he prefers to not use music services but collects vinyls instead.

“Vinyl has put me in touch with a lot of older artists and albums I would not otherwise have experimented with,” Mr. Pidgeon said.

Although Mr. Pidgeon uses records, he said he also has Spotify to discover new artists he might like.

A new music service called Tidal is giving more money to the actual artist instead of keeping it all for the service.

“Our artist-owners developed our model so that TIDAL pays the highest ratio of royalties vs. revenues to music creators of any streaming service,” according to the Tidal website.

According to Tidal, the problem with these music services is that most of the artists do not get the royalties they deserve.