So Adele's new album came out Friday. "25," her first record in four years, and by Friday afternoon my Twitter feed was just people posting screenshots of "Hello" lyrics and arguing about whether it's better than "21." Fine, whatever, it's a good record, I bought it. But the part that's actually stuck in my head all weekend isn't the music. It's that you can't stream it.
Not on Spotify. Not on Apple Music, not on Tidal, nowhere. If you want to hear "25" right now your options are: buy the CD, buy it on iTunes for $11.99, or I guess borrow it from someone who did one of those two things. Her label and management have said flat out this was deliberate: they pulled it from streaming on purpose, same move Taylor Swift made with "1989" last year, except Adele didn't even bother putting it up first and yanking it later. It just never showed up.
And I keep going back and forth on how I feel about that.
Part of me, the part that has a Spotify Premium subscription and hasn't manually bought an mp3 in probably two years, finds it mildly annoying. I'm used to new music just appearing in my library. I click a thing, it plays, I don't think about it again. Having to actually go open iTunes (which, let's be honest, is still a miserable piece of software to navigate in 2015) and pay actual money for one specific album felt like a weird throwback. Like being asked to fax something.
But the other part of me, and this is the part I didn't expect, kind of respects it. Streaming payouts are genuinely bad if you're not one of the top few hundred artists on the planet. Everybody in tech loves to talk about how streaming is "the future of music" like it's some inevitable law of physics, and maybe it is eventually, but right now today the economics of it are rough for anyone whose fanbase isn't the size of Adele's. She's basically the one artist alive who can say "no, not yet" and have it not matter at all commercially, because tens of millions of people will just go pay $11.99 anyway. That's not a small thing. It's a pretty explicit statement that streaming, as it exists right now, isn't good enough yet to trust with your biggest release.
I don't think this is the death of streaming or whatever hot take somebody is definitely going to write this week. I think it's just Adele being in the one position in the entire music industry where she gets to opt out and the numbers still work out fine for her. Most artists don't have that luxury and never will.
What I actually want to talk about, though, is the friction. I hadn't bought a whole album outright in ages, and going through the process again this weekend reminded me how much smoother streaming has made everything feel, even when the underlying deal for musicians is worse. I didn't even open the actual iTunes Store app at first, I tried searching from the Music app on my phone and it took me a second to remember that's not how you buy things anymore, you have to go find the Store tab. Small thing. But it's the kind of small thing that tells you which experience Apple's actually designed for these days, and it isn't the one where you own the file.
Anyway. I bought the deluxe version, mostly out of guilt for pirating so much music between about 2003 and 2009, and "When We Were Young" has been stuck in my head since Saturday morning, which is annoying because I have a deadline for a freelance thing due Tuesday and instead I've spent two days thinking about music industry economics instead of writing actual invoiceable words. Worth it, probably. Ask me again Tuesday night.
If you're on the fence about buying it versus waiting for it to eventually show up on streaming (it will, someday, everything always does), I'd just say don't wait. Four bucks less than most concert tickets cost for parking, and you get to actually own the thing.