At work, we listen to a lot of music from the internet:  either a paid streaming service, or YouTube.  At home, I listen to lots of music from my harddrive, because I feel that buying music is important.  In addition to streaming services making very little money for musicians, I’ve always been leery of them because I’ve never had that much luck finding techno jams on them.

So, I decided to test it.  I maintain a list of music that I need to obtain.  I ran through the first 200 singles from that through the search function of a streaming music service*, and counted how many tracks the service could play for me.  The results:

Thor:  88 (44%)

Internet:  112  (56%)

Advantage internet – but not by much.  And only being able to hear 56% of the music that I want is not that great –  so I certainly won’t forgo buying music, for now.  I could, in theory, cut my music budget by streaming half of my tunes – but that is not really what I am after.

In defense of the internet, some tracks on that list are vinyl only and are not available anywhere in digital.  I was also surprised that some very rep-heavy techno labels (L.I.E.S., for example) have their catalogs up.  Once someone make a plugin that allows for DJing via streams, we’ll see a very interesting debate, for serious.

*names changed to protect the innocent