I have an idea for a music streaming service that I think would be better than the ones that exist now. Imagine a service like bandcamp.com (bc lets literally anyone upload and sell their music, and it's very successful with the indie scene), but with a library as extensive as Spotify or Google Play. Now, imagine that whenever you buy an album from this service, you also get access to stream every other song in their library for a month, like an added bonus. So not only do you get to permanently own the album you bought, you also get access to everything else, with the knowledge that your time will run out after 30 days. So you buy another album! And you get another month of streaming! 1) Anyone would be able to distribute their music on this platform. Taylor Swift and Kanye West are playing on the same stage as that kid from your highschool who just released his mixtape on facebook. 2) No "subscriptions." You buy an album, you also buy a month of streaming. You can buy two albums at once, and you get two months of streaming. Once your time runs out, you still have the albums you purchased. Albums today cost about ~$10, the same amount as a month of Spotify Premium. 3) Support Artists. When you actually buy an album, a larger share of money goes to the artist than if the album had been streamed. Because you can stream everything, people might choose to buy albums from lesser-known artists and then stream more popular ones, if it's all the same to them. This makes the little artists happy. 4) You don't need a label to become a trending artist. This is probably why we'll never see this. Today, music labels do litterally nothing (OK, they have connections and fancy recording studios, but this is the 21st century and their bullshit will come to an end eventually) and get nearly all of the profits. On this service, anyone could upload their music and they'd receive the same share from their sales as anyone else. I don't know if enough people really care about music to buy into it though. I would sign up instantly if someone came out with a service like this, assuming they had useable apps to make it worthwhile. Most people today are fine with internet radio through Spotify or Pandora and would rather have their music chosen for them. They don't care about albums. tries not to sound pretentious
If it still gave you flac files like Bandcamp does, I'd say that that's strictly better than both bandcamp and spotify and would probably use it. The main thing for me is the selection of music available - Any artist that's on there should have their entire discography available and in flac. The second thing is price. I'm not going to pay $10 for an album anymore unless it's literally not available elsewhere. Otherwise, I'm just going to torrent things. ------ My music-related idea is something that keeps track of what music you have already, and tells you if you're missing any albums/eps/etc from an artist (particularly, new releases - but older ones too). I've been making a script that fetches a list from Musicbrainz and you tell it what releases you have, and it'll output which ones you're missing, but the way you tell it is setting a number in a database. It'd be nice if there was a program that did this for you instead.