Pandora Earrings

Rise of streaming signals a sea change in music SANTA BARBARA, Calif.

When pandora charms men Sonos co founder and chief executive John MacFarlane sketched out a design on a piece of paper 13 years ago for a digital speaker system that would make music as pervasive in homes as electric lights or running water, early adopters in Canada were downloading digital music but many people were still buying CDs. It would be another year before Future Shop would add online digital music sales. The digital music revolution was underway but it is only now that MacFarlane's vision of streaming music by subscription is moving from the margins to mainstream. What has changed?After years of holding to its online sales model for music, Apple has added flat rate music streaming on demand, and early adopters of the service are just coming to the end of their initial free, three month trial. While the company is entering a field that already price of pandora charm bracelet has a number of participants, MacFarlane likens it to the early days of MP3 music. It wasn't until Apple entered the fray that the frenzy really began. Apple, says MacFarlane, is a company that can change habits. "In my tenure in the streaming music space more has happened in the last 14 weeks than in the last 14 years and really the prime mover and the catalyst has been Apple Music," he said at a recent media preview of the company's new flagship Play: 5 speaker and Trueplay speaker tuning software. "I think this is a once in a lifetime moment in music," he said. They first called it Rincon Networks, after a well known surfing spot near Santa Barbara, and their office was above a Mexican restaurant there. The company launched in 2002, and in 2005 their first products shipped. But the recording industry cheap pandora charms on sale moved at a glacial pace, loathe to give up the lucrative CD model while it waged war on illegal downloaders. There was no way, though, that the musical genie was going to be stuffed back in the bottle and music listeners started proving that given a convenient and affordable option, they were willing to pay for music online. For some time in Canada options were particularly limited. Licensing restrictions meant that the pioneering Swedish music streaming service Spotify wasn't available for Canadians for years after it was first released and some services, like Pandora Radio, have never made it to Canada. There was a dearth of online music services here. However, eventually Canadians started to gain access to more services, with Rdio perhaps the first commercial service that offered ad free listening, as the Spotify model does, for customers who pay a monthly fee. And it's still possible to get music free through ad supported free service from Rdio, Spotify, Songza, YouTube, and other online sources. Apple Music delivers access to more than 30 million songs for $9.99 a month, or $14.99 for families, delivering music on demand as well as curated radio. Mike Darlington, co founder and CEO of Monstercat, an independent music record label based in Vancouver, said he is seeing streaming revenue climb. "In the last two or three years our streaming revenue is starting to overtake our iTunes revenue," he said. "They're almost equal. "I'd give it another two to three years for streaming revenues to outpace digital sales revenues from sources like Amazon and iTunes." Darlington said the difficulty has been in getting people to pay for something they have been accustomed to getting for free. "It's about developing the mentality that you should be paying a monthly subscription fee," he said. "It's difficult for people to stomach because they spent so many years pirating, or maybe only buying an album every couple of months." However, some former movie pirates have been persuaded to pay a monthly fee for Netflix movies and TV shows. And Darlington said services like Apple Music and Spotify are "like the new Netflix." "Eventually everyone will have that subscription. It's slowly getting better. Hopefully over the next couple of years more and more people will start to pay for their subscriptions. "It's a growing industry, I'm very excited about it." MacFarlane sees Apple Music as the catalyst that will transform music in the home just as the iPod took digital music from somewhat unknown to ubiquitous. In Canada, streaming music has been rolled into telecom services, most recently with Rogers offering Spotify Premium accounts under its Share Everything wireless plans. The growth in streaming music is good news for Sonos, a company that is staking its small but carefully crafted and designed selection of wireless audio speakers and associated products on a model in which consumers "listen out loud." It's also good news for Canadian music sterling silver pandora bracelet fans who now have a much wider range of listening options. While Spotify didn't make it to Canada until 2014, some six years after its launch, Google Play Music, Apple Music, Deezer and others weren't faced with the similar lag time as music labels started to adapt to the new global online world. "In 2002, if you just walked into a label there was no global licence that could be had," said MacFarlane. "There was no global licence for a label, they were all local." So streaming services would have to get licensing deals for each label in every country, an onerous undertaking that effectively left Canada and many other countries without a lot of streaming options.

"If you looked at their original structure, in 2002 compared to now, it has completely changed," said MacFarlane. "In fact, labels are pushing the streaming companies to go globally.".