What can you just not find on any of the streaming services? For me the most common ones are from movie soundtracks.
I search for George Clinton's version of Erotic City once every two months or so. It was originally recorded for the movie PCU, which is about the only good thing that came from it.
Another one that for years I couldn't find has been brought into the digital age.
YouTube is a streaming service. You found both those songs there.
What you seem to be asking is "are there songs you want to hear that aren't available on popular streaming services like Spotify?"
I kind of liked PCU.
In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :
And it too, is a shockingly difficult thing to find in the digital age.
I found that version of Ballroom blitz on I-tunes several years ago. (no wayne and garth voice over though) Not sure if its still there.
I haven't searched it out other than Vimeo, youtube, google video, and Amazon Prime music, so it may be available elsewhere, but an obscure Canadian bluegrass band Northern Lights - specifically their covers of Sailing to Philadelphia and King of California.
My favorite Christmas song ever is only found in one place on the internet from what I can tell: Soundcloud. Not a great streaming service if you want it to play you lots of music, but it is actually out there.
There's a bunch of older stuff that never made it, though. Obscure vinyl jazz as an example - the recording of my high school stage band that was pressed in the late 70s. Or small stuff that was only released on cassette and is just a bit too old for the YouTube generation. Local bands that were gone by the time streaming appeared, like Ottawa's Hammerheads.
As with books, there's a hole in what's available. It's probably worse with books because people aren't taking copies of A Certain Sound and putting it on YouTube - but still. It's easy to say the internet contains all human knowledge but any reference librarian will just laugh.
You don't like PCU? Did it not blow you where the Pampers is?
In reply to Appleseed :
I watch it periodically for nostalgia reasons, but liking it and acknowledging that it is not that great are not incompatible concepts.
The streaming services are much like video streaming. It's not just about what they want, it's what they can get. Netflix won't be streaming any Disney, and Prime won't be streaming much Marvel Universe.
They're constantly looking at what they want and weighing it against what P-funk wants to charge for them to have it (or if they'll allow it at all) versus how many people will actually listen to it. Cost/benefit.
I have several playlists on Spotify that I uploaded from my iTunes back in the day. On any given month, different titles are grayed out in the Spotify list because they don't currently have the rights to play them.
I use and enjoy Spotify (and YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud...), but this is why when a piece of music is important to me, I buy it, preferably on CD (Though Bandcamp's offering of direct FLAC download is nice).
The only way it's not going to wind up "greyed out" at some point is if I have it myself.
Whatever your feelings on the file sharing stuff, that was the last time we benefited from the fundamental ease of duplication digital media provides. It's important to me that artists get paid, but it's aggravating that some of the pursuits of that goal mean that the default becomes "unavailable at any price." Never mind that it takes an awful lot of streaming plays to pay as much as a single CD purchase.
Seriously; we go from needing to find something at a record store to only needing to find it on a machine connected to the Internet, and yet here we are on a thread talking about that move making it harder to find things.
Shutting up before I wade into non-fungible tokens...
I buy CDs. I don't subscribe to a streaming service. I guess that says everything I need to say about that particular topic :)
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Same here, Not hipster enough for vinyl anymore 
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One of the fairly well known artists who more or less disappeared from current distribution is Bob Seger. I don't think a lot of his back catalog is available as new CDs (although they're obviously not hard to find) and IIRC he is/wasn't really present on streaming services either.
Seriously; we go from needing to find something at a record store to only needing to find it on a machine connected to the Internet, and yet here we are on a thread talking about that move making it harder to find things.
I don't agree with that completely. Yes, there are things that you can't find now on streaming services. But, for a minute, lets say we never went digital with music beginning in the late nineties. Let's say we stayed with CDs and record stores. How hard would it be to find any of the stuff mentioned in this thread on CD in a retail shop? Ballroom Blitz - maybe, but only in a used CD store (we'll assume they exist in our alternate world.) The soundtrack to PCU? Pretty unlikely. I doubt many physical copies were sold when the movie was fresh, so finding one used wouldn't be a lot better than lotto odds. Obscure jazz pressings, your high school band vinyl - same chance as now because they stopped pressing those records WAY before we went digital. Then and now, good luck finding those anywhere but an estate sale.
I'd actually take the bet that thanks to YouTube, more small-market and non-hit music is still available to hear now and easier to find than it was in the midst of the CD boom. Physical media requires investment and physical process to make it available. Stuff on YouTube gets uploaded because someone liked it enough to record it on their phone and post it, no monetary investment required.
Granted, we lose songs all the time. But I think it happens less now than before. All those physical copies of older music exist in the same numbers they ever did. If you want one of those real, hard copies of your own, guess what the best way to find it is? Yep, the internet, via ebay or one of the record trader sites out there.
Napster had such potential if they hadn't allowed for theft and had artist (and yes labels even) been compensated.
Download any album available for $12-18 (depending on the cost that's set) and if you agree to seed it and someone pays and it downloads from your seed, you get a .25 credit.
Obscurity would've never been lost. There could've been other massive benefits with regards to distribution of live shows once verified for sound quality.
ultraclyde (Forum Supporter) said:Seriously; we go from needing to find something at a record store to only needing to find it on a machine connected to the Internet, and yet here we are on a thread talking about that move making it harder to find things.
I don't agree with that completely. Yes, there are things that you can't find now on streaming services. But, for a minute, lets say we never went digital with music beginning in the late nineties. Let's say we stayed with CDs and record stores. How hard would it be to find any of the stuff mentioned in this thread on CD in a retail shop? Ballroom Blitz - maybe, but only in a used CD store (we'll assume they exist in our alternate world.) The soundtrack to PCU? Pretty unlikely. I doubt many physical copies were sold when the movie was fresh, so finding one used wouldn't be a lot better than lotto odds. Obscure jazz pressings, your high school band vinyl - same chance as now because they stopped pressing those records WAY before we went digital. Then and now, good luck finding those anywhere but an estate sale.
I'd actually take the bet that thanks to YouTube, more small-market and non-hit music is still available to hear now and easier to find than it was in the midst of the CD boom. Physical media requires investment and physical process to make it available. Stuff on YouTube gets uploaded because someone liked it enough to record it on their phone and post it, no monetary investment required.
Granted, we lose songs all the time. But I think it happens less now than before. All those physical copies of older music exist in the same numbers they ever did. If you want one of those real, hard copies of your own, guess what the best way to find it is? Yep, the internet, via ebay or one of the record trader sites out there.
Oh yeah, obscure stuff has always been obscure by definition. But with people shifting to digital distribution instead of physical, it becomes much easier for them to disappear as well as appear in the first place. You're not going to pick up a hard drive full of music at an estate sale, but my high school still had a couple of those records when I went there. Digital is great at the long tail, but you have to get the music to digital in the first place. The jump from analog to digital was effectively a mass extinction event as people just plain stopped using those old media.
What killed Napster wasn't the lawsuits. It was iTunes. That established the price of a track at $0.99, which was low enough that it was so much easier to just buy the bloody thing instead of doing through the searching/download/mom you picked up the phone!/hope it's the real track rigamarole.
BoxheadTim (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to Keith Tanner :
Same here, Not hipster enough for vinyl anymore
One of the fairly well known artists who more or less disappeared from current distribution is Bob Seger. I don't think a lot of his back catalog is available as new CDs (although they're obviously not hard to find) and IIRC he is/wasn't really present on streaming services either.
Seger actually has a fairly interesting story on why he wasn't on streaming services. Most of his catalog is on (I think) Spotify now, though.
ultraclyde (Forum Supporter) said:he soundtrack to PCU? Pretty unlikely. I doubt many physical copies were sold when the movie was fresh, so finding one used wouldn't be a lot better than lotto odds.
Two on Amazon. $40ish each. I love that song, but not that much.
https://smile.amazon.com/PCU-Motion-Picture-Steve-Vai/dp/B000005LBZ
This band has pretty much disappeared without a trace too, other than a few used CDs for sale these videos are the only sign of them that remains online. I know the person singing in the first video/playing keyboard in the second one (she has a different band now) but otherwise I'd never have heard of them.
I've had this ping ponging around in my head, and I have been convinced by ultracylde. I don't think digital distribution put all that many songs into obscurity. I think it's the other way around - the digital long tail has kept more obscure songs accessible.
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