page_title: Steve Albini
section_title: Music streaming
hierarchical_section_title: Steve Albini / Views / Music streaming
caption_attribution_description: English: Ani DiFranco, RZA, and Steve Albini
context_page_description: Steven Albini is an American musician, record producer, audio engineer, and music journalist. He was a member of Big Black, Rapeman, and Flour, and is a member of Shellac. He is the founder, owner and principal engineer of Electrical Audio, a recording studio complex in Chicago. In 2018, Albini estimated that he had worked on several thousand albums during his career.
  Albini is also known for his outspoken and controversial views on the music industry, having stated repeatedly that it financially exploits artists and homogenizes their sound. Nearly alone among well-known producers and musicians, Albini refuses to take ongoing royalties from album sales, feeling that a producer's job is to record the music to the band's desires, and that paying a producer as if they had contributed artistically to an album is unethical.
context_section_description: Albini was asked about file sharing in June 2014 and he clarified that, while he does not believe that the technological development is the "best thing" for the music industry, he does not identify with the music industry. He considers "the community, the band, the musician" as his peers, and is pleased that musicians can "get their music out to the world at no cost instantly".
  As part of the Face the Music speech, Albini noted that both the corporate and independent industry models had been damaged by internet file sharing; however, he praised the spread of free music as being a "fantastic development," which allowed previously ignored music and bands to find an audience (citing the protopunk band Death as one example); the use of the internet as a distribution channel for music to be heard worldwide; and the increasing affordability of recording equipment, all of which allow bands to circumvent the traditional recording industry. Albini also argued that the increased availability of recorded music stimulates demand for live music, thereby boosting bands' income.
  Albini critiqued Jay Z's subscription-only, lossless audio streaming service Tidal in an April 2015 interview with Vulture.com, arguing that streaming services would eventually be usurped by a more convenient technology, that "if you want your music to play at the push of a button, convenience is going to trump sound quality 100 percent of the time", and that audiophiles would prefer vinyl to streaming. He made the point that the internet has a history "of breaking limitations placed on its content" by making paid-for products freely available.
caption: Steve Albini on right, with Ani DiFranco and RZA at The New Yorker festival in September 2005
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