Streaming will never stop downloading
Far from being a cure for the industry's woes, substituting streams for downloads wastes bandwidth, reduces privacy and slows innovation — Someone convinced the record and movie and TV industries that there is way of letting someone listen to audio …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years after the record industry's crackdown on personal-use copying made owning digital files legally fraught, the industry has apparently been sold on a different fix: substituting streams for downloads. The Guardian's column is a counter-argument arriving exactly as that pitch lands, claiming the swap costs consumers bandwidth efficiency and privacy while handing platforms control over playback.
It also reads as a rebuttal to the optimism of an April 2008 A VC post that something important was on the horizon in the music business — the streaming-access model this column now warns against. With no pickup elsewhere and no recorded reaction, the piece stands as a lone dissent at the moment the record, movie and TV industries were converging on rental access.
First-order effects
- The record, movie and TV industries face a concrete fork the column forces open: sell files consumers keep, or license streams they control — and per the column, they have already been convinced of the latter.
- Consumers holding downloaded libraries keep offline playback either way, but any shift to stream substitution turns owned purchases into access that evaporates if a licence lapses — the core trade-off the column flags.
Second-order effects
- Network carriers inherit the cost side of the argument: repeatedly streaming the same catalogue burns more bandwidth than a one-time download, so the industry's chosen model externalises traffic onto ISPs.
- Device and software makers built around local playback — portable players, syncing tools — lose their reason to exist if catalogues move server-side, concentrating the customer relationship in the streaming operator.
Third-order effects
- If access-rental displaces ownership across music, film and TV together, industry revenue migrates from unit sales to recurring subscriptions, with pricing power held by whoever operates the service rather than whoever makes the content.
- Privacy norms get rewritten in the process: once listening and viewing happen on servers, consumption data becomes a rights-holder asset, extending the surveillance logic of the 2007 personal-use enforcement into everyday use.
The trend: Media distribution is shifting from owned files toward rented access, and the argument over whether that trade serves consumers or just rights holders is only beginning.