Episode 100: Technology Bytes…Streaming Music

This is Technology Bytes, episode 100 for February 2nd, 2025.

Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.

Enjoy, and here we go.

So this week I was struggling to figure out what technology to talk about.

I mean, I use it all the time.

Sometimes it’s hard to know what to talk about because I use it all the time.

And so it’s like, well, that’s nothing new.

I do that all the time.

And then you realize, well, maybe there is something there to talk about.

And that’s kind of where this week’s episode comes from.

I was going to talk about streaming music, not I was, I am going to talk about streaming music.

I have used, and I only use one streaming music service.

And it will be of a surprise to exactly no one that that is Apple music.

Um, if you don’t know that about me by now, uh, maybe it did surprise you.

I don’t know.

I wonder if I might talk about Spotify at some point, but I’ve never used it.

I don’t really have a comparison.

There’ve been some things in the news as of late of what streaming music services paid the artists and whether it’s enough and the one thing that I keep hearing, and so I guess I will talk about Spotify for just a brief minute.

Is that Spotify is generating music through artificial intelligence.

So they don’t have to pay anybody.

And so many think that that is bad and, and wrong.

Well, if artificial, you know, I kind of agree with them, but if artificial intelligence can make music that people want to listen to and a company doesn’t have to pay an artist to play similar music, I don’t know, I guess that’s their prerogative, but if I can’t tell the difference between music that a person created and music that a machine created, I don’t know, maybe the person needs to be better, but I think what I’m hearing a bit is there’s good music that people created in a given Spotify playlist, and then there’s bad music that machines created in that same playlist, apparently in the same genre.

So overall at the moment, because of the ability of machine created music, it’s probably a bad idea.

And in the end, if you’re just cheaping out because you don’t want to pay good artists for good music, well, that’s another problem for another day.

So let me talk about album music for a moment.

So I’m not a huge music guy, but I do like music and I just go back in history a little bit.

Um, most of the music I listened to growing up, if it wasn’t from church and hymnals and my mom playing the piano, then it was music that my older brothers had acquired some way, purchased or whatever, most often in the form of records and we had a record player.

And, and so that is the music that I listened to when I, um, was in high school and I finally got a job and I had some money, then I purchased some of my own music and that was on cassette tape.

And it was a mix.

I, I really enjoyed country music, so I had quite a bit of that.

I enjoyed Christian music, so I had that and maybe a little bit of pop mixed in there somewhere if, if it happened.

Um, I don’t remember making like mixed tapes that didn’t seem to be something I did a lot, but I do know that I had the capability, I had a dual cassette tape deck, so I could do that if I wanted to, but in college, my first year of college, I, I spent more money cause I had more money, I had a really good summer job on music.

And I think I had three cases that hold, held like 48 tapes each or something like that, that I carried around in my car and put in my own sound system and would play the music that I enjoyed.

Um, I don’t have those tapes anymore.

And the reason that I don’t, or the CDs that I purchased later in my life is because of Apple music.

For a long time, even after Apple music came on the scene, I had all the physical copies of my music.

And I never used them because I ripped all that music to my computer and put it on my iPods.

So I used Apple music in the form of iPods long before Apple music ever showed up.

But once the streaming of music happened and Apple music came out with their music service, I immediately signed up and they have the family plan.

And so all my family has it as well.

And it gives us access to every type genre, quantity of music, pretty much that we would want to listen to.

And I listened to all kinds of music.

Sometimes I will go back and listen to music that I remember my mother listening to when I was growing up or my grandmother listening to.

And it’s available.

Sometimes I listen to music that my older brothers listen to because it brings back some good memories.

Sometimes I listen to music from my high school, late high school and early college days.

And most often I listen to current music in two forms.

I most often am listening to Christian music and second to that, I listen to country music.

And so those are really what I listen to.

Apple music has given me the ability to listen to all of that whenever I want, almost wherever I want.

And it’s been very fun to have that service at my fingertips.

So at its inception, Apple music gave a user the ability to combine their music with Apple music’s library.

And even if Apple music didn’t have the music that you listen to.

So for instance, um, my mother recorded three records, um, three albums as a record, one song and an album is a bunch of songs.

We’ll call it albums.

And that music is not available on Apple music.

You, you won’t find that, but I have it and I want to stream it on occasion, either for my listening enjoyment or to share with others, my mom’s awesome talent, and now that she has passed, it’s even more precious to me.

But the cool thing is that I’m able to load that up in the.

Basically kind of like the Apple music cloud, so I can stream my personal music that either I paid for or was created by someone that I know, like my mom and still have it in my Apple music, quote unquote library.

So it’s in my library, but an Apple music and allows me to stream.

So overall I’m really enjoy using Apple music.

I enjoy using streaming music and it has been something that I’ve used kind of from the day it came out.

Well, that is all I have for today.

As always, if you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybitesatmerigfamily.com.

That’s B-Y-T-E-S at M-E-A-R-I-G family.com.

As always, I want to thank you for listening to the technology bites microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.

Joel Mearig @technologybytes