“There was a large concern about the album being sort-of released via grainy video and leaked out online,” said Wesley Schultz, the band’s lead singer.

So the band decided to lock up people’s phones — not take them away, exactly, but just lock them up for the show. Like a timeout.

At the concerts, The Lumineers started working with a company called Yondr, which created a locking pouch for people to hold their phones in during performances. Audience members keep the pouches with them, and they stay sealed as long as they’re inside an established “phone-free zone,” but unlock outside of that.

Schultz said he was surprised at how well it works.

“If you can set it up so that people can’t get to their phones as easily or are deterred, people actually really welcome that,” he said. “It’s just such a strong force of habit in our lives right now.”

Schultz has taken it a step further and adopted the mentality in his personal life: At his wedding, he and his wife asked guests to check their phones at the door.

“It wasn’t because of any sort of a, ‘I don’t want photos of anyone at the wedding’ — it was more, we wanted people to be present,” he said.

That’s become somewhat of a mantra for entertainers these days.

As Beyonce herself told fans at a recent show, “Y’all gotta put the camera phones down for one second and actually enjoy this moment.”

Adele, too: “Yeah, I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I’m really here in real life — you can enjoy it in real life.”

Smartphones may be ubiquitous, but there are still limits to common courtesy. Recently the movie theater chain AMC backed off a proposal to allow texting in cinemas after it garnered enormous public backlash.

Schultz thinks that sense of decency should extend to live music.

“I think of it like, if we had that same attitude and you went to see Hamilton, people would be totally up in arms about that,” Schultz said. “But for some reason it’s completely acceptable to do at shows.”

(That said, Hamilton isn’t immune to cellphone faux pas either. As The New York Times reported, the musical’s star Lin-Manuel Miranda once chastised a certain celebrity on Twitter for incessant texting. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone grabbed a phone away from one audience member in the middle of Shows for Days.)

In this environment, Yondr has found fans of its own in artists like Alicia Keys and comedians like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and Hannibal Buress.

It’s not just about cutting the distractions of glowing screens and, worse, ringing phones. For some, there’s also a concern of creative security.

According to a Washington Post article, Keys hired Yondr for a concert where she planned to premiere new songs from her first album since 2012’s Girl on Fire. Louis C.K. did the same when he was trying out a new set at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood.

A new patent granted to Apple — for infrared technology that could disable smartphone cameras remotely from the stage — might make those pouches obsolete one day. But the idea is the same.

Not everyone has reacted positively to the idea of a “phone-free zone,” however.

“Even at one of the shows, a guy brought in a knife with him — just, he usually carries a knife, I guess — and he tried to stab through the case,” Schultz said. “And it’s got steel, I think, woven into it. So his knife got stuck in the thing, and then when he had to leave, he had the embarrassing deal of having to tell the people that he tried to open it, and they had to pry his knife loose.”

Will Yondr, or methods like it, eventually become the norm in entertainment? Schultz thinks so: “Something tells me in a little while we’ll kinda look back and say, ‘We were a little out of control with our use of phones — we didn’t really know boundaries. We were sort of working it out.’ ”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“I’ve never done this, walk around and count them,” Muller says, as he begins counting a row of jukeboxes tucked under a shelf of records.

He walks through the add-on garage, porch, living room and foyer. So far, he’s counted 62 jukeboxes, just in his own house — plus 40 in stock at his store, and plenty more in storage elsewhere.

“I’ve been telling people we have over a hundred,” Muller says. “Now, I know it’s even way more than that.”

Most of these jukeboxes are part of his company, Jukeboxes Unlimited, which he’s owned since 1971. He guts many of them to salvage their parts for assisting with repairs. Others, he fixes up to sell, while still others — the nicer looking ones, especially those that light up — he rents for parties and dances.

And some, Muller simply falls in love with and keeps for himself, like his 1948 Seeburg M100A. It sits in the corner of his living room at home.

“This machine is 100 percent original, every single aspect of it: the original cartridge, the original needle and original old 78 rpm records,” he says before playing Frankie Lymon’s “Goody Goody.”

Back when he got his start in the 1970s in Los Angeles, there were a lot of guys like him in the jukebox business — but he set himself apart by selling to the stars. His famous clients include Steve Martin and Mick Fleetwood, and their notes and copies of checks still fill books and albums of his. He even used to go to the Playboy Mansion to repair a jukebox owned by Hugh Hefner.

Muller, now 72, has seen many of his competitors go away. The business has gotten less glamorous, but he keeps busy through his online store.

“I get so many emails. I get ’em from all over the world, and it’s the same thing. It’s like, ‘Can you tell me what gear goes with this gear?’ And you know, for me to just get back to them and say, ‘What jukebox are you even talking about?’ I just don’t have time,” he explains.

He drives 50 miles to visit one of those people who contacted him online — Aline DeGroote, in Anaheim, Calif. She has promised to give him some records if he can take her jukebox off her hands.

Muller doesn’t need more records. The add-on to his house is full of them; he has hundreds and thousands already. Many are duplicates, and most aren’t worth that much — but he’s excited about the records DeGroote is offering anyway.

“I don’t collect records: I amass records,” he explains as he drives to DeGroote’s home. “I don’t even know what we’re getting today. I’m sure I already have 20 copies of what she’s got, but it’s an addiction.”

DeGroote’s jukebox is from the early ’60s, and she’s had some trouble selling it. She tried Craigslist and thrift stores.

“When I first tried to sell the jukebox, people were like, ‘Well, does it play CDs?'” DeGroote says.

Her dad, who died five years ago, used to keep the jukebox in the pool room. She grew up listening to it. But now it’s broken, and she’s selling it to Muller for $75.

“I wanted it to go to someone who would appreciate it for what it is,” she explains. “It’s a jukebox that plays old music.”

When she pulls out seven boxes of records, Muller’s face lights up. There are at least 2,000. He sorts through the records, putting them in other boxes he brought himself — “banana boxes,” he calls them, since he picked them up at the local grocery store.

“A packed banana box is 400 records,” he explains. “Four hundred 45s in a banana box.”

As he sorts through them, he gets excited when he sees a record by The Fleetwoods. He begins to sing “Come Softly To Me,” and DeGroote joins in.

Muller says he could make decent money if he sold his collection of over 400,000 records. But he doesn’t plan to unless someone comes along with a huge offer, because the records aren’t for his business.

They’re for his collection. And eventually, he’ll give them to his son.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Filmed Entertainment Inc., which owns Columbia House, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday in a Manhattan court after more than two decades of declining revenues, according to a company statement.

Although Columbia House moved exclusively to DVDs in 2010, it could not stay afloat in an industry crowded with streaming services. The company’s annual revenues peaked in 1996 at $1.4 billion, but by 2014, revenues had dwindled to just $17 million.

Columbia House “started in 1955 as a way for the record label Columbia to sell vinyl records via mail order,” according to the A.V. Club, which adds that it “continually adapted to and changed with the times, as new formats such as 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs emerged and influenced how consumers listened to music.”

Columbia House once set the bar for the music-club subscription business model, becoming a household — or at least high school — name through its famous deal: piles of CDs and tapes for a penny.

But with giving away CDs nearly free, how exactly was Columbia House turning a profit?

“The phrase you want is ‘negative option,’ ” Piotr Orlov said, referencing the idea of hooking people with a good deal and then roping them into a contract. (Orlov is a contributing editor for NPR music and former Columbia House director of A&R and marketing between 1996 and 1999.)

“You had a contract that was over a short period of time — two, three or four years — you had to buy a number of titles under regular prices,” he said. “And these regular prices put CD store prices to shame. Like $19.99 [instead of] $11.99. It was an enormous markup.”

Orlov also said Columbia House signed multimillion-dollar contracts with companies such as Sony, Warner Music and others that allowed it to obtain the raw materials and produce its own CDs.

“[Columbia House] was partially owned by major music distributors. [It] would get the music parts — the art and the master tape — and manufacture it themselves.”

Columbia House, however, wasn’t the only one cashing in. Because the CDs came in the mail and customers could pay with cash or check, Orlov said the subscription process lent itself to what he called “low-grade mail fraud.”

“People would fill out a real address with fake names and get 12 free CDs,” he said. “The punch line to this joke is that everybody who worked at Columbia House had done this too [earlier in life]. It really was like an inside joke.”

For another NPR music denizen, Stephen Thompson, Columbia House also represented more than mere music.

“For generations of people, Columbia House was a huge rite of passage — your first foray into maybe wrecking your credit rating, or at least running afoul of an authority beyond your hometown. I was never a member myself, because my parents filled my head with horror stories, but I always look back on Columbia House as, like, Baby’s First Mail Fraud,” he said.

Its business model wasn’t perfect, Orlov said, but Columbia House was valuable in its time.

“What it did do was serve a purpose. If you didn’t have a record store, this was the closest you got to having a good music selection. It put in front of you the ability to buy CDs and send them to your house even if you lived in [the middle of nowhere].”

The FEI statement said the decline was “driven by the advent of digital media and resulting declines in the recorded music business and the home-entertainment segment of the film business.” While streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify surely cut into Columbia House’s profits, Orlov said the main reason for the company’s downfall is something else entirely.

“No one cares about owning CDs anymore,” he said.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A new report released today by the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship details what it repeatedly calls a “lack of transparency” in the music business. Titled “Transparency and Money Flows,” the 28-page report also gives recommendations that highlight the labyrinthine complexity of the current system.

The output of a year-long study, the report cites estimates “that anywhere from 20-50 percent of music payments don’t make it to their rightful owners.” Proposed fixes include better behind-the-scenes technologies, a “Creator’s Bill of Rights,” a “Fair Music” seal and education campaigns.

Those approximated percentages for music payouts lost in limbo are “based on multiple conversations with many different folks involved in payments,” acknowledges Allen Bargfrede, an associate professor at Berklee who spearheaded the report. “I personally believe the number is closer to 20%, especially in Europe and North America, but probably can be as high as 50% when you start to look at streaming payments in other languages that have different character sets.”

The reasons so much revenue might fail to trickle down are as baroquely varied as the services and royalty types that generate music income in the first place. Musicians (or anyone to whom they sell their rights) can earn fractions of pennies or thousands of dollars from streaming services, from licenses for films, TV or commercials and from whatever lawyers deem “public performances” of their works, all without anyone ever buying a CD or mp3. A growing layer of middlemen that collect the money and theoretically pass it on to the rights holders presents another opportunity for some of that revenue to lose its way.

One focus of the report is the so-called “black box,” a phrase that refers to where money ends up when, for instance, royalty revenue from a stream can’t be linked back to a songwriter.

Or take “breakage,” the difference between the advance a streaming service pays to a label and the royalties. If each streaming service were to pay each of the three major labels the $42.5 million advance for which Sony Music was eligible under a leaked Spotify contract published by The Verge this past spring, the potential pool of breakage revenues to labels would total hundreds of million dollars, the report says. Since the leak, the major labels have all said they share advance payments with artists.

Another source of funds for the black box stems from differences in international copyright law, which results in license fees being collected abroad for what’s known as the “performance” of U.S. sound recordings. According to the report, this revenue usually ends up with foreign sources, which pass the money along to local artists.

“The biggest message out of the report is just the lack of technology adoption for the back end of the music industry,” Berklee’s Bargfrede says. “Streaming is now becoming the dominant method of music consumption. We need to figure out how to work with the streaming services in a way that makes sense to creators.”

More specifically, the report calls for an industry-standard format for up-to-date information about the various types of music revenues, so artists could in effect monitor their royalties online the way consumers track their bank accounts. The authors also propose creating “a decentralized, feasible” database of global copyright ownership details.

The “Creator’s Bill of Rights” would lay out a set of foundational principles for artists, from the right to be fairly compensated to the right to know which parties are taking a cut out of their payments streams. The “Fair Music” certification would allow digital services and labels to show they meet certain standards, similar to fair-trade coffee or organic vegetables.

Beyond that, the Berklee researchers suggest lobbying Congress to enact a sweeping overhaul of the music copyright system proposed earlier this year by the U.S. Copyright Office. Finally, the report urges education programs to inform musicians about these issues affecting their revenue streams.

(Editor’s Note: NPR’s Policy and Representation division is a member of the MIC Coalition, a consortium made up of organizations including Google, Pandora and the National Association of Broadcasters concerned about the potential for rising royalty rates. The Policy and Representation division is separate from NPR’s newsroom. NPR journalists and music curators have no role or involvement in the coalition. UPDATE at 12:40 p.m. ET, July 15: NPR’s Policy and Representation division confirmed today that it has left the MIC Coalition. It has not yet given give a reason. As Billboard reports, “Amazon dropped out of the coalition early last month because it believed the group was focusing too much on music rates and not enough on transparency.”)

The recommendations arrive as the issue of transparency in the music industry has been increasingly drawing more attention. A recent Financial Times op-ed suggested Swift should use her industry leverage to push for “a baseline set of contractual terms for digital, backed by more transparency about who is paying what to whom.” Bringing further scrutiny to the issue was a June lawsuit by a group of American Idol winners that includes Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, claiming Sony’s deal with Spotify cheats artists, given the label’s ownership stake in the streaming service.

Also significantly, Kobalt Music Group — a company that tracks and collects royalties — was the subject of a glowing May cover story in Wired UK featuring Skrillex. Kobalt is an underwriter of Berklee’s Rethink Music program, of which this report is a part. Bargfrede says the work remains objective.

Some industry observers agree that transparency is a problem for the music industry, though not all fully support the report’s proposed solutions.

Transparency is “the next big fight,” says Casey Rae, CEO of the artists’ advocacy nonprofit Future of Music Coalition, in an email.

“The current environment has too many ‘black boxes,'” he explains. “It’s simply too easy for big companies to sit on money because they can’t find out who to pay, or don’t care to know. It’s time to demand more accountability and transparency, and artists can play a crucial role in that push.”

Mark Mulligan, co-founder of digital-music market research firm MiDiA Research, says that while transparency is “certainly important,” increasing it isn’t going to fundamentally change the state of the industry.

“That’s essentially putting on a different coat of paint,” he tells NPR. “It’s still the same engine.”

To Mulligan, the biggest shift in the industry remains the transition from an “ownership model” to a “rental model,” and the differing payout methods that entails.

Jeff Price, founder of Tunecore and CEO of Audiam, a company that helps track down royalties from digital services, says between 15 percent and 30 percent of tracks on streaming services globally go unmatched with a songwriter. He says Audiam has collected more than $600,000 in the past 12 months from streaming services in so-called mechanical royalties for its client list, which includes the publishing catalogues of Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jason Mraz. More than 40% of that revenue, which is only from U.S. streams, predates the launch of his current business.

“For every single client we represent we have discovered they are just not getting paid for most recordings of their songs,” Price says.

Price lays much of the blame at the feet at what’s known as a “compulsory license.” That’s the system allowing any musician to copy another’s song without asking permission, so long as she pays a federally mandated fee. It’s a system that dates to a 1908 Supreme Court decision that also gave rise to the idea of “mechanical” royalties, which apply to all mechanical reproductions of songs; the machines in question, back then, were player pianos.

Price also expresses skepticism about the report’s proposal of a global rights database.

“Do you think Sony or Warner or even the kid down the street would want the condition of being paid to be some third-party database?” he asks. “Abso-f******-lutely not. I would never want that. I would want to go directly to the place that owes me money and tell the my name.”

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) declined to comment on the recommendations without seeing the full report. “We support efforts to ensure all music creators are paid fairly and efficiently for their work, and we look forward to reading the report,” says RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth in an email response.

The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), which represents independent labels, welcomes the discussion.

“A2IM is extremely supportive of all industry efforts that would result in greater accuracy in reporting on intellectual property usage and the resulting revenue streams for creators,” says Molly Neuman, acting president of A2IM, in an emailed statement. “The independent label community currently represents 35.1% of market share and we believe that with more accurate reporting, that share would be significantly larger.

“We look forward to working with our industry colleagues on efforts to adopt practices to ensure all rights holders are paid precisely what they are due.”

Ben Swank, a co-founder of indie label Third Man Records along with Jack White, also cautiously cheers the growing dialogue. (White is a prominent Tidal backer.)

“Transparency is paramount right now,” Swank tells NPR. “Artists want to be compensated fairly for their work and their art, but I think the communication is really important to artists, and making sure that they get their statements every six months. They like to work with us because they know someone’s actually going to respond to their emails.”

That said, while Swank doesn’t oppose the idea of some industry-wide standards around payouts, he says the accounting on digital streams might take more time than the “Creator’s Bill of Rights” would allow. And he’s similarly ambivalent about the idea of a “Fair Music” seal.

“I like that, but honestly think that labels’ reputations should be able to bear them out without having that official certification,” he says. “It feels weird to have to have some kind of certified thing to prove that you’re not f****** over your artists.”

As for streaming services, Spotify tells NPR it’s focused on transparency, too.

“We’re big believers in transparency and think it’s key to building a new music economy that pays artists and songwriters fairly,” says Jonathan Prince, global head of public policy and communications at Spotify, in an emailed statement. “We’re committed to working with everyone in the business to increase transparency because it will only work if everyone in the value chain — from creators to rights holders to platforms and distributors — does it together.”

Artists, fans, labels, streaming services and others with a stake in the music industry’s future will have more chances to weigh in on the report’s proposals. Berklee’s Rethink Music initiative has scheduled a public event on the subject in Boston on October 2. “We welcome anyone to please participate,” Bargfrede says. The floor for the music industry’s transparency debate is open.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

For more than 25 years, Tuesday has been the standard release day for new albums in America — a tradition Keith Caulfield, co-director of charts at Billboard, says had a lot to do with shipping in the pre-digital era.

“One particular retailer might get that album on, say, Monday morning before they open,” Caulfield says. “And they can have it on their shelf. Boom, great! So, if you walk in and you want Michael Jackson’s new Bad album, they will have it.”

“However,” he continues, “a store a couple blocks down the road may have not got their shipment.” That store couldn’t do anything but wait until it showed up.

In 1989, the recording industry settled on Tuesday as the day every retailer could start selling new releases at the same time — but that was just in the U.S. Albums came out on Mondays in the U.K. and Canada, Fridays in Australia and Germany. Recently, the industry decided it needed a global standard.

“In the digital world, you can’t make consumers wait,” says Adrian Strain, head of communications for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a trade group representing over 1,300 record labels worldwide.

Under the old system, Strain says, a fan in Britain could buy a new album on Monday and upload it — so her friend in Australia could listen before it came out there on Friday.

Strain says “New Music Fridays,” the nickname for the new global release schedule, “should give less reason for those people who can’t get the new release legally to go to illegal sites.”

The new release date isn’t just popular with industry officials. The IFPI asked consumers across eight countries when they would like to get new music. Of those who expressed an opinion, 68 percent said Friday or Saturday.

Still, album sales have been declining for years. Nielsen SoundScan just released its midyear report, and total album sales are down 4 percent over the same period last year. Total album consumption was up, thanks in part to the growth in music streaming services.

So, it might not seem to really matter when albums come out. But it does to the people who still sell them, like those at Amoeba Music in Hollywood, which calls itself the world’s largest independent record store. Co-founder Marc Weinstein says he was not consulted about the new global album release day.

“It’s not something we would choose to have happen,” Weinstein says. “I mean, it’s a logistic nightmare on a lot of levels.”

Weinstein explains that Amoeba now has to change its ad schedule, weekend staffing and live in-store performances, which were typically held when albums came out on Tuesdays.

“It gave us an opportunity to get a bump in the middle of the week when a lot of people would come in on a Tuesday, which normally wouldn’t be a busy day,” he says.

With many stores already struggling to survive, “this is gonna be perceived as kind of another nail in the coffin for brick-and-mortar retail, and it’s kind of sad that no one takes any of that into account when they make these kind of fundamental changes in the way things work,” Weinstein says.

Adrian Strain says not everyone will be happy with such a big change — but that the industry can only follow what it thinks the music fan wants.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The letter, from a law firm representing Universal, was addressed to the antitrust bureau of the attorney general’s office. It stated that Universal currently has no deals with Apple or companies such as Sony Music that would “impede the availability of free or ad-supported music streaming services, or … limit, restrict, or prevent UMG from licensing its recorded music repertoire to any music streaming service.”

The letter did not specifically say Apple was among the targets of the investigation. But Universal’s attorneys did say the company was not colluding with Apple or its two major rival labels, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had this response:

“This letter is part of an ongoing investigation of the music streaming business, an industry in which competition has recently led to new and different ways for consumers to listen to music. To preserve these benefits, it’s important to ensure that the market continues to develop free from collusion and other anti-competitive practices.”

The investigation centers on whether Apple may have urged the labels to drop support for free, ad-supported streaming services such as Spotify and Google’s YouTube. Such a move could be seen as anti-competitive.

Albert Foer, the founder of the American Antitrust Institute, says the current investigation may have been sparked in part by Apple’s history. The company was found guilty last year of conspiring with book publishers to raise the price of e-books when it launched its online book store. Among those who brought the charges were 33 state attorneys general, including Schneiderman.

There are some parallels between the music industry and the publishing business. At the time Apple entered into the e-book market, publishers were upset by the prices Amazon was forcing on them. Apple had a business model that let publishers set the prices higher. In the case of music, the labels have been unhappy with the money paid out by free, ad-supported services. Most famously, Taylor Swift withheld her latest music from Spotify over the issue.

“The suspicion would be of the corporate culture and how they operate,” Foer says about why the attorney general would investigate Apple Music. “It’s just that investigators will have suspicions in some cases because of what happened in the past.” But he says the investigation could also have been triggered by complaints from someone inside the music industry.

Chris Castle, a music industry attorney, finds it hard to believe that Apple would follow the same road that made it the target of an investigation that resulted in a $450 million settlement, along with supervision by an antitrust monitor. “The idea that these guys would blindly walk into this is crazy,” says Castle. “It just doesn’t seem plausible.”

In fact, Connecticut State Attorney General George Jepsen, who is also focused on music streaming, told Reuters that his office was satisfied that Universal did not have anti-competitive agreements to withhold music titles from free services. However, Jepsen did not say he’d stopped investigating Apple. And European Union officials are also investigating Apple Music.

But Castle says he will be surprised if this goes anywhere. Apple, he notes, has a lot of competition in the streaming music space: Spotify, YouTube, GooglePlay, Amazon. “There are inquiries all the time” he says. “They ask a few questions. You send a response and that’s it.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Yanez worries that more artists will follow Taylor Swift‘s lead and pull their music from the streaming service, though she believes this is their right. Aside from the limits to Spotify’s library, offline listening has also been a problem for her on long drives when she doesn’t plan ahead. She expects other services to compete with her current preference, though, and she’s willing to think big about what tomorrow might hold (“chips in our ears or brains?”).

“The only thing I know for sure is that I love music so much, it gets me through my days, it comforts me, it excites me,” Yanez writes in an email. “And when I can’t listen it frustrates me.”

With Apple poised to roll out a full-fledged streaming music offering of its own sometime soon, the battle between streaming and downloads will effectively be over. So it’s worth taking stock of what, exactly, would be the ideal streaming experience for listeners like Yanez, as well as for the artists and labels whose music makes the whole system possible.

Spotify, which now counts 15 million paying subscribers, has used the 40 million mark as a magic number for when it will be paying a more traditional amount to musicians. The suggestion, essentially, is that scale is the key to creating a world where everybody gets what they want.

With that in mind, NPR asked a wide range of people, well, what they want — through crowd sourcing and traditional interviews — and also collected commentary about streaming from public statements by musicians and others.

Listeners who responded to our crowdsourcing questions about their streaming utopia weren’t, by and large, asking for science fiction. Many were happy with their current digital tools, from Google’s Play Music All Access to the nonprofit concert archives at archive.org, and just wished for slight improvements, though they frequently expressed concern that artists should be getting a bigger cut of the profits.

High quality audio was one common desire, as was improved cover art work and liner notes, but more often perfection looked like a matter of minor tweaks.

Laura Whitehead, a 31-year-old high school teacher from Baltimore, Md., has had a $10-a-month Spotify subscription for two or three years, and her only complaint is that she can’t control playlists on her phone as well as on her computer — “par for the course with most apps,” she tells NPR in an email.

“When I’m tired of something or I don’t want it anymore, I just delete it without feeling like I’ve wasted my money,” Whitehead says. “To be honest I’d probably pay a little more.”

Price, of course, hasn’t become less of an object for all. For Hana Sambur, a streaming utopia would unite unlimited music from currently disparate music platforms, whether Spotify or Soundcloud. And it would do so at a rate that makes sense for her as a 21-year-old international student from Indonesia, studying at the University of Washington.

“A $7.50 per month fee, I think, is reasonable, as it recognizes the ethical responsibility of paying back musicians who worked hard for their art,” she writes in an email.

Among musicians, accustomed to disappointing royalties statements from streaming and a lack of artistic control over the format, a perfect world for digital music may be harder to imagine.

Jay Z’s contentious rollout of his recently acquired high-end streaming service Tidal signals his streaming utopia might prioritize lossless audio, plus an ownership stake for artists — at least, the most established ones.

Aloe Blacc, writing in Wired last November, called for regulatory changes allowing songwriters to earn more than the $4,000 he says he received domestically from Pandora for co-writing the No. 1 hit “Wake Me Up!” by Avicii. Björk, in a recent Fast Company interview, praised the Netflix model, saying that perhaps music, like cinema, should be a physical experience before it’s available for streaming.

For musicians at a more modest level, trading the old record industry for new streaming overlords can be a case of “meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.”

“The big issue is finding something that is actually ‘artist friendly’ and not just ‘music business friendly,'” emails Casey Dienel, who has recorded three albums as White Hinterland. “I’m tired of the rhetoric that streaming will ballast the fallout of the recording industry — an industry that has a checkered past when it comes to exploitation and trust issues with artists to begin with.”

Dienel worries about artists’ control over the listening experience, not only their compensation. Comparing the current streaming process to “buying pre-packaged ground beef in the store,” she envisions a utopia where listeners could gain a deeper knowledge of their music’s sources and context. Specifically, she praises EMA’s 2014 digital zine Back to the Void, released through the web platform New Hive, and the online setup of Nicolas Jaar, whose Other People label offers its own $10-a-month subscription service.

Rebecca Gates, a solo musician and arts advocate who formerly led the ’90s indie-rock band The Spinanes, voices similar suspicions about industry forces. She’s putting out her own music now and has chosen not put it on Spotify, although she suggests she’d be open to starting her own small subscription service for fans on her email list.

“Who is benefiting the most?” she asks of the current streaming landscape. “It’s huge corporations. It’s a wealth and data grab.”

Fred Thomas, an indie-pop stalwart who recently released the solo album All Are Saved, remembers seeing new faces at shows — but selling fewer records — during a 2010 tour of Sweden, when Spotify was available in Europe but not yet in the United States.

“All the different streaming services — it’s a joke,” he says in an email. “How could one possibly be better than another? It’s all free music that almost never sees any money coming back to the artist unless they’re world famous.”

Sharky Laguana, who led the ’90s and early-’00s indie-rock band Creeper Lagoon, urges a change in how streaming companies calculate royalties.

Currently, in what Laguana describes as a “pari-mutuel” system, Spotify takes about a 30% share of its total income, and musicians (often via labels or another intermediary) receive a cut of the rest that’s based on their percentage of the service’s overall plays. Every listen ends up counting for the same amount of money, whether a given subscriber listened to 10 songs in a month or 1,000.

In a Medium post last November, Laguana proposed shifting to a system based on “subscriber share,” where only the artists that a subscriber listens to would split up the royalties paid out from that subscriber’s monthly fee. “The fairest measure of value is whatever the subscriber decided to do with the resources that were given for them with the money they paid,” he tells NPR. “If I listen to Led Zeppelin 25% of the time, Led Zeppelin gets 25% of my money.”

Streaming, however utopian, isn’t yet the end-all, be-all for all types of artists. Take singer-songwriter Josh Ritter. While streaming tends to be more convenient for his younger fans than his older ones, both cohorts seek out Ritter’s physical albums and live shows “as a mile marker in their relationship with him as an artist,” says his manager, Darius Zelkha, of Tough Love Artist Management. “In that sense, we’re lucky to have a fan base that toes the line here.”

In general, though, the line Zelkha describes is clearly moving. As the number of people willing to pay for a streaming services rises, it makes sense that the number who are willing to pay for physical albums will dwindle. At the very least, sales of CDs — which last year, at 141 million units, were down 82% from their 2000 level, according to Nielsen Music — would be set for a continued slide. (By comparison, vinyl album sales in 2014, despite hitting an historic high, totaled only 9.2 million copies.)

Against that backdrop of streaming overtaking physical discs, skepticism about the new paradigm’s ability to make up for what artists have lost over the last 15 years runs as high as a band that once signed one of the most lucrative recordings contracts ever. “For the consumer it’s great,” says R.E.M.’s longtime manager Bertis Downs. “[For artists] it’s hard to see the math ever working out.”

From a label perspective, larger outfits are betting the current streaming system could evolve into a flourishing ecosystem.

“An ideal streaming world would be one where there are dozens upon dozens of different kinds of unique services for fans to choose from, and all pay fair market rates to music creators while sustaining thriving businesses,” says Cara Duckworth, a spokesperson for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the major labels. “Fans are happy, artists earn a healthy return and labels can invest in artists. Streaming is still a nascent business. We’re confident we can get there.”

Martin Mills, founder and chairman of the Beggars Group, a U.K. group of independent labels (many of which release music in the United States as well), has taken a public stand in streaming-related debates before, but he too speaks as if the utopia might not be too distant.

“We’re happy with how Spotify looks as a role model, and are confident about their ambitions for future growth, especially of the premium tier,” Mills says in an emailed statement. “Our artists are already seeing very significant benefits on their royalty statements and with their royalty checks from audio streaming income. But we also see the future as a mixed consumption model — streaming will keep growing, but downloading and physical are not going away anytime soon.”

Representatives of indie labels and artists have recently criticized a digital music business they see as damagingly opaque. Mills referred to “reduced transparency” in a February speech for a U.K. trade group the Entertainment Retailers Association. At the same event, Radiohead manager Brian Message also warned of non-disclosure agreements that mask tactics he said “distort the market,” including “equity positions at the expense of streaming rates.”

Some see sunlight as the best solution. Darius Van Arman, cofounder of the Secretly Group, a U.S. group of indie labels, explains that, by helping to build trust in an area riddled with artist criticisms about money, greater transparency could go hand in hand with an increase in the number of paid streaming subscribers.

“A more transparent licensing structure will ease some of the knee-jerk reactions and really help the creative community embrace streaming,” Van Arman says. “By doing that, I think there’s a greater chance that streaming will grow.”

In the business world, disclosure requirements tend to be enforced by federal regulators. Music is no exception.

Tony Kiewel, VP of A&R at Sub Pop, says streaming royalty rates in his perfect world would be set with government oversight, as is already the case for the so-called “mechanical” royalties paid for songwriting. “This would undercut the troubling trend of major labels brokering deals that grant them ownership stakes in the streaming companies in exchange for rates which may not in fact be in their artists’ best interests,” he explains in an email, noting his thoughts don’t necessarily reflect Sub Pop’s position.

For smaller labels, a streaming utopia might literally be “no place.”

Leeor Brown, who founded the Friends of Friends label in 2009, says that while “realistically an ideal streaming service is one that pays appropriately,” he worries that a short-lived moment when smaller artists could make a decent living may be coming to an end.

DFA Records label manager Kris Petersen concedes, “The strategy we’re having is, we’re sort of shrinking down a bit to match whatever market there is left for people who will actually pay an adequate price for music.”

What ultimately matters is the connection between audiences and artists, not between audiences and streaming providers, say Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom, co-executive directors of CASH Music, an artist career-sustainability nonprofit co-founded by Von Doom, Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh and L7’s Donita Sparks.

“Our ideal view of a streaming service would be one where artists and music are valued; where the service facilitates that artist/audience connection rather than trying to dominate it,” Vail and Von Doom write in a joint email. “That’s the only healthy way forward for artists of all sizes, and the long-term health of artists is vital to any music business.”

The idea that the valuable relationship is the one between creators and listeners puts a level of responsibility on music lovers. Not all music is valuable to any one person, perhaps, but some music has a great value. How much that’s reflected in the marketplace is for audiences to decide.

To electronic-pop artist Mauro Remiddi, who has released two albums as Porcelain Raft, in a way the music industry was ever thus. He points out that many people have long been what he calls “DIY streamers,” whether recording audio cassettes from the radio or videotapes from MTV.

“Let’s accept that in our century people pile up music, most of us never even listen to all the music we download (at times for free) or have on our streaming playlist,” Remiddi says in an email. “Here’s the catch. Stream for free, but if you find yourself going back to a certain song, to a particular album and you find yourself captured by that artist’s way of representing the world then you should support it [with purchases].”

Free music has been available to a lesser extent for decades, in other words, and so has the ideal way of expressing the worth of the music: some actual money returning to musicians.

Indeed, Acacia DiCiaccio, a 25-year-old marketing professional from Whitinsville, Mass., describes a streaming utopia close to concept of the so-called celestial jukebox. A self-acknowledged “huge music nerd,” she has shifted over the past few years from downloads on an iPod to Spotify streaming. In her utopia, both of these libraries would be integrated — which, to be sure, some services aim to do today — and it would all fit on her phone.

Her perspective, shared in an email to NPR, also illustrates that the perfect worlds of listeners, artists and musicians may forever be slightly out of synch, in a way that perhaps is endemic to a market-based society.

“For something like this I’d be willing to pay a subscription fee or one-time purchase fee,” she says, “although in a utopia it would all be free.”

Does she think that musicians should still be paid? “Definitely,” she says, when asked. “In utopia, they’d be paid for streaming more than they are getting paid now by Spotify and other streaming services,”

Given the unresolved dissonances between the priorities of artists, labels and listeners — let alone technology companies — a world dominated by streaming sounds like a work in progress.

In the digital music economy, nobody’s perfect.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Today, the original iPod, which was discontinued after just 13 years, looks as quaint as Sony’s Walkman cassette player, which survived more than 30. Last year, according to a report by Nielsen SoundScan, sales of digital songs dropped by more than 12 percent. Digital album sales were down almost 10 percent. They will not rebound in 2015.

Instead, more music fans are turning to free, ad-supported and paid-subscription services that offer instant access to libraries that would make the wildest dreams of the iPod user seem tame. The era of streaming music is upon us, and if you need writing on the wall, turn to the relentless coverage of Apple’s acquisition of Beats Music, a subscription service that is scheduled to be rolled into the iTunes platform sometime this year, possibly as soon as next week.

The timing can’t be an accident. Apple stands to gain plenty by luring its hundreds of millions of users to a subscription-based streaming service, but it stands to lose, as well: The transition will surely speed the decline of the single-song download, and iTunes, the world’s largest music store, will feel that pain acutely. Apple’s entry into the market isn’t the signal that the world is ready for streaming music; it’s proof that the transition has already begun.

So over the next week, rather than waiting to see when iTunes will launch its attack on established services like Spotify, we’re going to examine the world of streaming music that is upon us in a series called Streaming At The Tipping Point.

As these services have taken hold — Nielsen says that in 2014, on-demand streaming rose 54 percent — the news media has primarily covered them in two ways: as generators (but not always fair distributors) of cash and as technological novelties.

The question of money — of royalties — is a crucial one to the survival of the recording industry. But streaming music has unlocked other new questions for the musician and fan alike: of ownership, of taste and of morality. Do we listen differently when we have unlimited options? Does the rise of the streaming service eliminate the very need for a library of one’s own, or does it just change how we acquire and interact with that library? Do your musical preferences belong to you? What role do listeners play in ensuring the life of music and the livelihood of musicians?

For a large part of the recording industry, the move to embrace streaming actually solves a long-time paradox: one of ownership. Over digital music’s 30-year evolution, from the public introduction of the compact disc in 1981 to the international expansion of Spotify in the last half-decade, the question of whether listeners owned the music they purchased got murkier.

In an earlier era, there was no such question — buying a vinyl record meant you could listen to the music until you wore it out, filed it away forever or grew a new set of ears and snapped the old disc in half.

Call the CD — and the digital files it so precariously contained, the sources of the fundamental rift between listeners and labels — the digital infection. Once you could strip a song from its physical home and make a copy (or many copies), that control seemed to imply ownership. The recording industry’s fight against that principle took on the form of invasive digital rights management software, advertising campaigns, threats and lawsuits. You weren’t buying the music itself when you purchased an album or a song, it said, just the right to listen to it. But the MP3, the digital format gone airborne, turned this germ into a pandemic. The industry could argue all it wanted that listeners didn’t have the right to make copies and share them with strangers, but every new piece of technology made the counter-argument.

Streaming, at least the label-sanctioned version, puts the genie back in the bottle. Every time you click play on a streaming service, from Pandora to YouTube to Spotify, you’re licensing the right to listen to the song in that particular moment, whether you pay a subscription or sit through an ad. Ownership is never even an option. You listen, you license. If you want to listen again, you license again. In this way, streaming music suggests the passing of two eras: the digital download, but also the concept that fans might possess music itself.

No format lives forever. The LP, the cassette, the CD, the MP3 — each one dominated the market for about 15 years before ceding to the next technological advance. Will this latest revision define a new relationship between fans and cloud-bound digital files? The truth is, listeners bend each format to the utility they desire, and adapt to its particular attributes. The question we’ll ask over the next week is this: How will streaming change us?

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

But many people say they are leaving iTunes simply because it isn’t that easy to use. When the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs introduced iTunes almost exactly 14 years ago, on Jan. 9, 2001, he made fun of the other software-based music players like Real Jukebox and Windows Media Player. “They are too complex,” Jobs declared. “They’re really difficult to learn and use.” Jobs unveiled the first version of iTunes software from a stage in San Francisco, boasting that it was “really clean, really simple” and “far more powerful.”

It charmed a generation of music fans like Alex Newsom, who gets nostalgic talking about the first iTunes purchase she made when she was only 13 years old. “I downloaded this song by Liz Phair where it’s like ‘Why Can’t I Breath Without You,’ ” Newsom says. “I thought I was supercool because it was my first kind of grown-up-sounding song that I’d gone after myself.”

Newsom, who lives outside Seattle, is now 21 and increasingly frustrated with iTunes. For example, a recent update moved the playlist feature around. “You can still kind of go do things the old way but you have to go out of your way to do it,” she says. “And it’s clearly not the way that they expect you to do it.”

Newsom is not alone in her frustration. Jason Mosley, a Web designer who specializes in user experiences, says the last version of iTunes he used — 11 — made him work harder to do what he wanted. For example, instead of being able to create a stream of songs based on a single song he likes with one click, he now has to hover over the song and bring up a temporary menu and then select from different options.

Mosley says he was “shocked to see that they had this all nested within another link.” The Web designer says, “As a rule of thumb, for user experience you want less clicks to get to an action.”

Mosley says part of Apple’s problem is that the basic design is old. “It was built for older things,” he says. “I think it’s just kind of been added onto since then, and that’s just going to make it heavy and slow. Spotify, these new applications, they have the advantage. They are starting fresh.”

Indeed, iTunes has been through a lot of changes over the years. It’s more than a music service — it’s where customers buy and consume movies, TV shows and podcasts. Apple added a streaming radio service similar to Pandora.

Spotify is simpler. It’s all about music. Mosley has switched over, saying he’s willing to pay the $10 monthly subscription fee for the premium, ad-free version of the service because it’s so much easier to use.

James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks Apple should get credit for breaking open a new model for music with the mix of its software and the iPod — the first easy-to-use MP3 player. “The reason iTunes was adopted so well in the beginning was really not because it was great software,” he says. “It was because it was connected to this hardware that was unlocking your music access and letting you take it with you on the go and that was such a novel sensation.”

But McQuivey thinks Apple got a little over-confident. “They dominated digital music for so long, and maybe they thought, ‘Well, this is good enough. Look, it’s working for people. It’s going to replace the CD. We might as well just sit on it.’ ”

Meanwhile, services like Spotify, Pandora and Soundcloud were perfecting a new model — one dependent less on hardware and more on increasingly ubiquitous and fast wireless and cellular networks and a simple, single function: Connect to the Internet and stream millions of songs.

The story may not be over for Apple’s music service. iTunes still has some 800 million registered users. This past year Apple purchased Beats, which, along with its popular headphones, has a streaming service, which many think will be added to iTunes this year. But it’s clear that even if Apple adds streaming, users will still have to deal with a fairly complex set of options.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Young was plainspoken as he explained what motivated him to develop a new digital music player. As the world has gone digital, he said, many things have gotten better.

“You know, cameras got easier to use,” Young says. “Everything went up — and music went down.”

Young says MP3 files, and the similar ones you get on iTunes, actually hurt his ears. The same compression process that allows these files to move faster over the Internet and take up less room on your computer or device also takes away a lot of subtle highs and lows in the music.

“What we decided to do,” Young says, “was to come out with a new system that was not a format, had no rules, respected the art, respected what the artist was trying to do and did everything that it could to give you what the artist gave.”

Young says the music sold in the Pono store will sound anywhere from 5 to 25 times better than an MP3 — though the 128GB player can handle files of just about any format, setting it apart from iTunes and Apple’s mobile devices, which do not support certain formats.

Visually, the Pono player lacks the sleekness of Apple’s products (many online commenters have compared its triangular prism shape to a Toblerone bar). And it comes at a heftier price — about 400 dollars for this first release. Despite those limitations, Pono’s Kickstarter campaign exceeded its $800,000 goal just hours after launching; at the time of this writing, supporters have pledged $1.5 million and counting.

Young received praise from many musicians after his speech in Austin. But some in the industry think Young might be coming a little late to the music player game.

“A lot of consumers are opting for the convenience of streaming,” says Mike McGuire, an analyst for the technology research company Gartner. “People are kind of feeling a preference for being able to carry it around and access it from any device.”

But even proponents of streaming music would like to see better audio quality. D.A. Wallach is the artist-in-residence for Spotify; he says he wants his little sister to be able to hear, say, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon in something other than MP3.

“She doesn’t even know what the experience is like of imagining the music in sort of three dimensions in between the speakers — and that’s always part of what I’ve found so magical about music, is actually how visual it can be when the conditions are right for listening,” Wallach says.

Wallach is hopeful, as more people get faster Internet connections, that streaming music services will deliver high-fidelity audio. But he says he’s still rooting for Young and Pono to raise awareness and create demand for higher-quality digital music. In his speech, Young made it clear that it would be fine with him if that’s all he achieved.

“If we fail, we’ve made enough noise so people know something’s wrong and they can hear it,” he said. “If some big huge company comes along and kicks our ass with millions and millions of dollars, that’s great for music. If they’ll do what we do, it’s a no-lose situation. We win.”

But Young still wants you to buy his player.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.