$3 Per Month: The Largest Possible Music Budget
Mr. Money Mustache loves his music.
I need a constant soundtrack of it at all times – different types of music for breakfast-eating, house-building, furniture-making, driving, blog-writing, exercising, dancing, house cleaning, patio beer-drinking-and-campfire-having, and more. And it has to be different music all the time – no repeating the same song within a week (preferably a month), different genres throughout each day, and of course absolutely no talking or commercials interrupting the mix, ever.
With a habit like this, you can imagine that I have to spend a lot of time collecting and organizing the music, and making mixes that meet my stringent requirements. And in the past, I have spent a lot of money on the hobby as well. Let’s talk about those olden days to explain how things were, and how they have changed.
Ever since that golden day when my dad brought home a little battery-powered radio from an advertising industry trade show, I have been hooked. I used to slip the flat radio under my pillow before going to sleep each night as a 9-year-old, and one of my parents would quietly reach under my sleeping head and turn it off on their own way to bed later that night. At the time, I listened to an AM rock station called CKOC that played the cutting edge early ’80s rock and pop music that thrilled youngsters of my generation. Toto’s Africa and much of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album blew little Pre-teen MMM’s mind.
As the years went on, my interest grew. I bought my first double-cassette deck portable stereo (“ghetto blaster”, as we called them back then, despite the fact that we lived in a crime-free town, population 4,000, and thus there were no ghettos available to blast). I started buying tapes, meticulously recording songs from the weekly American Top 40 broadcast with Casey Kasem, and swapping recordings of records and tapes with friends. I discovered the concept of High Quality Sound, and commandeered the stereo system from the family living room for my own bedroom. After scoring my first minimum-wage job, I went crazy and bought an $1100 stereo system of my own, and some of my budding little audiophile friends followed suit. CDs were invented and we bought some of the first CD players and started accumulating CDs at a brisk pace, despite their punishing $20-per-disc price ($36.38 in today’s dollars if you adjust for inflation). I joined, and quit, the Columbia House music club repeatedly as a way of getting more CDs for less.
That was a funny time in our lives, since our spending on music as a percentage of income was ridiculous. By the age of 17, I had amassed about 300 CDs, representing well over $4000 of casual spending collected onto one heavy bookshelf. This is comparable to me buying and maintaining a multi-bedroom luxury motor yacht today, something which I obviously would not even consider. But kids will be kids, and Mr. Money Mustache wasn’t around to admonish me at the time for the careless spending.
But thankfully, both the Internet and the globalization of manufacturing have come along, and completely wiped out the old model. It’s much more difficult for Leather-clad Hair Metal bands like Kiss, Winger, Slaughter, and Quiet Riot to pack stadiums while simultaneously making millions for themselves and their managers and merchandisers and owners. But it’s much easier for independent musicians like my brother Wax Mannequin to spread the word and gain a moderate but dedicated fan base that spans a few countries and lets them travel and rock out upon many ‘a’ fine stage. And music consumers like myself have enjoyed the effects of Napster, Usenet newsgroups, eMule, Bit Torrent, and many other technologies that have fleshed out music collections worldwide at minimal expense, even while we enjoy buying the music of local musicians directly after a barroom concert, with cash, over a compliment and a handshake.
The thing about music for music enthusiasts is that we need a LOT of it. If I listen to music for an average of 4 hours a day, 30 days a month, with no repeats, I’d need a rotation of 1440 songs, or $1440 dollars worth of music at iTunes prices just to get me through the first month.
In the bad old days, a listener was trapped in a triangle between the options of Incredible Expense, Time-Consuming and Possibly-Illegal Piracy, or Awful Commercial-laden FM radio.
Then Internet Radio came along.
Suddenly there were thousands of streaming radio stations playing nice DJ-arranged mixes of music, supported only by small visual ads but no intrusive audio ads. It was a huge step forward, especially for office workers who want to groove along with headphones all day while they work on their computers. But each DJ’s taste still seemed to differ from my own, such that an annoying tuneless grating noise song or a schlocky Celine Dion-style ballad would pop incongruously into the mix and snap me out of my concentration. Because of this risk, I often had to resort back to my own digital music collection and the attendant time expenditures.
But one year ago, I discovered a nice hybrid of the two systems: Pandora Internet Radio. You type in the name of a musician, like my favorite Jazz piano player Ahmad Jamal. Pandora automatically creates a “Station” that plays only Ahmad Jamal and similar musicians.. 24 hours a day, advertising free, as long as you pony up the $36 per year fee for the premium Pandora One service.
If a station ever plays a song you don’t like, you run over to your computer and click the “thumbs down” button. This feeds back into Pandora’s algorithm to further figure out your tastes and make the station even better.
I have been a paying Pandora subscriber for one year, and it has been a constant companion for me, streaming out of my laptop into the main stereo at home, and out of my iPhone into the Construction Radio when I am out in the yard or at a party or job site.
I’ve created and customized about 30 stations, each of which draw upon thousands of songs, and I get to sit back and mix and match them for the event at hand. Ahmad Jamal, Alana Davis, Action Figure Party, AC/DC, The Biscuit Burners, Celia Cruz, The Dining Rooms, DJ Shadow, Don Ross, Fila Brazillia, India Arie, Jurassic 5 (best hip-hop group ever), Manu Chao, Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Medeski Martin and Wood, Mountain Brothers, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Strunz & Farah, Turntablism & Beat Science, and the classic early hip-hoppers Young MC/Digital Underground are just some of my stations that form the broad foundation of this crazy new world of infinite music listening.
Pandora satisfies my desire for high quality audio as well. With the premium service, I get streaming at a bitrate of 192kb/sec using a compression method that is more advanced than MP3 (aacPlus). I run this sound stream out of the digital output on the back of my laptop, into my beefy Yamaha receiver, where the digital-to-analog conversion is done in a nice low-noise environment. It is amplified with a fantastic amount of clean power, and pumped out to the gorgeous row of woofers and tweeters depicted in the headline photo of this article. The end result is rich, detailed concerts in my living room, where the fine hairs of brushes hitting the drums strike out into the kitchen, and where the Bass tickles your buttocks at strategic moments. (I will admit that in the area of music reproduction, my frugality has broken down in earlier years. Someday when I lead a more minimalist life, this equipment will have to go.. but for now, the MMM Household rocks on.)
All at a monthly cost of only 3 songs from iTunes, or 3 Justin Bieber ringtones that a teen might purchase for her phone while walking around in the shopping mall. If I can get all this legally for $3 per month, it is hard to imagine spending more in any situation. So I am actually enjoying the most decadent and expensive music collection that can possibly be justified.
It makes me wonder who these people are that are pumping hundreds of their hard-earned employees into Apple’s iTunes store each year, when I already have the largest music collection imaginable at $3 per month!
Sometimes it is great to be a big spender.
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Mr. Money Mustache is a family man living in the United States who retired from work, relatively wealthy, at about age 30. After several years of retirement, he noticed that his still-working peers were envious of his lifestyle. They were making more money than he ever had, yet they were somehow still broke. So he decided to write this blog to educate the world on how it is done.
“(I will admit that in the area of music reproduction, my frugality has broken down in earlier years. Someday when I lead a more minimalist life, this equipment will have to go.. but for now, the MMM Household rocks on.)”
A problem with minimalism… getting rid of things you genuinely enjoy. I got a receiver and a nice 5.1 system a little while ago, and I expect it to last nearly forever. Sure, I could use the speakers on my TV and still get enjoyment, but not as much. Is it mustachian to get rid of something that obviously brings you such (buttock tickling…) enjoyment?
I guess it’s all about priorities, right? As long as you’re not consuming excessively or spending excessively, there are no fast and hard rules. Especially if something like that brings you so much butt tickling enjoyment. Spend your money on a few select items that will bring you much joy and are worth it (MMM’s bread machine was a good example on here) as opposed to cheap plastic crap that won’t give you any fulfillment.
I believe that being a Mustachian doesn’t mean a vow of poverty – just of priorities :)
That’s the Joy of being an MMM reader.. it’s not Minimalism.. it’s not Hedonism. It’s Enlightened Hedo-Minimalism.
You just have to QUESTION everything you own, and everything you are tempted to buy, and feel the positive and negative emotions, imagine the lifelong burden of owning extra stuff, and do a bit of math.
Sometimes, owning the material possessions still wins – as with my house and stereo and even a reasonably new 2005 car.
On the other hand, over time I am finding that the joy of reduced material burden continues to grow, so I buy less stuff over time, and shed more and more things that turned out to be unnecessary (like my motorcycle, or the desire for an even fancier house, etc.). It’s the opposite of what usually happens to high-income consumers over time.
“It’s Enlightened Hedo-Minimalism. ”
My favorite MMM quote so far.
I use Spotify myself, but I do so love me some Pandora.
Sounds good. I’ll eventually go for $5/month as I prefer Spotify, but I agree with your basic premise!
We get most of our music for free – legally – from Internet Archive (archive.org). We’re pretty much Deadheads when it comes to music, and there are thousands of live audience recordings of our favorite bands (Grateful Dead, Ratdog, The Dead, The Other Ones, Phil Lesh & Friends, Furthur, Rhythm Devils) available on the Archive. And there are other great Bands such as Stringcheese and Carolina Chocolate Drops, so it’s not just for Deadheads. It;s great to be able to get a concert off the Archive the day after you’ve been to a show.
Not all bands will allow their stuff to go on the Archive though, and unfortunately, none of MMM’s favorites seem to be listed :(
There’s also video and literature and such.
Thank you very much for my new favorite website.
As a musician, I refuse (as much as possible) to pirate my colleagues’ work, but I think I might submit my own to this :)
So MMM, I just gotta ask – why not go for the free version? It’s unlimited listening as well (as of this week), you just have to put up with ads. No ads worth $3/month to you? I guess they are to me as well, just curious why you didn’t address it.
Yup, you guessed it. I can’t STAND audio advertising. Even one ad shatters my nice concentration zone while working and leaves me frazzled – because radio ads are so loud and fast-fake-talking and non-musical. If pandora played up to a maximum of one ad per week, I could survive.. But they seem to play many per day in free mode. The $3/mo also gets you higher-quality streaming and longer timeout before auto-stop, which is essential if you are not next to a computer all day and want the music to continue.
I like Spotify at $5/mo because it gives you much more control on your music instead of randomly generating the list of songs. I like to listen to entire albums at a time. Too bad none of these streaming sites have some of the Greats like The Beatles and Tool.
Yeah.. It is poetic justice for those control-freak publishers like the beatles, because if they don’t want to make it easily available legally, anyone can type in http://www.thepiratebay.org, type beatles, and have the complete anthology with all b-sides, pictures, videos, articles, remixes, etc. in one multi-gigabyte rar file within a few minutes… For $0. To compete with Free, you have to offer convenience, rather than oldschool lawyer attacks and snobbery. Yay Internet!
Pandora has Tool and The Beatles.
Not available in Canada.
Curses.
Sure we have that national health care thing, but what if my doctor prescribes 24 hours of Jazz infused butt tickling? Where will I be then?
Maybe Spotify will work.
It’s good to know for once that I’m already doing something that MMM recommends. Pandora One is so worth it. I think it’s weird that I can get one whole YEAR of premium music for less than the price of one month of cable TV.
Song to check out: Bronx Sniper by Mister Heavenly
Not available in the Netherlands either. I make do with my freeplay-wind-up radio and sometimes my ipod (yes, with music I actually paid for).
So you can stream it through an Iphone, but is there anyway to get it to an Ipod?
I don’t have a smart phone, so when I’m out and about, the Ipod is it.
Then again, I don’t really pay for my songs, I get about $25 to $50 worth of gift cards for birthday and Christmas, and that’s how I get my music.
The shift in music delivery medium is for the better in terms of cost. But how has it affected the way we listen to music as a whole? We used to purchase albums with an expectation for the entire piece of work. Now we seek individual tracks. Our selection of music towards a particular mood or feeling could be pinpointed to a specific disc we purchased, but now we hope that a streaming service satisfies that need when we no longer own the tracks or have ability to select them. Does this change the way we collect, develop taste, and appreciate music as a whole? Comments?
Yeah, that’s a nice point. I love the Full Album Experience too, and when I’m REALLY listening to music, like just sitting in a comfy chair centered between the speakers and soaking into it with no other activities, that’s how I do it – from track 1 up to track 16 with no breaks.
But sometimes during a construction work day, when I’m walking around and climbing ladders and using noisy saws, having a mix is nice as well. Also, the randomness of Pandora is what allows me to discover new bands that I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of. When an amazing new track comes on, I run down to the radio and bookmark the song for easy future reference when finding more music from that person.
“Enlightened Hedo-Minimalism” is the best name for anything ever.
Really? THE BEST NAME EVER!? Man, thanks a lot, that is quite a compliment. But I must admit that it throws my whole life for a bit of a loop. Making up silly yet amusing new terms for things is pretty much my main reason for living, and indeed, for writing this blog.
If I’ve made the best possible word in human history just like that, by accident, right here in this comment stream, I might have to quit and just cruise aimlessly for the rest of my adult life!! Shit!!!
Good article! I resisted streaming subscriptions until Spotify. They won me over. I’ve usually spent a little over $10/month on music, so it’s easy for me to justify the premium Spotify package (and I loving having all those tunes available on my Android). Pandora is quite good, and I respect their music genome project, though I’ve seen some really… QuIrKy… things coming outta that. So much so, I kept thinking someone was just trying to see if I was paying attention! Still, I wanted the control, which I get with Spotify.
I’m liking Spotify. I also like listening to Icecast radio and either streaming NPR or my local college station. I also use Replay music to record my streamed music for those times I’m offline.
If you are an adventurous sort, http://www.thesixtyone.com is an excellent (and beautifully designed) source for music. Select a Genre, hit go, let the music take control.
Another legal free source of music is http://www.jamendo.com, the music is Creative Commons licence on a donation model. This is a download service so you can create playlists and use it offline all you wish.
Being in Canada, Pandora isn’t an option for me, but I do use something that sounds very similar. I listen to Jango all day at work and love it. Good quality, no commercials and free. Sometimes there are emerging artists that play, and some I have liked, but if I don’t like what I hear, I just hit the “next” button. Judging from the friends list on my profile, it seems to be available world wide.
Pandora is FREE without commercials if you use the ROKU set-top box. Roku allows you to add channels, mostly it’s clam-to-fame is that it was developed to stream netflix content. But there are tons of other channels.
Pandora is on there, once you add it and connect up your regular non-paid account it plays through the set top box. Which costs as little as $60 bucks. No subscriptions or fees. You just need a high-speed internet connection.
But pandord on roku gives you streaming without commercials, just like you had a paid account. I listen to it all the time at home, piped through our audio surround system which is connected to my TV.
It’s easy, free (after you buy the box), simple and easy to use. Oh and you get a remote control too.
In my mind the best way to stream pandora content!
Spotify > Pandora * 10
I can’t believe how cheap internet music streaming is in the US. To access music on my phone I would have to pay £10 a month, which my handy currency converter tells me is $15.72. .
I know you like Jurrasic 5. Good Stuff. My favorite group is Deepspace5, an underground super hip hop group, with a similar feel. I haven’t used Pandora so not sure if they are on there or not. One of the members, Sintax the Terrific (My favorite), set up a sweet blogsite about a year or so ago where he raps current news events once or twice a week. You might like it, check it out Ipoet laureate
Fresh Raps every week is nice. I think a few of favorite’s were on Steve Jobs, Real Life Superhero in Seattle and his book review of Endgame (most recent biography of Bobby Fischer). Also in his day job he is a lawyer which is pretty rad.
I’d be interested to see what you think.
1) Pandora IS available to Canadians such as myself. By using a Proxy service located in the USA, one can gain access to the free version of Pandora. I believe the paid for version is also accessible but would require you to have a friend with an US address.
2) MMM, you mentioned that you do not want any songs to be repeated within a month. How do you handle that with Pandora? In my experience, using the free version, it often happened that the same song played almost back to back. This is especially true if there are several versions of a song (remixes) or if the pool of similar songs is limited (i.e., if you pick an obscure group to create a station).
Awesome – Proxy servers are a sweet invention and a nice way to get around the douchey big media companies who like to pretend they can control the flow of information. Do you have a recommendation for one in particular? Some of the more reliable ones (which cost a couple of bucks a month) might even allow you to stream Netflix movies to other countries, correct?
Regarding the repeating songs – I just use a very large rotation of stations on “Quickmix”, and then if a song still repeats too often, I click “I’m tired of this song” whenever convenient. It would be nice if Pandora would offer more control, like options such as “never repeat songs within days.
From what I can tell, they have a very minimal software development team. There isn’t even an iphone app that lets you control another instance of Pandora running on your main media server computer, for example. And there is no “I’m tired of this song” option on the mobile version. But I look at this as an exercise in Mustachian training for myself – learn to appreciate something that is already awesome, rather than focusing on what it is missing.
For european readers there is a new pandora-like service from Germany called Aupeo: https://www.aupeo.com/
It works from a PC (work) and from Android/iPhone. Yes, it’s free.
I wrote a blog post about getting music for free a little while ago myself. It goes over not only Pandora, but some other great options as well. It’s at : http://jamespetzke.com/2012/01/why-you-should-never-pay-for-music-in-the-21st-century/
Love the image for this post… Best speakers for the best price!
@johonn, which speakers do you mean? i have a nexus 7 tablet and am looking for good, less expensive speakers for it…. any suggestions anyone>
2 quick pandora-specific questions: approximately what kind of data usage do people see with it on their phones…. i’ve been using pandora on the phone direct wired into my aux port on my ca stereo, and absolutely loving it! just curious how much dat its using because i’ll be scaling down my cell plan at the end of the year and want to pan accordingly for the data part
also, i’m still not sure why the paid subscription is worth it? i’m very new to pandora, and yes, the script is only $3, but i don’t pay anything and get a ton of enjoyment… what am i missing? thanks guys!
I can certainly appreciate the thinking behind this article, and while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it per se, I do want to point out that services like Pandora and Spotify have come under pretty intense criticism over the past couple years for not compensating artists enough. If an artist’s song gets played tens of thousands of times on one of these services, the royalties still don’t add up to more than a couple bucks…
I don’t think that makes internet streaming services wrong, and they can be extremely helpful for helping artists get connected with new listeners. But I thought it was worth emphasizing that when you do stumble across artists whose music you deeply enjoy and relate to, it’s worth the extra time and money to actually purchase their albums, support them, let them know you care. For many of the bigger artists with household names, you might feel comfortable thinking that they won’t miss your $7-$10 since they’re already so successful, but it’s also true that many artists who might seem successful from the perspective of your average music fan are actually making very little off their artistic endeavors, and they could really use your support.
So kudos for a nice Mustachian tip on how to legally consume vast amounts of music for those times when a constant stream is needed, but don’t forget how meaningful it is to actually purchase albums directly from artists you love!