Hey, it's Charlie. I've been thinking a lot about this moment where streaming feels like it's both at its height

and simultaneously on the top of a precipice about to fall off.

So many musicians are fed up with the music streaming model getting fractions of a fraction of a penny and

The whole business model just seems precarious. I was talking about this idea with my friend Neely Patel

He's the editor in chief of the verge and host of the podcast decoder to show about big ideas

And so we taped a conversation about what's going on in music streaming through the case study of Taylor Swift

Who has definitely navigated the transition from the CD era into streaming and whose era tour may mark the end of an era in music

Here's my chat with Neely on decoder. I hope you enjoy it

Hello and welcome to decoder. I'm Neely Patel editor in chief of the verge and decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems

So I have this theory about the music industry. I think music is usually about five years ahead of the rest of the media in terms of its relationship to tech

Whether that's new formats based on new technology like vinyl to CDs new business models like streaming or

Or simply being disrupted by new kinds of artists who use new forms of promotion like TikTok and unexpected ways

I've always thought that if you can wrap your head around what's happening to the music industry

You can pretty much see the future of TV or movies or the news or whatever it is because the music industry just moves that fast

I was talking about this with my friend Charlie Harding

He co-hosts the podcast switched on pop and he said something really interesting to me

He thinks the Taylor Swift eras tour is itself the end of an era in music that the age of cheap streaming services is coming to an

Inevitable conclusion and it's something has to change in order for the industry to sustain itself in the future

Charlie's theory is that Taylor is the one artist who is managed to seamlessly and successfully

Transition between the different eras of the music business. She started out selling CDs like everyone else and she fought against the streaming model in the mid 2010s

But now she's not only embrace streaming but she's thriving in it

And she's one of the few artists committed to her music itself being valuable not just as marketing for a universe of other products

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