Streaming as the Future of High Resolution Audio Distribution

Streaming is now the dominant method of distributing audio, including high resolution audio (HRA), to consumers. Although HRA has been a small percent of the total, the major labels and the RIAA predicted from 2017 onward that high quality was of strong interest even to young listeners and should thrive given streaming's new affordability and portability. This workshop looks at current uptake and future directions in high quality audio streaming. Important to both sustainability and growth in this dynamic area are the evolving nature of music distribution infrastructure and the ability for all players in the area - major and indie labels, music streaming services, and designers of platform-spanning software and hardware - to address important issues. Those include growth models expanding to younger listeners, adequate remuneration of artists including indies while limiting costs, worldwide bandwidth constraints, differentiation from one another, and innovative provision for user requests like performance data, music discovery, radio, podcasts, etc. A very exciting new direction is live streaming, that for the first time permits HD video to be combined with HD audio.