Reverting to a 20 Year Old Commit

Music sucks now.

It probably always sucked but now I notice it more. What's changed? Spotify.

In essence, Spotify was the dream when I first signed up. Your whole music library online for free without doing anything illegal (screwing artists out of any meaningful profit on their music notwithstanding.) But, music is often the canary in the coal mine of what's to come.

Monoculture

If you look at your Spotify homepage, its kinda, everything. There's shit all over the screen implying that you should find your way around your music library using your eyes instead of ears.

And what artists are surfaced with priority? Are they the highest paying record labels? Does one of the Spotify execs have a demonic plan to push post-disco neo vibecore renaissance music on everyone? Who knows - all I know is whoever is "curating" our listening these days, human or algorithm, is doing a worse job of picking music for us than the previous model.

Spotify's "suggestions" for me have become a meme parody of myself. New music suggested either fits some corporate agenda or is just a melange of every other artist I've listened to. All of the food on my plate has been mashed and blended until it's formed a chunky tan slurry not unlike the one that you're drinking.

What are the stakes for giving me a bad music recommendation? Probably nothing - the convenience of having most music on my phone it's easy to write the recommendations off as gratis - a nice-to-have extra. But they're not a nice-to-have extra, they're everything that makes music human to us.

Tribes

In my pre-Spotify listening, music would come to me through tribes. My friends in music school had strong opinions on which version of Mahler's 2nd went the hardest. That's a tribe. My powerlifting friends would debate the merits and shortcomings of Meshuggah's djent versus Black Flag's perennially excellent My War which would lay the groundwork of sludge metal. That's another tribe (or two).

A couple prerequisite things would have to happen before someone would recommend you an album. First they'd have to listen to it. Second, they'd have to really love it. In fact, they'd have to love it so much that they'd risk looking stupid for recommending it if it wasn't up to spec. Make too many questionable recommendations and you'd be accused of "not having good taste in music" - one of the most vile setences one can receive in the court of public opinion.

Why People Don't Love Music Anymore

Music has gone quantity over quality. Everything is freeish (or $10.99 a month). Free is the most expensive price to pay for your music - it means that you get nothing in return. Why would you listen to the same song one hundred times when you can listen to one hundred songs once? You're playing "love 'em then leave 'em" with your media expecting to find the love of your life. The market moves in both directions and less artistry is being put into modern music - the game is to put up numbers, not quality.

We Fucked Up

I don't know where we fucked music up. Was it when we went from MP3s to streaming, went from CDs to MP3s, went from analog to digital, went from live performers to recordings, went from vocals to instruments, made our first sounds for entertainment?

I do know where music fucked up for me and it was sometime between CDs and streaming. I've gone back to MP3s.

I rip my music from CDs or buy directly from the artist if they're still odd enough to sell MP3s. I even had an cache of MP3s lying around from the good ol' days that I managed to extract from an old hard drive. For playback I managed to get an old 5th generation iPod up and running. Out of some surprising benevolence on the part of Apple, MacOS actually recognized the device immediately.

From here on out, I'll be taking recs from other humans that I know in real life and listening to a lot of songs on repeat. I like Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso but there was nothing else there after twenty-odd listens. Tangerine Dream's Phaedra on the other hand is like an infinitely unfolding fractal that offers something new on the tenth or thousandth listen.

Canary in the Coal Mine

This essay is about music. It's also about everything else.

Thinking is now on-tap for freeish (or about $20 a month). Art begets thinking on an individual level and at a societal level - everyone can see that this phenomenon is playing out in real-time. Thoughts will become cheaper and shallower but more rapid. Our thinking muscle will begin to atrophy just like our listening muscle did.

We are well past the era of biological evolution. In this technological age the only evolution is of the mind and it only takes years instead of generations. I know who we are without our listening muscles and it's sad. Something distinctly human about us has vanished to the gain of the machines. What will we feel like when our thinking muscle atrophies? It seems like we will be coked out on the machines' dope.

I'm not a luddite but I do like to stay more than a few steps behind the current trend. I used to have FOMO - what would I miss by not hopping into the latest-greatest? Once I saw what I would miss out on though I wasn't impressed.

While writing this I was listening to some bootlegged Grateful Dead live recording that I found on that old hard drive. How great (no pun intended) is that? When you take a step back, you will realize that the quality you get is a result of the effort you put in. There's never been an exception to this rule, only weak rationalizations.