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Some Sunday thoughts:
One way you can sense the extractive nature of Spotify (and similar streaming services) is the absolute atomization of artists and their works—it is specifically anti-collective. You cannot search for or collect artists from a label or scene or community.
One way you can sense the extractive nature of Spotify (and similar streaming services) is the absolute atomization of artists and their works—it is specifically anti-collective. You cannot search for or collect artists from a label or scene or community.
Also, beyond the obvious primacy of the algorithm, a “user”—nevermind them being a listener—experiences all releases, whether they be live tracks, singles, demos, or labored-over albums, as the same type of “content,” flattened hierarchically and treated identically in the UI.
The indignity of all this is heightened by the fact that this is simply where and how people are most likely to hear and engage with music, so despite all protestations, one must still celebrate and court any and all attention received on the platform. Like Amazon for authors.
This is not listeners’ fault, and I think that can get lost. People engage with art through popular/available technological channels, whether that’s FM radio or CD mail catalogs or Spotify. It’s not scalable to ask individuals to choose a less-available, if preferable, method.
But a related truth is that for musicians, particularly during a pandemic, the engagement one experiences of their music by listeners is largely through daily delivered metrics, which are constructed to preference, in many or most cases, only certain kinds of popular art.
That’s one reason the anti-community nature of Spotify is so limiting: an artist may not have huge numbers but still be fed by connection w/ a local or otherwise-organized scene. And that’s entirely absent from how Spotify can be used. There’s no connection—only *your* numbers.
I can’t speak for others, but to my mind a reason to make music and be part of a community is that each band/artist is somehow necessary to the whole. They speak to and resonate with one another. Some may rise above and become household names or whatever, but we are all needed.
The connections between artists aren’t always (or maybe even usually) btwn artists that sound the same. Find me an artist who only cares about music that sounds like what they make, and I’ll show you a machine-learning algorithm that’s generating Mood Music for Work or whatever.
Such non-linear connections intertwine with the financial reality of music-making, which is: it costs a lot of money to record, mix, master, design, and distribute music. The brilliant people who make music sound/look how it does *need* to be paid as the skilled workers they are.
No one, in independent music at least, is making any good money from any of this. But the connections that make it feel good to keep going—relationships with other musicians and music workers—are entirely absent from the place the work most popularly lives.
Anyway, the @UMAW_ campaign to get artists one penny per play is inspiring b/c it looks at the existing system and collectively proposes not only a reasonable financial improvement for musicians—but also demonstrates in solidarity a willingness to meet listeners where they are.
We all want people to listen wherever they find our music. (Please! Listen to Absent City wherever you might enjoy!) But there are non-trivial improvements that must be made to Spotify to help artists continue to want to engage with the most popular music platform of our time.
Why anybody would be against supporting artists in this relatively minor way (wrt a $20B+ company) or call artists hypocrites for continuing to promote music where listeners are—well, it only indicates a dismissal of music creators as app workers unworthy of respect. ( #NoOn22)
None of this, by the way, is particularly original thought. @lizpelly and @dada_drummer and many others are compellingly discussing such issues in deeper ways. Read them, listen to music, support the people making art that imbues our precarious world with care and meaning. <3
