spineflu

whats the opposite of a fixer?

  • he/him

resident gungler. 30 or 40 years old and do not need this.

paints at fakesambinder

Here? Here's where I post cats and while high.


itsnatclayton
@itsnatclayton

Caught a long thread of posts about some fully evil shit Spotify is getting up to again and just thinking about how, even without a lifetime history of stealing revenue from artists and other ethically-challenged practices, the entire model of streaming music has done tremendous harm to our (read: my) ability to simply Enjoy Music.

I definitely used to be the kind of person who got by saying "well, at least it's a place you can discover new music", and in some instances that was true. Shit, I found one of my favourite bands through "[artist] radio". But the endless churn of algorithmic playlists and generative suggestions feeds you through these insular spirals, the software learning what you'll tolerate and narrowing down until you're hearing the same inoffensive stream of the same sounds on repeat ad infinitum.

I noticed that I was no longer even really listening to music with Spotify. It was just a blur of noise going on in the background, an indie-rock ambience that I had no connection to because Spotify had figured out what I liked and was just looping a perfectly tolerable series of sounds to keep me on the system. It didn't even really matter if I liked something that came up - it'd be forgotten within the noise sooner than later.

A couple of years ago, between knowing too many musicians getting screwed over in payments and a long night of listening to a friend re-score the Rankin/Bass Return Of The King animated feature, I ditched streaming services pretty much outright and started buying music again (mostly on Bandcamp), saving things locally, building a library.

You know what rules? Putting together a music collection. Seeing your tastes expand and change and diversify over time without needing some "Wrapped"-style marketing event to tell you what you listened to. Putting on music feels like a conscious choice now, and even sticking on an ambient background album feels like I'm engaging more with the medium than scrolling down a "Monday Morning Study and Relax Playlist".

I'm still discovering new bands every week. I probably "discover" a more varied range of artists and genres through friends, discords, flipping through a local record store or simple sheer happenstance than any algorithmic recommendation feed could offer. It kinda makes me feel like an insane person to be like "hey have you heard about SOUND?" but it's genuinely transformed my relationship with music.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @itsnatclayton's post:

Over the last couple years, I've found how people listen to music a really interesting topic. How you describe a local music library is how I listened from 2004 to 2014, and when I moved to Spotify, I changed nothing, I still just curate a library and monthly playlists and never touch an algorithmic system it provides. I just open AOTY posts or go to /r/indieheads if I need new stuff. Sometimes I feel dumb for not using those discovery tools at all, but I truly cannot enjoy music if I don't listen to an album multiple times, so just having random stuff I've never heard playing non-stop would be like anathema to me.

god yeah. i switched from spotify to youtube music years ago bc spotify's app was frustratingly slow on my phone and im also almost exclusively an album listener and dont engage with any of the algorithm stuff so it felt stupid to keep paying for that shit lol. i feel like an alien whenever i explain i hate playlists and listen to whole albums instead lmao

This is extremely relateable, and I've done the same thing. Back in the day I used to buy a lot of vinyl, not because it was cool but because it was cheap as chips and you could hit up every charity shop in a neighbourhood, flip past the endless pile of Phil Collins albums and find something that looked neat, and if it was shit, oh well, it cost £1. Nowadays I do the same thing with CDs, which usually run to about £2.50 on eBay. The "discovery" features of those apps never grabbed me, even 5 years ago: my main source of new music is BBC Radio 6 and the occasional episode of the Bandcamp podcast. Or, my personal favourite: when I visit one particular friend's house I grab one of the many CDs sitting on top of the stereo, likely taking it out of its cellophane, and put it on. If I want something on in the background that's entirely inoffensive, that's what LoFi Girl is for.

The best part? It's not going to disappear on me. There will be no vanishing act from my library because a license somewhere expired, and there will be no mysteriously appearing or disappearing music depending on which side of the Atlantic I'm on when I fire up the app.

Before the internet was this all-encompassing thing that you'd have in your pocket I spent a lot more time putting on an album and just listening to it, or reading a book. It's something I've been trying to set aside time to do more of.

Also for some reason he's not famous yet so my recommendation for the day is Band Spectra.

The rare occasions in which I'm listening to music that isn't in my (very large) library, I'm putting on something like a SomaFM station, like Underground 80s or Secret Agent. I'd consider their type of streaming radio to be the last bastion of truly great human-curated radio, worth putting on when I just don't feel like deciding what to listen to and when I'm tired of mashing "random" on my music player.

somafm.com has tons of stations in lots of interesting genres, has a free mobile player app, a web player, and can be tuned into by anything that supports shoutcast (so Winamp, iTunes, foobar, audacious, deadbeef, even whatever random abandoned 90s Mac OS app). it's listener donation supported and has zero ads whatsoever. you are guaranteed an interesting listen no matter what time of day.

Spotify's convenience pales in comparison of the connections I've formed over decades of doggedly keeping a local music library, in pure spite of what became "popular" or "trendy."

I have memories attached to a lot of these albums. Some of them have hopped through dozens of devices and main PCs. I've gone to high school - and graduated - with some of these albums. I flew across the Atlantic with some of these albums.

Meanwhile, my "Liked" songs on Spotify is a giant disorganized mess that sucks to go through.

I would rather pirate something and then buy it digitally or physically later than to abandon local files and go streaming-only - in fact, I would argue doing that screws artists over way less than just relying on streaming service revenue.