Music libraries is something they’ve tried to kill, and I might have pinpointed why.
When they saw that Napster allowed users to build libraries faster and cheaper, they had to pivot into iTunes and then streaming. But I think it put them into a unique position that Movies/TV & Games also found when switching from the old method into this one. They can hold the monopoly, take it away from you whenever they want, and have the right to do so. Tech has also started sliding to the point that you can’t store any of your data anymore with expensive storage & focus on cloud streaming where they own your data. They wouldn’t come in and steal your discs or erase your own files from your hard drive. As much as I’m a fan of media preservation and I don’t like this practice, I am the digital consumer who finds it more convenient to purchase digital and give the tech overlords control of my library and data. I’m phasing out of it and I’m realizing how hard it actually is to deplatform and decentralize.
This idea of always searching for new music, keeping up with the latest releases and being on the cutting edge, isn’t really useful anymore in monoculture. Drake dropped over 60 songs and people only cared about 5. With everyone doing the same shit over and over, this ‘evolution of sound’ happens so slow that it’s inherently more efficient as a ‘cutting edge’ listener to drop out of the game for a year and come back when these micro-adjustments have started becoming more evident. There’s for sure people who are still keeping up with the Jones’s and listening to everything new, but that’s almost become a disposable activity with very few useful takeaways.
When you build a music library, especially a diverse one, you curate your music listening experience. I build my definitive experience in different genres and subsets of music. A lot of people don’t ‘need’ more classic rock or more boom bap because they have 100 hours locked and loaded for whenever they wanna hit that vibe. When Greta Van Fleet came through and cloned Led Zepplin, it was great for everyone who wanted more, but I didn’t need it as I already had Led Zepplin. Maybe if that was my main squeeze that would have been a welcome addition, but my music library & taste allowing me to pivot vibes so often means that that vibe is already secure in a playlist I haven’t run into the ground yet. When that Brae&Joey Valence shit popped off cloning Beastie Boys, I was a bit more open to it as I figured they’d evolve the sound on their next projects but I’m not sure if that ever came into fruition.
As the industry churns, I see bands or acts come up that get the youth excited, and it’s usually 2 things:
- 1) the listeners are too young to know who inspired the act, and that act becomes a door to those influences before realizing the shit they heard first is just derivative of them
- or 2) the artist is pushing the boundaries and genuinely sounds nothing like anything before it, allowing the youth to feel personified and unique in their generation.
#1 instills boomerism gatekeeping and #2 instills boomerism ‘they’re breaking rules!’ but both are actually pushed forward via elder audiences with their music libraries that they can enlighten with. #1 being the kids love Slipknot/Manson/NuMetal/etc again, and #2 getting to dissect my old library and see what Kanye did for modern mainstream, or what E40’s off the wall flow explains for Blueface & the Detroit rap scene’s off the wall flow. Where this used to be loaning of discs or sending of files, it’s now sending links to big corpo platforms and the friction of ‘oh I’m on Apple Music I can’t open that’ also creates an extra layer of ‘keep listening to our new major label slop instead!’
I think it’s important to build our libraries, whether slopping it all into your Spotify Liked Songs and praying for the best, making playlists on your corposlop platform that is trying to turn your shuffle button into a ‘please shoehorn AI slop music into my headphones’ button, if you’re building a digital library, or if you’re building a physical one of CDs & Vinyls. It is important for these pieces of art to be able to be pulled off the shelf or file transfered rather than compressed into a link to a tech overlord’s datacenter.
There’s something to be said about piracy in modern age. Spotify’s pay structure (and Netflix, and Xbox Game Pass, etc), is essentially a huge Squid Game piggybank of subscriptions that period. After they take their massive cut, they give the rest of the pool out to artists. Music wise, this usually floats from $0.003 per stream to $0.007 per stream if you’re lucky. After the artist’s team (label, producers, services, etc) take their cut, the artist is left with even less, with some labels taking 90% or more. Not only that, but the labels are working together with the streaming platforms to give even less money out, including through means of AI music that Spotify owns so a ton of those lil $0.003 slices funnel back into them and make the artist pay pool even smaller. So what is piracy doing except taking 15 cents from an artist from my listening portion AND making me 10x more excited to buy tickets when they come around (which is ALSO completely fucked because of LN and TicketMaster, who are also in bed with Spotify & streaming services.) Ugh.
This is stupid. I have some plans on how I’m going to personally do something about it. As a consumer, I’m toying with the idea of building my own Android MP3 player that can stream from my home server. As an artist, you’ve already seen the start of it via this website. I have some plans on how to do way cooler shit than just upload to Spotify, post a Tiktok of me dancing, and then walk back and forth on a dive bar stage yelling for 30 minutes.
Stay tuned. Good morning y’all
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