For someone who hasn't read your book, what is the short thesis of what it's about?
It looks at the impact of the streaming model on both listeners and artists, using Spotify as an entry point into a bigger story that doesn't start or end with one specific streaming company. I interviewed over 100 sources, including musicians, people who work at independent record labels, and former Spotify employees, and tried to write something that could serve as an introduction to a broader discourse around streaming critique that has emerged over the past decade or so. It's a work of reported criticism. There are some chapters that are more investigative, and there are some that are more like cultural criticism. My background is as a music journalist, but there’s also a clear perspective about the impact of streaming on music, and about the relationship between the streaming model and creative labor, as well as what it looks like to try to make a living as an artist in this era.
What is your background in independent music? You seem pretty immersed in the New York and Brooklyn music scene.
Over the past 15 years, I have been involved in music as a music journalist, but I have also worked at music venues. I did college radio, and I've been going to DIY shows since I was a teenager. I went to Boston University, was the music director at the radio station there, and I started booking house shows for touring bands. In 2014, I moved into this DIY all ages venue, the Silent Barn, in Brooklyn, that was collectively run, and helped book hundreds of all ages shows. I also ran a music blog when I was in college, and later another online publication for five years that covered underground music. I had one foot in the world of journalism and underground publishing, and then another foot in the world of DIY music. I also play in bands as well, but my music playing has taken a backseat this year. The last time I played a show was about a year ago.
The book mentions how Spotify was originally more of an advertising vehicle, not a way to enrich musicians or listeners.
Anyone could relate to the problem that streaming services attempt to solve, which is staring at a streaming library and being overwhelmed by all the choices and not knowing what to choose or where to start. But the way in which streaming services go about attempting to solve that problem isn't necessarily done with the intent of helping people consider all the music that is at their fingertips, or to understand it, or give them pathways through lineages, histories, and trajectories that would help a listener have a more meaningful relationship with music. Instead, their goal is, "How can we get people to press play and then not hit skip? How can we extend their listening session and keep them on the platform?" The things that are being optimized are not meaningful connections, understanding, or contextualizing of music. It's about hitting play, not hitting skip, extending session length and "boosting consumer sentiment," or whatever weird phrases they use to describe the success of their product.
I was doing some artist management last decade, and I went to a panel in 2019 on optimizing streaming revenue. After several hours of listening to the panel, my conclusion was that the goal was to make music fairly bland so that people wouldn't hit the skip button.
That's a good point. One of the phrases from my book – and the reporting process that has really stuck out to me – was an interview that I did with a former Spotify employee who talked about how the goal of their recommendation apparatus was to help reduce the cognitive work that a user has to do when they open the app. When I hear the phrase, "reduce cognitive work," it sounds like shorthand for helping people think less. I don't think that's just specific to Spotify, but to this whole era of people being nudged and conditioned to rely more on AI tools to make decisions for them. They're trying to "offload tasks that make them use their brain too much." Ultimately, in order to form meaningful connections with music, we should be encouraging people to want to think more about music. I always think about this in relation to criticism, as a music critic or someone who cares a lot about criticism. I think of criticism as another word for thinking. You want people to read your perspective on a work, in hopes that they think about it, consider your perspective, and think about whether or not they agree with it. Hopefully, at the very least, you can expand the context on something and cause someone to reflect on their own relationship or their own perspective. When everything is about frictionlessness and reducing cognitive work, supporting people thinking less about music ultimately shapes this diluted relationship. It's a culture where people often don't care about what they're listening to.
How can people like us resist this trend of less cognitive thinking, and how can we support alternatives to companies like Spotify?
One of the things that has always struck me about streaming is the way in which independent music, and fans and participants in independent music culture, have been nudged to accept and embrace this model that was built for the pop music world. There are those two worlds, and then there are so many different worlds within the broader world of music, the reasons why people get involved with music, and how they relate to it. There's a pretty strong agreement and understanding – within non major label music culture right now – that there needs to be different approaches. Maybe even different digital tools, as well as a rejection of certain digital tools, in order to figure out ways of relating to digital music that work for different types of music. One thing that is important is to remember that the streaming model is built for music that scales, with the replay value being a core metric that decides how artists are compensated. That is something that only best serves music operating at scale. For non-major label music, non-pop music, weirder and more experimental music, and local grassroots music scenes, it doesn't work very well. The task is to figure out arrangements that work for supporting music that is not aspiring towards mass scale. Right now, there seems to be a common and growing understanding that for music operating at a smaller scale, or in more grassroots economies, the thing that makes the most sense is buying music directly from artists, if you can, and not buying into the idea that streaming is serving those artists.
I like streaming as a way to discover new artists. When I find an artist I enjoy, I try to buy their record on Bandcamp or at a gig. Unfortunately, it still feels like a drop in the bucket.
Maybe. There are some artists, independent artists for whom people buying their music directly – either through Bandcamp, or directly from their websites, or at their shows – makes a more meaningful impact than what they see from streaming. In fact, one person buying a record could contribute more to an artist’s funds than another fan’s whole year of streaming. Those two listeners might consider themselves to be both equally dedicated fans of the artist. If there’s a broader strategy for a cultural transformation we could hopefully see in coming years for independent music, I do think it has to involve individual fans thinking about their consumer behavior. But it also needs to involve regulating the services, and holding them accountable to be more fair to artists, and also the building of an alternative digital infrastructure for independent music from the ground up. We're starting to see some of that, whether it's artists building their own scrappy web stores to sell music directly, or putting their music up for free and saying, "Just download this. If you want to PayPal me, buy something from my store, come to one of my shows, or buy something on Bandcamp, that's cool." There are all of these cooperative and open-source alternatives to Bandcamp that are starting to pop up as well. I think we're entering a time where people in independent music will be more open to experimentation, which is exciting because independent artists have always challenged power in music and culture. It's not unusual that we would increasingly see more artists trying to figure out what that looks like for the streaming era.
I hope so! In ways, the current era reminds me of when I graduated college in 1983 and moved from Sacramento, California – a pretty boring local music scene – to Olympia, Washington – an amazing local music scene, with the early era of Bruce Pavitt’s Sub Pop and Calvin Johnson’s K Records. When I moved back to Sacramento in 1985, the music scene was totally booming. We were in the middle of “alternative music,” the rise of fanzines, locally booked venues, indie labels, and grassroots touring. It feels similar now, in that there is so much amazing new music outside of the major label world.
Something that was meaningful about that era of independent music culture is that you had strong examples being set by people who were running these labels. They weren't saying, “We're Dischord Records.” “We're K Records.” “We're going to be the only alternative answer to how to support independent music.” They were saying, “Here's a model of how you could start a DIY label along with us.” I taught a class at NYU a few years ago called “What is Indie?” I was looking back at all these legendary independent record labels, trying to figure out what they meant when they talked about independent music culture and how that phrase was different for a lot of independent labels. But something that struck me was that, for a lot of these independent labels, something that was important was sharing resources and sharing information about how other people could also do what they were doing. One of the things I assigned my students to read was from Simple Machines [Records], a DC label run by Jenny Toomey and Kristin Thomson from Tsunami. They put out this guide, called The Mechanic's Guide, where they laid out everything you needed to know in order to run an independent record label. How to record your own music, produce it, distribute it, and press vinyl. “Here's your guide to doing all this yourself.” From what I understand, that ended up getting into the hands of a lot of people who went on to start independent labels themselves. I feel like we need more of that for the next era. Maybe that will involve thinking beyond just the framework of independence from major labels to start thinking about a new lexicon for how to define the values of music culture that challenges power in this era. What are the new words that we could use to describe making music, outside of the major label and big tech systems in this current era? There are probably other values that need to be considered, in addition to independence from major labels. There's a lot of potential there. In my book, I talk about this cooperative called Catalytic Sound, which is a group of 30 musicians who started their own cooperatively run streaming platform where their music can be accessed. I'm not sure on the status of it, but when I did the interview with them a few years ago, they talked about making a manual on how to create a cooperative digital infrastructure for your scene that could be distributed to others. That is interesting and important. It's also not lost on me that my whole project of writing about streaming services and writing criticisms of the Spotify era started in 2016 when I got assigned by Maggie Vail [ex-Kill Rock Stars Records] to write about the subject for the blog of this nonprofit she was running called CASH Music. It was a nonprofit that gave open-source tools to musicians so they could build their own digital infrastructure and create a web presence outside of corporate centralized tech platforms. Free code to build a web store, a mailing list, or whatever digital presences artists were trying to build. It doesn't exist anymore, but it was ahead of its time. Something like that could be useful again for artists trying to figure out how to take advantage of the potential of the current digital worlds, while avoiding the more extractive aspects of it.
It feels like someone could create a platform that cared about artists, while actually helping them make a living. It seems like it would be easier than the fanzine and touring network that was set up in the ‘80s.
One of the problems is that music fans have become accustomed to this idea of having access to everything through one app. For that type of fan, there's a problem to be solved. But for music fans who are more interested in contributing to an underground media ecosystem, it's a whole different conversation. I also think that something that must be embraced in coming years is the idea that these are very different economies. There's going to have to be one app that people use for their “access to everything," and there then needs to be another app, or set of apps, in which they engage with to directly to support underground, grassroots, emerging, and DIY artists. They are different economies. People have gotten used to that for film, so it'll be interesting to see if people can also do that for music.
What advice do you have for artists to do their best to tune out this economy, on a financial level but even more so on a creative level? As you pointed out in your book, it's almost changing the way people write and produce. Artists are having to aim for this weird streaming model of consumption.
I would say minimize the noise of the metrics in your head. There's all this different data that we are being overwhelmed by, whether streaming data or social media metrics, that can cloud your sense of creativity. You might have one song that – for whatever reason you don't understand – goes viral on streaming or gets added to a big playlist. All of a sudden, you're in the back of your head, wondering, “Oh, wow. Should I do more of this? Should I lean into this?” How can you minimize that voice, in order to stay connected to your own imagination and sense of creativity? This is also happening to writers, because the platform economy has come for the independent writer as well, with places like Substack that were initially pitched as these “alternatives” to the social media rat race. Now, they’re becoming exactly like social media platforms. Substack just rolled out A/B testing for headlines last week, where you can figure out how to make a clickbait headline through metrics. I get why people would be drawn to communities of what seems like a built-in audience or discoverability. I've had a couple of personal newsletters, and then in 2021 and 2022 I was working on a more dedicated newsletter project. It's important to me to use newsletter platforms that did not overwhelm me with those types of metrics. I did this newsletter with my sister, that was a track reviews newsletter for about a year in 2022. We were working with Jesse von Doom, who also was the other person running CASH Music. We built a tool for sending out newsletters that wouldn't even track the data, in order to minimize the influence of all that data collection. So, yeah. How do I get data out of my head that I don't need to be considering, in order to do the thing I'm trying to do?
Well, one way is to put your phone away and pick up a book or a record. We're still making a printed magazine! It can be a struggle to communicate the value of a physical object that has no metrics to an advertiser, but our readers love it. I think vinyl is similar.
Rejecting exploitative technology could also look like embracing physical media. For people who are invested in independent, grassroots music culture, physical media has never stopped being central to participating, for reasons that make a lot of sense. There's no data being collected on you when you open a music magazine and read it, or when you listen to a cassette.
In your book you discuss the rise of chill and ambient music, and how it's devolved into a lot of AI-generated and work-for-hire tracks from musicians that Spotify hires cheaply. But, within that space, there's also lot of thoughtful, interesting music as well, going back to someone like Brian Eno [Tape Op #85]. I did an interview with Emily A. Sprague for this issue, who does ambient music. She references the Japanese Kankyō Ongaku music from the 1980s. Her music is interesting to me, and somehow there's a connection there as a listener. How does that happen? How do we encourage that, in this low cognitive era?
It can be hard to grasp why some types of music, artists, labels, and presenters seem to encourage a sense of presence that does not always feel like a given in this era. But yeah, thinking about ways to encourage that presence with music is important to the bigger project of figuring out how to prevent music from being treated as simply playlist fodder, or music to answer emails to. At the same time, there's this whole era of this anonymous, sterile, streaming ambient music for functional purposes. Meanwhile, there has also been a resurgence of interest in environmental, meditative, and ambient music that is beautiful. You see that in the current popularity of listening rooms or outdoor series for listening to music collectively. I went to a concert in [Brooklyn’s] Prospect Park that was very beautiful meditative music. I know that there's a lot of that that happens in L.A., upstate NY, and other places. How do you encourage this type of music to be a means towards collective listening, or something that listeners are approaching from the perspective of deep listening, instead of just something that goes on in the background. A lot of it has to do with context. I know I talk about context a lot in my book, but I think that it's in the intention of how work is presented.
I know I identify more with music in general if I know something about the artists and feel we have some shared values. We've lost a lot of that information, and we've lost a lot of criticism and music journalism.
The conundrum of this era is as much about the economy of music as it is about the media environment. And, in remembering that with the connections that get formed around music, there's a big role that people play: The ones who write about music, present music, and curate music – whether it be music journalists, or hosts on community radio shows. There's a reason why we've seen a boom of interest in online community radio, whether it’s The Lot Radio, dublab, and even NTS [Radio]. NTS is part owned by Universal Music Group now, which is unfortunate; but clearly the programming there is good, and it speaks to a lot of people. I think part of the reason is that there is a hunger and desire on the part of listeners and musicians to participate in media around music that feels more intentional, and that is respectful to the art form. I also should say I'm a big fan of listening clubs. People meeting at their houses or in a community space; like having a book club but for records. Listening clubs, as well as gathering for the purpose of people collectively listening to and discussing music, can be a powerful way to recommit to the social aspects. as well as It’s an important way to contextualize learning about music from the people around you.
A lot of our readers are producers, engineers, and studio owners. Having a listening session or club at your studio once a month could be a productive way to do this.
I think calling it a club feels like an important part of the social aspect. You're not coming to hear some expert talk about their record. Everyone's on the same page to listen to a record and talk about it. I do also think that listening sessions, where someone plays through a new record that they just made and talks about it, could also be an interesting way for someone who runs a studio to think about their studios as social spaces, to the extent that they're able to. That's definitely something that we need more of, not just in music, but in general in our world. Places where people could go without necessarily feeling they have to buy something to connect with people in their communities, people with shared interests, or to learn about music. That would be one thing you could do.
Yeah. I like that idea. Studios barely make money anyway, so why not have fun and start a club?
Yeah, totally. We exist in this time where there's a lot of pressure on artists to produce as much music, as quickly as possible, as cheaply as they can. You have people like Daniel Ek, the Executive Chairman and former CEO of Spotify, going on record saying that the cost of making content is now close to zero. This is a landscape very influenced by these powerful people who are disconnected – not just from the material realities of artists lives, but also the resources that it takes to make a record. Home recording is great. But keeping studios accessible as places where groups of people come to make things together is part of the puzzle to resisting platform pressures.
I own a studio, and it's part of my living, but home recording is great. Artists can work at home without the pressures of finances.
Yeah, totally.
What advice do you have for artists who want to leave Spotify?
There is never a part in my book where I say everyone needs to leave streaming, or everyone needs to delete their accounts. Part of that is trying to keep in mind the vast spectrum of experiences that artists have with the streaming economy. I think calls for boycotts should come from organized groups of musicians, like unions, and not necessarily from individuals. Although, I also applaud all of the artists who are loudly leaving streaming services for principled reasons right now. Part of it is thinking about: Where are you telling people to go find your music? Maybe your music is available in a bunch of different places, and you want to keep it available because you have income coming from all of them. But when someone clicks on to your website, Linktree, or Instagram, what are you telling them to go do? There's a way that you could have your music exist in places without necessarily championing them. Making it clear to listeners and fans of your band what you hope they will do with their own listening habits. Whether it's buying music from artists directly or buying it directly from your label. Maybe there's an independent record store that stocks your music, and you want people to go support independent music retail. Make it clear what people could do and make it the top link when you announce your record.
You have a chapter in the book on Spotify for Artists, and it comes off as an almost predatory practice. Many of these online services are supposedly going to help artists. However, when you look at them more closely, they're actually hurting them.
Spotify for Artists is rooted in a broader crisis PR strategy of hoping to appear artist-friendly. But the way in which that department of the company claims to be offering people tools to support their career, and then turns around and tries to sell them “opportunities,” like discovery mode or marquee ads, ends up being a bad deal a lot of the time. It's a unique issue of the streaming era that artists get considered as customers of these products, and that this happens through the Spotify for Artists app.
You also talk about how Spotify has co-opted certain music scenes, such as hyperpop for example. That was started by a small group of people, co-opted by Spotify, and then they pushed them out and diluted it down to their own playlists.
The hyperpop thing is so interesting. While I was writing it, I was thinking about grunge a lot, because I do think there is precedence for a mainstream media narrative being pushed on to a group of potentially unrelated artists, and how that can have an impact on public perception of the scene, of the major label gold rush around it, and how artists think of their own work in relation to it. Maybe this has always been the case and it's more pronounced in the streaming era, or maybe it's new. I'm not sure, but it definitely seems like the way in which Spotify was making up these random tags for what they perceived as “online scenes” was almost a form of misinformation or a contextual error. Those types of questions about how media narratives impact the way communities think of themselves is something that has always existed and certainly continues to exist. One thing that it highlights is how the impact of streaming on music should be understood, not just in terms of economic issues or labor issues, but also in terms of issues of media, and as part of this broader media crisis that music culture and journalism has been experiencing for many years now. We need to make sure that, in addition to supporting artists, we are also supporting the grassroots music media ecosystem.
