As I write, I have Tidal, Apple Play, Spotify, Youtube and Movietube open.
I am searching Van Morrison on Apple Play (nothing much), listening to Weezy on Tidal, putting together an overview of last week’s releases on Spotify, adding a Godfather scene to a song sharing page I belong to on youtube, watching the Nina Simone documentary on Movietube and finally, I have MLB’s “Fare Thee Well” open waiting on 8pm for the Dead at Chicago.
How did things ever get so far? I don’t know. To quote Don Corleone.
Look: I realize there was a time in the 70s when we used three separate forms of distribution, 8 Track, cassette and vinyl, but this is insane. Any concept of concentrating your musical taste doesn’t exist. Everywhere you look you can put together pieces of information but you can’t put them all together and so, not least because we are renting and not buying music, nothing belongs to us.
Despite the power of the CD, the only time music has truly belonged to the people who bought it was on vinyl. On vinyl, the way you listened to the songs you listened to affect the way it played back to you. Hisses and pops yes, but the wearing down of favorite tracks, the scratch and the skip, the two sides, the playing favorites. The actual vinyl became a sculpture of the music itself and how we treated the music. In 2015, we neither touch it nor see it nor own it, we don’t physically treat it and we can lose it with ease.
So instead of the one of one of vinyl we have the multi platform world of streaming and it is a huge mountain of information we can not deal with. Somebody recently claimed he could help me find bands to write about. As though the problem was a lack of choice.
There is too much choice, too many platforms. We can’t keep up.
My solution: Walk away. That’s what I did. Digital music gave you an illusion of innovation and that’s now gone. It gave you convenience but only for awhile because convenience for you is anathema to maximization of corporate profit. So now what you have is what you’ve described here, a nettlesome thicket of streaming services, all of them unsatisfying. In addition, the bottom has been ripped out of the economy for it except for those at the very top. This, too, you would have expected as it mirrors the wide inequality in American society, inequality that is huge and getting worse. The future is an ever smaller pie with fewer at the top using their power to vacuum up everything. The downward trend of statistics is merciless. And technology is optimized for that purpose. The reason for the complication is so more businesses can put their hand in your pocket, not anything near some idiotic notion of furnishing all the world’s music ever, all the time, at your fingertips, coming through a little box. Did your old record player, even your CD player, ever screw you over with unexplained changes in procedure and terms or unexplained glitches that made a hash of your music for a few hours, making you take time out of your day to sort it? No, of course not. But, hey, you have all the music in the world now at your fingertips through your smart device, right?