Over on the Twitter, there’s been a flurry of discussion as to whether Spotify is an improvement over illegally downloaded music or if it’s basically the same thing. I’d like to propose a third stream: that the problem we face is not one of economics, but of the spiritual nature of how consume music. That is to say: what Spotify and illegally downloaded music have in common is that they both spiritually devalue music by making a surfeit of it too accessible. With the proliferation of sites/apps like Spotify comes the demise of curation as it applies to one’s music collection. What irritates me is not that people steal music, but that they steal so much of it that they don’t listen to any of it. If someone ripped my CD because they couldn’t afford it, I would feel cheated, but not as cheated as I do knowing that the value of a carefully curated collection of CDs, tapes, records, what-have-you—- has gone to zip thanks to the gluttony of 21st-century consumers who don’t know when to stop downloading and start listening.
And the fundamental problem, as I see it, is that we as a society have gradually (d)evolved to the notion that universal access qua quantity is axiomatically good. As Butthead once queried Beavis, “if nothing ever sucked, how would you know if something was cool?” By the same logic, how are we to assign value to any music if we have access to all of it?
There is another problem, which has to do with the common defense of Spotify that argues that its service allows people to “check out” music and then decide if it’s worth purchasing. This would be all well and good, except it seems to me this puts music that may require several listenings in order to get under one’s skin at a real disadvantage. In the “old days”, if we bought a CD and didn’t take to it immediately, there was an economic imperative of sorts to grow to like it, i.e. “I paid $15 bucks for this record, so I better give it a second spin to see if it takes”. Nowadays, the only records that people seem to give second chances after an initial reaction of indifference or dislike are those given the stamp of approval by select tastemakers in the blogosphere, i.e. “Umm, I don’t really get this BadgerDance record, but Pitchspoon gave it a 9.7317 so it is good and therefore I will listen to it until I understand the music slash find it relatable.”
So I imagine a near future wherein Spotify has become ubiquitous, and the listeners of the world simply bounce around from one immediately satisfying songlet to another, and anything that is truly visionary/difficult/new will probably get tossed aside.
All of which is to say: if someone wants to use Spotify the way he or hse once approached the purchase of physical albums, I’m in full support. But if it’s just a means of sampling music at a surface level, folks might as well just download illegally, because the damage to serious listening has already been done.
Gabriel
You touched on this subject a bit in Vail and I couldn’t agree more . Amen I say .
The current Zeitgeist of ” No Brow ” the blatant consumerism of everything from books and music to religion and philosophy , from the Dyslexic Hummingbird attention spans of even people of my generation lately ( over 50 ) to our obsessions with being ” Connected ” when in fact we are becoming more distant : such is our current De-Evolution .
The above was part and parcel to mine and my wife’s decision to walk away from our Higher Ed careers . Myself from a conservatory as well as private instruction , my wife from 23 years in Linguistics
But I will say on the positive side , what a pleasant shock it was to hear one of your generation ( you ) speak in such erudite terms , to be so well read , and yes to speak in complete sentences without a single ” Like ” being interjected
As well as to see all those young ones , who at least from my perspective ( you’d know better as you spent more time ) were , unlike so many their age thirsting for knowledge
I walked away from the Vail experience feeling that perhaps there is still some hope . I only wish I could of taken the Bass players invitation to attend the following master class . So perhaps a change with a return to music and possibly teaching are once again in order .
In closing , Brilliant Essay and please keep it up ( both the writing and the music )
And thanks for the inspiration .
The likes of you are needed in these odd at best times
Just read the Twitter comment and your rebuttal on your Tumblr site .
May I say here as I do not Twitter that A. You have nothing to apologize for B. Calling for Quality over the Ephemeral is in no way being an Elitist C. Anyone who thinks it does ( B) needs to spend a bit of time with ” Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ”
You’re breaking new ground ( well in truth its old ground that never succeeded in the past , I ought to know ) Criticism is bound to come Hot and Heavy . The old guard who are still in power somehow will condemn you and the new guard who seem to think everyone deserves a Gold Medal and All music art etc are equal are duty bound to whine and claim the Elitist Moniker upon any that would dare to contradict their misguided beliefs
So Hold Your Ground . Don’t apologize ( unless you’re actually proven wrong ) and don’t try to justify your opinions / actions to those incapable of understanding .
Take the advice that was given to me long ago , which I’ve only now taken to heart
Do what you do . Do it to the best of your ability . Stand your ground and be prepared for the worse .
Ultimately … if its good ( and yours is ) it will succeed .
If you can get past the barf inducing pretentiousness of this article, I think you might like it: http://www.slate.com/id/2289177/pagenum/all/
I know that you secretly love Bourdieu
-DT
Delcan
Assuming you were responding to Gabriel’s essay and not my posts , first allow me to apologize for ” cutting ” in .
As interesting and fascinating as Bourdieu’s Philosophy and Theories are , they would collapse under the hard weight of my family tree .
My Grandfather ( fathers side ) was the first in the family to work his way out of the coal mines of Pennsylvania to a blue collar job in NJ , where my father worked his way into a decent paying ,albeit also a blue collar job in the same company . My Grandmother cleaning homes and doctors offices to make ends meet
On my mothers side , my Grandmother worked her way out of the sweat shops of NYC to become manager and prototype seamstress for a major designer . Grandfather working his way up his Blue Collar job to supervisor . With my mom going from factory worker , to entrepreneur over a 40 year period . Me being the first to go to and graduate from College , as well as the first to pursue the Arts as a profession .
So Nature played no part in my musical or otherwise tastes . That comes down to living close enough to NYC to grow up listening to a Radio station as a child ( WKRS I think ) who’s motto in the 60′s was ” We only play good music ” going from Dylan to Debussy to Coltrane etc with a healthy dose of poetry , philosophy and literature ( and yes the Chris Stevens character in ” Northern Exposure ” was modeled on one of the DJ’s ) to being in a NJ public school system that made trips to the Met and Lincoln Center mandatory , to lets face it Bugs Bunny cartoons extensive use of the Classical repertoire.
Add in experiencing Bernstien’s Young People Orchestra , having him explain High Brow taste was a decision , to be learned and not an inheritance and that would sum up my current mindset .
Nurture , not Nature , at least in my case .
Let me end with a few reading recommendations of my own relating to GK’s essay . Books though , not links being the ” Elitist ” that I am so often accused of ;
” No Brow ” John Seabrook
” At the End of an Age ” John Lukacs
” Against the Machine ” Lee Seigel
” The Technological Bluff ” Jacques Ellul
” Silicon Snake Oil ” Clifford Stoll
The death of curation may have been exaggerated?
I use Spotify, Rdio and Pandora (in my home through a Sonos system). I find that with Spotify or Rdio that I still have to curate. (Pandora is a different beast – that’s more akin to listening to radio).
I have almost the entire world of music at my fingertips but the question “what should I listen to” is now actually even harder. How do I decide what to listen to? Either I have to consume playlists that other people have made or I have to make my own. To make my own I still need to curate. Even when consuming the playlists of others I have to curate because I must choose which playlists to listen to and I decide to follow some playlists or people and not others.
There is some concept of a “station” on Spotify or Rdio but they become very limited.
To truly appreciate music I still have to curate my own playlists and collections in these services, no?
I don’t think that follows that the idea of being a discriminating listener goes away when music is more accessible.
Do we really think that people won’t fall in love with a song anymore, that they won’t put it on repeat and listen to it over and over and over just because it’s easier to obtain music (stealing or spotify) ::rolls-eyes::
Well no mater which it is, the one thing we can say is that statements such as:
“universal access qua quantity is axiomatically good”
are completely wrong, completely lacking in evidence, are just theory with no justification WHATSOEVER that someone made up without thinking twice. Maybe the opposite will be true: being immersed in music will allow people to fall in love with songs that they never knew existed (has happened to EVERYONE of us) and encourage artists to strive for quality over quantity (we are seeing this already), that this new dialogue and immersion will be a renaissance for a revived love of music over the commidification of it, over the lascivious desire for physical items to add to one’s ‘collection’ (NO, the old guard were the collectors, now that this no longer matters we can concentrate on the music), maybe it’s a return to music for music’s sake.
Yeah, that second one sounds much more likely.