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Autoplay’s Algorithmic Hit-Maker

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Spotify’s infamous recommendation algorithm is a hot topic on this blog, under fire for pay-to-play schemes and encouraging saccharine content. Stereogum’s Nate Rogers touches on both aspects while exploring how an obscure Pavement b-side became the band’s most popular song on the streaming platform. No one is certain of the reason for this — fucking algorithms, how do they work? But the song did start collecting massive play counts in early 2017 when Spotify switched Autoplay ‘on’ for everyone by default. 

The Autoplay feature on Spotify plays a stream of songs automatically once you’ve finished listening to an album, its selection based on that album’s sound. Autoplay also is enacted when you launch Spotify’s ‘radio’ function. That function is also based on a band or a song’s sound — you could specify ‘LCD Soundsystem Radio,’ for example. I’ve written before about how Spotify uses Autoplay to keep you listening to the platform in a way that pays fewer royalties. 

The theory goes that, for whatever mysterious reason, Spotify’s algorithm loves Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes.” Whenever, in Autoplay mode, the algorithm selects a song from Pavement, that’s the one it picks. 

Damon Krukowski has noticed something similar. The Galaxie 500 song “Strange” is similarly the most popular song on Spotify from the band by a wide margin. Damon was puzzled as the song was never a single and “not particularly popular in the past” (which I’ll dispute as I’ve always loved that song). But its rise on Spotify coincided with the ascendance of “Harness Your Hopes” — January 2017. That pesky Autoplay algorithm.

It’s nice that these deep cuts get thrust in the Spotify spotlight, even though Autoplay streams pay much lower royalties than intentional streams. But why are these songs sticking out? It’s argued that “Harness Your Hopes” is a quintessential Pavement song — not as crazy or weird or (and I don’t mean this disparagingly) memorable as other titles in their catalog. I’m sure the band agrees. Krukowski wonders about this, too, with regards to “Strange”:

“‘Strange’ is a touch faster, louder, with a more regular backbeat and a more predictable song structure than most Galaxie 500 songs,” he pointed out on his blog. “Might an unintended result of Autoplay, then, be the separating out and rewarding of the most ‘normal’ songs in each band’s catalog…? … As albums are increasingly supplanted by playlists, and intentional listening of all kinds is increasingly replaced by algorithmic recommendations, ‘Play Galaxie 500’ may really come to mean, ‘Play the song by Galaxie 500 that most resembles songs by others.'”

That sounds worrying, but keep in mind that Autoplay is a passive listening mode. It’s playing in the background for most listeners. So keeping the crazy or weird or memorable at bay is desirable. The music shouldn’t linger or provoke by design.

The problem is the list of ‘top songs’ on an act’s Spotify artist page. These Autoplay ‘passive’ listens are treated the same as intentional listens. Though purposefully selecting to listen to a song or album holds more weight for the artist — both in royalty and fan-building — it’s treated the same as a passive, in-the-background listen. One hundred passive Autoplay streams are identical to one hundred intentional plays when determining a band’s top songs. So, when you go to Galaxie 500’s Spotify page, you’ll see “Strange” as the top song at 11,680,597 plays. 

“When Will You Come Home” is probably a song more beloved by fans, and it’s certainly more indicative of Galaxie 500’s sound, but it’s stuck at 1,439,734 streams. That seems measly compared to the top song’s count. But, assuming those million-and-a-half streams are intentional plays as opposed to Autoplay-ed, that song has a lot more relevance than an algorithm’s inscrutable choice.

🔗→ Why Is The Obscure B-Side “Harness Your Hopes” Pavement’s Top Song On Spotify? It’s Complicated.

Update: Damon Krukowski got in a spirited discussion with Spotify’s Glenn McDonald over the issues raised in the Stereogum article Check out the thread on Twitter.

Any Relief is Sweet Relief

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One More Post About Stress and Creativity → I’ve alluded to the challenges and difficulties of putting together a weekly email newsletter, which are the obstructions of creative work, really. Whether writing, music-making, brainstorming, anything requiring the mythical ‘creative juice’ — the stars should be aligned, right? If something’s out of whack, then perhaps it’s not happening. The mood escapes us, and, creatively, we feel like fish flapping on the edge of the dock. 

I could probably say it’s felt like this for four years, but COVID-times — coinciding with the launch of my newsletter somehow — exaggerates the mental forecast for dark clouds. A few of you have picked up on these feelings, responding to confirm the matching weather in your heads. Our challenges aren’t equal, and I’m aware I’m better off in these circumstances than most. But the combination of daily chaos from the White House, a global pandemic, and the duly exacerbated struggles of self-employment weigh heavy. I admit: this stress-fog is the reason the newsletter slowed down its pace to fortnightly. No matter how much I try to keep my brain fresh — news-avoiding, stoic reminders, meditation — the dark clouds find a way to shoo off the ideas. And the motivation to go along with them. 

So how do I feel today? Probably, like you, a bit better. Damon Krukowski tweeted yesterday that Boston’s 4.2 earthquake was actually “everyone jumping out of bed with energy for the first time in 4 years.” I don’t know how long this lasts — the daily chaos is already starting to resume, battering us for at least a couple of months. The pandemic is scarier than it’s ever been. And I’m still a self-employed person balancing the financial precipice. But on at least one or two of those points, I see some hope, and I didn’t feel that way several days ago. Any relief is sweet relief, and my creative process is thankful. 

I decided to use this blog and my newsletter as a respite from all this turmoil. That’s why I haven’t spoken about it much and why it feels weird writing about it now. And I don’t want to make it all about me, either. But I feel like it’s a good possibility you’ve been going through the same challenges. You might also feel less ‘weighted’ today. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s easier from here out — creation is hard even in the best of times. But any ray of light helps shine through those clouds, doesn’t it? Onward.

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Speaking of my Email Newsletter → Will Sumsuch let loose a bunch of lovely words about Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care in the new issue of 5 Mag. He calls my newsletter “a neatly packaged antidote to our horrendously homogeneous musical landscape” and “like an artistic self-help guide.” Can you see me blushing through the email? I hope to live up to those accolades as rev back up to my weekly broadsides. Thanks, Will! The latest issue of 5 Mag is only available to subscribers right now, but you can download it for $2.99. You should! It’s rad, and, as usual for the publication, it features a lot of informative underground dance music content to grok. [LINK]

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Pylon – Box → The best band I ever saw live (and I didn’t even get to see them in their early ’80s prime) has a wonderful box set out. It’s Pylon, and it’s called Box. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote some great words about it on 4Columns, including this thinly disguised call-to-arms: “These recordings demonstrate how powerful the idea of punk was as liberation, not in the sense of political emancipation but as a license to start from scratch.” Anyway, you could do worse than put on Pylon today or any day. “These kids listen to dub for breakfast.” You can listen to (and buy) Box on Bandcamp or those streaming spots. [LINK]

Generous Expertise

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The terrific documentary about Other Music popped up on Prime Video last month. I’ve wanted to see this for a while — the NYC store, much mythologized, really was the ideal of an indie record shop. It had it all: a niche selection curated by the owners and staff, records filed under sometimes-baffling genre section names, cards with reviews filled to the edges with jumbled handwriting affixed to releases, store layout and organization to the point of disorganization, and so on.

The documentary made me miss New York City (I’m so happy I got to visit a few months before The Strange Times) and, of course, browsing in record stores. But, most of all, I miss the communities and interactions that revolve around great shops. This aspect of music culture was fading, along with independent retail stores, with or without COVID interference.

Other Music, New York City

Record store clerks get a bad rap for being smug jerks, judging customers’ musical tastes from behind the counter. Sure, I know a few of those —perhaps on a bad day, I’ve been one of those — but I think the cliché is overblown. As the Other Music doc shows, record store employees are often helpful experts in their chosen fields. As Caroline said as we watched the movie, “I could listen to them talk about records all day.” They know a lot about music, they listen to a lot of music, and their favorite thrill is turning someone else on to great music. People who work in record shops live for that.

There’s a moment in the documentary when a customer says to the clerk, “I’m looking for something like Lou Reed that’s not Lou Reed.” We wait for the side-glance, or a snarky response, or the indignant huff. The legends and depictions of pretentious record shops train us to believe this might be a terrible thing to ask. The customer is brave even to bring it up. 

But record store staff enjoy questions like this. The request is open-ended but has a launchpad. It’s an invitation to explore, and, most of all, it’s the customer saying, “I trust you to turn me on to something I haven’t heard yet. And I’m inclined to love it.” Maybe that’s just my own experience (I owned a record store once, remember), but I think I’m right. 

I can’t imagine the response if that person asked for “something like Lou Reed but not Lou Reed” on Facebook or Twitter. Maybe he’d get a handful of helpful replies in the spirit of a record shop clerk, but the snark would cover those over like a storm cloud. I don’t know of an internet equivalent of a space where one stranger can ask another for an open-ended recommendation without fear of trolls or insults or intimidation. 

Record stores are places of generous expertise. It’s sad that the concept almost seems quaint in this volatile age. And that’s what I miss the most about stores like Other Music. Hopefully, these stores — Other Music not included, unfortunately — will be around once we get out of this mess. In the meantime, watch the documentary. If you ever had — or have! — a favorite record store, this movie will move you.

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A couple of weekends ago, 1200 record stores participated in Record Store Day. I don’t need to tell you that this was a weird edition of the annual tradition. Record store day occurs typically in April but, this time was pushed to June, as there was a thing called “wishful thinking” back then. As that plan fizzled out, we’re now celebrating RSD 2020 through three ‘RSD drops’ on the last Saturdays of August, September, and October.1One wonders if this monthly schedule was inspired by ‘Bandcamp Days.’ In part, the idea is that spreading it out will thin the crowds showing up at actual record stores. This schedule, in theory, will also help space out the releases, so they’re not all hitting on a single day. I’m not so sure.

The decision exists in our current retail paradox of ‘less physical customers, more physical sales.’ The dramatic lines in front of record stores (which you can see in photos from a year-old blog post of mine) are no longer welcome. Elbow-to-elbow bin browsing is not allowed. That’s a shame as peeking at the person’s selections next to you is how vinyl junkies make friends. 

Most record stores won’t open their doors to the record-collecting masses. The RSD organizers frowned on online orders of exclusive releases, but this year it’s acceptable. Stores are trying to restrict orders of these limited items to local addresses, which sounds like a losing battle. Some stores are using a lottery to determine which customer snags a rare vinyl release or who gets to step in the store for an allotted time. Others are using platforms like Instagram, posting a photo of the record. Then it’s ‘first come first serve’ among the commenters. And, appropriate for this year of live-streaming, Zoom-led RSD tours from stores are happening.

In Variety, Mick Pratt of the Northeastern US indie chain Bull Moose says of the challenges, “I choose to be optimistic about it and hope that it will be great and it will not result in too much stress, either for staff or for customers who are like, ‘Damn, what I really needed to get through 2020 was this record.'”

How did it go? It seems like it went okay, but shifting vinyl fans from crowding the stores to crowding the internet had foreseeable problems. Here’s a tweet from Damon Krukowski, whose old band Galaxie 500 released the live album Copenhagen for RSD:

Regardless, the point is to support these stores (among all the other independent businesses you’re supporting) during this difficult time. You don’t need to wait for the next Record Store Day to do so. We can’t lose these places of generous expertise: the record stores, the bookshops, the locally-owned restaurants, the farmer’s markets, etc. I have the feeling once we get out of this, we’ll need these places more than ever. I don’t know how we’ll manage if they’re gone.

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John Shepherd has a generous expertise. You’ve probably heard about the short documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens by now. So you know Shepherd’s expertise wasn’t only his musical selections. Though I’m not convinced all those knobs and wires and screens and machinery actually did anything, you know, scientific. You might also know that his generosity extended to alien life forms. He DJ’ed to the great unknown, an audience that may or may not be out there. I know the feeling — I used to have an overnight slot on college radio.

As evidence of my embarrassing music-nerdom, the most crucial part of the documentary, to me, is when, in vintage footage, Shepherd pulls Musik Von Harmonia out of his vinyl collection for a local TV crew. As obscure as that album is now, it was but a rare fossil when that television ‘human interest’ piece aired — sometime in the ’80s is my guess. Shepherd’s geek move was strategic. He knew this would go out on television, potentially to an audience in the hundreds of thousands. So what album does he choose to show? And then he plays some of the music, announcing “now here’s a song from Harmonia” into the microphone. Shepherd’s audience is now more than extraterrestrial, and he knows it. 

Like making friends with the person browsing next to you at the record store, John Shepherd aims for connection. He’s satisfied if that connection is with aliens or a TV viewer left dumbfounded at a Harmonia album on the evening news. The film’s director, Matthew Killip, speaks about these connections in The Guardian: 

Killip was interested in extraterrestrial life less as scientific inquiry than cultural phenomenon – “if you make a film about someone trying to contact aliens, there’s an in-built narrative problem, which is that they don’t contact aliens,” he said. But he found Shepherd’s lifelong interest in contacting someone, or something, in outer space to be “deeply romantic”, and more universal than a guy rigging thousands of dollars of radio and electrical equipment in his grandparents’ living room might seem. “We’re all sort of sending out a message hoping that someone else will pick it up and understand us and understand who we are,” Killip said. “We’re all trying to make contact.”

The compact but poignant documentary John Was Trying To Contact Aliens is streaming now on Netflix. And, John is right — Musik Von Harmonia is an album worth hearing.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

A Series of P.O. Boxes

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For all the writing I’m suddenly doing about nostalgia and memories, my memory is terrible. I’m amazed by people who instantly recall faces or specific events from their teenage years as I can barely remember any of that. It’s frustrating. This frustration popped up again as my friend Jeff, who drove us the five hours to see the Butthole Surfers, wonders why I didn’t mention the pre-dawn speeding ticket. Simply, I don’t remember it. I mean — I know it happened, especially now that he brings it up. But it’s not a part of my brain cargo. That slot is empty.

That makes writing about events from my past a little tricky. I guess that’s the case for all of us, as, often unintentionally, we tailor our memories to fit a present story. It’s Kris Kelvin‘s dilemma and his downfall (you should watch Solaris, either one will do). I suggest starting a journal to document your days if you haven’t already. I’m bummed I didn’t start until a couple of years ago.

The present story is the post office. I have many memories of the post office. They’re bubbling to the top as I read with frustration about what that institution is going through. Much of the world’s happenings have caused me (and probably you) incredible sadness and distress over the past months. But I have a strong and personal connection with the post office. It’s responsible for much of who I am and how I cultivated that identity. So, yeah, I’m pretty bummed out right now.

I opened my first post office box when I was sixteen. All you needed to get a P.O. Box was a driver’s license, so, in my world, one quickly followed the other. Living in Central Louisiana in the late ’80s, my internet was Factsheet Five and the classifieds in Maximumrocknroll. That’s where I found punk rock pen-pals, weirdos with photocopied zines, mail art deviants defacing postcards, and experimenting artists encoding noise signals on cassette tapes. I needed a place to receive these subversive materials without alarming disapproving parents. The post office came to my rescue. I’ll go as far as to say that the post office saved my life.

I’ve had a P.O. Box ever since. Every time I move, one of the first things I do is visit the post office and fill out that application. It’s like I have a timeline of my life marked by each of those boxes. I still remember the numbers for some old ones (not bad for someone with a shitty memory). Each box had a primary purpose, different from the one before. That P.O. Box timeline becomes a signifier of what was important to me at that point in my personal history. 

The first box was about connecting and ‘finding the others.’ Discovering who I was and if there were people in the world sharing these strange interests. It turns out there were.

I opened my second box at the beginning of college, where I was still connecting and figuring things out. But I also remember The Village Voice appearing in the box weekly. I’d pour over the ads for the live music coming through the NYC area and dreaming about being in a place where I could see all of that. To me, that box was about the future and its dreams.

Things got complicated with the third P.O. Box. I moved to Florida, grabbed a box, and got involved with the college radio station. It’s a long story I’ll write about someday, but I helped lead a protest movement against the corrupt faculty managing the station. As they employed me (I was the music director), I had to do my activism in secret, distributing leaflets and petitions to be returned to an anonymous mailing address. This unidentifiable P.O. Box drove the faculty crazy — I know they suspected I was behind it, but they couldn’t prove it. 

One day, in the heat of the radio station scandal, I checked my mail at the post office. There was a slip for a certified letter. I took this to the counter, and the postman told me I had to print my name and sign to receive this mail. Of course, the sender would receive this form with my name as a receipt. This was obviously sent by the suspecting station management. No thanks, and nice try! 

My fourth P.O. Box was in downtown Orlando. I opened a record store — Bad Mood Records — and the post office was directly across the street. Incredibly convenient. That was also when I co-founded the Eighth Dimension label and started DJ’ing professionally. So this box was all about receiving vinyl — tasty 12″ promos from across the globe. Every couple of weeks, I faxed out a short store newsletter to all my favorite record labels with my Q-BAM top 10 chart. My phone bill was out of control, but it was worth it. Most days, there were at least a couple of records arriving at my P.O. Box.

In the early 2000s, I moved across town, which meant a new post office and P.O. Box. I started my music publishing business, so I was using my P.O. Box to receive contracts, notices, and other legal papers for the first time. Grown-up stuff. This post office also makes me think about the Great Recession, as I helped support myself by selling off my vinyl collection through Discogs. Ten years before, I went to the post office every day to see what records got sent to me. Now my daily visits were about sending records off. 

These days I have a P.O. Box that’s only used for business. You’ll find it listed at the bottom of my email newsletters. I visit it maybe once a week (and even less now due to lockdown). I don’t necessarily think that’s entirely due to the internet and online communication. Yes, this newsletter might be a mailed zine at a different time. But all these trappings of adulthood — the permanent home address, the decreased need to seek new connections, the DJ’ing career that’s now in the past — have made my post office visits infrequent. But I still get a thrill when I open the P.O. Box’s tiny door and there’s something surprising waiting for me.

So, that’s my little love letter to the US Postal Service. I know a lot of people that could write their own. And many of those people also love music.

The chaotic state of our postal system comes at an especially bad time for the music community. Without in-person visits or merch tables on tours, record stores and artists rely on the USPS to get records and other physical paraphernalia to fans. Media Mail is a godsend here — one can send a record anywhere in the USA at a slower pace for a reduced price. Media Mail was how I mailed the vinyl I sold through Discogs, and it was remarkably dependable — I rarely ran into problems with delays or damaged goods. I’m betting Media Mail is a nightmare right now.

The demand for physical music formats — vinyl, CDs, cassettes — has increased alongside growing dissatisfaction with streaming platforms. Artists make more of a profit, and fans feel supportive of their favorite artists. There’s also a desire for something tangible to hold — representing membership in a cultural movement — that’s absent from digital music. The resurgence of ‘legacy formats’ is a compelling narrative in the modern music industry, an unexpected trend that’s welcomed a lot of analysis. In a new interview with Damon Krukowski, Bandcamp’s Ethan Diamond says, “half of the sales on Bandcamp at this point are for physical goods.” That even surprised me.

What happens to this aspect of fandom with a crippled postal service? Without Media Mail? What happens to record stores and Discogs sellers and vinyl labels? Book stores and other indie sellers are in the same boat, too.

It’s essential to consider the impact the US Postal Service has on maintaining small businesses and independent endeavors. I don’t want to live in a world where only corporations can afford to ship using expensive privatized services or, in the case of Amazon, their own shipping infrastructure. That’s one of my fears about what happens when we come out of the pandemic: a lot of the framework that supports independent business will be gone.

Here’s a good Twitter thread on what we can do to help the USPS. Some of the top posts’ info is a little dated as this is a quickly developing situation. Scroll down a little for some concrete things you can do. And here’s a useful page for ‘How You Can Help Save the US Postal Service’ from the fantastic art site Hyperallergic.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Surviving Spotify’s Future Landscape

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There’s a lot of chatter about Daniel Ek’s recent interview with Musically’s Stuart Dredge. There are more than a few nuggets to dissect, but this one is getting the most attention:

“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek. […] “I feel, really, that the ones that aren’t doing well in streaming are predominantly people who want to release music the way it used to be released …”

As Liz Pelly has explored on The Baffler, Spotify seems intent on influencing artists to tailor their music to benefit the platform. Yes, some point out that in past decades artists used to release 1 or 2 albums every year, so what Ek proposes is nothing new. But the difference is that artists now almost solely rely on touring for income. It’s impossible for most acts to frequently take months off to record a succession of albums without dire financial risk. No doubt you’ve heard the common refrain that bands used to tour to promote album releases, and now it’s the other way around. 

PRS’s Tom Gray illustrates this using The Beatles as an example. The Beatles stopped touring to concentrate on their studio work and, to Ek’s satisfaction, released a lot more than an album every few years. It’s doubtful a 2020 Beatles could do the same. Without touring income, they would be in the hole. Here’s Tom’s take (click here to read the full thread):

Tom’s numbers get a little fudgey — studio costs and such don’t need to be that high these days — but the point stands. The Spotify age is not kind to bands that camp out in studios. (The streaming model is even crueler to those who write songs but don’t perform, but that’s a whole other harrowing tale I’ll save for another time.)

Damon Krukowski challenges Ek’s statement by looking at current Spotify earnings from his former band, Galaxie 500. Krukowski points out that the band hasn’t released anything in over 20 years so, by Ek’s reasoning, they shouldn’t do well in ‘this future landscape.’ But they get more than one million streams a month. That’s pretty good, right? God knows I wish my catalog got half those monthly streams. 

You might think those numbers put Krukowski and Galaxie 500 in the musical middle class. Instead, those streams amount to about $1250 per band member a month. Here’s Damon (click here to read the full thread):

The concern isn’t what Ek refers to as the ‘top tier’ artists. Those are doing fine. The top artists have always done fine. And, for a variety of factors, they can (for now) live off Spotify royalties and the other compounding advantages of fame and exposure. The problem is the disruption of music’s middle class. This sector relied financially for most of this century (so far) on touring. And with COVID-19 in the air, the absence of touring and the diminished value of recorded music creates a crisis. Music’s middle class was already disappearing — in 2021, it could be gone entirely.1Be sure to put a pin on the idea that this disappearing middle class is reflective of income disparity in our society at large.

That’s what this interview — and Bob Lefsetz’s defense of Spotify — glosses over. Of course, wildly successful artists, with tens or hundreds of millions of plays a month, make good money from streaming. And it’s disingenuous to imply that artists complain because they feel entitled to the same. I can confidently speak for most artists that we just want an opportunity to earn a living through our music. Opportunity is not entitlement. Even though an artist’s ‘middle class’ was always precarious, there’s very little chance now to make it work. 

The implication from Ek is — and he’s not that far off — in the eyes of Spotify, you’re either a superstar or an unknown. The insult is Ek saying that the latter position is mostly the artist’s fault because she’s a Luddite who’s not “putting the work in.”

(I’m reminded of this insightful quote from author Nancy Baym: “It’s amazing to me to see how so many careers, in music and beyond, have shifted such that it’s no longer enough to do the work. Now you have to do the work of making sure everyone is seeing that you’ve done the work.”) 

But I’m not placing all the blame on Ek, streaming, and the Napster guys who let this genie out of the bottle. All of that became inevitable as soon as the first ones-and-zeroes were digitally encoded on a compact disc. But as listeners and recording artists, we play a part by accepting the notion that Spotify is unavoidable and necessary. Yes, I believe that Spotify is not going anywhere. And I doubt they’ll change anything except notch their monthly price up a dollar or two in a few years. What it’s essential also to understand is we’re not obligated to play along. 

As concerned recording artists, we don’t necessarily need to remove our music from Spotify (though, if you do exit the platform, good on you). The key is to treat streaming as the entrance of a marketing funnel to lead potential fans to our sites and mailing lists. Let’s look at it as if it’s radio. Radio in the US egregiously doesn’t pay a royalty to performers, but performers still allow their music on the radio as it’s an entry for new listeners. But they never say, “You should only listen to my music on the radio.” 

Or as a more musically-inclined Tyler Durden might say: “The first rule of Spotify is you do not talk about Spotify.” Only post links to your site or a store like Bandcamp. Seriously — there is no reason to send your fans to Spotify. The distant hope that the company will return the favor by adding your song to one of their big playlists is a broken motivation.

As listeners, we have a responsibility, too. I frequently write about the seductive appeal of streaming — I know I can’t resist effortlessly accessing an album or band that I just learned about. But we should also support the artists we enjoy by directly purchasing their music, ordering their merchandise, and signing up for their mailing lists. It’s not that difficult, and these gestures mean a lot to the artists. And, like musical Tyler, we should spread the word by posting to our favorite artists’ websites and Bandcamp pages, not Spotify players. 

We’ll all benefit the sooner we start thinking of Spotify as an occasional sampling tool instead of a go-to listening necessity. Let’s happily hand the platform over to the ‘top tier’ with their frequent releases and domination of playlists. It’s evident from the interview that’s who Ek has in mind for his company, anyway (besides Joe Rogan, of course). 

Bandcamp’s ‘Imperialism’

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There’s a solid profile of Bandcamp in The Guardian with insight into the company and its founder Ethan Diamond. The piece also features quotes from former Galaxie 500 drummer and present digital music critic Damon Krukowski about how an essential element of fandom is the exercising of agency:

The direct connection between fans, artists and labels, whether it’s leaving a positive review or paying an extra few pounds because it’s your favourite artist, is about “being an agent, rather than a passive participant,” [Krukowski] says. “When you have not surrendered your agency, it makes perfectly natural sense to think, ‘What can I do with that agency to take some action?'”

But then the piece strikes a strange note when it reaches for criticism of the Bandcamp platform. There’s so much love for the service — especially right now — that it was probably tough to find someone to give a negative quote or two. In the end, it’s an unnamed ambient artist (not sure if anonymity is warranted here but okay) and his comments are head-scratchers: 

“As a non-American,” he says in an email, “I object to the idea that my music is used by Bandcamp to push what are essentially American political messages, regardless of whether I agree with the spirit of the message. I view it as a form of American cultural imperialism that is ignorant of the international user base.”

I believe it’s a desirable quality for a company to focus concern on where it’s based. It shows that, for one thing, you’re not dealing with a global behemoth (or one currently with those aspirations). And we’re also getting the voice (and, sure, brand) of the people in charge — they’re addressing problems affecting them and their community. Oakland is Bandcamp’s home, and Diamond has Oakland (and American) concerns. I consider that a feature, not a bug.

Many artists donated their Bandcamp sales to charitable causes on June 5th and June 19th. It was good to see some artists pledge to causes addressing their communities — such as M. Sage’s Cattails & Scrap Tactics, which donated to Chicago’s My Block My Hood My City. I have no ties to Chicago, but I was happy for the artist to use the proceeds in this way upon my purchase of the album. And it gives a personal brush-stroke to the artist — knowing what he cares about adds to my appreciation and connection.

Besides, it will do us all good to think locally more often. The internet is good at conditioning us to ignore the things — and injustices — happening right in front of us.

As for imperialism (?), is it the same if a Hungarian company I bought from gave donations to a Hungarian charity? I’m for supporting any company or individual improving their vicinity and encouraging good deeds. The countries that make positive changes influence us all and set examples for others to follow. That’s important, no matter who does it. 

There’s also the Barry Crimmons joke (often recounted by Bill Hicks) about people who ask why, if he’s so critical of the US, he doesn’t move elsewhere: “What, and become a victim of our foreign policy?” That’s a vintage quote but now, more than ever, local change is global.

The mystery artist has more thoughts:

The artist has set up a separate webstore to underline what he sees as an unhealthy dominance of the underground music market. “Bandcamp should be a tool to help artists and labels achieve an end, not the cultural statement in itself. What began as a liberating force is starting to fester into a rigid dead end, stifling the creative freedom of artists by indirectly and facelessly demanding they comply with the cultural standards they dictate to us.”

This opinion sounds like more tiring ‘musicians should just shut up and make music‘ talk. For one thing, Bandcamp’s donations come out of their take, so it’s not like anyone’s forcing the artists to ‘comply.’ And, in my opinion, we should treasure companies that take stands1And, yes, that includes causes that I disagree with. Discerning the owner’s predilections makes it easier to know where to spend my cash. Understandably, this is scary for many companies and their owners, and it’s a form of bravery we should welcome. It tells us they still have a foothold in their communities and aren’t obsessed with scale and the ‘please everyone’ mindset that comes with scale. From a tech company, that’s refreshing. It’s the opposite of Facebook’s refusal to moderate inciting and misleading content for fear of appearing to take sides. Inadvertently, that’s become a ‘stand’ of its own and look where it’s gotten them.

I do agree with one action taken by the unnamed artist. “The artist has set up a separate webstore …” That’s an excellent move. As terrific as Bandcamp is, it’s a mistake to solely rely on the platform — or any third party platform — as an artist’s sole window to her audience and potential fanbase. One should think of Bandcamp as merely a tool and not the hub, the same as Facebook and all the others. An artist’s own website is always the preferable destination.

Tiny Accidents

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A useful skill in songwriting is the subtle deployment of the unexpected. When there’s a sudden chord change out of nowhere, a melody that rises when you think it should fall, a strange production effect that changes the tone of the song — these surprises generate listener goosebumps. My favorite: when the bass line in The Feelies’ “Slow Down,” which is a constant single note for most of the song, changes to a second note at 2:19. There’s nothing to this — it’s so simple — but it gets me every time.

The trick is that these surprises can’t be too surprising. Sure, in compositions aiming to unmoor the listener (often in experimental music) the surprises are abrupt and heavy. But I think there’s a higher art in subtlety — sonic and compositional changes that are unexpected but not necessarily out of place. Sometimes these sound like accidents, but tiny ones.

Occasionally these surprises or imperfections are genuinely accidental. Think about a singer whose voice cracks mid-phrase, or a botched note in a guitar riff, or a tape delay echo tail that gets a little too out of control. In the podcast series and accompanying book Ways of Hearing, Damon Krukowski mentions his imperfect drumming in recordings by the band Galaxie 500. “We played as steadily as we could,” he says. “But this was a performance. We were nervous and excited. And we sped up at the chorus.”

Sometimes these flaws are unwelcome and distracting. In Galaxie 500’s day, an inexcusable mistake would mean recording a new take of the song. Other times these unplanned incidents are at the edge of unacceptable — such as speeding up in the chorus — and it’s more trouble than it’s worth to re-record. So they get left alone. And, a lot of times, these strange little errors grow to become favorite song moments for both the listeners and the artists.

Now, instead of re-recording, one can ‘fix it in the mix.’ A quantization or manual shifting of beats in the DAW can correct that excited drummer. A singer can choose from multiple takes of a vocal line to replace that bit where her voice cracked for a second. The tape delay is an automated plug-in, so there’s no chance of that echo getting distorted and out-of-bounds.

By nature (or un-nature), digital production provides fewer opportunities for accidents. If a musician or producer wants to incorporate the unexpected in a song, she must program the error into the digital tool. There are now plug-ins and scripts that feature options to randomize settings. One can get carried away — check out the lengths Brian Eno goes to in randomizing Logic Pro:

We commonly refer to these fortunate misfortunes as ‘happy accidents.’ And, outside of software, one can encourage these detours in the analog world. Artists often purposefully set up loose creative environments to inspire a moment of chance. Musicians jam or improvise to see what happens, hoping for a phrase of synergy to develop into a previously unimagined song. Guitarists might try alternate tunings, or drummers might play on unfamiliar percussion set-ups. Even recording in strange surroundings could inspire different outcomes.

There are also creative games. I mentioned Gysin and Burroughs’ The Third Mind in an episode of my email newsletter. The cut-up method detailed in that book is used by a number of artists to summon unforeseen creative options. Here’s a video of David Bowie using the cut-up method. Other examples of creative games are Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s well-known Oblique Strategies cards (even used by country music superstars) or John Cage composing “Music For Changes” using the I Ching.

At the beginning of last year, I tried my own creative game project. Before starting a song, I set up a bunch of rules to output random results. These rules covered the sounds I’d use, the tempo, the audio plug-ins, even the song’s title. The project was short-lived but inspired the process of creating the ‘theme songs’ for my newsletter. And I had a name for that project, which I also use to describe the ‘unexpected but not out-of-place’: Tiny Accidents.

In my experience, these accidents are valuable creative exercises. They allow artists to step outside of their heads and develop works that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Each throw of the dice is a chance to learn new techniques by outwitting artistic obstacles. The process is incredibly satisfying. So, I’m resuming my Tiny Accidents practice. And I challenge you to start one.

This post was adapted from Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, a weekly newsletter loosely about music-making, music-listening, and how technology changes the culture around those things. Click here to check out the latest issue and subscribe.

Podcasts: Analog to Digital, Music Rights Brawls, and Imagining Utopia

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Damon Krukowski used to be in Galaxie 500 and is currently the first name in Damon & Naomi. He also spends a lot of time thinking philosophically about our cultural shift from analog to digital media. I briefly wrote about his brilliant Ways of Hearing podcast series here, and he recently followed that project with a book of the same name. It’s near the front of my reading queue. In the meantime, Damon appeared on the Madison, WI, public radio program A Public Affair to talk about the concepts of his book and podcast. That topic gives us much to chew on. I also enjoyed (and cringed at) the side-story of how Galaxie 500 had to bid on their master recordings in an auction.

Season two’s first episode of The Secret History Of The Future tackles the relationship between technology and music dating back to the invention of the phonograph. It turns out songwriters have been panicking about getting paid since the beginning of commercial sonic reproduction. Go figure. The podcast follows the prescient concerns of John Phillip Sousa (he’s a lot more fascinating than I would have guessed) to the freak-outs over digital sampling. And then there’s the more recent tug-of-war over The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.” The hosts provide an excellent intro to music rights, delivered in a way that is entertaining and comprehensible to the novice.

Listen to “Rutger Bregman’s utopias, and mine” on Spreaker.

In the last paragraph of yesterday’s post, I wrote that “we need to imagine that better world to draw us closer to it.” This interview with Rutger Bregman on The Ezra Klein Show is all about that sentiment. Bregman wrote the book Utopia for Realists (also near the front of my reading queue) and speaks about accomplishing change by aiming for a shared paradise. His ideas are rosy and appear ludicrous to many — open borders! universal basic income! 15-hour workweek! — but he makes the case that any step toward these visions will improve our world. We need to foster hope and optimism in the face of despair and defeat — admittedly not an easy task right now. I strongly recommend this episode.