A celebration of the return of live gigging, but with concern about music streaming.
The antithesis to the community-based good feeling is Spotify, which is almost completely unavoidable ... in the modern world. This is the season of Spotify Wrapped, which gives listeners the chance to have their listening habits ranked and broken down, and gives artists the chance to see how many millions, or billions of streams they have. ... It’s addictive.
It’s fun, if you’re a geek, which I am. The other side is knowing that this platform ... is paying so little to the vast majority of artists, whilst making a select few very rich. Consider: 38-year-old founder Daniel Ek is rich beyond anything I can comprehend, and has a habit of investing in ethically dubious areas..., a move which directly caused a few musicians (with the power and agency to do so) to quit the platform.
I have no solutions to offer right now, other than to try and preserve what’s important to myself and my peers and my community, and to think about how to do that. It’s easy to feel hopelessness about it and ask whether as an individual I have any power at all. I’ve done my best to buy music directly from artists, labels and record shops this year, though money is tight and I have a finite amount of space for more records and CDs. It’ll take a bigger infrastructural shake up. I’m sceptical that the people who could make it happen would allow it.