I'm no snob but the digital age of music created the dual decline in musical standards and audience taste.
It's lazy to blame Spotify, the story is complex but...
Just how evil is Spotify?
We know how badly Spotify treats musicians but what it does to listeners is even more sinister.
When musical direction was in the safe hands of the musicians music meant something culturally, and it sounded a damn sight better.
Spotify algorithms push vapid, banal, soul-less pap-shite. It should be illegal, it is immoral, but in a world of no shame or consequences they shrug off criticism of the way they promote intellectual content they own over good music. See the Spotify scandal
Some of the ways we are all worse off
You can blame listeners for having attention span of a gnat but the real reason that songs don't have intros anymore is because if a song is listened to for less than 30 seconds no royalty is paid out.
Technology has always shaped listening habits. Albums started out with half the available time until vinyl pressing technology improved. CD's killed the side A and Side B concept when you didn't need to turn the disc over, it played through.
Video killed the radio star
Then came streaming. It started well, anyone could release a track from their bedroom.
The problem is with capitalism, it's not the wealth sharing system that should ensure progress by promoting competition. No, it promotes monopoly. In the immortal words of Duncan McCloud from the Highlander movie...
there can be only one
The system favors the bad faith curators, and that's how we ended up with Spotify
Does the wealth trickle down to the creators? Ask the musicians doing 2 minimum wage jobs and still not getting by. The suicide rates for musicians are through the roof
Can we do anything to change things?
We can all agree it's bad - yet we don't protest, why is that? Apathy. Like politics, you get what you vote for and you get what you get if you don't vote.
There's no buyer's remorse with streaming. If you don't like a track there is an infinite loop of others.
As John Harris says in a recent article...
"it's insidious - it goes beyond alterations of music’s forms into what we think music is there to do, and one of big tech’s most sinister powers - the way that it side-lines dissent in such a subtle way that we only realise what has happened when it is far too late."
Joni Mitchell said it all in Big Yellow Taxi (50 years ago now!)
You don't know what you've got till it's gone
What do you think about the state of music these days? Click contact and tell me!
