no more streaming!

Okay we’re back!!

It’s been a busy few weeks for me. But I think the title of this post is the most interesting news that I can convey to you, my (at the time of writing) 19 venerable subscribers.

I thought this post was going to be more of a one and done dump all my thoughts on the matter here - but surprise surprise, I’ve realised that I have a lot of them. So today I’m just going to try and talk about the primary reason I decided to cancel, and what has happened next.

Background - 3 years of music streaming has honestly been fine

I subscribed to Tidal for about 3 years. I chose that service because it reportedly paid artists more than the others per stream (no longer entirely true). But the service itself was pretty great! I felt like I was getting a lot of value out of it as a listener - and I also discovered a few artists who I now really quite like from its algorithmic recommendations.

But I decided to cancel it anyway!

Why??

The main reason was this: I realised I had stopped “buying” music almost entirely. And honestly, I actually quite liked buying music! I felt good about directly supporting the artists I liked, and I liked owning physical or digital copies of the music that I could trace back to a point in time when I “got in to them” and bought them.

The supposed upshot of streaming was that I (theoretically) could listen to any album I wanted without the upfront barrier of album cost. This would hopefully help broaden my music taste and give me a richer experience of the whole world of music that’s out there, I thought.

The reality however was the opposite. I have been noticing that whenever I opened the app, at least 70% of the time I would gravitate toward the same “recently played” albums - and if nothing in there immediately took my fancy, I often found myself aimlessly scrolling through the algorithmic recommendations of “albums you might like”. And yeah, occasionally I would find some gems (Fleet Foxes’ “Shore”, The Hotelier’s “Home Like No Place is There”) but it’s entirely possible I would have found these anyway through more intentional investigation.

I think that intentionality in my listening practice was what streaming was directing me away from. Algorithmic music recommendations are fun! But I think having them so available and encouraged by the app design (even “recently listened” albums!) made me treat music a bit too much like… chips. Like picking the right flavour of chips to buy that will sate my desire for crunchy flavoured exciting snacks…

…less so a hugely important part of my identity that says something about who I am and what I’m interested in at the moment.

It was getting just a little bit boring!!

Maybe part of this was that my $13 a month was disappearing with 0 fanfare, anticipation or excitement - the kinds of emotions that I would previously feel when buying and listening to a new album. On streaming, I mostly wasn’t feeling those fun emotions when I did consciously try to listen to new music - perhaps because it wasn’t a ‘purchase’? I guess with streaming, the stakes are just so low… you can just skip if you don’t immediately like it and there’s nothing lost.

Maybe that’s what I was missing?

What was listening to music like for me before streaming?

I have a real connection to the albums that I have bought, regardless of whether they’re digital or physical copies. It’s not because these albums are better than what I’ve been listening to recently - I think it’s more to do with the value I placed on them (due to having to pay for them) and the way that my early days of listening to them felt as a result of this.

The first album that I bought by myself was Coldplay’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends (that might come as a surprise to some of you… for others probably less so :)). I adore that album to this day - it’s a beautiful sonic hug of intricate pop and gorgeous ambient interludes (provided by Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins and others). I bought it as an iTunes download (you can still do that by the way!) and can vaguely remember listening to some of the 30 second previews of the songs - but i think my 13 year old self mostly went in blind because I knew I liked the single. Parting with $12 or something when I was that age was a BIG DEAL for me - and as such I listened to that whole album, top to bottom, over and over and over again. I was invested in it! I wanted to properly get to know it, to discover every little detail that I could possibly hear on my shitty blue phillips earbuds.

I didn’t give myself the option of giving up on it and going to something else if a track didn’t immediately grab me. That would have been such a waste of my $12!!!

Looking back on my 3 years of streaming music, I can still identify albums that I really like and have a connection with. But there aren’t as many of them, and something about them feels different.

I’m willing to concede that this may well be a product of me now being in my mid twenties vs teens-early twenties. The way that people cling to the music they listened to during those formative years is generationally very well established.

Except that I’m not willing to concede that at all haha.

What happened next??

A few days after the tidal app stopped working, I bought Mountain Moves by Deerhoof (2017). This is an album where my cursory preview listen to the recordings didn’t immediately grab me. But recordings of live performances that I’ve seen from this band are absolutely electric (There’s a live recording of “I will Spite Survive” where drummer Greg Saunier gives the most exciting and joyful drum performance I’ve ever seen with only a kick, snare and ride cymbal), and I really wanted to give it a proper chance.

Mountain Moves is wild. It is not a conventional album by any stretch: it plays host to Deerhoof working alongside legions of disparate collaborators, and is full of dramatic shifts in compositional approach, subject matter, and mood. Conceptually, I love this kind of thing!!! It is the kind of artistic experimentation and bravery that that I want to encourage in others and in myself.

But it didn’t grab me at first - and if I had listened to it on Tidal (or any other streaming service), it’s pretty likely that I wouldn’t have given it the chance to. Having not made my initial monetary (and thereby conceptual) investment, I wouldn’t have listened to it over and over and over, just like I did all those years ago with the Coldplay album.

I don’t think my eyes would have widened on my 3rd listen to the guitar riff after “I Will Spite Survive”’s first chorus which just aches with joy and loss and possibility all at the same time.

I might not have eventually allowed myself to be enveloped by the whole band riff at the start of “Ay That’s Me” - at first it sounded kinda like soup to my ears. But as I gave it more time I was able to make out all of the intricate little details… it’s a riff that requires three completely distinct guitar parts delicately conversing with one another. It’s so rich, compelling and completely different from the approaches to riff writing that I have been listening to for the past decade.

I might not have given myself the chance to properly appreciate the subtle detail and humour in Satomi’s vocal writing and delivery. Hearing her in dialogue with the many other vocalists on this album also really brings this out… but you’ve got to really listen to get it and be excited about it!!

These thoughts didn’t wedge themselves in my head yet on the first or honestly even second listen. Even now I know that I have so much more to discover in this album.

So that’s my recommendation this fortnight, as well as the live performance that I referenced earlier.

End

Music streaming is very connected to many of the other musical, economic and political stuff happening now, so I’ll no doubt talk about it again soon. Maybe when my other thoughts are a little more coherent.

Let me know your thoughts too if you have them!