Addressing the Digital Platforms Problem

How important should they be, and how do we regain some control?

I’ve been tracking a larger conversation about how exploitative Spotify is, and how the big tech platforms have made themselves both a necessity for artists and a net-negative on revenue that should be supporting artists.

Chris Zappa

,

Ted Gioia

, and

Matty C

all published must-read articles on the subject in December (links below) and they prompted me to think again about how I “acquire” music, where I go to buy it, and who my habits benefit most.

If you haven’t read their pieces, please do, then come back here.

Spotify’s Broken Model: How the World’s Biggest Streaming Platform Crushes Artists for Profit

The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed

What We Talk About When We Talk About Spotify

Not Everything Can Be For Everybody

As Matty C says, “I don’t want you to stop listening to Spotify! I want Spotify to pay artists and help them earn a living, and I want your help in making that happen.” Their 5 suggestions for addressing the labor problems in Spotify’s model seem like a great start to me - because on balance, I think the existence of the platforms is necessary.

The best thing about digital platforms is their accessibility. Not everyone has the means to curate a physical collection - and that isn’t a sustainable model, anyway. Not everyone lives where they can see their favorite artists, and attending live events has its own constellation of obstacles. (Ticket prices, health threats from pandemics, sensory and anxiety issues for us neuro-atypical folks, etc.)

But everyone who can hear and who has access to the Internet can potentially access virtually any recording - and enough people have proven willing to pay a monthly fee for that access to establish companies like Spotify in the first place. We’re way past the “if you build it, will they come?” stage of development.

I say all of that to establish that, like Matty, I’m not interested in destroying the digital platforms. I’m interested in convincing them to adopt suggestions like Matty’s so that they don’t destroy themselves by following the path that Ted Gioia’s piece outlines - a path where their AI-generated music and AI-generated audience becomes a digital self-licking AI ice cream cone that doesn’t benefit anyone.

My Struggle With Live Music

A few years ago, when we still lived in Baltimore, I got a cool Christmas present: tickets to this show:

TMBG w/ Jonathan Coulton

It was an amazing show. My wife and I had a great time, and I got to shake JoCo’s hand. I was saved from embarrassing myself with an emotional speech thanking him for his body of work and babbling about how important it is to me by a drunk guy blundering up to the merch table and…thanking him for his body of work and babbling about how important it was to him. (The drunk guy also tried to hug him, and dammit, I wanted to hug him!)

But even though there was only a week between when I learned we were going (Christmas day) and New Year’s Eve, and even though I knew I was going to love the experience of the music, my anxiety from anticipating the show was almost crippling. I had trouble concentrating (a problem when your job involves concentrating), and experienced bouts of nausea and even some light-headedness. I wasn’t thinking about the show, specifically, but I was constantly distracted and worried, until afterward, heading home from the show, when the post-performance high hit me.

I have bought tickets and anticipated shows before - and I always assumed that the anxiety had more to do with surrounding events and circumstances, like travel, and weather. Or I coded my anxiety as “excitement”. But this show drove home the reality that seeing musicians live is not good for me.

It wasn’t just me, either. All four of my kids went along, and while they like TMBG and JoCo, they were miserable. Between sensory overload, agoraphobia, and simply standing in a crowded room for several hours, they suffered more than I did. The live music experience is simply not for everybody - even people who love the music.

I still try - one of my first posts here was about seeing a live show:

Returning to Dizz Knee Land

…but I have to be mindful that there will be a price to pay for showing up.

And it sucks that this harms the artists that mean so much to me.

About That Physical Media…

The other point Matty made that hit home for me was the way people treat their physical collections as a redemption for their tacit support of digital platforms. But there are numerous problems with physical media - and this post started out with the intent to look at my own collection, how I acquired it, and who it actually benefits.

The upshot is that buying music on physical media is not the answer, for a number of reasons.

But, I still want to talk about my collection and look at how I “shop” for music because I think it ties back to the issues around exposure, marketing of music, and helping artists find an audience in the age of near-universal accessibility.

Lets set an appointment to do that next week.