8 January 2025 to 4 December 2016 · tagged essay
¶ You choose the mood you seek · 8 January 2025 essay/tech
As an editor at a large publisher who liked my proposal for a book but was not going to publish it very reasonably explained to me, commercial publishers are in the business of publishing books that people already know they want to read. In books about music, as other editors told me less apologetically, this mostly means biographies of popular musicians. But glamour does generously leave a little shelf-space for fear, and so the book that a bigger publisher than mine thinks people already want to read is Liz Pelly's Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. If you are the people they have in mind, who already wanted to read soberly-researched explanations of some of the ways in which a culture-themed capitalist corporation has pursued capitalism with a disregard for culture, written in a tone of muted resignation, here is your mood. For maximum irony, get the audiobook version and listen to it in the background while you organize your Pinterest boards of Temu products by Pantone color.
As a corporation, Spotify is very normal. Its Swedish origins render it slightly progressive in employment policies relative to American companies, at least if you want to have more children than you already have when you get hired, and can make sure to have them without getting laid off first. In business and product practices, I never saw much reason to consider it better or worse than what one would expect of a medium-to-large-sized publicly-traded tech company.
I arrived at Spotify involuntarily via an acquisition, and left involuntarily via a layoff, but in between those two events I was there voluntarily for a decade. I believe that music is what humans do best, and that bringing all(ish) of the world's music together online is one of the great human cultural achievements of my lifetime, and that the joy-amplifying potential of having the collective love and knowledge encoded in music-listening collated and given back to us is monumental. That's what I spent that decade working on, and although Spotify as a corporation finally voted decisively against this by laying me off and devoting considerable remaining resources to laboriously shutting down everything I worked on, I was hardly the only person working there who believed in music, and wanted there to be a music company that put music above "company", and wanted Spotify to behave in at least a few ways like that company.
It was never very likely to, of course. As Liz begrudgingly notes in her introduction, she set out to write an anti-Spotify book only to realize the problem wasn't really just Spotify so much as power. Spotify entered a music business largely controlled by a few record companies, at a point in history when the other confounding factors in the industry were already technological. Spotify did eventually come up with a few minorly novel forms of moral transgression, but they were never really in a position to explode the existing power structures, even if we could pretend they wanted to.
There were three specific things I fought against throughout my time at Spotify, and although my layoff was officially just part of a large impersonal reduction in "headcount", it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some connection. Mood Machine describes two of these in depressing detail: the secret preferential treatment of particular lower-royalty background music, and the not-secret "marketing" program to pressure artists to voluntarily accept lower royalty rates for the prospect of undisclosed algorithmic promotiom. Liz quotes multiple internal Spotify Slack messages about both these programs, and if somehow this ends up with all those grim private threads getting published, I'll be pleased to get so much of my earnest polemic-writing back. The quote from "yet another employee in the ethics-club" on pages 193-4, pointing out that Discovery Mode is exactly structured to benefit Spotify at the collective expense of artists, is definitely me. I'm pretty sure I went on to explain how to fix the economics of this by making Spotify's benefit conditional on artist benefit, and how to fix the morality of it by actually giving artists interesting agency instead of just an opportunity for submission. Sadly, Liz doesn't quote that part.
But I hadn't resigned in protest over PFC or Discovery Mode, partly because I didn't think either one actually caused sufficient practical damage that removing them would solve enough, but mostly because I had the autonomy and ability to spend my time fighting against the third and much bigger thing, which Mood Machine alludes to in far less detail than the others, which is Spotify's relentless and deliberate subordination of music and culture and humanity to machine learning. "ML Is the Product", the executive exhortation went. I wrote an internal talk explaining exactly why this was a culture-destructive way to think, which I would also like back. I am enthusiastically not against the use of data and algorithms in music and thus culture, but computers are tools that accomplish our human intents, and it is thus us that should be judged on their effects. Over the years at Spotify I found that it was increasingly dishearteningly common that people, and especially hierarchical company priorities based on obtuse quantitative metrics, not only did not care about the widely varying effects of erratic ML on music, but didn't even notice that they often didn't have enough information with which to care. I developed a small library of internal tools that only existed to make it unignorably easy to compare the outputs of two different systems on any individual example, and every time I ever compared a complicated state-of-the-art ML system developed by demonstrably talented ML engineers against whatever I whipped up in BiqQuery and spent a couple of hours tweaking while looking at exactly what it did for different bands or genres or songs, the music results from the less-exciting tech were always clearly better.
And each time I did this, it renewed my uncooperative senses of possibility and optimism, because collective human knowledge is astonishingly broad and deep, and the world is full of amazingly great music, and it takes only a little bit of very simple math to use the former to discover the latter. This is what my decade at Spotify was about, and thus is also what my book is about. If you care about music, you ought to want to read Liz's book. But if you can also stand being reminded why anybody cares about this subject in the first place, whether you already thought you wanted that or not, read mine, too.
Should you read either of our books? No. Do it if you want, or read something else, or put on some music and go for a walk, or put on some music and dance or hold still. My book is geeky, and tells you things you don't really have to know. Liz's is depressing, and tells you things you could already have guessed.
I will say, though, that mine involves both fears and joys. Liz's could have, but does not. It's telling that she talked to so many people, but as far as I can tell only people who she already knew agreed with her. Liz and I were on a Pop Conference panel together in 2018, I've offered to talk to her multiple times over the years, and she quotes my tweets and this blog and discusses my work in the book, but she didn't talk to me. Her book is decent journalism, but it's journalism to explicate a grudge, to deepen understanding in only one specific trench. I don't think, when you get to the bottom of it, there's any treasure, or really anything productive to do except climb back out, and then we're just where we started. Liz makes a good case for public libraries collecting local music, which seems like a fine idea to me, but not really an answer to any of the same questions. Mood Machine laments the loss of small things Liz thinks we used to have, maybe, but doesn't seem interested in looking for any of the big things we could have had, and still might. If the problem is mood, I don't think this is the solution.
Not that I solved anything in my book, either. We both note that maybe Universal Basic Income is really the only thing likely to. But if you think the only moral direction is retreat, and the right model for music is that you never hear any unless it was made next door, then you are choosing passivity over curiosity, and just a different status quo over all the possible better worlds, and reducing a complicated problem to choosing sides. And to me that's what we should be against, together.
As a corporation, Spotify is very normal. Its Swedish origins render it slightly progressive in employment policies relative to American companies, at least if you want to have more children than you already have when you get hired, and can make sure to have them without getting laid off first. In business and product practices, I never saw much reason to consider it better or worse than what one would expect of a medium-to-large-sized publicly-traded tech company.
I arrived at Spotify involuntarily via an acquisition, and left involuntarily via a layoff, but in between those two events I was there voluntarily for a decade. I believe that music is what humans do best, and that bringing all(ish) of the world's music together online is one of the great human cultural achievements of my lifetime, and that the joy-amplifying potential of having the collective love and knowledge encoded in music-listening collated and given back to us is monumental. That's what I spent that decade working on, and although Spotify as a corporation finally voted decisively against this by laying me off and devoting considerable remaining resources to laboriously shutting down everything I worked on, I was hardly the only person working there who believed in music, and wanted there to be a music company that put music above "company", and wanted Spotify to behave in at least a few ways like that company.
It was never very likely to, of course. As Liz begrudgingly notes in her introduction, she set out to write an anti-Spotify book only to realize the problem wasn't really just Spotify so much as power. Spotify entered a music business largely controlled by a few record companies, at a point in history when the other confounding factors in the industry were already technological. Spotify did eventually come up with a few minorly novel forms of moral transgression, but they were never really in a position to explode the existing power structures, even if we could pretend they wanted to.
There were three specific things I fought against throughout my time at Spotify, and although my layoff was officially just part of a large impersonal reduction in "headcount", it's hard to imagine that there wasn't some connection. Mood Machine describes two of these in depressing detail: the secret preferential treatment of particular lower-royalty background music, and the not-secret "marketing" program to pressure artists to voluntarily accept lower royalty rates for the prospect of undisclosed algorithmic promotiom. Liz quotes multiple internal Spotify Slack messages about both these programs, and if somehow this ends up with all those grim private threads getting published, I'll be pleased to get so much of my earnest polemic-writing back. The quote from "yet another employee in the ethics-club" on pages 193-4, pointing out that Discovery Mode is exactly structured to benefit Spotify at the collective expense of artists, is definitely me. I'm pretty sure I went on to explain how to fix the economics of this by making Spotify's benefit conditional on artist benefit, and how to fix the morality of it by actually giving artists interesting agency instead of just an opportunity for submission. Sadly, Liz doesn't quote that part.
But I hadn't resigned in protest over PFC or Discovery Mode, partly because I didn't think either one actually caused sufficient practical damage that removing them would solve enough, but mostly because I had the autonomy and ability to spend my time fighting against the third and much bigger thing, which Mood Machine alludes to in far less detail than the others, which is Spotify's relentless and deliberate subordination of music and culture and humanity to machine learning. "ML Is the Product", the executive exhortation went. I wrote an internal talk explaining exactly why this was a culture-destructive way to think, which I would also like back. I am enthusiastically not against the use of data and algorithms in music and thus culture, but computers are tools that accomplish our human intents, and it is thus us that should be judged on their effects. Over the years at Spotify I found that it was increasingly dishearteningly common that people, and especially hierarchical company priorities based on obtuse quantitative metrics, not only did not care about the widely varying effects of erratic ML on music, but didn't even notice that they often didn't have enough information with which to care. I developed a small library of internal tools that only existed to make it unignorably easy to compare the outputs of two different systems on any individual example, and every time I ever compared a complicated state-of-the-art ML system developed by demonstrably talented ML engineers against whatever I whipped up in BiqQuery and spent a couple of hours tweaking while looking at exactly what it did for different bands or genres or songs, the music results from the less-exciting tech were always clearly better.
And each time I did this, it renewed my uncooperative senses of possibility and optimism, because collective human knowledge is astonishingly broad and deep, and the world is full of amazingly great music, and it takes only a little bit of very simple math to use the former to discover the latter. This is what my decade at Spotify was about, and thus is also what my book is about. If you care about music, you ought to want to read Liz's book. But if you can also stand being reminded why anybody cares about this subject in the first place, whether you already thought you wanted that or not, read mine, too.
Should you read either of our books? No. Do it if you want, or read something else, or put on some music and go for a walk, or put on some music and dance or hold still. My book is geeky, and tells you things you don't really have to know. Liz's is depressing, and tells you things you could already have guessed.
I will say, though, that mine involves both fears and joys. Liz's could have, but does not. It's telling that she talked to so many people, but as far as I can tell only people who she already knew agreed with her. Liz and I were on a Pop Conference panel together in 2018, I've offered to talk to her multiple times over the years, and she quotes my tweets and this blog and discusses my work in the book, but she didn't talk to me. Her book is decent journalism, but it's journalism to explicate a grudge, to deepen understanding in only one specific trench. I don't think, when you get to the bottom of it, there's any treasure, or really anything productive to do except climb back out, and then we're just where we started. Liz makes a good case for public libraries collecting local music, which seems like a fine idea to me, but not really an answer to any of the same questions. Mood Machine laments the loss of small things Liz thinks we used to have, maybe, but doesn't seem interested in looking for any of the big things we could have had, and still might. If the problem is mood, I don't think this is the solution.
Not that I solved anything in my book, either. We both note that maybe Universal Basic Income is really the only thing likely to. But if you think the only moral direction is retreat, and the right model for music is that you never hear any unless it was made next door, then you are choosing passivity over curiosity, and just a different status quo over all the possible better worlds, and reducing a complicated problem to choosing sides. And to me that's what we should be against, together.
¶ Data Rights · 22 December 2024 essay/tech
Your data is yours. Data derived from your actions, your tastes, your active and passive online presences, is all your data. Your public life generates public data, which contributes to collective knowledge, but in addition to personal knowledge, not in place of it.
You are entitled to both your public and private data. Your public data can be used by the public without your consent, but not without your awareness and their accountability. You are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how it has been used. You are entitled to be able to double-check the sorting of your Spotify Wrapped just as you can double-check the math for the interest payments from your savings account.
You may choose to share your private data with other people, or applications, or corporations, in order to let them do something for you, or to help you do something for other people. For this your informed consent is necessary, and thus you are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how your data would be used if you permit. You are entitled to know what Spotify would do with your Wrapped before you decide whether to join.
This is the world we have now:
you < corporations > software > your data
This is the world we want:
you > your data > software > corporations
The actors are the same, but the roles and the power are not. Today most computational power is structurally centralized and hoarded, and thus its potential for conversion into human energy is constrained and reduced. Most software is made by corporations, formulated for their corporate goals, and sealed against any other access or experimentation. Recent developments like LLM AIs seem inertially on a path towards even more centralized power-control and thus individual and social powerlessness.
We want a future, instead, in which creative power is widely distributed and human energy is bountifully amplified. We want software creation to be democratized so that our sources of imagination can be more broadly recruited. We want people and groups to have the power to pursue their own goals, not just for our own narrow sakes, but for our collective potential.
For this world to exist, we must figure out how, both logistically and politically, to move the data layer on which most meaningful software acts into the computational and conversational open. We need not just data portability -- the right to chose between evils -- but a shared language for talking about algorithms and data logic like we use math to discuss numbers. We need to be able to talk about what we want, and test what we might have and how.
This is how the AT Protocol, on which the social microblogging platform Bluesky runs, is designed. Its schemas are public, its public information is public. Bluesky, the application, makes use of this protocol and your data to construct a social experience for you and with you, producing feeds and following and public conversations and personal data ownership. The Bluesky software is open source, and most of the data relationships that constitute the social network are derivable from accessible data in tractable ways. But the Bluesky application still conceals the data layer more than it exposes it, so I made a ruthlessly basic Bluesky query interface called SkyQ to try to invert this. You can see the data directly, and wander through it both curiously and computationally. You can build data tools for yourself, or for everyone, that everyone can share.
Current music streaming services, like Spotify, are not built this way at all. Your Spotify listening data is yours, morally, but so inaccessible to you that Spotify can make a yearly spectacle out of briefly sharing the most superficial and unverifiable analyses of it with you. And the collective knowledge that we, 600 million of us, amass through our listening, is so inaccessible to us that Spotify can passively deprive us of its insights just by not caring.
Curio, thus, my web thing for collating music curiosity, is both an experiment in making a music interface that does music things the way I personally want them done, but also a meta-experiment in making a data experience that uses your data with respect for your data rights. Every Curio page has data link at the bottom. Every bit of data Curio stores is also visible directly, on a query page where you can explore it however you like. I made a bunch of Spotify-Wrapped-like tools with which you can analyze your listening, but they do so with queries you can see, check, change or build upon, so if your goals diverge from mine, you are free to pursue them. The more paths we can follow, the more we will learn about how to reach anywhere.
There is a lot more to the human future of Data Rights than just microblogging and listening-history heatmaps, obviously. We are not yet near it, and we probably won't reach it with just our web browsers and a query language and a manifesto. Maybe no tendrils of these specific current dreams of mine will end up swirling in whatever collective dreams we eventually create by agreeing to share. I claim no certainty about the details. Certainty is not my goal. Possibility? Less resignation, more hope. I'm totally sure of almost nothing.
But I'm pretty sure we only get dreamier futures by dreaming.
You are entitled to both your public and private data. Your public data can be used by the public without your consent, but not without your awareness and their accountability. You are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how it has been used. You are entitled to be able to double-check the sorting of your Spotify Wrapped just as you can double-check the math for the interest payments from your savings account.
You may choose to share your private data with other people, or applications, or corporations, in order to let them do something for you, or to help you do something for other people. For this your informed consent is necessary, and thus you are entitled to an intelligible and verifiable explanation of how your data would be used if you permit. You are entitled to know what Spotify would do with your Wrapped before you decide whether to join.
This is the world we have now:
you < corporations > software > your data
This is the world we want:
you > your data > software > corporations
The actors are the same, but the roles and the power are not. Today most computational power is structurally centralized and hoarded, and thus its potential for conversion into human energy is constrained and reduced. Most software is made by corporations, formulated for their corporate goals, and sealed against any other access or experimentation. Recent developments like LLM AIs seem inertially on a path towards even more centralized power-control and thus individual and social powerlessness.
We want a future, instead, in which creative power is widely distributed and human energy is bountifully amplified. We want software creation to be democratized so that our sources of imagination can be more broadly recruited. We want people and groups to have the power to pursue their own goals, not just for our own narrow sakes, but for our collective potential.
For this world to exist, we must figure out how, both logistically and politically, to move the data layer on which most meaningful software acts into the computational and conversational open. We need not just data portability -- the right to chose between evils -- but a shared language for talking about algorithms and data logic like we use math to discuss numbers. We need to be able to talk about what we want, and test what we might have and how.
This is how the AT Protocol, on which the social microblogging platform Bluesky runs, is designed. Its schemas are public, its public information is public. Bluesky, the application, makes use of this protocol and your data to construct a social experience for you and with you, producing feeds and following and public conversations and personal data ownership. The Bluesky software is open source, and most of the data relationships that constitute the social network are derivable from accessible data in tractable ways. But the Bluesky application still conceals the data layer more than it exposes it, so I made a ruthlessly basic Bluesky query interface called SkyQ to try to invert this. You can see the data directly, and wander through it both curiously and computationally. You can build data tools for yourself, or for everyone, that everyone can share.
Current music streaming services, like Spotify, are not built this way at all. Your Spotify listening data is yours, morally, but so inaccessible to you that Spotify can make a yearly spectacle out of briefly sharing the most superficial and unverifiable analyses of it with you. And the collective knowledge that we, 600 million of us, amass through our listening, is so inaccessible to us that Spotify can passively deprive us of its insights just by not caring.
Curio, thus, my web thing for collating music curiosity, is both an experiment in making a music interface that does music things the way I personally want them done, but also a meta-experiment in making a data experience that uses your data with respect for your data rights. Every Curio page has data link at the bottom. Every bit of data Curio stores is also visible directly, on a query page where you can explore it however you like. I made a bunch of Spotify-Wrapped-like tools with which you can analyze your listening, but they do so with queries you can see, check, change or build upon, so if your goals diverge from mine, you are free to pursue them. The more paths we can follow, the more we will learn about how to reach anywhere.
There is a lot more to the human future of Data Rights than just microblogging and listening-history heatmaps, obviously. We are not yet near it, and we probably won't reach it with just our web browsers and a query language and a manifesto. Maybe no tendrils of these specific current dreams of mine will end up swirling in whatever collective dreams we eventually create by agreeing to share. I claim no certainty about the details. Certainty is not my goal. Possibility? Less resignation, more hope. I'm totally sure of almost nothing.
But I'm pretty sure we only get dreamier futures by dreaming.
¶ Subgenres, subcontinents · 9 December 2024 essay/listen/tech
¶ Music and Football · 20 March 2024 essay/listen
Spotify's Loud and Clear site includes an analogy between musicians and football players, ostensibly to explain how "aspirations" to make money from creative/athletic pursuits are more widespread than actual career success.
This comparison is not original or unique to Spotify, and does make some limited sense. With both art and sports, you can choose to spend your time on them, and the process of making music or training for football is labor in the sense of requiring time and effort, but most of the people making this choice are not going to end up being financially compensated for their labor. A small minority are able to make a living from it, but you cannot join this minority simply by wanting.
The key difference between music streaming and football, however, is that in music, every stadium is Wembley.
If you are an amateur soccer player, you know that you are an amateur soccer player. You play on an amateur team, in an amateur league, probably with amateur referees in a random city park that has other uses the rest of the week. No matter how astonishing a goal you score, it is a goal in an amateur game in a park on Sunday.
In music, however, everybody plays in the same venue, nominally in the same league. Any song on any of the major commercial music-streaming services could be streamed 1 billion times tomorrow. Structurally, in the music version of football, an amateur player from a local park could kick a ball and it could slip past Caoimhin Kelleher in the 121st minute to send Liverpool crashing out of the FA Cup.
That game was at Old Trafford, not Wembley, but the point is that this mostly doesn't happen. The statistical economic dynamics of music and football are very similar, which is why the analogy presented itself in the first place. But the aspirations are exactly why it doesn't work. In football, not only do you know your current status, but you can see the potential future steps in your career, and how they might happen. You could impress a local scout with your park goal, and get a tryout for a local semi-pro team. You could lead the semi-pro league in assists and get signed for a year by a second-division team. You could captain your second-division team to promotion, and like a fairy-tale, three years later you are getting crushed 7-0 by Manchester City and trying to claw your way out of the relegation zone so your dream can continue just a little bit longer.
In music, there used to be a story like this. You played club gigs in your hometown, and gave demo tapes to your friends. Somebody who ran a local label maybe heard you and liked you enough to help you put out a record. Maybe that record got played on college radio a little, and got you a chance at a deal on a minor major label. Maybe your minor major-label debut had a minor hit. Maybe your label stuck with you and you got to make more records. Maybe your third album has a song about getting drunk alone in your hometown and introducing yourself again to your friend's mother and it blows up and suddenly you are playing in Wembley. Or Fenway Park, at least.
Streaming offers the tantalizing illusion that these laborious steps have been eliminated by technology. But really they haven't. Music is an attention economy. The dominance of the biggest attention companies used to be reinforced by constraints of physical distribution, but it mostly survives the format shift. Most of the songs on the biggest playlists still come from the three major labels.
Which doesn't mean that the story of your potential career hasn't changed. The new steps might involve playlists instead of clubs, viral videos instead of college radio, and maybe a judicious distribution deal instead of an old-school contract with an advance you will never recoup. And these new steps, if they happen, could happen more suddenly than the old steps, and thus it can feel like they could happen suddenly at any moment.
But, still, mostly they won't. Mostly the paths to big success still go through labels, particularly major ones. Mostly the old major-attention economy survives through minor adaptations. Whatever aspirations they have, or labor they expend, most of the 10 million artists on streaming services will never get beyond semi-professional status in the most marginal sense of "semi". I have songs on Spotify, too. They took labor to make. A few people have streamed them, and I have been paid a few cents for those streams. Last time I checked, my lifetime earnings from streaming music were well on the way to $5. From $4.
But I am an amateur. I know I'm an amateur, I'm not trying to make a living by making music. If streaming services all start imposing minimum stream-thresholds for royalty payouts, I may never get to that glittering $5 in the distance, and that will be morally disappointing but practically fine.
If you're trying to become a professional, it's not fine. If regressive thresholds take away your sense of progress, that's not fine. If the successes you aspire towards operate like lotteries, so that you can't work towards them, that's not fine. If the people who operate the economy in which you will or will not be able to make a living sound like they are dismissing you as a non-participant, that's not fine.
I like the football analogy, actually, but I think it applies the other way around: if you own a stadium, and you invite all the players in the world to come in and play in front of all the fans, you don't have to promise them all glory, but you better not try to tell them that some of their goals won't count.
This comparison is not original or unique to Spotify, and does make some limited sense. With both art and sports, you can choose to spend your time on them, and the process of making music or training for football is labor in the sense of requiring time and effort, but most of the people making this choice are not going to end up being financially compensated for their labor. A small minority are able to make a living from it, but you cannot join this minority simply by wanting.
The key difference between music streaming and football, however, is that in music, every stadium is Wembley.
If you are an amateur soccer player, you know that you are an amateur soccer player. You play on an amateur team, in an amateur league, probably with amateur referees in a random city park that has other uses the rest of the week. No matter how astonishing a goal you score, it is a goal in an amateur game in a park on Sunday.
In music, however, everybody plays in the same venue, nominally in the same league. Any song on any of the major commercial music-streaming services could be streamed 1 billion times tomorrow. Structurally, in the music version of football, an amateur player from a local park could kick a ball and it could slip past Caoimhin Kelleher in the 121st minute to send Liverpool crashing out of the FA Cup.
That game was at Old Trafford, not Wembley, but the point is that this mostly doesn't happen. The statistical economic dynamics of music and football are very similar, which is why the analogy presented itself in the first place. But the aspirations are exactly why it doesn't work. In football, not only do you know your current status, but you can see the potential future steps in your career, and how they might happen. You could impress a local scout with your park goal, and get a tryout for a local semi-pro team. You could lead the semi-pro league in assists and get signed for a year by a second-division team. You could captain your second-division team to promotion, and like a fairy-tale, three years later you are getting crushed 7-0 by Manchester City and trying to claw your way out of the relegation zone so your dream can continue just a little bit longer.
In music, there used to be a story like this. You played club gigs in your hometown, and gave demo tapes to your friends. Somebody who ran a local label maybe heard you and liked you enough to help you put out a record. Maybe that record got played on college radio a little, and got you a chance at a deal on a minor major label. Maybe your minor major-label debut had a minor hit. Maybe your label stuck with you and you got to make more records. Maybe your third album has a song about getting drunk alone in your hometown and introducing yourself again to your friend's mother and it blows up and suddenly you are playing in Wembley. Or Fenway Park, at least.
Streaming offers the tantalizing illusion that these laborious steps have been eliminated by technology. But really they haven't. Music is an attention economy. The dominance of the biggest attention companies used to be reinforced by constraints of physical distribution, but it mostly survives the format shift. Most of the songs on the biggest playlists still come from the three major labels.
Which doesn't mean that the story of your potential career hasn't changed. The new steps might involve playlists instead of clubs, viral videos instead of college radio, and maybe a judicious distribution deal instead of an old-school contract with an advance you will never recoup. And these new steps, if they happen, could happen more suddenly than the old steps, and thus it can feel like they could happen suddenly at any moment.
But, still, mostly they won't. Mostly the paths to big success still go through labels, particularly major ones. Mostly the old major-attention economy survives through minor adaptations. Whatever aspirations they have, or labor they expend, most of the 10 million artists on streaming services will never get beyond semi-professional status in the most marginal sense of "semi". I have songs on Spotify, too. They took labor to make. A few people have streamed them, and I have been paid a few cents for those streams. Last time I checked, my lifetime earnings from streaming music were well on the way to $5. From $4.
But I am an amateur. I know I'm an amateur, I'm not trying to make a living by making music. If streaming services all start imposing minimum stream-thresholds for royalty payouts, I may never get to that glittering $5 in the distance, and that will be morally disappointing but practically fine.
If you're trying to become a professional, it's not fine. If regressive thresholds take away your sense of progress, that's not fine. If the successes you aspire towards operate like lotteries, so that you can't work towards them, that's not fine. If the people who operate the economy in which you will or will not be able to make a living sound like they are dismissing you as a non-participant, that's not fine.
I like the football analogy, actually, but I think it applies the other way around: if you own a stadium, and you invite all the players in the world to come in and play in front of all the fans, you don't have to promise them all glory, but you better not try to tell them that some of their goals won't count.
¶ Make Streaming (Listeners) Pay · 12 March 2024 essay/listen
I like legislation as a tool for social change, so I'm positively predisposed towards the Living Wage for Musicians Act as a tactic, and I agree with its goal of making it possible for more people to make better livings as musicians.
But I don't think this proposed law, as written, will work.
Here's how it would operate:
Music-streaming subscriptions in the US would have a federal government fee of 50% added to them...
This ought to be in the headline of every article covering this story. "Make Streaming Pay", the UMAW slogan for this effort, sounds like a vendetta against streaming services, especially coming from the same people who brought us "Justice at Spotify" previously, but as a music listener you should understand that the people who would pay this time are you. The proposed bill would add fees to music subscriptions. Fees are a well-established tactic, but not exactly a well-loved one. It's at least faintly ironic that Congress is scrutinizing Ticketmaster's excessive fees at the same time that this bill is proposing to add one to music streaming.
And 50% is a lot. A $10.99/month subscription would get an added $5.50 government fee, raising the total to $16.49. The bill even specifies a minimum of $4, so a $5.99 student subscription would rise to $9.99. While I don't think either of those are unreasonable prices for all the music in the world, they're giant relative jumps. I would fully expect them to be publicly unpopular as a proposal, and thus hard to find support for in Congress. If enacted, they would probably cause many existing subscribers to downgrade to free (ad-supported) alternatives. Enough people doing so could cancel out the monetary benefit, so this should not be proposed without careful modeling of likely price flexibility. I doubt that has been done, and certainly no evidence of it has been presented by the bill's advocates. I would also expect most or all streaming services to lobby vigorously against this change because of these effects, even though the fee itself is not paid by them. Except...
and music-streaming services would have a 10% tax on their "non-subscription" (meaning mainly advertising) revenue in the US...
You can't add fees to free, so here's the other half of the plan. Most streaming services already pay ~70% of revenue to licensors, keeping ~30% for themselves. A 10% tax on revenue thus cuts gross advertising profit by a third. Since Spotify (whom I single out here only because as a public company they report music-specific financial results, which Apple/Amazon/YouTube Music as divisions of larger companies do not) has mostly not turned a net profit at all, this proposed tax will almost certainly be taken as intractably punitive, and I expect all the services with ad-supported tiers to resist it. Spotify probably cannot afford to threaten to pull out of the US like it threatened to pull out of Uruguay when a (different) version of this idea was proposed there, and would presumably not want to increase their own prices again having only recently raised them in most countries, making it hard to take the tactic they are taking in response to a 1.2% tax in France. So I would expect Spotify to lobby against this as if it is an existential threat.
There's also a very important question here about what constitutes a music service, and in particular whether YouTube (not YouTube Music) and TikTok count. The bill doesn't address this, although the UMAW advocacy for it strongly implies that YouTube, at least, is meant to be included. I do not expect Google to quietly accept a 10% tax on any meaningful subset of YouTube advertising revenue.
which would be collected into (and by) a new government fund/agency...
Streaming music royalties are already split into three different components: to licensors, to publishers (for songwriters), and to performing-rights agencies (also for songwriters; it's a long story). This bill would add a fourth. That seems to me like the wrong direction, and grounds for skepticism even before we get into how the new fund would work. As an example it also implies that every country would need to create a similar fund of their own, although the bill as written seems to ignore the fact that it applies to the flow of money in only one country, while the music itself is global.
which would also collect and tabulate monthly streams by unique master recording...
This detail is unexplicated in the bill, but introduces a very serious technical requirement. Music is delivered to streaming services by licensors in releases composed of tracks, and it's normal for there to end up being many different tracks that have the same original audio, e.g. a single and that same song on the subsequent album and the same song again later on a compilation, and all these again in many different countries. Reconciling these requires audio-analysis software that can correctly match two tracks of the same recording even if they've gone through slightly different processing, and correctly differentiate between two different pieces of music even if they contain substantial similarity (like a song and a remix of it that adds a guest verse). And even after you've correctly matched tracks by their audio, their credits might differ, so you have to figure out which credits you're going to use. I can testify from 12 years of involvement with the process at the Echo Nest and Spotify that this is all not a trivial problem, and can be error prone even in a long-running production system. The administrators of the new fund are going to have to hire more programmers than they probably realize.
impose a cap of 1 million streams/month on each such recording...
This is arguably the most critical, progressive and interesting detail in the bill. Rather than just increasing all artists' current income by a small proportional amount, the bill attempts to specifically support artists who might not currently be making a living from their music, by effectively redirecting some or most of the money from songs with >1m streams back into the payment pool. This is why the recording-matching has to be accurate, but sadly is also the key to trivial manipulation of this scheme to evade its intent. Each detected "unique recording" is subject to a 1m cap, but it's not hard to produce multiple tracks that sound the same to listeners, but intentionally defeat the usual methods for automatic matching. Were this bill to be passed, I expect it would become normal practice to do this across releases and services, to make every track of the same recording register uniquely, so that each one gets its own 1m cap. The producers of very popular songs would have a strong incentive to also try to do it over time for each song during a given month, hoping to accumulate N million streams 1m at a time across N variations of the same song.
The 1-million-stream threshold here is arbitrary. The bill itself doesn't justify or explain it. Rep. Tlaib has mentioned in speaking about this bill that it takes 800,000 streams/month at a current average rate of $.003/stream to make the equivalent of minimum wage, which is correct math, but that's per artist, not per track. The unavoidable market truth about music (like most non-commissioned art) is that financial reward is not a function of quantity of labor. You can spend any amount of time making a song, and maybe nobody will play it. If we really want, as a society, to give people a living wage for the labor of making music, as opposed to lucking into popularity, then we need to spend our government energies on grants or Universal Basic Income, not on streaming taxes and fees.
and then divide payments proportionally by capped streams...
This sounds like just unremarkable process, but is sneakily the most serious flaw of the whole bill as written. The fund combines all streams from all services, and all money from all services, and distributes that combined money according to those combined streams. This sounds like the pro rata royalty-allocation method already in use by all major streaming services. The crucial difference, though, is that services do not do this with one big pool of money and streams, they do it with an individual pool of money and streams for each payment plan (in each country). This is essential, because the revenue per listener varies widely across countries and plans. A stream from a Spotify Premium subscriber in Iceland is worth considerably more than a stream from an ad-supported listener in India.
By combining all the streams and all the money, this plan would make it possible to use the cheapest form of artificial streaming to accumulate fraudulent streams that would share money from the most expensive ones, thus inaugurating a golden age of streaming fraud.
This is not only a fatal flaw of the bill as written, it's one that reveals that the writers of the bill do not know how the existing royalty methods work, and didn't consult with anybody who does.
90% to "featured" artists and 10% to "non-featured" artists...
It's a minor selling point of this bill that it would result in some royalties being paid to "non-featured" artists, like session musicians and backing vocalists, who do not (usually) get royalties at all from the current system. The amount is small, though, and administering it would be a procedural headache. Because those people don't currently get paid royalties, their participation isn't necessarily included in the licensors' metadata. And, conversely, because those people don't get royalties, they're currently mostly paid for their work in old-fashioned wages. Give them a share of the royalties and we might find that that becomes an excuse to pay them less up front, in the same way that tip workers are often given lower base wages.
The bill does not say how royalties would be split between multiple featured or non-featured artists. I guess it's loosely implied that it would automatically be equal shares to each, since there's no mention of any mechanism to specify otherwise. The bill does specify that "artists" means individual humans, not corporations or generative AIs (!), which seems to mean that bands are not part of this scheme, only each person one at a time.
And, notably, the bill as written specifically does not include songwriters. This is a little surprising to me, since I think of advocacy for higher royalty rates for songwriters as part of the same family of social-justice causes as higher royalty rates for performers, and songwriters get the smallest share of royalties in the current system. I'm not looking forward to the antagonism between "performers" and "songwriters" that this omission might provoke.
who sign up with the fund and provide payment information.
This, too, is both a distinguishing characteristic of this plan and a drawback. The whole point of this fourth royalty scheme is to route it around the first three, although in practice it's mainly the payment of recording royalties to licensors (and thus to labels) that the writers are trying to avoid. Labels, particularly major ones, often write artist contracts in which advances are paid up front, and artists not only get a small percentage of the royalties later, but even that small percentage is accounted for as repaying the advance as a loan. So an artist might, in practice, get no royalties for a while, or ever. (Although, again, they were paid an advance, and if their royalties don't earn back the advance, they don't have to repay it any other way.)
But, of course, you don't have to sign a label contract in order to release music on streaming services. DIY distributors either charge small flat fees, or take very small shares of your royalties. But labels provide services in addition to taking royalties (and paying advances), and maybe you want those. I suspect that musicians signed to major labels are mostly doing OK, at least temporarily during their maybe-short label tenure. And if they aren't, and their label contracts are why, maybe that's where the laws should be pointed.
But that means this fund is yet another thing an artist has to sign up for and manage, and which in turn has to manage and verify them. I have not found any good estimates of how many artists currently do not do the work to register their songs to collect performance and mechanical rights, and how often there are contradictions between ownership claims, but I'm sure both are common. There's precedent in performance-rights organizations for international cooperation, but I don't know if any of those operate on this scale, and even if they do, this bill doesn't propose to use them, so this new fund (and its equivalents in other countries, if they exist) would have to reinvent all of that process.
The stipulation about individuals, not companies, seems obviously like a preemptive attempt to keep labels from registering on their artists' "behalf" and collecting this new windfall too, but I'm not immediately convinced that won't happen somehow anyway. And indeed it might have to for the scheme to accommodate the estates of dead artists, whom I assume it doesn't intend to exclude.
Even if we imagine that nobody attempts to evade this rule, though, the existence of a fourth royalty that bypasses labels is likely to push labels, and the three major-label companies in particular, to object to this bill too. And were it enacted, I would expect to see labels begin to change the terms of their contracts to reduce or eliminate artist shares of the recording royalties since they're now supposedly getting this new Living Wage paid separately.
The notable thing this bill does not include is any mechanism or support for this claim that the UMAW, who collaborated on it, continue to make here:
Nor have I seen any explanation of why the suspiciously round penny is coincidentally the magic living-wage level, and I'm willing to bet a large number of pennies that no such explanation exists. There are many very-good bands who do not have 1 million streams total, all time, across all their songs on Spotify. That's not a multi-year living wage for a group of people even at a dime per stream.
But OK, it's easy to criticize. If I'm in favor of laws, and I share the goal of improving the lives of musicians, what should we do instead?
When in doubt, try to remove imbalances of power. Reduce complexity, reduce secrecy. Personally, I would start by trying to simplify and improve the existing royalty process, rather than adding another incompletely-thought out layer with uncertain consequences.
We got a good idea about how to do this, by accident, recently, when Spotify and Deezer and UMG collaborated to change their contractual rules for recording royalties to pay nothing to tracks that don't reach 1,000 streams over the course of the last year. This is a regressive measure I personally despise, but the interesting part is that they actually couldn't pay those songs nothing, because the performance and mechanical rates are set by law (at least in the US). If the recording rates were also set by law, those wouldn't have been subject to secret contract negotiations either. Moving all the rates into law would also allow them to be determined (and debated in public) as a coherent set, which would make a lot more sense. And while we're at it, we could eliminate the spurious performance royalties, reducing the number of royalty components to two, one for the performers and one for the songwriters. And, in fact, if we allowed artists to designate original songs, so that this information was passed on by licensors to streaming services, then both royalties could be paid at once for those tracks, reducing the reporting overhead for artists and services both, and recovering some of the money currently lost on the way to artists who never took the time to sign up for BMI or ASCAP.
Those simplifications would not, in themselves, provide a predictable living wage for all working musicians, either. But they would make the current streaming model less mysterious, and less beholden to secret agreements between a few giant corporations. Plenty more work would remain to be done. But that work would be easier think about, and easier to do. And less likely to produce earnest laws that probably have no chance of living up to their authors' hopes for them, or ours.
But I don't think this proposed law, as written, will work.
Here's how it would operate:
Music-streaming subscriptions in the US would have a federal government fee of 50% added to them...
This ought to be in the headline of every article covering this story. "Make Streaming Pay", the UMAW slogan for this effort, sounds like a vendetta against streaming services, especially coming from the same people who brought us "Justice at Spotify" previously, but as a music listener you should understand that the people who would pay this time are you. The proposed bill would add fees to music subscriptions. Fees are a well-established tactic, but not exactly a well-loved one. It's at least faintly ironic that Congress is scrutinizing Ticketmaster's excessive fees at the same time that this bill is proposing to add one to music streaming.
And 50% is a lot. A $10.99/month subscription would get an added $5.50 government fee, raising the total to $16.49. The bill even specifies a minimum of $4, so a $5.99 student subscription would rise to $9.99. While I don't think either of those are unreasonable prices for all the music in the world, they're giant relative jumps. I would fully expect them to be publicly unpopular as a proposal, and thus hard to find support for in Congress. If enacted, they would probably cause many existing subscribers to downgrade to free (ad-supported) alternatives. Enough people doing so could cancel out the monetary benefit, so this should not be proposed without careful modeling of likely price flexibility. I doubt that has been done, and certainly no evidence of it has been presented by the bill's advocates. I would also expect most or all streaming services to lobby vigorously against this change because of these effects, even though the fee itself is not paid by them. Except...
and music-streaming services would have a 10% tax on their "non-subscription" (meaning mainly advertising) revenue in the US...
You can't add fees to free, so here's the other half of the plan. Most streaming services already pay ~70% of revenue to licensors, keeping ~30% for themselves. A 10% tax on revenue thus cuts gross advertising profit by a third. Since Spotify (whom I single out here only because as a public company they report music-specific financial results, which Apple/Amazon/YouTube Music as divisions of larger companies do not) has mostly not turned a net profit at all, this proposed tax will almost certainly be taken as intractably punitive, and I expect all the services with ad-supported tiers to resist it. Spotify probably cannot afford to threaten to pull out of the US like it threatened to pull out of Uruguay when a (different) version of this idea was proposed there, and would presumably not want to increase their own prices again having only recently raised them in most countries, making it hard to take the tactic they are taking in response to a 1.2% tax in France. So I would expect Spotify to lobby against this as if it is an existential threat.
There's also a very important question here about what constitutes a music service, and in particular whether YouTube (not YouTube Music) and TikTok count. The bill doesn't address this, although the UMAW advocacy for it strongly implies that YouTube, at least, is meant to be included. I do not expect Google to quietly accept a 10% tax on any meaningful subset of YouTube advertising revenue.
which would be collected into (and by) a new government fund/agency...
Streaming music royalties are already split into three different components: to licensors, to publishers (for songwriters), and to performing-rights agencies (also for songwriters; it's a long story). This bill would add a fourth. That seems to me like the wrong direction, and grounds for skepticism even before we get into how the new fund would work. As an example it also implies that every country would need to create a similar fund of their own, although the bill as written seems to ignore the fact that it applies to the flow of money in only one country, while the music itself is global.
which would also collect and tabulate monthly streams by unique master recording...
This detail is unexplicated in the bill, but introduces a very serious technical requirement. Music is delivered to streaming services by licensors in releases composed of tracks, and it's normal for there to end up being many different tracks that have the same original audio, e.g. a single and that same song on the subsequent album and the same song again later on a compilation, and all these again in many different countries. Reconciling these requires audio-analysis software that can correctly match two tracks of the same recording even if they've gone through slightly different processing, and correctly differentiate between two different pieces of music even if they contain substantial similarity (like a song and a remix of it that adds a guest verse). And even after you've correctly matched tracks by their audio, their credits might differ, so you have to figure out which credits you're going to use. I can testify from 12 years of involvement with the process at the Echo Nest and Spotify that this is all not a trivial problem, and can be error prone even in a long-running production system. The administrators of the new fund are going to have to hire more programmers than they probably realize.
impose a cap of 1 million streams/month on each such recording...
This is arguably the most critical, progressive and interesting detail in the bill. Rather than just increasing all artists' current income by a small proportional amount, the bill attempts to specifically support artists who might not currently be making a living from their music, by effectively redirecting some or most of the money from songs with >1m streams back into the payment pool. This is why the recording-matching has to be accurate, but sadly is also the key to trivial manipulation of this scheme to evade its intent. Each detected "unique recording" is subject to a 1m cap, but it's not hard to produce multiple tracks that sound the same to listeners, but intentionally defeat the usual methods for automatic matching. Were this bill to be passed, I expect it would become normal practice to do this across releases and services, to make every track of the same recording register uniquely, so that each one gets its own 1m cap. The producers of very popular songs would have a strong incentive to also try to do it over time for each song during a given month, hoping to accumulate N million streams 1m at a time across N variations of the same song.
The 1-million-stream threshold here is arbitrary. The bill itself doesn't justify or explain it. Rep. Tlaib has mentioned in speaking about this bill that it takes 800,000 streams/month at a current average rate of $.003/stream to make the equivalent of minimum wage, which is correct math, but that's per artist, not per track. The unavoidable market truth about music (like most non-commissioned art) is that financial reward is not a function of quantity of labor. You can spend any amount of time making a song, and maybe nobody will play it. If we really want, as a society, to give people a living wage for the labor of making music, as opposed to lucking into popularity, then we need to spend our government energies on grants or Universal Basic Income, not on streaming taxes and fees.
and then divide payments proportionally by capped streams...
This sounds like just unremarkable process, but is sneakily the most serious flaw of the whole bill as written. The fund combines all streams from all services, and all money from all services, and distributes that combined money according to those combined streams. This sounds like the pro rata royalty-allocation method already in use by all major streaming services. The crucial difference, though, is that services do not do this with one big pool of money and streams, they do it with an individual pool of money and streams for each payment plan (in each country). This is essential, because the revenue per listener varies widely across countries and plans. A stream from a Spotify Premium subscriber in Iceland is worth considerably more than a stream from an ad-supported listener in India.
By combining all the streams and all the money, this plan would make it possible to use the cheapest form of artificial streaming to accumulate fraudulent streams that would share money from the most expensive ones, thus inaugurating a golden age of streaming fraud.
This is not only a fatal flaw of the bill as written, it's one that reveals that the writers of the bill do not know how the existing royalty methods work, and didn't consult with anybody who does.
90% to "featured" artists and 10% to "non-featured" artists...
It's a minor selling point of this bill that it would result in some royalties being paid to "non-featured" artists, like session musicians and backing vocalists, who do not (usually) get royalties at all from the current system. The amount is small, though, and administering it would be a procedural headache. Because those people don't currently get paid royalties, their participation isn't necessarily included in the licensors' metadata. And, conversely, because those people don't get royalties, they're currently mostly paid for their work in old-fashioned wages. Give them a share of the royalties and we might find that that becomes an excuse to pay them less up front, in the same way that tip workers are often given lower base wages.
The bill does not say how royalties would be split between multiple featured or non-featured artists. I guess it's loosely implied that it would automatically be equal shares to each, since there's no mention of any mechanism to specify otherwise. The bill does specify that "artists" means individual humans, not corporations or generative AIs (!), which seems to mean that bands are not part of this scheme, only each person one at a time.
And, notably, the bill as written specifically does not include songwriters. This is a little surprising to me, since I think of advocacy for higher royalty rates for songwriters as part of the same family of social-justice causes as higher royalty rates for performers, and songwriters get the smallest share of royalties in the current system. I'm not looking forward to the antagonism between "performers" and "songwriters" that this omission might provoke.
who sign up with the fund and provide payment information.
This, too, is both a distinguishing characteristic of this plan and a drawback. The whole point of this fourth royalty scheme is to route it around the first three, although in practice it's mainly the payment of recording royalties to licensors (and thus to labels) that the writers are trying to avoid. Labels, particularly major ones, often write artist contracts in which advances are paid up front, and artists not only get a small percentage of the royalties later, but even that small percentage is accounted for as repaying the advance as a loan. So an artist might, in practice, get no royalties for a while, or ever. (Although, again, they were paid an advance, and if their royalties don't earn back the advance, they don't have to repay it any other way.)
But, of course, you don't have to sign a label contract in order to release music on streaming services. DIY distributors either charge small flat fees, or take very small shares of your royalties. But labels provide services in addition to taking royalties (and paying advances), and maybe you want those. I suspect that musicians signed to major labels are mostly doing OK, at least temporarily during their maybe-short label tenure. And if they aren't, and their label contracts are why, maybe that's where the laws should be pointed.
But that means this fund is yet another thing an artist has to sign up for and manage, and which in turn has to manage and verify them. I have not found any good estimates of how many artists currently do not do the work to register their songs to collect performance and mechanical rights, and how often there are contradictions between ownership claims, but I'm sure both are common. There's precedent in performance-rights organizations for international cooperation, but I don't know if any of those operate on this scale, and even if they do, this bill doesn't propose to use them, so this new fund (and its equivalents in other countries, if they exist) would have to reinvent all of that process.
The stipulation about individuals, not companies, seems obviously like a preemptive attempt to keep labels from registering on their artists' "behalf" and collecting this new windfall too, but I'm not immediately convinced that won't happen somehow anyway. And indeed it might have to for the scheme to accommodate the estates of dead artists, whom I assume it doesn't intend to exclude.
Even if we imagine that nobody attempts to evade this rule, though, the existence of a fourth royalty that bypasses labels is likely to push labels, and the three major-label companies in particular, to object to this bill too. And were it enacted, I would expect to see labels begin to change the terms of their contracts to reduce or eliminate artist shares of the recording royalties since they're now supposedly getting this new Living Wage paid separately.
The notable thing this bill does not include is any mechanism or support for this claim that the UMAW, who collaborated on it, continue to make here:
The Living Wage for Musicians Act is built to pay artists a minimum penny per stream, an amount calculated specifically to provide a working class artist a living wage from streaming.The bill, as written, is very definitely not "built" to pay $.01/stream. UMAW's intro puts the current average stream rate at $0.00173 (including YouTube), and after an hour or so of spreadsheet noodling I could not see any way it would more than double this for the biggest beneficiaries (artists whose tracks all approach 1m streams without going over), even if nothing else in the industry changed in reaction. That would be $0.00346/stream, still a long way from $0.01. It doesn't help my confidence in UMAW's math diligence that their "calculator" to show the effects of this bill not only just multiplies streams by $0.01, but doesn't even bother to apply the 1m-stream cutoff.
Nor have I seen any explanation of why the suspiciously round penny is coincidentally the magic living-wage level, and I'm willing to bet a large number of pennies that no such explanation exists. There are many very-good bands who do not have 1 million streams total, all time, across all their songs on Spotify. That's not a multi-year living wage for a group of people even at a dime per stream.
But OK, it's easy to criticize. If I'm in favor of laws, and I share the goal of improving the lives of musicians, what should we do instead?
When in doubt, try to remove imbalances of power. Reduce complexity, reduce secrecy. Personally, I would start by trying to simplify and improve the existing royalty process, rather than adding another incompletely-thought out layer with uncertain consequences.
We got a good idea about how to do this, by accident, recently, when Spotify and Deezer and UMG collaborated to change their contractual rules for recording royalties to pay nothing to tracks that don't reach 1,000 streams over the course of the last year. This is a regressive measure I personally despise, but the interesting part is that they actually couldn't pay those songs nothing, because the performance and mechanical rates are set by law (at least in the US). If the recording rates were also set by law, those wouldn't have been subject to secret contract negotiations either. Moving all the rates into law would also allow them to be determined (and debated in public) as a coherent set, which would make a lot more sense. And while we're at it, we could eliminate the spurious performance royalties, reducing the number of royalty components to two, one for the performers and one for the songwriters. And, in fact, if we allowed artists to designate original songs, so that this information was passed on by licensors to streaming services, then both royalties could be paid at once for those tracks, reducing the reporting overhead for artists and services both, and recovering some of the money currently lost on the way to artists who never took the time to sign up for BMI or ASCAP.
Those simplifications would not, in themselves, provide a predictable living wage for all working musicians, either. But they would make the current streaming model less mysterious, and less beholden to secret agreements between a few giant corporations. Plenty more work would remain to be done. But that work would be easier think about, and easier to do. And less likely to produce earnest laws that probably have no chance of living up to their authors' hopes for them, or ours.
¶ Talking to Robots About Songs and Memory and Death (PopCon 2024) · 7 March 2024 essay/listen
Talking to Robots About Songs and Memory and Death
Infinite Archives, Fluctuating Access and Flickering Nostalgia at the Dawn of the Age of Streaming Music
(delivered at the 2024 Pop Conference)
Let me tell you how it used to be. Songs were written and sung and recorded, but then they were encased in finite increments of plastic, and our control over our ability to hear them relied on each of us, sometimes in competition, acquiring and retaining these tokens. The scarcity of particular plastic could shroud songs in selective silence. A basement flood could wash away music.
Imagine, instead, a shared and living archive. Music, instead of being carved into inert plastic, is infused into the frenetic dreams of angelic synapses. Every song is sung at once in waiting, and needs only your curious attention to summon it back into the air. Nothing, once heard, need ever be lost. The rising seas might drive us to higher ground, but our songs watch over us from above.
When I proposed this talk, Spotify held 368,660,954 tracks from 61,096,319 releases, and I could know that because I worked there. The servers of streaming music services are unprecedented cultural repositories, diligently maintained and fairly well annotated. We pour our love into them, and in return we can get it back any time we want.
That's the techno-utopian version, at least. In the real-life version, the angels are only robots, and the robots aren't even actual robots. The infinite generosity of technology is constrained by relentless pragmatic contingencies: corporations, laws, contracts, stockholders, greed. All those songs are there, technically poised, but whether we are allowed to hear them depends on layers of human abstraction and distraction. This is what people mean when they object to streaming as renting the things that you love. The erratic logistics of music licensing control whether any given song is permitted to escape from the streaming servers. Licensing, in turn, is permuted by artists and labels and distributors and streaming services, and then again by the borders of countries and the passage of time. The song you want to hear again is still there. But that may not be enough.
"Renting the things you love" sounds bad. But so too, I think, does "purchasing the things you love". I don't philosophically need or want my love to be materialized in a form for which I have to transact, and which I then have to store. I want to be able to recall joys effortlessly. The system model of instant magical recall, which is an illusion that streaming can sustain under conducive network conditions, is what I think we want, what music wants. If renting is reliable, maybe it's fine. But how reliable is it?
If you don't work for a streaming service, you can only really assess this by anecdote. Joni Mitchell objected to Spotify's podcast deal with Joe Rogan, and revoked its rights to her whole catalog. Because rights are complicated, though, it didn't entirely work. When I proposed this talk, there was one Joni Mitchell song still accessible on Spotify in the US, a stray copy of "A Case of You" from a random compilation released in roundabout evasion by some label other than hers. If you didn't know this context, you would have no immediate way to tell Joni wasn't an emerging artist with just the one complicated, hopeful first single so far. A complicated hopeful first single with 103,102,704 plays, apparently, so you might wonder a little bit. Promising, I think. I'd like to hear more.
Since then, the license police caught up to that rogue compilation, and "A Case of You" is gone again. As of my drafting of this talk, Joni Mitchell's Spotify catalog was a 10-song 1970 BBC live album, and a single pointlessly overbearing cover of "River" by somebody else that was gamed onto Joni's Spotify page by the trick of labeling it as a classical composition, which causes Spotify to treat its composer as one of its primary artists. If the only artists with the power to withhold their songs were ones of Joni's stature, that would actually be fairly manageable. The plastic tokens of Blue are not scarce or expensive. If only artists had the power to withhold songs, actually, this would be a conversation about art and the limits of authorial control, and whether Joni is allowed to come take your copy of Blue away from you if you listen to Joe Rogan.
If you do work for a streaming service, though, and you can manage not to resign in protest of anything it does that you disagree with, then you don't have to rely on annecdote, you can use data. So I did. I ran the historical analysis of all post-release licensing gaps in song availability from 2015 to 2023, both overall and aggregated by licensor. In practice, in turns out, almost all songs available today have been available for streaming continuously since release. There are a handful of licensors whose tracks are routinely retracted, and there are good reasons for this, which I'm not allowed to tell you but I can reassure you that those are not the tracks we're worried about. Actual licensing gaps for actual songs with actual audiences are, statistically speaking, vanishingly rare. I made a nice graph of this.
If you work for a streaming service, however, you can also get laid off by that streaming service, which I also did. When this happens you have a surprise 10-minute call with an HR rep you've never seen before at 9:15 on a Monday morning, and then your laptop is remote-locked and you don't have those graphs any more. The robots are not allowed to talk to me now. Who will sit with them when they are sad? The problem with externalizing our memories and our note-taking into the cloud isn't technological reliability, it's control. The problem with renting the things you love is not the fragility of the things, it's the morally unregulated fragility of the relationship between you and the corporate angels.
We'll be OK without that graph. It was not, shall we say, the "A Case of You" of data graphics. The things that really belonged to Spotify, Spotify can keep. The goverance models for modern corporations are still painfully primitive. We understand that local democracies and a little bit of international law are a better model than crusader feudalism for communities of place, and I feel like it's morally apparent that corporations, as communities of purpose, ultimately deserve the same models and protections. If you move away from a city, you're still allowed to come visit. I should probably be allowed to visit my graphs. I like to imagine Joni ripping copies of her own CDs and adding them to Spotify as local files just as a jurisdiction flex.
My listening, on the other hand, is my own. Consumer protections are slightly more advanced than employee protections, so you can request your complete listening history from Spotify any time you want. For much of the decade I spent working at Spotify, though, I also maintained an abstruse weekly annotated-playlist series called New Particles, so I have my own record, not just of what I heard, but what I cared about. Over the course of 454 weeks, I cared about 35,900 tracks by 13,951 different artists. This is small for data, but big for annecdotes. What I find, going through it, is that almost every week beyond the recent past has at least one song that is now, or at least currently, unavailable. Some of the earliest lists from 2015 are missing 3 or 4, but by 2017 and 2018 it's usually 1, plus or minus 1.
Counting is not an emotional exercise, though, and all interesting music-data experiments begin with some kind of counting but don't stop there. So I went through the playlists I was listening to in my birthday week each year, cross-checking the specific tracks that had gone gray in Spotify, to see if I could tell a) how missing they really are, and b) how much I care. This is mostly what my job at Spotify was like, too: short bursts of math, and then the long curious process of trying to understand the significance of the resulting numbers. And I did consistently say that I would be doing this even if they weren't paying me.
From my March 31st 2015 list I am missing the song "Kranichstil" by the Ukrainian/German rapper Olexesh. His albums before and after seem to all be available for streaming still. This one isn't, but the song is easily found on YouTube. It's still sinuous and boomy and great.
2016: I'm missing "Rolling Stone" by the Pennsylvania emocore duo I Am King. They're still putting out sporadic emo covers of pop songs, which is one of my numerous weaknesses. "Rolling Stone" was an original, and I admit I don't remember it super-well, so maybe the version that is currently available on Spotify is different from the unavailable one I liked in 2016, but it's definitely close enough.
2017: "Por Amor" by the Chilean modern-rock band Lucybell. I had the single of this on my playlist, and you can't play that any more, but the slightly longer version is still the first track on the readily-available album Magnético, and still sounds like a stern Spanish arena-rock transformation of a New Order song.
2018: The whole album MASSIVE by the K-Pop boy-band B.A.P. is unavailable, but the song I liked, the cartoonish rap-rock rant "Young, Wild and Free", was originally on a 2015 EP, which is still available.
2019: The trap-metal noise-blast "HeavyMetal!" (no space between the words, exclamation point at the end) by 7xvn (spelled with the number seven, then x-v-n) is off of Spotify, but you can still find it on Soundcloud, which in this case feels about right.
2020: A gothic metalish song called "Menneisyyden Haamut" by the Finnish band Alter Noir. Their Spotify page is empty now, and if you Google this song, the results are the orphaned Spotify page, two links from their own Facebook page to that empty Spotify page, and then my playlist that I put the song on. I sent myself an email to see if I knew what the story is with this, but I haven't heard back from myself yet.
2021: "Fuck You Nnb" by lieu. I am old and do not know what "Nnb" stood for, but I do know that lieu was supposedly a 15-year-old kid deliberately switching between distributors so their songs would end up strewn across disconnected artist identities. Perfect public memory of what we thought was a good idea when we were 15 is not necessarily a civic virtue. In some cases forgetting is probably the right way to remember.
2022: ANISFLE were an ornate Japanese rock band, or at least a heavily embroidered impression of one. Their Spotify profile is blank, their web store is empty, I guess something catastrophic happened to them. But there are still a few of their videos on YouTube, and they're still ridiculous and magnificent.
2023: The only new thing I loved last April 4th that didn't even survive for a year was a maskandi song called "UYASANGANA YINI" by uMjikelwa. It seems to still be available on Apple Music. One of his other albums is on Spotify, and I will be completely honest that although I adore maskandi and follow hundreds of maskandi artists to make sure I have a constant supply of new maskandi to listen to, I usually pick one random song from each album and I do not pretend I can really tell them apart. If you snuck into my web archives and swapped this for anything similar, I would almost certainly not notice.
I think I can live with that much loss. Individual human obstruction occludes individual archives, but the network of archives, from the well-regulated to the unruly, tends to route around suppression. It's hard to make everybody forget.
And meanwhile, my database memory is far, far better than my brain memory. How many of those 13,951 artists could I list without looking? Some. Lots, but not most. But this is how I live, now. How old was my kid when we had the birthday party where their best friend's brother fell on a brick and had to be taken to the ER? I don't remember, but I can look through Google Photos and find it by the pictures we took before the panic. Which China Mieville book did I read first? I don't remember, but I bet I can find the email I wrote you right afterwards. Or maybe I sent it from a work address and so I can't.
So yes, our technically perfect externalized memories are imperfected by our insistence on staging them behind our contentious and fluctuating rules. We produce a compromised projection of our archives by fighting over their access controls. Our human systems hold back our information systems.
But I think we'd rather have that than the other way around. If my record store, in 1989, had made a ridiculous deal with Joe Rogan and Joni had pulled her whole divider out of the M bins, we had no collective recourse. We could check the used stores, but who gets rid of Joni Mitchell albums? Recovering from this, later, would require re-shipping a case of Blue to, oh, Canada? And everywhere else. The grayed-out tracks on Spotify playlists are more like the coy ropes across the wine shelves in Whole Foods on Sunday in blue-law states. Not only are we ready when the laws and processes finally relent, but we are reminded, every moment until then, how arbitrary and ridiculous it is that they still have not.
What would better laws and processes involve? What we need here, I think, is a legal and syntactical structure for asserting music rights as layers, starting with the artist. Right now, each licensor of a recording makes a deal with its artist, with terms and dates, but then turns around and sends the streaming services only enough data to assert that licensor's own isolated claims. If licensors were required to pass along both the span of their claim, and the underlying artist ownership to which the rights will subsequently revert, then royalty attribution could fluctuate without affecting availability. And by the way, while we're building that, we could also use the same structure to embed the composition rights with the recording rights, eliminating the completely insane indirection in which the publishing rights for streaming songs have to be re-asserted separately by writers and then rediscovered separately by collecting societies.
If this last idea appeals to you so much that you would like to read it again in print, it also appears in my upcoming book, titled You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music, which comes out in June on Canbury Press. A book is another kind of externalized memory. It's good to remember how we thought things were. In my case I wrote this one while I was working at Spotify, but not because I was working at Spotify, and at least I got laid off in time to edit a bunch of present- and future tenses into the past before they were printed on paper. Memory, too, is a system: of layers and contingencies and adaptation and revelation. Underneath, somewhere, there's always love. We fall in love three minutes at a time, and we might forget the songs but we won't forget the falling.
Meanwhile, we improve the world when we can, with whatever tools and influence we are currently allowed. When we can't, we try to preserve it's potential in hiding, if not in angelic invulnerability, then at least above the water line. We leave the robots on guard, not because we trust them, but because it makes them feel useful and we don't have the heart to tell them that they aren't real. We let new songs invoke the ones we're not supposed to hear. We name our loss, and we try to not die before the day when we're allowed to remember everything again.
Infinite Archives, Fluctuating Access and Flickering Nostalgia at the Dawn of the Age of Streaming Music
(delivered at the 2024 Pop Conference)
Let me tell you how it used to be. Songs were written and sung and recorded, but then they were encased in finite increments of plastic, and our control over our ability to hear them relied on each of us, sometimes in competition, acquiring and retaining these tokens. The scarcity of particular plastic could shroud songs in selective silence. A basement flood could wash away music.
Imagine, instead, a shared and living archive. Music, instead of being carved into inert plastic, is infused into the frenetic dreams of angelic synapses. Every song is sung at once in waiting, and needs only your curious attention to summon it back into the air. Nothing, once heard, need ever be lost. The rising seas might drive us to higher ground, but our songs watch over us from above.
When I proposed this talk, Spotify held 368,660,954 tracks from 61,096,319 releases, and I could know that because I worked there. The servers of streaming music services are unprecedented cultural repositories, diligently maintained and fairly well annotated. We pour our love into them, and in return we can get it back any time we want.
That's the techno-utopian version, at least. In the real-life version, the angels are only robots, and the robots aren't even actual robots. The infinite generosity of technology is constrained by relentless pragmatic contingencies: corporations, laws, contracts, stockholders, greed. All those songs are there, technically poised, but whether we are allowed to hear them depends on layers of human abstraction and distraction. This is what people mean when they object to streaming as renting the things that you love. The erratic logistics of music licensing control whether any given song is permitted to escape from the streaming servers. Licensing, in turn, is permuted by artists and labels and distributors and streaming services, and then again by the borders of countries and the passage of time. The song you want to hear again is still there. But that may not be enough.
"Renting the things you love" sounds bad. But so too, I think, does "purchasing the things you love". I don't philosophically need or want my love to be materialized in a form for which I have to transact, and which I then have to store. I want to be able to recall joys effortlessly. The system model of instant magical recall, which is an illusion that streaming can sustain under conducive network conditions, is what I think we want, what music wants. If renting is reliable, maybe it's fine. But how reliable is it?
If you don't work for a streaming service, you can only really assess this by anecdote. Joni Mitchell objected to Spotify's podcast deal with Joe Rogan, and revoked its rights to her whole catalog. Because rights are complicated, though, it didn't entirely work. When I proposed this talk, there was one Joni Mitchell song still accessible on Spotify in the US, a stray copy of "A Case of You" from a random compilation released in roundabout evasion by some label other than hers. If you didn't know this context, you would have no immediate way to tell Joni wasn't an emerging artist with just the one complicated, hopeful first single so far. A complicated hopeful first single with 103,102,704 plays, apparently, so you might wonder a little bit. Promising, I think. I'd like to hear more.
Since then, the license police caught up to that rogue compilation, and "A Case of You" is gone again. As of my drafting of this talk, Joni Mitchell's Spotify catalog was a 10-song 1970 BBC live album, and a single pointlessly overbearing cover of "River" by somebody else that was gamed onto Joni's Spotify page by the trick of labeling it as a classical composition, which causes Spotify to treat its composer as one of its primary artists. If the only artists with the power to withhold their songs were ones of Joni's stature, that would actually be fairly manageable. The plastic tokens of Blue are not scarce or expensive. If only artists had the power to withhold songs, actually, this would be a conversation about art and the limits of authorial control, and whether Joni is allowed to come take your copy of Blue away from you if you listen to Joe Rogan.
If you do work for a streaming service, though, and you can manage not to resign in protest of anything it does that you disagree with, then you don't have to rely on annecdote, you can use data. So I did. I ran the historical analysis of all post-release licensing gaps in song availability from 2015 to 2023, both overall and aggregated by licensor. In practice, in turns out, almost all songs available today have been available for streaming continuously since release. There are a handful of licensors whose tracks are routinely retracted, and there are good reasons for this, which I'm not allowed to tell you but I can reassure you that those are not the tracks we're worried about. Actual licensing gaps for actual songs with actual audiences are, statistically speaking, vanishingly rare. I made a nice graph of this.
If you work for a streaming service, however, you can also get laid off by that streaming service, which I also did. When this happens you have a surprise 10-minute call with an HR rep you've never seen before at 9:15 on a Monday morning, and then your laptop is remote-locked and you don't have those graphs any more. The robots are not allowed to talk to me now. Who will sit with them when they are sad? The problem with externalizing our memories and our note-taking into the cloud isn't technological reliability, it's control. The problem with renting the things you love is not the fragility of the things, it's the morally unregulated fragility of the relationship between you and the corporate angels.
We'll be OK without that graph. It was not, shall we say, the "A Case of You" of data graphics. The things that really belonged to Spotify, Spotify can keep. The goverance models for modern corporations are still painfully primitive. We understand that local democracies and a little bit of international law are a better model than crusader feudalism for communities of place, and I feel like it's morally apparent that corporations, as communities of purpose, ultimately deserve the same models and protections. If you move away from a city, you're still allowed to come visit. I should probably be allowed to visit my graphs. I like to imagine Joni ripping copies of her own CDs and adding them to Spotify as local files just as a jurisdiction flex.
My listening, on the other hand, is my own. Consumer protections are slightly more advanced than employee protections, so you can request your complete listening history from Spotify any time you want. For much of the decade I spent working at Spotify, though, I also maintained an abstruse weekly annotated-playlist series called New Particles, so I have my own record, not just of what I heard, but what I cared about. Over the course of 454 weeks, I cared about 35,900 tracks by 13,951 different artists. This is small for data, but big for annecdotes. What I find, going through it, is that almost every week beyond the recent past has at least one song that is now, or at least currently, unavailable. Some of the earliest lists from 2015 are missing 3 or 4, but by 2017 and 2018 it's usually 1, plus or minus 1.
Counting is not an emotional exercise, though, and all interesting music-data experiments begin with some kind of counting but don't stop there. So I went through the playlists I was listening to in my birthday week each year, cross-checking the specific tracks that had gone gray in Spotify, to see if I could tell a) how missing they really are, and b) how much I care. This is mostly what my job at Spotify was like, too: short bursts of math, and then the long curious process of trying to understand the significance of the resulting numbers. And I did consistently say that I would be doing this even if they weren't paying me.
From my March 31st 2015 list I am missing the song "Kranichstil" by the Ukrainian/German rapper Olexesh. His albums before and after seem to all be available for streaming still. This one isn't, but the song is easily found on YouTube. It's still sinuous and boomy and great.
2016: I'm missing "Rolling Stone" by the Pennsylvania emocore duo I Am King. They're still putting out sporadic emo covers of pop songs, which is one of my numerous weaknesses. "Rolling Stone" was an original, and I admit I don't remember it super-well, so maybe the version that is currently available on Spotify is different from the unavailable one I liked in 2016, but it's definitely close enough.
2017: "Por Amor" by the Chilean modern-rock band Lucybell. I had the single of this on my playlist, and you can't play that any more, but the slightly longer version is still the first track on the readily-available album Magnético, and still sounds like a stern Spanish arena-rock transformation of a New Order song.
2018: The whole album MASSIVE by the K-Pop boy-band B.A.P. is unavailable, but the song I liked, the cartoonish rap-rock rant "Young, Wild and Free", was originally on a 2015 EP, which is still available.
2019: The trap-metal noise-blast "HeavyMetal!" (no space between the words, exclamation point at the end) by 7xvn (spelled with the number seven, then x-v-n) is off of Spotify, but you can still find it on Soundcloud, which in this case feels about right.
2020: A gothic metalish song called "Menneisyyden Haamut" by the Finnish band Alter Noir. Their Spotify page is empty now, and if you Google this song, the results are the orphaned Spotify page, two links from their own Facebook page to that empty Spotify page, and then my playlist that I put the song on. I sent myself an email to see if I knew what the story is with this, but I haven't heard back from myself yet.
2021: "Fuck You Nnb" by lieu. I am old and do not know what "Nnb" stood for, but I do know that lieu was supposedly a 15-year-old kid deliberately switching between distributors so their songs would end up strewn across disconnected artist identities. Perfect public memory of what we thought was a good idea when we were 15 is not necessarily a civic virtue. In some cases forgetting is probably the right way to remember.
2022: ANISFLE were an ornate Japanese rock band, or at least a heavily embroidered impression of one. Their Spotify profile is blank, their web store is empty, I guess something catastrophic happened to them. But there are still a few of their videos on YouTube, and they're still ridiculous and magnificent.
2023: The only new thing I loved last April 4th that didn't even survive for a year was a maskandi song called "UYASANGANA YINI" by uMjikelwa. It seems to still be available on Apple Music. One of his other albums is on Spotify, and I will be completely honest that although I adore maskandi and follow hundreds of maskandi artists to make sure I have a constant supply of new maskandi to listen to, I usually pick one random song from each album and I do not pretend I can really tell them apart. If you snuck into my web archives and swapped this for anything similar, I would almost certainly not notice.
I think I can live with that much loss. Individual human obstruction occludes individual archives, but the network of archives, from the well-regulated to the unruly, tends to route around suppression. It's hard to make everybody forget.
And meanwhile, my database memory is far, far better than my brain memory. How many of those 13,951 artists could I list without looking? Some. Lots, but not most. But this is how I live, now. How old was my kid when we had the birthday party where their best friend's brother fell on a brick and had to be taken to the ER? I don't remember, but I can look through Google Photos and find it by the pictures we took before the panic. Which China Mieville book did I read first? I don't remember, but I bet I can find the email I wrote you right afterwards. Or maybe I sent it from a work address and so I can't.
So yes, our technically perfect externalized memories are imperfected by our insistence on staging them behind our contentious and fluctuating rules. We produce a compromised projection of our archives by fighting over their access controls. Our human systems hold back our information systems.
But I think we'd rather have that than the other way around. If my record store, in 1989, had made a ridiculous deal with Joe Rogan and Joni had pulled her whole divider out of the M bins, we had no collective recourse. We could check the used stores, but who gets rid of Joni Mitchell albums? Recovering from this, later, would require re-shipping a case of Blue to, oh, Canada? And everywhere else. The grayed-out tracks on Spotify playlists are more like the coy ropes across the wine shelves in Whole Foods on Sunday in blue-law states. Not only are we ready when the laws and processes finally relent, but we are reminded, every moment until then, how arbitrary and ridiculous it is that they still have not.
What would better laws and processes involve? What we need here, I think, is a legal and syntactical structure for asserting music rights as layers, starting with the artist. Right now, each licensor of a recording makes a deal with its artist, with terms and dates, but then turns around and sends the streaming services only enough data to assert that licensor's own isolated claims. If licensors were required to pass along both the span of their claim, and the underlying artist ownership to which the rights will subsequently revert, then royalty attribution could fluctuate without affecting availability. And by the way, while we're building that, we could also use the same structure to embed the composition rights with the recording rights, eliminating the completely insane indirection in which the publishing rights for streaming songs have to be re-asserted separately by writers and then rediscovered separately by collecting societies.
If this last idea appeals to you so much that you would like to read it again in print, it also appears in my upcoming book, titled You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music, which comes out in June on Canbury Press. A book is another kind of externalized memory. It's good to remember how we thought things were. In my case I wrote this one while I was working at Spotify, but not because I was working at Spotify, and at least I got laid off in time to edit a bunch of present- and future tenses into the past before they were printed on paper. Memory, too, is a system: of layers and contingencies and adaptation and revelation. Underneath, somewhere, there's always love. We fall in love three minutes at a time, and we might forget the songs but we won't forget the falling.
Meanwhile, we improve the world when we can, with whatever tools and influence we are currently allowed. When we can't, we try to preserve it's potential in hiding, if not in angelic invulnerability, then at least above the water line. We leave the robots on guard, not because we trust them, but because it makes them feel useful and we don't have the heart to tell them that they aren't real. We let new songs invoke the ones we're not supposed to hear. We name our loss, and we try to not die before the day when we're allowed to remember everything again.
¶ A short essay about long playlists of short tracks of rain noises and streaming-music economics. · 24 September 2021 essay/tech
Rolling Stone published this recent story (https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-sleep-music-playlists-lady-gaga-1223911/) about the streaming success of the sleep-noise artist/label/scheme Sleep Fruits, who chop up background rain-noise recordings into :30 lengths to maximize streaming playcounts.
Sleep Fruits is undeniably and intentionally exploiting the systemic weakness of the industry-wide :30-or-more-is-a-play rule, as too are audiobook licensors who split their long content into :30 "chapters". The :30 thing is a bad rule. Most of the straightforward alternatives are also bad, so it wasn't an obviously insane initial system design-choice, but this abuse vector is logical and inevitable.
The effect of the abuse for the label doing it is simple: exploitative multiplication of their "natural" streams by a large factor. x6 if you compare it to rain noise sliced into pop-song-size lengths.
The effect on the rest of the streaming economy is more complicated. More money to Sleep Fruits does mean less money to somebody else, at least in the short term.
Under the current pro-rata royalty-allocation system used by all major subscription streaming services (one big pool, split by stream-share), the effects of Sleep Fruits' abuse are distributed across the whole subscription pool. The burden is shared by all other artists, collectively, but is fractional and negligible for any individual artist. In addition, under pro-rata if an individual listener plays Sleep Fruits overnight, every night, it doesn't change the value of their "real" music-listening activity during the day. Those artists get the same benefit from those fans as they would from a listener who sleeps in silence.
Under the oft-proposed user-centric payment system, in which each listener's payments are split according to only their plays, Sleep Fruits' short-track abuse tactic would be less effective for them. Not as much less effective as you might think, because the same two things that inflate their overall numbers (long-duration background playing + short tracks) inflate their share of each listener's plays. But less, because in the pro-rata model one listener can direct more revenue than they contributed, and in the user-centric model they can't.
In the user-centric model, though, if an individual listener listens to Sleep Fruits overnight, that directly reduces the money that goes to their daytime artists. Where pro-rata disperses the burden, user-centric would concentrate it on the kinds of artists whose fans also listen to background noise. This is probably worse in overall fairness, and it's definitely worse in terms of the listener-artist relationship, which is one of the key emotional arguments for the user-centric model.
The interesting additional economic twist to this particular case, though, is that sleeping to background noise works very badly if it's interrupted by ads. Background listening is thus a powerful incentive for paid subscriptions over ad-supported streaming. (Audiobooks similarly, since they essentially require full on-demand listening control.) So if Sleep Fruits drives background listeners to subscribe, it might be bringing in additional money that could offset or even exceed the amount extracted by its abuse. (Maybe. The counterfactual here is hard to assess quantitatively.)
And although the :30 rule is what made this example newsworthy in its exaggerated effect, in truth it's probably not really the fundamental problem. The deeper issue is just that we subjectively value music based on the attention we pay to it, but we haven't figured out a good way to translate between attention paid and money paid. Switching from play-share to time-share would eliminate the advantage of cutting up rain noise into :30 lengths, but wouldn't change the imbalance between 8 hours/night of sleep loops and 1-2 hours/day of music listening. CDs "solved" this by making you pay for your expected attention with a high fixed entry price, which isn't really any more sensible.
I don't think we're going to solve this with just math, which disappoints me personally, since I'm pretty good at solving math-solvable things with math. But in general I think time-share is a slightly closer approximation of attention-share than play-share, and thus preferable. And rather than trying to discount low-attention listening, which seems problematic and thankless and negative, it seems more practical and appealing to me to try to add incremental additional rewards to high-attention fandom. E.g. higher-cost subscription plans in which the extra money goes directly to artists of the listener's choice, in the form of microfanclubs supported by platform-provided community features. There are a lot of people who, like me, used to spend a lot more than $10/month on music, and could probably be convinced to spend more than that again if there were reasons.
Of course, not coincidentally, I have ideas about community features that can be provided with math. Lots of ideas. They come to me every :30 while I sleep.
PS: I've seen some speculation that Sleep Fruits is buying their streams. I'm involved enough in fraud-detection at Spotify to say with at least a little bit of confidence that this is probably not the case. Large-scale fraud is pretty easy to detect, and the scale of this is large. It's abusing a systemic weakness, but not obviously dishonestly.
Sleep Fruits is undeniably and intentionally exploiting the systemic weakness of the industry-wide :30-or-more-is-a-play rule, as too are audiobook licensors who split their long content into :30 "chapters". The :30 thing is a bad rule. Most of the straightforward alternatives are also bad, so it wasn't an obviously insane initial system design-choice, but this abuse vector is logical and inevitable.
The effect of the abuse for the label doing it is simple: exploitative multiplication of their "natural" streams by a large factor. x6 if you compare it to rain noise sliced into pop-song-size lengths.
The effect on the rest of the streaming economy is more complicated. More money to Sleep Fruits does mean less money to somebody else, at least in the short term.
Under the current pro-rata royalty-allocation system used by all major subscription streaming services (one big pool, split by stream-share), the effects of Sleep Fruits' abuse are distributed across the whole subscription pool. The burden is shared by all other artists, collectively, but is fractional and negligible for any individual artist. In addition, under pro-rata if an individual listener plays Sleep Fruits overnight, every night, it doesn't change the value of their "real" music-listening activity during the day. Those artists get the same benefit from those fans as they would from a listener who sleeps in silence.
Under the oft-proposed user-centric payment system, in which each listener's payments are split according to only their plays, Sleep Fruits' short-track abuse tactic would be less effective for them. Not as much less effective as you might think, because the same two things that inflate their overall numbers (long-duration background playing + short tracks) inflate their share of each listener's plays. But less, because in the pro-rata model one listener can direct more revenue than they contributed, and in the user-centric model they can't.
In the user-centric model, though, if an individual listener listens to Sleep Fruits overnight, that directly reduces the money that goes to their daytime artists. Where pro-rata disperses the burden, user-centric would concentrate it on the kinds of artists whose fans also listen to background noise. This is probably worse in overall fairness, and it's definitely worse in terms of the listener-artist relationship, which is one of the key emotional arguments for the user-centric model.
The interesting additional economic twist to this particular case, though, is that sleeping to background noise works very badly if it's interrupted by ads. Background listening is thus a powerful incentive for paid subscriptions over ad-supported streaming. (Audiobooks similarly, since they essentially require full on-demand listening control.) So if Sleep Fruits drives background listeners to subscribe, it might be bringing in additional money that could offset or even exceed the amount extracted by its abuse. (Maybe. The counterfactual here is hard to assess quantitatively.)
And although the :30 rule is what made this example newsworthy in its exaggerated effect, in truth it's probably not really the fundamental problem. The deeper issue is just that we subjectively value music based on the attention we pay to it, but we haven't figured out a good way to translate between attention paid and money paid. Switching from play-share to time-share would eliminate the advantage of cutting up rain noise into :30 lengths, but wouldn't change the imbalance between 8 hours/night of sleep loops and 1-2 hours/day of music listening. CDs "solved" this by making you pay for your expected attention with a high fixed entry price, which isn't really any more sensible.
I don't think we're going to solve this with just math, which disappoints me personally, since I'm pretty good at solving math-solvable things with math. But in general I think time-share is a slightly closer approximation of attention-share than play-share, and thus preferable. And rather than trying to discount low-attention listening, which seems problematic and thankless and negative, it seems more practical and appealing to me to try to add incremental additional rewards to high-attention fandom. E.g. higher-cost subscription plans in which the extra money goes directly to artists of the listener's choice, in the form of microfanclubs supported by platform-provided community features. There are a lot of people who, like me, used to spend a lot more than $10/month on music, and could probably be convinced to spend more than that again if there were reasons.
Of course, not coincidentally, I have ideas about community features that can be provided with math. Lots of ideas. They come to me every :30 while I sleep.
PS: I've seen some speculation that Sleep Fruits is buying their streams. I'm involved enough in fraud-detection at Spotify to say with at least a little bit of confidence that this is probably not the case. Large-scale fraud is pretty easy to detect, and the scale of this is large. It's abusing a systemic weakness, but not obviously dishonestly.
¶ 2019 in Music · 6 January 2020 essay/listen/tech
I starting making one music-list a year some time in the 80s, before I really knew enough for there to be any sense to this activity. For a while in the 90s and 00s I got more serious about it, and statistically way better-informed, but there's actually no amount of informedness that transforms a single person's opinions about music into anything that inherently matters to anybody other than people (if any) who happen to share their specific tastes, or extraordinarily patient and maybe slightly creepy friends.
Collect people together, though, and the patterns of their love are sometimes very interesting. For several years I presided computationally over an assembly of nominal expertise, trying to find ways to turn hundreds of opinions into at least plural insights. Hundreds of people is not a lot, though, and asking people to pretend their opinions matter is a dubious way to find out what they really love. I'm not really sad we stopped doing that.
Hundreds of millions of people isn't that much, yet, but it's getting there, and asking people to spend their lives loving all the innumerable things they love is a more realistic proposition than getting them to make short numbered lists on annual deadlines. Finding an individual person who shares your exact taste, in the real world, is not only laborious to the point of preventative difficulty, but maybe not even reliably possible in theory. Finding groups of people in the virtual world who collectively approximate aspects of your taste is, due to the primitive current state of data-transparency, no easier for you.
But it has been my job, for the last few years, to try to figure out algorithmic ways to turn collective love and listening patterns into music insights and experiences. I work at Spotify, so I have extremely good information about what people like in Sweden and Norway, fairly decent information about most of the rest of Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia, and at least glimmers of insight about literally almost everywhere else on Earth. I don't know that much about you, but I know a little bit about a lot of people.
So now I make a lot of lists. Here, in fact, are algorithmically-generated playlists of the songs that defined, united and distinguished the fans and love and new music in 2000+ genres and countries around the world in 2019:
2019 Around the World
You probably don't share my tastes, and this is a pretty weak unifying force for everybody who isn't me, but there are so many stronger ones. Maybe some of the ones that pull on you are represented here. Maybe some of the communities implied and channeled here have been unknowingly incomplete without you. Maybe you have not yet discovered half of the things you will eventually adore. Maybe this is how you find them.
I found a lot of things this year, myself, some of them in this process of trying to find music for other people, and some of them just by listening. You needn't care about what I like. And if for some reason you do, you can already find out what it is in unmanageable weekly detail. But I like to look back at my own years. Spotify's official forms of nostalgia so far define years purely by listening dates, but as a music geek of a particular sort, what I mean by a year is music that was both made and heard then. New music.
I no longer want to make this list by applying manual reductive retroactive impressions to what I remember of the year, but I also don't have to. Adapting my collective engines to the individual, then, here is the purely data-generated playlist of the new music to which I demonstrated the most actual listening attachment in 2019:
2019 Greatest Hits (for glenn mcdonald)
And for segmented nostalgia, because that's what kind of nostalgist I am, I also used genre metadata and a very small amount of manual tweaking to almost automatically produce three more specialized lists:
Bright Swords in the Void (Metal and metal-adjacent noises, from the floridly melodic to the stochastically apocalyptic.)
Gradient Dissent (Ambient, noise, epicore and other abstract geometries.)
Dancing With Tears (Pop, rock, hip hop and other sentimental forms.)
And finally, although surely this, if anything, will be of interest to absolutely nobody but me, I also used a combination of my own listening, broken down by genre, and the global 2019 genre lists, to produce a list of the songs I missed or intentionally avoided despite their being popular with the fans of my favorite genres.
2019 Greatest Misses (for glenn mcdonald)
I made versions of this Misses list in November and December, to see what I was in danger of missing before the year actually ended, so these songs are the reverse-evolutionary survivors of two generations of augmented remedial listening. But I played it again just now, and it still sounds basically great to me. I'm pretty sure I could spend the next year listening to nothing but songs I missed in 2019 despite trying to hear them all, and it would be just as great in sonic terms. There's something hypothetically comforting in that, at least until I starting trying to figure out what kind of global catastrophe I'm effectively imagining here. I'm alive, but all the musicians in the world are dead? Or there's no surviving technology for recording music, but somehow Spotify servers and the worldwide cell and wifi networks still work?
Easier to live. I now declare 2019 complete and archived. Onwards.
Collect people together, though, and the patterns of their love are sometimes very interesting. For several years I presided computationally over an assembly of nominal expertise, trying to find ways to turn hundreds of opinions into at least plural insights. Hundreds of people is not a lot, though, and asking people to pretend their opinions matter is a dubious way to find out what they really love. I'm not really sad we stopped doing that.
Hundreds of millions of people isn't that much, yet, but it's getting there, and asking people to spend their lives loving all the innumerable things they love is a more realistic proposition than getting them to make short numbered lists on annual deadlines. Finding an individual person who shares your exact taste, in the real world, is not only laborious to the point of preventative difficulty, but maybe not even reliably possible in theory. Finding groups of people in the virtual world who collectively approximate aspects of your taste is, due to the primitive current state of data-transparency, no easier for you.
But it has been my job, for the last few years, to try to figure out algorithmic ways to turn collective love and listening patterns into music insights and experiences. I work at Spotify, so I have extremely good information about what people like in Sweden and Norway, fairly decent information about most of the rest of Europe, the Americas and parts of Asia, and at least glimmers of insight about literally almost everywhere else on Earth. I don't know that much about you, but I know a little bit about a lot of people.
So now I make a lot of lists. Here, in fact, are algorithmically-generated playlists of the songs that defined, united and distinguished the fans and love and new music in 2000+ genres and countries around the world in 2019:
2019 Around the World

You probably don't share my tastes, and this is a pretty weak unifying force for everybody who isn't me, but there are so many stronger ones. Maybe some of the ones that pull on you are represented here. Maybe some of the communities implied and channeled here have been unknowingly incomplete without you. Maybe you have not yet discovered half of the things you will eventually adore. Maybe this is how you find them.
I found a lot of things this year, myself, some of them in this process of trying to find music for other people, and some of them just by listening. You needn't care about what I like. And if for some reason you do, you can already find out what it is in unmanageable weekly detail. But I like to look back at my own years. Spotify's official forms of nostalgia so far define years purely by listening dates, but as a music geek of a particular sort, what I mean by a year is music that was both made and heard then. New music.
I no longer want to make this list by applying manual reductive retroactive impressions to what I remember of the year, but I also don't have to. Adapting my collective engines to the individual, then, here is the purely data-generated playlist of the new music to which I demonstrated the most actual listening attachment in 2019:
2019 Greatest Hits (for glenn mcdonald)
And for segmented nostalgia, because that's what kind of nostalgist I am, I also used genre metadata and a very small amount of manual tweaking to almost automatically produce three more specialized lists:
Bright Swords in the Void (Metal and metal-adjacent noises, from the floridly melodic to the stochastically apocalyptic.)
Gradient Dissent (Ambient, noise, epicore and other abstract geometries.)
Dancing With Tears (Pop, rock, hip hop and other sentimental forms.)
And finally, although surely this, if anything, will be of interest to absolutely nobody but me, I also used a combination of my own listening, broken down by genre, and the global 2019 genre lists, to produce a list of the songs I missed or intentionally avoided despite their being popular with the fans of my favorite genres.
2019 Greatest Misses (for glenn mcdonald)
I made versions of this Misses list in November and December, to see what I was in danger of missing before the year actually ended, so these songs are the reverse-evolutionary survivors of two generations of augmented remedial listening. But I played it again just now, and it still sounds basically great to me. I'm pretty sure I could spend the next year listening to nothing but songs I missed in 2019 despite trying to hear them all, and it would be just as great in sonic terms. There's something hypothetically comforting in that, at least until I starting trying to figure out what kind of global catastrophe I'm effectively imagining here. I'm alive, but all the musicians in the world are dead? Or there's no surviving technology for recording music, but somehow Spotify servers and the worldwide cell and wifi networks still work?
Easier to live. I now declare 2019 complete and archived. Onwards.
¶ Genre Politics · 21 April 2017 essay/listen
[Adapted from a talk I gave at the MoPop Conference 2017 in Seattle today.]
"Speaks Truth to Power Metal
Conceptual Fantasy, Cryptic Nihilism and the Abstruse Political Neutrality of Progressive Rock and Metal
November 7, 2016"
Hilarious.
I am kind of anti-political by nature, and I had reluctantly gotten involved in politics a little bit over the course of last year, and on November 7 I was looking desperately forward to finally beginning another long period of mostly ignoring dull but semi-functional government.
The songs that were most distinctively popular on Spotify in the US on November 7, 2016, versus the next day, were things like this:
"Intro From the President"
Diplo ft. Nicky Da B "Express Yourself"
Michael Jackson "We Are Here to Change the World"
USA for Africa "We Are the World"
Ricky Reed "Express Yourself"
Manic Street Preachers "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next"
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Ohio"
It was a tense, but mostly optimistic day in music. Personally, I spent most of the day listening to gothic symphonic metal, because that's what I like to do when the internet is working:
Nightwish "Wish I Had an Angel"
The next day was a little different. The songs that were most distinctively popular on Spotify in the US on November 8, 2016, were things like this:
YG "FDT"
YG "FDT - Pt. 2"
Mac Miller "Donald Trump"
REM "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"
The Rolling Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want"
Rae Sremmurd "Up Like Trump"
Eminem "White America"
and way down here at #61 or something we finally get a little of this:
Toby Keith "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue"
I grew up in Texas, where we had school prayer in my public school and music tended to sound like this:
Amy Grant "I Have Decided"
ZZ Top "Sharp Dressed Man"
Lynyrd Skynyrd "Sweet Home Alabama"
But my parents met folksinging in the 60s in New Haven, so inside my house it was more like this:
Peter, Paul and Mary "Puff, the Magic Dragon"
Pete Seeger "If I Had a Hammer"
Joan Baez "Pack Up Your Sorrows"
In order to rebel against both of these impulses simultaneously, I hit upon this:
Nightwish "Wish I Had an Angel"
Except that didn't exist yet, so instead it was actually more like this:
Rush "Trees"
Music and fantasy and Pokemon or whatever can function as methods of escape, but "escape" is sometimes an impatient way of dismissing a slower or less direct metanarrative of attempted understanding. "The trouble with the maples, and they're quite convinced they're right...". Rush was not avoiding issues, they were attempting to rise above them. This is definitively pretentious, but it's a form of pretension I instinctively respond to: not advocacy, but analysis. What is the nature of the problem? How do different people's contexts and preconceptions lead them to different conclusions given the same facts?
Gloryhammer "Unicorn Invasion of Dundee"
Gloryhammer are not ignoring the social conflicts and issues of Brexit-era northern Scotland, they are trying to illuminate them by putting them into an expanded context: namely: what if, in addition to the cultural invasions of globalism and technological change, there was also an actual physical invasion of the coastal town of Dundee by zombie unicorns?
You might contend that this is technically more apolitical than metapolitical. I might find this troublesome to contradict, given how much time I spend listening to cryptic metal in languages I don't even speak, or that nobody can understand by listening to them.
Deathspell Omega "Wings of Predation"
A few years ago, Brian Whitman, a music scientist who was the co-founder of the startup where I was working, did a statistical study of the political tendencies of music fans by artist. Many of his discoveries were reassuringly predictable: the artists most disproportionately liked by Democratically-inclined listeners tended to be hip hop or R&B or pop stars.
Nicki Minaj / Rihanna "Fly"
Beyoncé "Run the World (Girls)"
Katy Perry "Wide Awake"
Most of the artists most disproportionately liked by Republicans were more like this:
Kenny Chesney "Drink It Up"
Jason Aldean "My Kinda Party"
Except actual political stances by musicians clearly do register, because this pop skewed Republican:
Kelly Clarkson "I Do Not Hook Up"
and this country skewed Democrat:
Dixie Chicks "Lubbock or Leave It"
The detail that excited me, though, was that at the end of the study, almost as a footnote, Brian looked at which artists were the least predictive of their fans' political affiliations, and several of the top ones were metal bands.
Paradise Lost "Theories From Another World"
Moonspell "Alpha Noir"
To me as a metal fan, this naturally felt like it was probably mathematical proof of the moral and intellectual superiority of metal.
Later our startup got acquired by Spotify, and now I have even more data, so I decided to do this study again, abstracting up from the level of individual artists to the cultural level of genres.
Replicating statistical experiments in social science is often a thankless pit of despair and frustration, and you usually end up proving not only that the first study was wrong, but that all your data is terminally flawed to begin with, and the universe is rapidly collapsing towards the point where the only music left is either Drake, or Major Lazer remixing Drake, or algorithms generating endless choruses of excruciatingly cheerful faux-reggae by virtualized white people.
But whatever. I have the daily listening behavior of over 100 million people, and somebody quietly slipped me the US political affiliations (or not) of about 7 million of them, and I have a map of about 1500 music genres, and apparently I have an infinite supply of computers, because when I requisition more of them nobody ever says no.
So here are the top 24 metagenres in the US, ordered by their tendency towards political neutrality. Metal is...not quite first. But if we drill down to the top 150 or so microgenres, metal is...still not first. But if we go all the way down to the 1094 genres for which we have at least 100 fans with supposedly-known political affiliations, then there, finally, #1 is in fact melodic power metal.
Gloryhammer "Unicorn Invasion of Dundee"
104 fans in my sample, of whom 27 are Democrats, 26 are Republicans, and 51 are unaffiliated.
Having successfully proven my point, I began poking around in the rest of the data. And I made it into a web application, so you can poke around in it yourself.
The most left-leaning metagenres do seem to have a certain consistency to them: funk, soul, r&b. The most right-leaning ones: christian and modern country and classic country. At the microgenre level, the patterns are even more striking. The Democratic end has new jack swing, quiet storm, pop r&b, neo soul, latin pop.The Republican end has worship music, contemporary christian music, christian rock, christian alternative rock, redneck, modern country rock, texas country.
And at the hyper-microgenre level, it gets kind of ridiculous. Several of the leftmost genres are not just African-American forms, but actually African: kizomba, azonto, makossa, mbalax. After that there's a parade of Afro-Caribbean and Latin forms like kompa, zouk, cumbia, merengue, boogaloo, salsa, norteno, ranchera. Pretty much any kind of American hip hop you can think of leans Democratic, as do almost all indietronic or hipster anythings. If you're conservative and you want pop music, how about some a cappella covers?
BYU Vocal Point "Happy"
Or performances from TV talent shows?
Jeffery Austin "Dancing on My Own"
So basically, with nothing but listening data, I have replicated the same insight that more or less every other statistical examination of American politics has come to, which is that we are a nation of urban liberals who are exposed to diversity in their daily lives, and rural conservatives who are exposed to church and television.
Collectively. But it's not entirely that simple. Thank Satan. If we sort by neutrality, which I defined as a combination of tendencies both towards fans' political non-affiliation and towards balance between Democratic and Republican fans, the patterns aren't as depressingly obvious.
The two most neutral genres with at least 100k fans in my sample are pixie and screamo. For those of you who are older than 25, pixie is basically cheerful pop punk:
With Confidence "Voldemort"
and screamo is basically angry pop punk:
Blood Youth "Buying Time"
And then there are some other kinds of pop punk and metalcore and emo, but also teen pop and viral pop. And a little farther down we start seeing electro house and EDM. The kids are not as polarized as the grown-ups. Not yet.
And in fact, almost anywhere you look closely, you find a range. In hip-hop, hardcore and latin and east coast and west coast hip hop all lean left, but there's also Christian hip hop way on the other end, and nerdcore and horrorcore and most forms of hip hop from other non-Latin countries are much closer to neutral in their American fans' politics.
In country, we find that the bro-ier the country form, the more Republican it leans, but alt-country leans Democrat, and alternative Americana leans way Democrat.
And so, for me, basically, this is how I reconcile keeping my day job working on music recommendations, instead of quitting and becoming a full-time climate or diversity activist. I observe that making enemies and then trying to convert them doesn't seem to be working super well, but exposing people to difference and diversity tends to result in them becoming less intolerant and isolationist on their own, and music is one of our most powerful vectors for exposing people to bits of different cultures. Music and food. Maybe food is even better, but the towns with no Lebanese people probably don't have a lot of Lebanese restaurants, either. But if you have the internet, you can now have all the music in the world. You are not stuck in your small town. You are not stuck in your multi-cultural megacity. Having empathy for the people you think are your enemies is never trivial, but no matter how insane they seem, they always turn out to also have awesome music.
Passion "Remember"
Turns out, I like Christian progressive rock.
Levante "Le mie mille me"
I like Mexican indie pop.
Joker ft. Ayben "Microphone Show"
I like Turkish hip hop.
And yeah, sometimes I still feel kind of self-conscious when it seems like a lot of people are doing this:
Body Count "Black Hoodie"
and I'm still playing this:
Nightwish "Wish I Had an Angel"
RuPaul is doing this:
RuPaul "American"
And I'm listening to concept albums about the Platonic solids, or the internal bureacracies of Atlantis.
But I've come to understand, or maybe resolve, that my own goal is not to magically turn activists into analysts, or isolationists into explorers, but just to seed and cultivate and encourage and reward curiosity. "Acceptance" and "Tolerance" are kernels of empathy, but they are also still assertions of authority and privilege. Curiosity is different. Curiosity goes beyond "I tolerate you" towards realizing that other humans are not subject to your tolerance or not. The questions about Them are questions for them to answer, not you. Music can help people understand a little better how their place in the world is just another place. How their awesome musics are just a few of the many awesome musics. How the act of singing is essentially human, and how singing allows the act of listening to be inherently life-affirming, and that maybe, therefore, music is part of how we undo political division, and thus part of how humanity survives.
Maybe power metal has actual power.
Ayreon "Everybody Dies"
Maybe.
This thing is online at everynoise.com/genrepolitics. See if it helps you.
"Speaks Truth to Power Metal
Conceptual Fantasy, Cryptic Nihilism and the Abstruse Political Neutrality of Progressive Rock and Metal
November 7, 2016"
Hilarious.
I am kind of anti-political by nature, and I had reluctantly gotten involved in politics a little bit over the course of last year, and on November 7 I was looking desperately forward to finally beginning another long period of mostly ignoring dull but semi-functional government.
The songs that were most distinctively popular on Spotify in the US on November 7, 2016, versus the next day, were things like this:
"Intro From the President"
Diplo ft. Nicky Da B "Express Yourself"
Michael Jackson "We Are Here to Change the World"
USA for Africa "We Are the World"
Ricky Reed "Express Yourself"
Manic Street Preachers "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next"
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young "Ohio"
It was a tense, but mostly optimistic day in music. Personally, I spent most of the day listening to gothic symphonic metal, because that's what I like to do when the internet is working:
Nightwish "Wish I Had an Angel"
The next day was a little different. The songs that were most distinctively popular on Spotify in the US on November 8, 2016, were things like this:
YG "FDT"
YG "FDT - Pt. 2"
Mac Miller "Donald Trump"
REM "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"
The Rolling Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want"
Rae Sremmurd "Up Like Trump"
Eminem "White America"
and way down here at #61 or something we finally get a little of this:
Toby Keith "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue"
I grew up in Texas, where we had school prayer in my public school and music tended to sound like this:
Amy Grant "I Have Decided"
ZZ Top "Sharp Dressed Man"
Lynyrd Skynyrd "Sweet Home Alabama"
But my parents met folksinging in the 60s in New Haven, so inside my house it was more like this:
Peter, Paul and Mary "Puff, the Magic Dragon"
Pete Seeger "If I Had a Hammer"
Joan Baez "Pack Up Your Sorrows"
In order to rebel against both of these impulses simultaneously, I hit upon this:
Nightwish "Wish I Had an Angel"
Except that didn't exist yet, so instead it was actually more like this:
Rush "Trees"
Music and fantasy and Pokemon or whatever can function as methods of escape, but "escape" is sometimes an impatient way of dismissing a slower or less direct metanarrative of attempted understanding. "The trouble with the maples, and they're quite convinced they're right...". Rush was not avoiding issues, they were attempting to rise above them. This is definitively pretentious, but it's a form of pretension I instinctively respond to: not advocacy, but analysis. What is the nature of the problem? How do different people's contexts and preconceptions lead them to different conclusions given the same facts?
Gloryhammer "Unicorn Invasion of Dundee"
Gloryhammer are not ignoring the social conflicts and issues of Brexit-era northern Scotland, they are trying to illuminate them by putting them into an expanded context: namely: what if, in addition to the cultural invasions of globalism and technological change, there was also an actual physical invasion of the coastal town of Dundee by zombie unicorns?
You might contend that this is technically more apolitical than metapolitical. I might find this troublesome to contradict, given how much time I spend listening to cryptic metal in languages I don't even speak, or that nobody can understand by listening to them.
Deathspell Omega "Wings of Predation"
A few years ago, Brian Whitman, a music scientist who was the co-founder of the startup where I was working, did a statistical study of the political tendencies of music fans by artist. Many of his discoveries were reassuringly predictable: the artists most disproportionately liked by Democratically-inclined listeners tended to be hip hop or R&B or pop stars.
Nicki Minaj / Rihanna "Fly"
Beyoncé "Run the World (Girls)"
Katy Perry "Wide Awake"
Most of the artists most disproportionately liked by Republicans were more like this:
Kenny Chesney "Drink It Up"
Jason Aldean "My Kinda Party"
Except actual political stances by musicians clearly do register, because this pop skewed Republican:
Kelly Clarkson "I Do Not Hook Up"
and this country skewed Democrat:
Dixie Chicks "Lubbock or Leave It"
The detail that excited me, though, was that at the end of the study, almost as a footnote, Brian looked at which artists were the least predictive of their fans' political affiliations, and several of the top ones were metal bands.
Paradise Lost "Theories From Another World"
Moonspell "Alpha Noir"
To me as a metal fan, this naturally felt like it was probably mathematical proof of the moral and intellectual superiority of metal.
Later our startup got acquired by Spotify, and now I have even more data, so I decided to do this study again, abstracting up from the level of individual artists to the cultural level of genres.
Replicating statistical experiments in social science is often a thankless pit of despair and frustration, and you usually end up proving not only that the first study was wrong, but that all your data is terminally flawed to begin with, and the universe is rapidly collapsing towards the point where the only music left is either Drake, or Major Lazer remixing Drake, or algorithms generating endless choruses of excruciatingly cheerful faux-reggae by virtualized white people.
But whatever. I have the daily listening behavior of over 100 million people, and somebody quietly slipped me the US political affiliations (or not) of about 7 million of them, and I have a map of about 1500 music genres, and apparently I have an infinite supply of computers, because when I requisition more of them nobody ever says no.
So here are the top 24 metagenres in the US, ordered by their tendency towards political neutrality. Metal is...not quite first. But if we drill down to the top 150 or so microgenres, metal is...still not first. But if we go all the way down to the 1094 genres for which we have at least 100 fans with supposedly-known political affiliations, then there, finally, #1 is in fact melodic power metal.
Gloryhammer "Unicorn Invasion of Dundee"
104 fans in my sample, of whom 27 are Democrats, 26 are Republicans, and 51 are unaffiliated.
Having successfully proven my point, I began poking around in the rest of the data. And I made it into a web application, so you can poke around in it yourself.
The most left-leaning metagenres do seem to have a certain consistency to them: funk, soul, r&b. The most right-leaning ones: christian and modern country and classic country. At the microgenre level, the patterns are even more striking. The Democratic end has new jack swing, quiet storm, pop r&b, neo soul, latin pop.The Republican end has worship music, contemporary christian music, christian rock, christian alternative rock, redneck, modern country rock, texas country.
And at the hyper-microgenre level, it gets kind of ridiculous. Several of the leftmost genres are not just African-American forms, but actually African: kizomba, azonto, makossa, mbalax. After that there's a parade of Afro-Caribbean and Latin forms like kompa, zouk, cumbia, merengue, boogaloo, salsa, norteno, ranchera. Pretty much any kind of American hip hop you can think of leans Democratic, as do almost all indietronic or hipster anythings. If you're conservative and you want pop music, how about some a cappella covers?
BYU Vocal Point "Happy"
Or performances from TV talent shows?
Jeffery Austin "Dancing on My Own"
So basically, with nothing but listening data, I have replicated the same insight that more or less every other statistical examination of American politics has come to, which is that we are a nation of urban liberals who are exposed to diversity in their daily lives, and rural conservatives who are exposed to church and television.
Collectively. But it's not entirely that simple. Thank Satan. If we sort by neutrality, which I defined as a combination of tendencies both towards fans' political non-affiliation and towards balance between Democratic and Republican fans, the patterns aren't as depressingly obvious.
The two most neutral genres with at least 100k fans in my sample are pixie and screamo. For those of you who are older than 25, pixie is basically cheerful pop punk:
With Confidence "Voldemort"
and screamo is basically angry pop punk:
Blood Youth "Buying Time"
And then there are some other kinds of pop punk and metalcore and emo, but also teen pop and viral pop. And a little farther down we start seeing electro house and EDM. The kids are not as polarized as the grown-ups. Not yet.
And in fact, almost anywhere you look closely, you find a range. In hip-hop, hardcore and latin and east coast and west coast hip hop all lean left, but there's also Christian hip hop way on the other end, and nerdcore and horrorcore and most forms of hip hop from other non-Latin countries are much closer to neutral in their American fans' politics.
In country, we find that the bro-ier the country form, the more Republican it leans, but alt-country leans Democrat, and alternative Americana leans way Democrat.
And so, for me, basically, this is how I reconcile keeping my day job working on music recommendations, instead of quitting and becoming a full-time climate or diversity activist. I observe that making enemies and then trying to convert them doesn't seem to be working super well, but exposing people to difference and diversity tends to result in them becoming less intolerant and isolationist on their own, and music is one of our most powerful vectors for exposing people to bits of different cultures. Music and food. Maybe food is even better, but the towns with no Lebanese people probably don't have a lot of Lebanese restaurants, either. But if you have the internet, you can now have all the music in the world. You are not stuck in your small town. You are not stuck in your multi-cultural megacity. Having empathy for the people you think are your enemies is never trivial, but no matter how insane they seem, they always turn out to also have awesome music.
Passion "Remember"
Turns out, I like Christian progressive rock.
Levante "Le mie mille me"
I like Mexican indie pop.
Joker ft. Ayben "Microphone Show"
I like Turkish hip hop.
And yeah, sometimes I still feel kind of self-conscious when it seems like a lot of people are doing this:
Body Count "Black Hoodie"
and I'm still playing this:
Nightwish "Wish I Had an Angel"
RuPaul is doing this:
RuPaul "American"
And I'm listening to concept albums about the Platonic solids, or the internal bureacracies of Atlantis.
But I've come to understand, or maybe resolve, that my own goal is not to magically turn activists into analysts, or isolationists into explorers, but just to seed and cultivate and encourage and reward curiosity. "Acceptance" and "Tolerance" are kernels of empathy, but they are also still assertions of authority and privilege. Curiosity is different. Curiosity goes beyond "I tolerate you" towards realizing that other humans are not subject to your tolerance or not. The questions about Them are questions for them to answer, not you. Music can help people understand a little better how their place in the world is just another place. How their awesome musics are just a few of the many awesome musics. How the act of singing is essentially human, and how singing allows the act of listening to be inherently life-affirming, and that maybe, therefore, music is part of how we undo political division, and thus part of how humanity survives.
Maybe power metal has actual power.
Ayreon "Everybody Dies"
Maybe.
This thing is online at everynoise.com/genrepolitics. See if it helps you.
Dear @realDonaldTrump, I was touched by your thoughts for us here in Cambridge, where we just experienced a 10-alarm fire that left dozens of families homeless. I know how busy you are not laughing at jokes about you on television, holding divisive "victory" rallies in case your campaign and existence weren't already divisive enough, and preemptively fucking up international relations just in case you get impeached before you're inaugurated, so the fact that you took the time to dedicate almost half of a tweet to a humble local tragedy in a town where you lost the election 87% to 6% definitely does not go unnoticed.
You asked how you could help, or probably would have if you hadn't run out of characters, and I know it can be difficult to figure out how to apply the high-level powers of the president-electicy to tangible local issues, so I thought I'd try to help by making a short list of things we need, as we recover from this tragedy, that you are uniquely and personally qualified to offer us:
1. Less hate, less encouragement of hate, less shouting, more listening. Also about 50 units of replacement low-income housing, preferably with modern fire-safety equipment. Make some of them 3-bedroom units, too. We're a little overbalanced towards high-market-rent low-occupancy housing here, and families can so easily get priced out of their neighborhoods even without catastrophic events.
2. A chief advisor without any ties to white supremacy. Also some basic self-awareness that we are a country of immigrants. I mean, a country literally defined and built by every form of immigration from conquest to conscription to opportunity to asylum. Some people around you who embrace this as our most unique resource and the single thing that makes us the most "great" in the world if there's any non-idiotic meaning to that idea.
3. A head of the EPA who is not a climate-change denier, and in general an awareness that science is the basis of civilization and our only chance of not getting ourselves wiped off the surface of the planet like the dinosaurs. Also maybe some extra phone-chargers, preferably the kind that operate based on science instead of on retweets of racists.
4. An education secretary who realizes that public education is more or less the bedrock of any meaningful idea of "public" anything. Also a national education policy based less on standardized tests and more on fostering children's natural curiosity. Also maybe some extra funding for teaching languages in elementary school, when children's minds are the most receptive to learning and are least likely to have already fearfully and myopically concluded that "foreign" equals "bad". It's really cool that your wife speaks multiple languages. Imagine how cool it would be if college dropouts in this country could speak multiple languages.
5. A commerce secretary whose idea of commerce isn't buying "distressed assets". Maybe some role models for how to have successful businesses that produce social good in the world, instead of shitty luxury hotels that highlight disparities in wealth and garish decorating. A national conceptual model of capitalism that is about production more than branding, and designed to reward lifting the desperate into hope at least some fraction as much as lifting the most wealthy into ludicrous decadence and isolation. Also, since you seem to think that health care is stifling business, maybe a national approach to heath care that is tied to humanity instead of employment, and maybe is based on providing health care instead of enriching health insurance. Good luck with that one. Luckily for you, your predecessors have been working on it for a couple decades, so at least you don't have to start over from scratch.
6. Some diplomats who have the right nerdy temperament to read briefings, and/or who happen to already know more about other countries than how to wire money to their banks. I realize how time-consuming it is to actually visit other countries, due to the ocean thing and not all of them speaking English, but maybe some people who eat food from other places, or listen to their music. Incidentally, have you heard foreign music? So good. See if you can get more of that. Also foreign food. Also foreign people. So good.
7. Moral leadership. I once saw a bunch of politicians taking turns saying idiotic and inflammatory things about a non-profit that provides reproductive and women's health services, and then this one guy jumped in and at least was willing to say aloud that the organization does good things for women's health. Be like that guy. Of course, it's totally pathetic that the richest and greatest country on the planet has to have a non-profit to help provide health services to half of the populace, so maybe work on that, too.
8. Infrastructure. And progress, and innovation. Fire-fighting crews from 10 different towns came to Cambridge yesterday to help, and we had roads to get them here, and fire hydrants all over the place for them to run hoses to. A block from the fire is a giant pit where they're digging geothermal wells for the new school they're going to build there. If the school stays on schedule, my daughter might get to spend her last year of middle school there, instead of in a temporary facility somewhere else. So things here are pretty good. Are they that good everywhere in this country? I kind of get the impression that they aren't. Also, it was amazing seeing all that water they poured on the fire. But, at the same time, we have a neighborhood of wooden houses that burn like crazy if they catch on fire, and it's 2016 and pretty much our best idea about putting out fires in wooden buildings is pouring shit-tons of water on them until they're soggy wrecks instead of flaming wrecks, so that part isn't totally great. Also, my daughter's current school had lead in the drinking-fountain water, so that sucked. Maybe, given that it's 2016, we should be trying to get way better at all this stuff. Also at dealing with earthquakes, and diseases, and weather. I guess I feel a little vulnerable right now, so I'd love to know that our national safety priorities are lined up towards keeping us safe from actual things that happen to us all the time, rather than imaginary things like voter fraud and all Muslims being terrorists and all Mexicans being criminals and other stupid shit that isn't happening and was never happening and just makes us all look like fucking idiots when we have to explain to the rest of the world that half our country voted for a giant angry idiot baby even though there are all these real problems that affect everybody on the planet and we're supposedly the most powerful country on it.
9. Coats. It gets cold here. Some of the people who live here came here from warmer places, so more coats are always good. Boots, too. And food. Also the opportunity to travel. Some of the people who live here have never been anywhere else. It's amazing to see a community pull together. This gets even more amazing the bigger and more inclusive and more expansive the community is. I've seen whole cities pull together in the face of adversity. Imagine if a whole country could do that. Imagine if the whole planet could do that. Imagine if it didn't even require the sudden addition of extra adversity.
10. Perspective. I feel pretty fortunate. I live a couple blocks from where the fire happened. My house is OK, my family is OK, my cats are OK. The cats are sleeping here watching me write this. Outside I can hear helicopters coming by to get some news footage of the buildings that burned, and people starting to clear away the burned cars and the wreckage of some people's homes. When things happen, even if they don't happen to you, it helps you focus. This is part of why it's such a good idea to get up every morning. You must be experiencing this, too, having just accidentally gotten elected to a job for which you are totally unprepared and unsuited. When shocking things happen, you can either panic and start lashing out at whatever is closest to you and most defenseless, or you can accept the challenge and try to rise up. Make America Great Again, you keep saying. Who could object to Greatness? The "Again" part is kind of self-righteous and judgmental, though. If somebody comes and says they're going to make the buildings that burned in this fire Great Again, the "Again" part would make sense. We can all pretty easily agree that burned+soaked wreckage is Not Great. But even so, I'd expect them to have a plan. And if you're going to say "Again" to people whose houses haven't burned, too, but who just got way more aware of how easily they could, you're going to need both an explanation and a plan. And a story of how we got here and how we go forward that isn't based on scapegoating and distraction and cheap pandering and bilious dishonesty. And some way to win with grace instead of vindictiveness. And some way to mobilize people instead of polarizing them. And some way to get bigots to defend the rights of people they don't understand, and incompetents to defend the right of the press to expose their mistakes, and oligarchs to abdicate. And some way to fall in love with exactly what we most instinctively flee from. Like, some way for a town that voted 87%-to-6% against you to believe that you aren't just one more arbitrary disaster that suddenly happened to us one sunny afternoon, and now we have to stop all the other important projects we we're doing and put out a fucking fire and help a bunch of people who had been getting ahead in their lives start over from what isn't nothing, because we have each other and even the people you hate are always better than you realize, but what definitely feels like nothing while it's happening.
Anyway, those are some things that would help right now.
PS: Did I mention phone chargers? Super-helpful to have some extras. Twitter isn't so bad, but Pokémon Go eats batteries.
You asked how you could help, or probably would have if you hadn't run out of characters, and I know it can be difficult to figure out how to apply the high-level powers of the president-electicy to tangible local issues, so I thought I'd try to help by making a short list of things we need, as we recover from this tragedy, that you are uniquely and personally qualified to offer us:
1. Less hate, less encouragement of hate, less shouting, more listening. Also about 50 units of replacement low-income housing, preferably with modern fire-safety equipment. Make some of them 3-bedroom units, too. We're a little overbalanced towards high-market-rent low-occupancy housing here, and families can so easily get priced out of their neighborhoods even without catastrophic events.
2. A chief advisor without any ties to white supremacy. Also some basic self-awareness that we are a country of immigrants. I mean, a country literally defined and built by every form of immigration from conquest to conscription to opportunity to asylum. Some people around you who embrace this as our most unique resource and the single thing that makes us the most "great" in the world if there's any non-idiotic meaning to that idea.
3. A head of the EPA who is not a climate-change denier, and in general an awareness that science is the basis of civilization and our only chance of not getting ourselves wiped off the surface of the planet like the dinosaurs. Also maybe some extra phone-chargers, preferably the kind that operate based on science instead of on retweets of racists.
4. An education secretary who realizes that public education is more or less the bedrock of any meaningful idea of "public" anything. Also a national education policy based less on standardized tests and more on fostering children's natural curiosity. Also maybe some extra funding for teaching languages in elementary school, when children's minds are the most receptive to learning and are least likely to have already fearfully and myopically concluded that "foreign" equals "bad". It's really cool that your wife speaks multiple languages. Imagine how cool it would be if college dropouts in this country could speak multiple languages.
5. A commerce secretary whose idea of commerce isn't buying "distressed assets". Maybe some role models for how to have successful businesses that produce social good in the world, instead of shitty luxury hotels that highlight disparities in wealth and garish decorating. A national conceptual model of capitalism that is about production more than branding, and designed to reward lifting the desperate into hope at least some fraction as much as lifting the most wealthy into ludicrous decadence and isolation. Also, since you seem to think that health care is stifling business, maybe a national approach to heath care that is tied to humanity instead of employment, and maybe is based on providing health care instead of enriching health insurance. Good luck with that one. Luckily for you, your predecessors have been working on it for a couple decades, so at least you don't have to start over from scratch.
6. Some diplomats who have the right nerdy temperament to read briefings, and/or who happen to already know more about other countries than how to wire money to their banks. I realize how time-consuming it is to actually visit other countries, due to the ocean thing and not all of them speaking English, but maybe some people who eat food from other places, or listen to their music. Incidentally, have you heard foreign music? So good. See if you can get more of that. Also foreign food. Also foreign people. So good.
7. Moral leadership. I once saw a bunch of politicians taking turns saying idiotic and inflammatory things about a non-profit that provides reproductive and women's health services, and then this one guy jumped in and at least was willing to say aloud that the organization does good things for women's health. Be like that guy. Of course, it's totally pathetic that the richest and greatest country on the planet has to have a non-profit to help provide health services to half of the populace, so maybe work on that, too.
8. Infrastructure. And progress, and innovation. Fire-fighting crews from 10 different towns came to Cambridge yesterday to help, and we had roads to get them here, and fire hydrants all over the place for them to run hoses to. A block from the fire is a giant pit where they're digging geothermal wells for the new school they're going to build there. If the school stays on schedule, my daughter might get to spend her last year of middle school there, instead of in a temporary facility somewhere else. So things here are pretty good. Are they that good everywhere in this country? I kind of get the impression that they aren't. Also, it was amazing seeing all that water they poured on the fire. But, at the same time, we have a neighborhood of wooden houses that burn like crazy if they catch on fire, and it's 2016 and pretty much our best idea about putting out fires in wooden buildings is pouring shit-tons of water on them until they're soggy wrecks instead of flaming wrecks, so that part isn't totally great. Also, my daughter's current school had lead in the drinking-fountain water, so that sucked. Maybe, given that it's 2016, we should be trying to get way better at all this stuff. Also at dealing with earthquakes, and diseases, and weather. I guess I feel a little vulnerable right now, so I'd love to know that our national safety priorities are lined up towards keeping us safe from actual things that happen to us all the time, rather than imaginary things like voter fraud and all Muslims being terrorists and all Mexicans being criminals and other stupid shit that isn't happening and was never happening and just makes us all look like fucking idiots when we have to explain to the rest of the world that half our country voted for a giant angry idiot baby even though there are all these real problems that affect everybody on the planet and we're supposedly the most powerful country on it.
9. Coats. It gets cold here. Some of the people who live here came here from warmer places, so more coats are always good. Boots, too. And food. Also the opportunity to travel. Some of the people who live here have never been anywhere else. It's amazing to see a community pull together. This gets even more amazing the bigger and more inclusive and more expansive the community is. I've seen whole cities pull together in the face of adversity. Imagine if a whole country could do that. Imagine if the whole planet could do that. Imagine if it didn't even require the sudden addition of extra adversity.
10. Perspective. I feel pretty fortunate. I live a couple blocks from where the fire happened. My house is OK, my family is OK, my cats are OK. The cats are sleeping here watching me write this. Outside I can hear helicopters coming by to get some news footage of the buildings that burned, and people starting to clear away the burned cars and the wreckage of some people's homes. When things happen, even if they don't happen to you, it helps you focus. This is part of why it's such a good idea to get up every morning. You must be experiencing this, too, having just accidentally gotten elected to a job for which you are totally unprepared and unsuited. When shocking things happen, you can either panic and start lashing out at whatever is closest to you and most defenseless, or you can accept the challenge and try to rise up. Make America Great Again, you keep saying. Who could object to Greatness? The "Again" part is kind of self-righteous and judgmental, though. If somebody comes and says they're going to make the buildings that burned in this fire Great Again, the "Again" part would make sense. We can all pretty easily agree that burned+soaked wreckage is Not Great. But even so, I'd expect them to have a plan. And if you're going to say "Again" to people whose houses haven't burned, too, but who just got way more aware of how easily they could, you're going to need both an explanation and a plan. And a story of how we got here and how we go forward that isn't based on scapegoating and distraction and cheap pandering and bilious dishonesty. And some way to win with grace instead of vindictiveness. And some way to mobilize people instead of polarizing them. And some way to get bigots to defend the rights of people they don't understand, and incompetents to defend the right of the press to expose their mistakes, and oligarchs to abdicate. And some way to fall in love with exactly what we most instinctively flee from. Like, some way for a town that voted 87%-to-6% against you to believe that you aren't just one more arbitrary disaster that suddenly happened to us one sunny afternoon, and now we have to stop all the other important projects we we're doing and put out a fucking fire and help a bunch of people who had been getting ahead in their lives start over from what isn't nothing, because we have each other and even the people you hate are always better than you realize, but what definitely feels like nothing while it's happening.
Anyway, those are some things that would help right now.
PS: Did I mention phone chargers? Super-helpful to have some extras. Twitter isn't so bad, but Pokémon Go eats batteries.