Life after streaming

Been a lot of buzz about getting off Spotify due to the military industrial profiteering. It’s fair enough, but I’d like to encourage people to treat it as an opportunity to upgrade their relationship with music rather than just installing a competing app and trying to carry on as before. I uninstalled that app myself a while ago for other reasons and tried a bunch of the competitors for a while before coming to this conclusion. Maybe I can save you wasting a bunch of time pissing around with importing and exporting playlists over and over.

All these services share more or less the same music library, the same key suppliers, and the same economic incentives and pressures. Take it from someone who’s sat in two different meeting rooms named “Rage Against The Machine” at two different music streaming companies. It’s “tech guy who thinks he's the good guys because he rides a skateboard to the office” all the way down, and that’s coming from someone who rode a skateboard to both those jobs.

You can do a ton of analysis and research to pick your replacement app and you’re gonna get 99% the same thing no matter which one you choose. It’ll have 100 million-ish tracks and it’ll do a bunch of collaborative filtering to try to recommend new tracks to you from that dataset. A corporate gameshow of KPIs and performance reviews will drive a small army of talented people to work day and night to modify your behaviour to produce statistics to impress investors. Music will continue to be part of “going on the computer” for you instead of its own thing.

A little FM radio that doesn’t even need batteries might cost you between one and two months of streaming subscription money. Personally, I was amazed by how much meaning I found in the process of learning what was broadcasting locally and when. Connecting with the actual place where I physically live made me realise how sterile and isolating the “going on the computer” version of music discovery had become for me. Like it was fun to learn that some of my fav stations broadcast from the roofs of Turning Torso and Kronprinsen, both of which are visible from our front window.

A vinyl record from an actual shop will usually cost between one and four months of streaming subscription money. The great thing about those shops compared to the apps is that the shop is the same for everyone. They can’t personalise the record shop based on their surveillance camera footage in order to make you stay longer, or trick you into listening to cheap knockoff music they’ve made themselves to improve their unit economics.

Dan MacQuillan has been talking about the concept of “decomputing” a lot lately in the context of resisting AI. It’s about rejecting the datafication of everything, the alienating ideology of efficiency, and instead emphasising human judgement and local context. He talks about how the problems AI is causing in society aren’t new or revolutionary, but rather incremental steps as part of a longer process that's been ongoing for a while. It's a critique that would apply very well to Helsing's AI drones, now that I think about it.

I think it applies really neatly to the conversations I’m seeing about music too. For example, there’s a lot of debate about these AI-generated slop songs and whether these streaming platforms should allow them. From a decomputing perspective the real turning point happened several moves earlier in the chess game, when decision making authority over what music to play was delegated to the computer. Nobody would care about spammers uploading millions of AI slop songs without algorithmic music discovery giving all that spam a shot at going viral. In short, if the computer isn't giving you the outcomes you want any more, how about turning it off and trying something new?