Let’s own our music again

I have fond memories of my 10,000+ song music collection that I stored on an iPod back in college. I also have fond memories of discovering and downloading a decent portion of that library off OurTunes over the dorm network at speeds I never dreamed of back home.

When streaming first came on the scene I was one of the first to use Spotify back when it was only available in Europe (forgot how I got around that restriction in the US). Suddenly I had all the music in the world in the palm of my hand, literally. Looking back, it’s clear that I was mainly using it as a discovery tool at first and still loading files into my phone or iPod.

The problem streaming will never solve

Back then, just as now, there was a portion of my music library that wasn’t available on streaming services. When Apple Music was launched I jumped ship from Spotify because for $25 a year I could upload my entire library to iCloud and access it through Apple Music regardless of whether any streaming service had the rights to the songs I liked.

Over time I relied more and more on streaming providers to catalog and keep my music library available to me. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, my library felt like it had shrunk. Shuffling my songs would always bring about the same few artists. Trying to browse the library became tedious. I had too much music and not enough simultaneously. It didn’t make sense until I took a look at what was happening.

Hoarding

Streaming is great for discovering music. It makes music cheap. A new hit song can be played for practically free on repeat right on release day. But think of some of the music you once liked that comes up in your library. Maybe it’s some crappy song you convinced yourself you liked because they’d play it in the car with you. Maybe it was something viral that sounded good at the time but you never want to hear again. That stuff is collecting digital dust in your library and I’d argue that most of it wouldn’t be there if not for streaming making it a little too easy to just tap that plus button and add it to your collection. Your collection right now is full of crap.

Licensing/technology hell

At the same time your library becomes something you might see on an episode of Hoarders, it’s also somehow getting smaller. How many times have you added a new song from an indie artist or someone on the edges of major label deals and find a year or two later that they aren’t on streaming anymore. The track is there but not available in your country right now or it was just pulled completely. With streaming you’re at the mercy of the labels. This isn’t news to anyone so I won’t belabor the point.

You might also find that when switching phones or messing with technology in general your streaming library just up and loses a bunch of music. It’s not uncommon and not unlike instances when you upgrade an iPhone and find that photos you know you took long ago can’t be found anymore and for no good reason. What I’m getting at here is that you don’t own that music and in the world of cloud storage sometimes what you do own isn’t even yours as much as you’d think.

Disposable music

The problem with digital media primarily accessed by smartphones is that it makes all art disposable. Think of the countless photos taken on phones. How many of those does anyone really go back through and catalog, care for, or even have time to go back to. They’re mostly not special. They’re made not special because they’re so common. They’re all average. There’s nothing that’s setting them apart because when you can take a photo of anything anywhere you do and that makes everything boring.

The same has happened to music. The problem isn’t that anyone can make music, it’s that too much of the music made is being pumped out cynically. Take the latest Taylor Swift album. I like a decent amount of her music for what it is but TTPD is a soulless cash grab that could only have been made today. Instead of taking some time off to record a proper album Swift comes back after only a couple years with an uninspired, oftentimes cringy lump of a double album that sounds like b-sides and is being sold in several different editions to make sure she can milk her fans for every penny while they buy each of the almost identical versions of this record.

Streaming promotes this bad behavior. The way that album stats are calculated through streaming gives artists an incentive to make something that’ll be dated quickly but make big money right now. The flip side to this is that older artists can earn a steady income and that’s great but it comes at the expense of pushing out new talent that may have a slow burn in them before they can even catch on. The labels that everyone thinks lost in the age of streaming are still the gatekeepers of music. They just hide now behind digital distributors and streaming services that they invest in. They’re making money in new and more cruel ways than ever before and making sure that organic growth is kept to a minimum.

The alternative

The alternative to all this is to be mindful of how you’re consuming music. Is everything background music nowadays? What happened to the music that was the soundtrack to peoples lives at certain points? If you stop paying your music rent you won’t own that anymore. We used to own towers worth of CDs that were all ours. We traded that in for the convenience of being able to access that music whenever we wanted.

The alternative to this is to start owning your music. Whether that means downloading it again, ripping your CDs, or building up your physical media collection again, it doesn’t matter. We should all probably take a moment to think about how many more services (and their eventual price increases) we can deal with or how many licensing agreements have to make music previously available disappear from our collections.

We outsourced the management of our music libraries to the streaming providers thinking they’d do it better than us but in the end we just made it so that when they screw up it’s our problem. At least when you owned your music you had more control over fixing mistakes when they happened.