Spotify: The new/old musical counter-revolution

I got two packages in the mail - a vinyl record and a compact disc. All on the day that Australian music lovers would point their fingers and laugh at my stubborn luddism. Hadn't I heard? Spotify had finally launched Down Under! I could now stream any song I wanted from a pool of over sixteen million tracks filled by virtually all the major labels and independents wanting to fill their own cups with a totally "new" musical model.

As many pundits would have you believe the Spotify "revolution" isn't one at all - it's not the Red Army storming the Winter Palace and declaring peace, bread and land for the people; it's like the bound and gagged family Romanov inexplicably sprouting laser turrets from their heads seeing the ghosts of Cossacks rising from their graves to mercilessly hound Trotsky and his troops back toward the Ukraine. Spotify is a musical counter-revolution aiming to quash the orgiastic "free" producer/consumer-led music rebellion once and for all.

It’s so deliciously evil it beats life back into Monty Burns’ desiccated heart and has him whistling Dixie and calling Mater. (Ahoy-hoy?) Here’s why.

The digital arms race
Ever since the dawn of recorded music, the industry at large has had its eye on one prize. That is, controlling the content, the media and the distribution of both.[1] When gramophone records first appeared it wasn’t uncommon to have the music on vinyl sold in shops that had totally vertical integration (ownership from top to bottom from producer of the content to the point of purchase by the consumer. Case and point: HMV or “His Master’s Voice.”) The Compact Disc was a shift toward higher-fidelity media and lower overall manufacturing costs per unit.

The CD was jointly developed by Sony and Philips in the late-70s, the format gaining acceptance among consumers in the late-80s when an economy of scale was established. Sony and Philips jointly paid for the research & development, marketing and manufacturing of both the Compact Discs and the machines that would play them. Then they could license the technology to other companies. It’s a no brainer – Sony and Philips were (and still are, to some extent!) multinational music labels with vast back catalogues and new talent ready to be pressed to polymer which proves almost pilfer-proof (until the late 1990s, as we all know.)

But what to do! The medium of playback and distribution went spectacularly rogue after a stylized cat roamed around harvesting the innards of beige boxes through squeaky telephone wires in the yawning sunrise of 2000 AD. The pirates, once thought guerillas with nothing better to do than trade tapes around and occasionally burn a CD for a few bucks a pop were now legion, moving torrents (oh I love this water analogy) of (almost!) intangible data across networks without proper authorization from their intellectual property holders. The content was there, like it had been since Tin Pan Alley and even centuries before. But the stranglehold on media and distribution methods had slipped the grasp of the industry virtually overnight. It felt like no amount of speech impeded Danes with expensive lawyers could ever halt their revolutionary advance.

Commodification ala mode and a cup of tea
So what now? Do the record companies under the aegis of RIAA and their cronies hunt down the pirates and strong-arm them back toward their sanctioned tripartite model of music consumption or do they spend more money than they’re prepared to on R&D to create a new medium and a new distribution method? The iTunes model seemed “revolutionary” at the time – you know, telling people to pay for something they could get illegally for free – lest the counter-revolutionary martinets bound in and lay down the(ir) law. “Our content was never yours to begin with and now we’re keeping it,” they bellowed. And lo, Spotify and its ilk emerged.

They own the content. That's a given. The clever rub lies thus: remove the medium and utilize a well known distribution network that has existed in its present broadband form for about fifteen years. They seek to change the concept or perception of content ownership back to an near pre-technological state much like in the age of travelling band shows of yore. Yes, you may hear the music but you can no longer hold it in your hands.

By removing the physical or even the illusion of physicality (files on a hard drive), the medium and the distribution is in a state of simultaneous allness and nothingness; it’s always “on” yet you can never “have” the music. It's "your" song when you choose it - like out of a jukebox - but once the last note decays, so is your claim over it (not that you really had one in the first place). You can “search” the (not your) collection but it’s never “yours” – they’re the gatekeepers and you pay for them to lower the drawbridge. Once inside their opaque vaults, they're able track your playing habits to sell you more of what you already want. Then you're their billboard as they publish every guilty play of Pat Benatar to your friends on Facebook. It’s like the IKEA of promotion – IKEA keep their prices low because they outsource the construction of the product to you. Now Spotify have got you to do their marketing for them, too.

If budding content producers are paid a pitiful commission, more so the better in the eyes of the industry. By melding (or abnegating) the medium, they’ve lowered the price of music and also its value. If Spotify spends the same amount of money paying for the rights to the new Gotye record (quelle horreur) and the entire back catalogue of Darkthrone, per se, then what is the differential of worth between the two? There is none. The only savvy trick the labels can pull is restricting the “supply” of Gotye (or someone just as horrible and popular) but that would distort the market and their profit margins (in this new medium-lite model). Make everything on offer the same (pre-paid) price per click, throw in some ads and the money rolls in regardless. Not much for those who wish to furnish Spotify with music, but big payoffs for those who control mammoth oceans - not paper cups full - of content.

But what really fucking burns my potatoes is that Spotify is the closest thing we have to the real pop music experience. Richard Meltzer in his inquiry/parody of the Aesthetics of Rock posited that rock and pop music is the act of making the mundane interesting and exciting. Shit, if you can make money off it, more so the better.

Spotify is accessible on a desktop computer which you more than likely stare into each day to earn those dollars to pay for, well, Spotify. For the fraction of a second your consciousness wanders toward the sublime tongue of rock and pop in all its tinned ferocity on your shitty laptop speakers, the music industry suits have not only breathed a sigh of relief, their tar-stained cackles can be heard from a blue million miles...

Like I said, it’s pure evil fucking genius.



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1: Jones, S. Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication, Sage Publications: Newbury Park, CA, 1992 p. 185.

Where's Our Google, Too?

I felt compelled to add my opinion to the billion-strong chorus of ill-baked and half-formed critiques and hagiographies of Google+ on the basis none of them seemed to catch on to some fundamental facets of media ecology. Media ecology put simply is the study of media as an environment and was pioneered by Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Jacques Ellul and many others. In honor of ABC Radio National's week-long celebration of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan, I present my simple media ecological analysis of Google+ and why I don't feel it'll take off to Facebook proportions.

1. Because it's Google+, not Google 2: Electric Googleoo

The mantra of media ecology, especially that of the late great Neil Postman is that new media is not additive but transformative. You don't get a culture plus television, you get a completely new way of disseminating and interpreting information. 20 years ago, not everyone needed a computer. But in 2011 you go into someone's home, chances are you'll see a computer in residence with a connection to the internet. Computers hooked up to the internet are a material change to our culture that results in a behavioral change. Go to any restaurant and see the new table adornments: black rectangles that go "ping" when your date is talking about new boots or football or whatever.

Google+ only works on the premise that it will make a material or behavioral change to your life somehow. If you intend to own a Chromebook, then yes - Google+ makes total sense. Using Chromium OS, Google+ fits right in to the entire purpose of the operating system and the computer; making it a purely web-based machine and experience.

If you don't own one nor do you intend to own one, it has to offer something drastically new and something substantially more cooler than Facebook to kick the Facebook habit.

2. The people who give a shit about it give a shit already

I've noticed no one is pestering me for invites any more - partly because they don't like me and mostly because those who already want it, have it and those who don't give a shit...well, don't give a shit. Google+ has almost already hit a critical mass of people who give a shit about it and now that anyone can send an invite the give a shit factor has taken a nosedive. Those who do give a shit evangelize about it as the Facebook killer but inevitably hit the obvious roadblock:

"So what's it like?" asks the incredulous bystander. "It's like bringing all your friends together, but you can follow other people you think are cool and you put them into circles and it's AWESOME," replies the Google+ zealot.

"So it's like Facebook."

"Yes, but better."

But is it better? Faster? Harder? Stronger? In what way? Pick any one of the preceding and it's especially difficult to evaluate if that's even true or not. But there is one way, which I'll explain later.

3. Pitching something to everyone means you need to make a habit out of it

Facebook was revered by university students because it couched them in a sort of electronic elitism - don't go to uni? Well fuck you, you can't use Facebook. Before long it was available to high school students, technical colleges and eventually everyone. Then it opened itself up to the internet and segued into the background of the web experience, not as the go-to site of the minute. It became a habit.

G+ seems to work on the premise that it's ridiculously simple enough for the web-only Chromium set but also powerful and malleable enough for the media "gurus" and code monkeys. Where does it leave the people in the middle? Killing e-cows with their mafia goons on Facebook. It's difficult to change a habitual behavior and the reason has to be compelling for those to change. Facebook wasn't built on a new premise, but its advantage over MySpace? It successfully broke down an ingrained habit (for some) and facilitated other people to form new ones.

Your friend posts a photo of what they're eating, every day? It's the online equivalent of twirling one's hair or tapping one's foot, mostly unconsciously. (How can you spend 2 hours on that fucking thing without realizing, I mean, seriously.) Perhaps we all need an e-Gestalt therapist to ask us "Vat is the sik-niff-ee-kunss of zat what you are doing zere?"

Can Google+ achieve the same thing? I doubt it - at this stage. To get to Facebook or even Twitter status, it has to be come a lasting and integral part of our everyday experience. Right now it's like "Oh yeah, shit, I have Google+. I should post this blog post about Google+ on it, right now!"

Even those who signed up for Facebook and didn't make a habit out of it would probably log in and find their notifications area awash with red. If there's no sustained buzz, I suppose we can wave it away.

Doomsday Simulated

It seems that films depicting material threats to our continued existence - tsunami, large meteor, nuclear explosion - are much more horrifying than those about terror caused by technology. The T-800 is a protector in Terminator 2, the Matrix can be subverted to serve human ends and the detrimental effects of the programs on Videodrome seem so outlandish they could never be believed as real by any rational person.

Reading Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of our Culture to Technology, he offers a bold critique of "progress" as contextualized by the advance of technology and our uncritical use of it. By abandoning the deification of omnipotent creators, we instead worship at the altar of Intel, Apple and Microsoft instead. It is almost we as humans require these machines to make sense of the world when in most cases, it obfuscates and confuses many people.

Most people cannot see the "point" of Facebook. If you ask a random sample of people as to the purpose and function of Facebook, I do not believe anyone could point to an extensional or definitive answer. So many of us subscribe to Facebook uncritically much like the masses of the Middle Ages that had an unwavering and unquestioning devotion to Christ and God. Those Facebook "heretics" that refuse to open an account or deactivate it are looked at with suspicion, much like Atheists and agnostics are by Christians and other religious believers. Though it is arguable that this new digital culture has supplanted an "analog" conception of culture, its worth noting how one interprets the information given over such a medium.

For example, Facebook relishes in two-valued thinking - like and dislike - for the images, video and text that can be posted on the site. A "like" encourages others to share and provide an opinion on what is being presented. If our content cannot be "liked", we modify it to such an extent where it will fit the constraints of the medium. Likewise, we refer to Facebook as a complete abstract entity and not as a process that has no real solid form. When Facebook goes "down" we yell at Facebook itself, not the servers, nor the connection leading from it to our computers or the human staff that are responsible for them. "Facebook" in and of itself is not hilarious, malevolent or inane yet we think it to be without any further investigation.

Technology, as Postman explained, "giveth and taketh away." What exactly social media has given us is difficult to discern. But I can guarantee is that almost no one has asked as they blindly entered their name and email address as they signed up what it has subtracted from our culture as a whole and whether it's a thing to be "liked" or "disliked" in and of itself.