Does it matter whether we own music?

If you have ten minutes of your time, watch this video by music historian Ted Gioia. I think it might spark some conversation. It did between myself and my wife who, after watching it, realized that her distrust of capitalism to do the right thing overrides her desire to have a house free from CDs and vinyl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmm1yq5Q4FE

i'll make ten minutes for ted gioia, he knows his shit

watching videos instead of reading is still weird, i get fixated on the way he moves like bald bull

ah yes, ted "'if you force pop culture insiders to be as precise as possible in articulating the reasons why they favor a band or a singer, it almost always boils down to: “I like [fill in the name] because they make me feel good about my lifestyle.'" gioia

Doesn't seem like that long ago that I would say that I was such a huge fan of some artist because I had this album and that album and that EP. Totally pointless to say that nowadays. I still do, of course.

having watched his video i'm not convinced by it. i used to be very into preservation, but lately, you know, i'm feeling that everything is temporary. everything we know will at some future point be unknown. only question is what we lose first.

a similar argument could be made for the advent of radio. today's version of 'the collectors who dove into the milwaukee river' are not streaming, they're hoping their digital recordings will remain playable by future tech

also stop doing that thing with yr hands, ted

He's playing with invisible wool.

Yes, keep preserving. Because otherwise you'll often have shite "improved" versions of things you used to like or even taken away from you altogether.

Rushomancy- what you not convinced by? Why not hold onto things you care about for as long as you can?

Feel like videogame companies in particular don't like people owning things.

Rushomancy- what you not convinced by? Why not hold onto things you care about for as long as you can?

― Robert Adam Gilmour

because attachment is dukkha

gaming is interesting because software is a form of creative work that postdates the age of digital reproduction, software was pirated, and pirated efficiently and effectively, from day one

I think he's right but a lot of people still press to vinyl and still reissue albums physically so I don't see it as an emergency.

does ted have his own version of cal chuchesta?

Ownership and attachment are not synonomous.

"Invisible wool" = legit lol

I thought I was a fully paid up object fetishist but now I'm (mostly) happy to let it all float away on the breeze. And I'm sure I've seen Gioia (how many vowels?) spouting a lot of conservative bollocks on the Twitters.

The treasure hunters/hoarders are heroic to me because they have enriched my life immeasurably. So many of the best things are far apart in time and place and needed preserving. I have considered that maybe if we only lived in the moment culturally, we would make exciting different versions of the good past things or feel an absence and create something to fill it but ultimately I don't believe this. You often don't notice an absence unless you have known a thing to exist before. A great deal of my treasures are unknown to most people and they aren't being recreated because the absence is not felt. Vigorous treasure seeking expands your sense of creative possibilities and this is only possible with collectors hoarding it for you.

Maybe if we just created for the moment, the freedom of letting it pass quickly into oblivion would give us some kind of extra exuberance? I'm also skeptical of this, we'd probably just create more chewing gum for the brain.

Whatever conservative bollocks this guy believes, that video contains his cool conservative opinions.

I really cant emphasize enough how the online art collections of a few people have changed my life. For years I've resolved that if I ever have any kind of book made, I'll dedicate it to them.

Ownership and attachment are not synonomous.

― timellison

no but they're also not unrelated

i mean i don't and never will engage with music primarily through streaming but i also know enough about archiving to know that amateur collectors are no substitute for professional archives, as much as we like to flatter ourselves

It all helps.

i'm not saying don't do it, because us collectors are going to do what we do no matter what other people say (and no matter what laws other people make!), but as great as the work everybody has done with paramount is, it'd be better if paramount hadn't thrown their fucking stampers into the river.

There might be some more valuable old music in the river - let's throw Ted Gioia in to find out.

Aided by his trusty wool

i have the benefit of having no clue who ted gioia is, but he appears to be john bolton's smarter relative.

i think he makes a lot of interesting points. i, like a lot of you, probably, also have a weird perspective on all this. i own more records than the vast majority of the public (though not ilxors - this is a weird place). that automatically makes me a bit of an outlier. i also switched completely to streaming 2 years ago. not by choice, but because i don't have any money. that gives me a weird take on streaming, too, i think.

i don't know where i'm going with that, other than to make the point that many of us here are outliers in terms of our connection with physical objects and attitudes on streaming.

his doubts future generations being able to rely on streaming services to provide an accurate historical archive seem legit to me, if only because we can already see the effects of digital decay in so many forms, even on ILX. check out the amen dunes thread. so much of the conversation is in reference to youtube videos that don't work now. even if they did work, at some point they won't. i used to think of my drunkenly animate thread as a personal archive of learning how to manipulate objects, but then last year me and photobucket collectively shit the bed together and now there's a bunch of broken images.

i'm veering off track, but digital is inherently ephemeral, no matter how carefully we update our computers and try to keep our tech backward compatible. i'm just spitballing here but i would guess that the most useful and robust musical archives of the future will have the physical objects at its core. those physical archives will still exist - it's not like we're in danger of our present being completely erased - but i don't think it's outlandish to think that the popularity of streaming means there are fewer physical objects in the first place, which makes it even more difficult to preserve remaining copies in the future. and of course that especially applies to releases that were never physically pressed in the first place.

Robert Christgau went on about this a bit recently:

[Q] How do you feel about the listening habits and practices of current generations compared to that of previous? -- Giorgio Tolaini, London

[A] Big question that I will answer partially. I stream all the time. It can't be avoided if you're to review seriously, much less as comprehensively as I do. And for economic reasons I never hear a good portion of my Honorable Mentions any other way. But anything that sounds like a possible A I buy--mostly from Amazon, to my chagrin, though I do sometimes use Amoeba or CDUniverse and check with Bandcamp when appropriate. In my art-friendly nabe the only generalist CD retailer is Barnes & Noble, where the shelves are scanter all the time; at Best Buy the clerks barely know what a CD is (of course, they also barely know one charger from another, or where the air conditioners are). My preference for physicals isn't about audio primarily. It has to do with what I've come to call externality. Streaming creates the illusion--greatly magnified by headphone use, which is another matter--that music is a utility you can turn on and off; the water metaphor is intrinsic to how it works. It dematerializes music, denies it a crucial measure of autonomy, reality, and power. It makes music seem disposable, impermanent. Hence it intensifies the ebb and flow of pop fashion, the way musical "memes" rise up for a week or a month and are then forgotten. And it renders our experience of individual artists/groups shallower. In a promotional 500-worder for the now defunct Borders to help promote Grown Up All Wrong in 1998--which now ends the introductory section of Is It Still Good to Ya?--I wrote about getting to know "musicians themselves, not as they 'really' are, but as they create themselves in music." This year I'm feeling that way about two rather different acquaintances, both from Chicago: Noname and Rich Krueger. The physicals were crucial to that.

https://www.iowasource.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/stomp-colors-1024x658.jpg

I stream all the time. It can't be avoided if you're to review seriously, much less as comprehensively as I do. And for economic reasons I never hear a good portion of my Honorable Mentions any other way. But anything that sounds like a possible A I buy--mostly from Amazon, to my chagrin, though I do sometimes use Amoeba or CDUniverse and check with Bandcamp when appropriate.

I'm with him on most of this. I pay for Spotify and use it as a research tool - if I'm reviewing an album or preparing for an interview, and want to hear the artist's previous work, that's where I go first (with YouTube as a backup). I also get a ton of promos emailed to me every day, most of which I don't even bother downloading, but some I do.

If I hear something I like a lot, I will frequently buy the CD - my favorite record stores are (more or less in order) Amazon, ImportCDs.com, Discogs, Grooves-Inc.com, and eBay. I also buy a lot of stuff on Bandcamp, but not physical CDs very often (Bandcamp's shipping rates seem high to me). Sometimes I'll email an artist directly to buy CDs straight from them - I did this last month with Norwegian saxophonist Hanna Paulsberg, whose first two albums lack US distribution. I go to actual record stores about as often as I go to movie theaters - once or twice a year at best.

They're memory scrapbooks. Bookshelves, bluray/DVD/CD shelves, MP3 folders. Each one an episode in a misspent life. There's much I'll never read, see, or hear again, but I have teaching, appreciative, convincing relationships with a few cultural artifacts every year.

I can hardly comprehend how others expose themselves to thousands of tracks or can say they've digested over one hundred albums at year end. That's a second job, and one that doesn't pay particularly well. Really I think most of us are lucky to have a serious relationship with a half-dozen cultural artifacts in a given year, and passing acquaintance with dozens more. This scale is tractable for someone who wants to add increments to the scrapbooks they live among.

Compensation is dire for nearly all musicians. By making the purchases, whether bandcamp mp3 or merch, I'm doing a small part towards informing them that others care and have relationships with what they're making. In a streaming only world, they'd lack even that feedback.

Someone stopped me at a street fair the other day and was giving me a bit of a hard sell to sign up for a farm-to-table service that would deliver produce to me. He kept me for quite a while and gave me every reason why I should sign up and how there would be no expense to me if I ended up not wanting to do it and then went into, "Can I enter your email address" in order to sign me up right there. But I didn't feel like it and I didn't know what to say about it - he'd already refuted all my arguments. I realized yesterday, though, that I don't necessarily buy his philosophy about eliminating the middle man. I go to food stores that are not all mega-corporations and it's something you do. There's a social aspect to it, plus I can walk to them and that gets me into the fresh air and moving. That's a part of music for me. It's something I think about a lot when I have free time - Should I go to the record store today? They're a part of my community, people make their livings from them, I know people there, and it's fun. In fact, one of the stores here puts this sign out on the sidewalk that says, "Buying records is fun."

How did he refute the #1 objection that comes to mind — I want to pick out my own damn apples and zucchini from the bins, I don’t trust others to choose the best specimens?

i mean i don't and never will engage with music primarily through streaming but i also know enough about archiving to know that amateur collectors are no substitute for professional archives, as much as we like to flatter ourselves

Completely correct. Wearing my library worker hat here:

Though not a trained archivist myself, I work with one and our conversations in recent years, along with my general experience in the field, underscores the clear distinction between the efforts of happy enthusiasts and the serious, detailed work that makes a truly useful archive, in the sense of something that scholars, researchers etc. of any stripe can use. The amount work alone in creating something that people can use to search for material -- metadata in all senses -- is immense, especially in the realm of purely digital product. The sheer amount of format changes, instability in listening platforms and delivery mechanisms, the differences in mastering for different media etc all add to a situation where the individual listener may create something of note for him or herself but the archivist has to be incredibly careful about.

It is certainly very easy to say, in the face of information overload (always conditional and incomplete), that nothing can be done except to shrug and let said avalanche overwhelm while pulling together what you possibly can. By all means do so. But unless you are actively planning on coordinating something that an institution somewhere would conceivably want and have made a case for already, for good reason, don't think you're the keeper of memories for the future, because the end result may just be a lot of 'Well, we can't use that and have no reason to,' estate sales, and so forth.

Robert makes a thoughtful inspiring post and for some reason gets interpreted as minimizing the heroic efforts of pro archivists? The amateurs positively affected his life. That's the point, right? Preserving things "for all time" is a different question.

I think Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets and the myriad volumes that followed would have had more impact than some comprehensive database even if pro archivists had been working in that area.

This was interesting, thanks.

And I'm sure I've seen Gioia (how many vowels?) spouting a lot of conservative bollocks on the Twitters.

More info on this? It's v surprising to me. I follow him on Twitter and almost always only see him posting about music. Occasionally, he shares political articles when they have something to do with music and his implicit positions never struck me as conservative.

as with a lot of things, I think the more music ownership & distribution is consolidated and centralised, the worse it is for artists and ultimately listeners. framing it as a physical v digital split obscures the real issue

Gioia is a small-c conservative ("It was better in the old days") when it comes to art, so it wouldn't surprise me if his politics drifted in that direction too.

His tastes seem really eclectic and fairly progressive to me!

Seriously, do people see him as some kind of Stanley Crouch type?? Guy is constantly keeping up with new music, e.g. writing about South Asian jazz artists or lo-fi solo guitar music, has a real appreciation for the avant-garde, and puts together a top 100 list every year that I find more reliable than the Wire's. Is this all over something he wrote about pop music journalism 4-5 years ago?

It might well be that, aye. I recall a rumble of some sort on Twitter, where he was aggressively (small-c) conservative about pop music and I thought he came across as a dick. None of which stops me checking out his end of year lists, like.

I’m not familiar with this guy, but what’s an example of being “conservative” about pop music? “It was better in the ‘80s”?

I like the thoughts laid out in this video and I am charmed by the incidental piano doodles

I'm not even sure this was a 'conservative' take on pop music, tbh, unless you think that placing a value on chops is inherently conservative:

Yet we need smart musical criticism more than ever nowadays... Listening to new releases, I am reminded of how an Australian friend once described the United States to me: “You Americans represent the best of the best, and the worst of the worst, all hopelessly mixed together.” The same is true of the output of the music industry in the present day. I hear artists who can sing like birds, others who would need to retire if Auto-Tune disappeared. I encounter songwriters who have mastered all the nuances of harmony, others who couldn’t modulate keys if you handed them the chords on a silver flash drive. I’m dazzled by performers who possess a deep grasp of rhythm; others apparently haven’t yet figured out the simplest syncopations.

(Tangentially, I always understood "small-c conservative" to mean "ideologically conservative but not necessarily affiliated with the (capital-C) Conservative Party" so it seems curious to see it applied to an American musicologist.)

(Tangentially, I always understood "small-c conservative" to mean "ideologically conservative but not necessarily affiliated with the (capital-C) Conservative Party" so it seems curious to see it applied to an American musicologist.)

That's exactly what I mean. I'm sure he's not a Republican (save every fetus, shoot every immigrant) but he is an aesthetic conservative, and an elitist.

as with a lot of things, I think the more music ownership & distribution is consolidated and centralised, the worse it is for artists and ultimately listeners. framing it as a physical v digital split obscures the real issue

(Digital being streaming which is the debate. I don't consider having an MP3 on my computer as "owning" the music even though I can play it whenever I want but it's still better than relying on streaming if the album is not there.)

otm. In practice it's easier for me to download an album from Spotify to my phone than to... well, anything else (buy files, buy physical and put it in the CD player, etc.). This is so true that I usually don't even bother to redeem download codes. I have a little box full of them for the next quiet weekend I spend curating my collection (...hopefully never). Why not earn the artist a few extra cents by streaming when I am out and about? But all this can change at any time.

I buy just about as many physical releases as I ever did, but streaming means I listen to loads more, and there's a lot more variation in my physical collection because of it.

Sorry for shitposting above with the image copied from "Continuing with CDs" thread. I meant to also contribute to discussion at the time.

physical and digital are not even mutually exclusive categories. digital files are digital files whether they're on a CD or your hard drive or some central server you pay for access to

That's true. I really am getting this discussion mixed up with "Continuing with CDs". By physical I really meant buying music. Buying files is not something I've done much.

Ogmor OTM

I can hardly comprehend how others expose themselves to thousands of tracks or can say they've digested over one hundred albums at year end. That's a second job, and one that doesn't pay particularly well.

― Sanpaku, Saturday, December 15, 2018 4:13 PM

This is what I find really interesting when it comes to the interplay of streaming and collecting/buying. Though I've lurked here for years, I'm new to posting and I'm learning who's who, and who actually works in music.

I bought maybe 10 new albums this year, and really engaged with around 10 more via streaming (the rest is "tracks"). The distinction between those two groups and how the latter 10 can vanish from my phone if some record company policies change, that's clear to me. What's crazy to think about is how different my selections would be in the absence of streaming. But the machinations of Spotify playlists and changing nature of payola I'm sure are best left to another thread.

Speaking of, is there a thread for users' year end favourites? I'm only seeing the one with lists from magazines and websites.

there will be one later

I failed on Saturday. Was talking to my daughter about this and, as a record collector, talking about how I think records sometimes sound really great in ways that are different from digital, but I tried to do an A/B of something for her and...I don't think it was clear. I didn't demonstrate anything. But I realized that it doesn't matter! Records do sound really good sometimes and I realized it's OK to collect them just because it's a cool format. The technology itself is kind of amazing. And, of course, the packaging, artwork, design of the thing as a material object. Listening to an album on Spotify is a step up from listening to an album that a friend taped for me, but I'd put it in the same realm of experience.

How old is your daughter?

I wouldn't attempt to demonstrate something like that to my parents or my sister but that doesn't mean that there is no difference.

She's seventeen.

Records are not the superior listening medium if you're looking for fidelity, just get a good DAC and lossless audio sources.

However, records are superior in that they are tangible, and give emotional value to music. They also require you to listen to things rather than skip through them. Streaming seems to turn us all into ADD DJs occasionally, playing 1/2 a song at a time or just having it in the background and not really paying attention. With a record, it sometimes feels the connection is more tangible. The warmth of the high frequency rolloff and track noise/dust also lend an artisan hand made character to the sound whIch I also think can appeal emotionally, much like a hand made flea market pottery mug can be so much more enjoyable to drink your coffee out of rather than a nicely made one purchased at sur la table.

I think when you're a teenager, practicality rules above all else. Certainly was a higher value to me in terms of music than it is now. Especially financially yeesh

I don't consider them superior in terms of fidelity but they can have a distinctive quality and work well for some things, especially music that was originally mastered for vinyl.

I'm a huge fan of lossless digital and good DACs, btw, although I sometimes compromise bc hard drive space + current listening setup is not always optimal.

Yeah for sure - vinyl masterings are distinctly better than many digital masters these days, it's crazy, and arguably one of the best reasons to buy vinyl for fidelity purposes. But the new Kate Bush remasters are a great example where the vinyl is unnecessary imo. I totally get where you're coming from (I have many records and a quality table for exactly the same reasons), just playing devil's advocate here.