Music Just Ain’t No Good

An ADOLESCENT sits down to learn to play the guitar. They are about to look up some free video lessons on their phone, but first they check the per-stream royalty rate. A third of a penny. Dejected, the ADOLESCENT packs the guitar away, never to play a single note.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, I (ME) am trying to write this essay but I’m stuck at the start. Something feels off about every option I consider, plus I’ve started to imagine the beginning as something like a CARDBOARD BOX which sits out the front. I know what the CARDBOARD BOX is for because I’m the one who put it there: I’m supposed to place something inside it that might grab your attention. But I hate that there is a CARDBOARD BOX sitting out front of my essay, and I’ve become sick of standing around it trying to figure out what best to dump inside.

*

When I pitched this essay nearly half a year ago, I’d planned on starting with a commentary on Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign. Or rather, I was going to offer a meta-commentary commenting on the commentary surrounding the campaign—critiques of the personalised listening data roundup land in December just as predictably as the roundup itself. But the campaign and the critiques, and the year rolled over, and I didn’t write the essay. Now it’s March and this idea for a beginning has gone stale. This shouldn’t really be a big deal because I could make my point using any news story about Spotify—I could for example start with something about the recent layoffs at the company or its plan for a more algorithmic TikTok-style feed. But the problem is that searching for new news and critiques (so that I can in turn generate a new critique) feels disingenuous.

I considered beginning instead with something more personal, which might help to illustrate how I feel about music, or rather, how music makes me feel. I came up with two options: the first was going to be something about being in a band, and about how our bandmate died last year. In my mind, this experience is expressly linked to the subject of how we think about music, art, and culture in the digital age—but it’s also a complicated story about relationships, which I’m not comfortable writing about. Option two involved something about the pandemic and learning to love listening to music. Of course I’d always loved music, but something happened one Friday night during lockdown when my partner and I stayed up until sunrise, smoking cigarettes and listening to the same four or five Leonard Cohen songs over and over again. We stopped sleeping on weekends, and then on some weeknights too, because we couldn’t turn off the speaker. This was perhaps terrible for our bodies (and our productivity), but then again, isn’t it much worse to never leave the ‘comfort’ of your own home, to work for thirteen hours a day, to be told to avoid contact with all that constitutes a human life? Staying up on music, wine, and cigarettes was our small, shared rebellion—it was something like living a life.

Staying up on music, wine, and cigarettes was our small, shared rebellion—it was something like living a life.

This beginning has potential because it edges closer to the thing I want to say, which has to do with music and resistance. The problem is that it also begins to hint towards nostalgia, which convinces us that being alive in the past is in some way better than being alive right now. In terms of the pandemic, and lockdowns in Melbourne, that is unequivocally not true.

*

I place a bunch of scraps into the CARDBOARD BOX. I feel so relieved that I even put the CARDBOARD BOX into the CARDBOARD BOX. I also throw the ADOLESCENT in there, right on top, because—well, it honestly seems like the perfect place to throw an aborted artist.

Everything goes dark and (finally!) the CARDBOARD BOX disappears.

I feel great and to be honest quite pleased with myself.

The darkness lingers for a bit longer and then ‘People Ain’t No Good’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds starts to play.

*

I will keep this brief, because the problems with music in the digital age are well-documented and you have likely heard many of them before. The biggest issue is that artists are not paid fairly, or enough, for their work. The payment model of streaming—wherein one Spotify stream is equal to something like one-third of a penny—devalues musicians’ labour. This labour, by the way, now extends far beyond the creative (ie making music) so that it also involves things like marketing or the development plus maintenance of relationships with fans online. And so, artists are experiencing exacerbated pressures and precarity. Furthermore, because platforms suggest to users what to listen to (and when to listen to it), users decreasingly make conscious choices and those fractions of a penny go to pre-existing hits or else it goes to music you might call ‘vanilla’—bland, unchallenging, the stuff of bad sex (to paraphrase David Hesmondhalgh). Worse: songs are getting shorter to better farm the benefits. Quantity, brevity, repetition and simplicity are rewarded. Musical artistry is not.

*

A DIRECTOR is directing this essay. They are sitting in their director’s chair, watching the rehearsal.

Yeah, that’s good, that’s really good. But can someone make it so that he’s singing ‘Music it just ain’t no good’? Like, do some audio-Photoshop or whatever? Let’s make the point a bit more obvious, okay. I don’t want to bludgeon anyone with what we’re trying to say here, but—and you know I hate to have to say this—but we really just have to assume they’re not paying attention at this point.

I (ME) am also watching this rehearsal, sitting in my own chair behind the DIRECTOR, silently fuming.

*

What to do? If this issue concerns you, perhaps the most apparent answer is to quit the streaming platforms. Some people do it, ostensibly setting themselves free by choosing instead to purchase music using ‘ethical’ alternatives or returning to mp3s and iPods. One music journalist details an approach she describes, earnestly, as ‘uncomplicated’: it consists of a VPN alongside open source software installed on a home-based server, with recommendations gathered from ‘friends, Bandcamp editorial, and stuff he comes across at his job working at a local record shop’. For the most part, though, critics and researchers are starting to agree that it is unreasonable, if not impossible, to expect the world to fix music by quitting music streaming. In Overland a few months ago (back when it was still timely enough to lede with Spotify Wrapped), Ben Brooker summarised the argument:

The decision to leave an exploitative system rests with the individual, not the collective—precisely why the quitting of this or that online platform feels, beyond its isolated benefits to productivity, mental health and so on, politically weak.

This line of reasoning is not necessarily so obvious to me, but I understand the point: individuals’ actions and decisions are made under the influence of a system or ideology (ie. capitalism or neoliberalism)—and ultimately, it is these larger forces which are to blame. We are moving away from dangerous notions of personal responsibility because no one person is, or can be, held responsible for the workings of a society, culture, or network when they are indeed not so much individuals as individual parts of that society, culture, network.

Critics and researchers are starting to agree that it is unreasonable, if not impossible, to expect the world to fix music by quitting music streaming.

This argument is compassionate, and that is good. But—and this is a private thought, which usually keeps to itself somewhere dark and deep down—at the same time, it is also undeniably handy, self-serving, don’t you think?

I am not saying that this argument is at its root disingenuous—I’m just saying that it comes with a neat perk. The truth is, I like being able to listen to anything I want, whenever I want. I pay twenty dollars a month for my music streaming family plan—it covers me and my partner and my mother (and by extension my father, who does not have his own account but does enjoy the benefit of hearing whatever it is that my mother is currently playing). Between the three/four of us, we pay less for ‘unfettered access to the entire history of recorded music’ than the average individual subscriber. So it’s a very sweet deal. And—again, this is one of those deep down thoughts I tend to prefer to repress—I’m not willing to give it up.

*

Montage featuring the vibes of war goes here. It’s confusing and unclear what’s going on, but the DIRECTOR says it’ll be super poignant. There’s one clip of a big-deal MUSIC CRITIC asking, direct to the camera:

What are you willing to sacrifice, Comrade Consumer?

Then it cuts to some gory footage of dying soldiers, limbs missing, helmets akimbo, lots of blood and dirt. The camera focuses on one of them. They are difficult to recognise at first, but you realise it’s the MUSIC CRITIC. Then——and this is quite shocking and unexpected——someone suddenly runs into the shot and yells:

(NOTE TO SOUND MIXER: MAKE IT REALLY LOUD)

WELL ACTUALLY DUDE, QUITTING SPOTIFY OR ANY OTHER DIGITAL PLATFORM IS IN FACT POLITICALLY WEAK!

Then they punch the CRITIC right in the face and run off!

The last clip shows rubble and a collapsed bridge. What looks (aesthetically) like a protest sign billows in the wind: 'One fan’s freedom is another fan’s extremely unreasonable ask.'

*

I am being facetious, and I’m a little bit sorry. There is of course no sense of relief or secret rush that follows a guilt absolved when something you love is in a bad way, when it is dying before your very eyes. And it makes sense that all of us—critics, researchers, fans, musicians, etc etc—would throw all that we can find, any idea we can muster, to try to save it.

Surely it is worth saving. Music has a way of making you feel a part of something beautiful and immense, able to collapse the past and the present and even the future into the passage of just four or five minutes (actually—sometimes it seems to even manage, miraculously, to do it in two, like how Wave of Mutilation can bring me back to country Victoria early in March 2020, when the shutdown of the world was behind the scenes but already in motion, and I was sitting on an astroturfed crate far behind the crowd with two of my bandmates and glitter on my face and listening (really listening) to the Pixies for the first time in my life and we kept talking through the set because we couldn’t help but to take turns repeating out loud in magical disbelief: ‘holy shit, we are here chilling and drinking beers while the fucking Pixies are up there slaying right now’).

How music is able to do something like this is a philosophical mystery of supreme scale, and one that’s been acknowledged. So it would indeed be quite a shame, and very sad too, if the thing was on its deathbed.

There is of course no sense of relief or secret rush that follows a guilt absolved when something you love is in a bad way, when it is dying before your very eyes.

There was another way I had thought about starting this essay. I’d recently completed a Masters thesis on creativity in the digital age. I’d interviewed a handful of Australian artists about their creative practice—I wanted to know how they made music today, and test their reality against how Spotify imagines artists make music today. I was certain I’d find a disparity. And so I did.

Spotify, and the company’s spokespeople, imagine some inspired, frenetic, grand ordeal. This idea reeks throughout Spotify’s marketing and PR materials; you can see it in the way the company’s CEO Daniel Ek gets off on Beyoncé’s process in one interview about his business acumen (‘She keeps almost four or five different studios running at the same time in a city…and she actually goes from room to room: brainstorming ideas, trying different things, working on different songs.’)​​. But you don’t have to undertake a postgraduate research project, you don’t even have to know how to make music, to know that no one (not even Beyoncé) makes music how Daniel Ek imagines Beyoncé makes music.

In a recent book, Nick Cave told an interviewer about a friend—someone who makes movies but not music—who ‘sees music as the purest, or the most holy, of art forms—the closest to God’. Something grand, immense, divine. Except of course making music cannot be divine, because it is made expressly by humans. Indeed, it is so ordinary, so common that any kid could do it—and they do, no matter how badly it pays.

Nick Cave explains how it’s done, which is probably how you know it’s done: ‘You just sit in a room with your friends and make music.’ Maybe it’s lame, a waste of time. Or maybe that’s magical, even divine.

*

TITLE CARD: CAN A THING SAVE ITSELF FROM ITS OWN DEATH, EVEN ON ITS DEATHBED?

AD-ROCK is at his laptop, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth in concentration. He’s writing one of the early sections of The Beastie Boys Book:

I WOULD HAVE FUCKING LOVED THE SHIT OUT OF HAVING AN IPHONE. For real. Anyone who’s trying to convince you that tapes are cool, and that iPhones are corny, is dead wrong. I can tell you from experience, and with a professional’s opinion: the cassette vs. vinyl vs. CD vs. mp3 argument is boring. […] ‘Yeah, but … mp3s sound terrible.’ Who cares?! Try Scotch-taping a broken cassette tape four or five times in different places on the tape, and then listen back to that after it’s been in various linty pockets for a year and a half.

AD-ROCK leans back in his chair to gaze upon his page, satisfied, excited.

Meanwhile, a GUY is meticulously setting up a VPN in his home, part of the preparations in his life he must make in order to DIY some sort of miracle. He believes that music is in a bad way, but he has identified a demon (music streaming), and has invented a pretty complex series of intensive actions he is willing to perform to cast it out. But if you squint, it looks like a fountain of youth as he is returned to the ‘pre-internet’ days of his younger self, that time back when music was still meaningful to him.

Whatever it is the GUY is doing looks like a pain in the ass to ME but I guess he’s enjoying the whole thing so I let him be. (He must be enjoying it, because otherwise the ritual won’t work.) Besides, I am half a world away with my PARTNER as we tend to our own ceremony in the courtyard. MUSIC is playing. We (continue to) slip ourselves another cigarette, pour another drink——we laugh and call this ‘healthy’. No one else can tell if we are joking or not.

*