How Do You Listen To Music?

And how do you 'fix' streaming? What if this is the best we're going to get?

As the streaming industry continues to grow and change so do our listening habits. But how do we listen to music - how do we find it, how do we discover it, what roles do various platforms play in that and can they do it any better?

It used to be simple, you’d hear a track on the radio or get a music magazine and see a feature or review of a single or album, head down to your local music shop and try and listen to a copy before taking home the cassette, CD or vinyl. Maybe you’d record it off the radio yourself, or someone you knew would give you a tape or CDR of the album. 

Nowadays that ‘sales channel’ (God I hate that phrase, but it makes sense in this context) still exists but the amount of people who use it is smaller than before. For people like you and I (that is, people who are into music enough to want to read about it and consume it) this will still be the way a lot of us find and purchase music. For the wider majority though, they will consume music much differently - they may not even realise they’re listening to something at all.

One of the reasons HMV succeeded for so long on the High Street is that it was a less intimidating environment than your traditional indie record shop - the albums you knew, laid out in a straightforward manner, relatively well presented and a clean(ish) environment. Your parents or grandparents could go into HMV and find the CD you wanted for your birthday with ease. Now Spotify exists you can hear whatever you want whenever you want. You can search for almost any artist and up comes their entire repertoire within a split second. Once you’ve listened to what you wanted to hear Spotify will continue to play you music it thinks you’ll like, and most of the time it will get that more or less right. On the few occasions I let it play through I very rarely find myself skipping it’s suggestions.

Algorithms and playlists are all well and good but they’re not going to foster discovery in the way a music journalist or record shop employee can. A lot of the time once an album is finished playing it might take a moment to realise that the music has shifted a little in style - an attuned listener should notice fairly quickly, but I’d wager many people won’t notice at all. DSP’s shout about how they’re the tools for discovery but I don’t think that’s true - discovery needs context, why this record, why this artist, why now? A DJ can weave a thread or tell a story by placing records in context, a journalist can do so in print. The majority of Spotify users do so in a “lean-back” manner, they’re not really paying attention, the music is just on in the background whilst they work or do something else. The algorithm isn’t set up to surprise the listener, or to push them out of their comfort zone with something they’ve not heard before. In many cases it will push a piece of music created specially for Spotify, by a fake artist. The music will be technically good, but it has no reason for existence other than to make more money for a streaming company. No thought has gone into it’s creation, there’s nothing of the artist in there, there’s no reason for it at all.

Every now and again comes a new startup on Twitter promising to shake up the music industry - all the best music! Your music! Free! Artists will be paid a massive royalty rate! Community! Crypto! All this kind of stuff - but they always tend to fall at the first hurdle - namely the immense cost of licensing music from the majors and Indies. We don’t help ourselves in this matter, but everyone wants a piece of the pie. Remember Rdio? Remember Bloom.fm? A lot of these start ups now don’t bother with licenced content, but then what’s the point? There’s a tonne of unsigned music out there online, that’s why Soundcloud literally exists, YouTube is full of it. It’s mostly crap. Spotify got the major label content by giving away a huge swathe of equity, it’s a quid pro quo, the equity is worthless without content, the content makes the platform popular. 

We also need to consider that Spotify has such a large user base because it’s free, and bundled with mobile phone deals in many markets. Apple Music gives a trial when you buy an Apple device, but still lags behind in sheer numbers of subscribers. People on the whole don’t care enough (I’m talking about the wider general public here) to move all their playlists over to a new platform, especially if it’s not got the hits they’re after. People on the whole don’t care enough about music in general really -  what can a new platform do that the existing streaming platforms don’t? Pay artists better? No-one cares enough (sorry, it’s a harsh truth). Allow you to connect with fans with a similar music taste (I know a few people who like some of the same music as me, some of them are arseholes)? Allow users to comment on releases? How many will actually bother, and it will require a lot of moderation to stop it becoming a cesspit of shit takes. Some kind of Crypto/NFT thing? Waste of time.

Like it or not, what we’ve got is probably the best we’re going to get, from an artist and users point of view. Maybe that’s a defeatist attitude from me, but I think sometimes in this industry we’re sometimes blinkered by our passion for music and our friendship groups. I’ve got a song that has done half a billion streams on Spotify alone, but the number of people who’ve actually seeked it out, actually typed it’s name into the search box, is much smaller than that. Personally speaking, I’d welcome a number of changes to streaming platforms, including adding label pages and the kind of tagging you get on Discogs to see artist aliases etc, and some additional editorial providing context would be a great addition in my eyes (Apple Music already do this for select releases, but it’s a huge task to do it for everything). Beatport already provide a track description for releases, but that’s written by the label as opposed to being editorially contributed.

So in the mean time it relies on people outside the DPS themselves to sell music to others - call us gatekeepers if you want, but we need gatekeepers otherwise you end up with a constant flood of music, much of it worthless.  Playlist curators, Substack writers, Social Media figures - all these people are sharing their passions, many of them for little or no money to bring great music to an audience. Find them, support them, tell them you enjoy what they’re doing. Engage with them, send them new music and discuss it with them. Music is far from a dying medium, and there’s a load of great stuff out there if you can find it, or find someone to show you it. Keep going.

Plainsong

On to this week’s new music…

Loidis - One Day [Incienso]

Wow, just wow. I think this might be one of the best albums I’ve heard all year. Big praise indeed. I’ve waxed lyrical about the previous Loidis EP before, and it’s rarely far from my deck, so I had high expectations when Huerco S reanimated the name for a full album. Is it as good as A Parade, In The Place I Sit…? That was one of the best electronic releases of the 2010’s, but I don’t think it matters either way, it’s different enough, and we don’t need to compare everything to what’s come before do we? It’s a bit deeper, a bit housier, look, just buy/stream this, I’ve listened to it about four times already since I got home last night.

James Alexander Bright - Cool Cool [Athens of the North]

Picture the scene: you’re at a bar in Ibiza, the sea just a few meters away, you’ve got a nice cold Estrella on the go. This is the soundtrack. If you’d have given me this album and told me it came out in the 80’s I’d have believed you. Sometimes artists can wear their hearts on their sleeve a bit too literally, but this sounds like it was recorded in the summer of ‘83. The funk, the vibe, the production - it all adds up to a 10/10 summer record.

Primal Scream - Love Insurrection [BMG]

I love Screamadelica. I love Give Out But Don’t Give Up. I love Vanishing Point. I love XTRMNTR. I kind of loved Evil Heat. I’m not sure about this - maybe it’ll grow on me, but it feels a bit safe on my first listens.

The The - Linoleum Smooth To The Stockinged Foot [earMusic]

Two new singles from The The’s Matt Johnson? Wasn’t expecting that. These were written from a hospital bed during the pandemic apparently. They sound okay to me so far. This Is The Day is one of the greatest songs ever written, these are much starker in their vibe, probably given the circumstances in which they were written.

Seefeel - Sky Hooks [Warp]

Rustie - Thornzz [Warp]

A Warp double header. Seefeel were always one of the more interesting Warp groups, kinda crossing that divide between IDM-era electronica and the ‘guitar era’ that followed. This fits right in with my ‘post-rock summer’ narrative too, although it’s more electronic as you’d expect. Rustie put out some good tunes back in that era of shiny dubstep or whatever you want to call it. Glass Swords & Green Language were both classic albums. This new one isn’t really like those, if I’m honest it’s a little unremarkable but I’ll give it another go.

MONIC - Where Reality Fades [Osiris Music]

You didn’t think I was gonna write a whole In Strict Tempo without some proper dark, gnarly gear did you? Simon Shreeve in his MONIC guise here bringing the crackly, mechanical noises we know and love.

Lina Filipovic - Idealized [CPU]

You know what you’re gonna get with a CPU record - consistently good, proper ‘let’s go’ techno & electro. Big love for this one from me.