International Sad Hits

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A tree had fallen in Walden Pond and I could still hear the sound.

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Watching the year-end charts tumble in and missing the many critical spaces we have lost in recent memory, both analog and digital: arts pages in the daily paper, alt weeklies, zines, music blogs...tumblr! (Is anyone here anymore?)

Charts have always been with us, but in the current media environment they feel too close for comfort to top ten clickbait - to Spotify playlists - to sponsored ads in response to Google searches - to all the cookies and tracking and rankings and targeting that corral our lives online. Shouldn’t we be working to explode those limits? To write and publish against the data set...

Here’s to a more discursive year TK

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Iain Matthews, “Morgan the Pirate” (by Richard Fariña), 1971.

I’m moved to praise digital music piracy once again - despite the hard feelings it always leaves behind - because of data freshly shared by those copyright mavens, Apple.

After four-plus years of streaming, Apple Music has finally created a portal where artists can register to see some aggregate numbers about the use of their music on the platform. And at least from the vantage point of our accounts, those numbers are...low. Galaxie 500 sees more streams in two days on Spotify than it does in a month on Apple Music, Spotify’s nearest competitor. Put another way: for Galaxie 500 (and I have no reason to think we’re not representative of at least some other bands), every three months on Spotify matches the lifetime total of streams we’ve seen via Apple Music.

Of course Apple Music is less popular than Spotify in part because it charges all subscribers - there is no free option, as there is on Spotify. Free beats paid; not really news.

What seems useful to observe about this, though, is that even a company with resources as great as Apple - there are none richer, in fact - can’t beat free.

So if Apple can’t take on Spotify while charging for music, who can?

I think the answer is no one. Which leaves those of us creating the content on Spotify without a meaningful option for competing with their free use of our digital media. Except: piracy.

Free v free. Who wins then? At least it will be a competition.

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In April, MIT Press published a print version of my 6-part podcast Ways of Hearing.

To celebrate the publication, the creators of both podcast and book joined me for an evening of behind-the-scenes talk, which we’ve now released as a “Making-of” podcast about a podcast, and about a book about a podcast...

This Making-of episode is available wherever you get podcasts by searching for Radiotopia’s Showcase, or MIT Press. You can also download or stream it for free at the Ways of Hearing bandcamp page.

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‪An album transferred to a piece of cloth with which you could wipe your brow etc‬.

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Youssou N’Dour and Super Étoile at the Sinclair in Cambridge MA, October 2018.

Here in Cambridge, Youssou N’Dour and his dozen-plus entourage performed to a 500-capacity room - on a tour that includes stops at Carnegie Hall, and l’Olympia in Paris. The room was clearly so much smaller than the band was used to, watching from the audience felt a bit like watching from the wings - there were details visible and audible that didn’t feel intended for the public. Youssou himself would periodically take the two steps back to the drum riser, turn his back and elaborately wipe away sweat from under his spectacular suit, recomposing himself to face the crowd. At various points, certain members of the band exited for a tune or two, chatting with the others as they squeezed past to get off stage. And all of the musicians occasionally sang along with the lyrics, off mic yet audible in this small space.

The experience reminded me why I not only generally prefer to see music in small rooms, I often choose to watch friends play large rooms from backstage rather than in front. As fun as it can be to join a big audience’s collective experience, the band’s position behind the PA always includes sounds and gestures that don’t register in the house - those bits may not be intended for amplification, but they are communicative nonetheless. To me, Youssou N’Dour’s elegant stage presence was all the more impressive, given a glimpse of what he has to do to maintain it through the exertions of a two-hour show.

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Nazimova as Salomé (1923), and the wig she wore discovered in a trunk left at her lover Glesca Marshall’s last home, Columbus GA (2014).

Silent film was of course not known by that name in its own time - it could only be considered “silent” in contrast to the later “talkies.” Their salient characteristic was not a lack of synch sound, but the amazing fact that they were “moving pictures.” Salomé’s wig sparkles as Nazimova shakes her head, pouts, scowls, and dances. No one is waiting for her to speak, particularly - we already know her most important line. But we’re all, like Herod, watching her every move.

It can be easy to lose that sense of movement - of life - in a work from the past. Salomé’s wig, in the present, is a strange but rather lifeless artifact. The film could feel that way, too - just a curious piece of history - if we fail to animate it with our attention, our imagination, our participation. If we don’t put the wig on and give it a shake.

Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux does exactly that with a live soundtrack she’s written to perform alongside Salomé. She gives that wig a run for its shimmy, sampling her low singing voice through a synthesizer, using live strings and a muted trap drum kit to animate the drama she sees in the film. Her score is a pulsing, breathing - literally, her voice technique is like a very complete exhale - frightening set of gestures that fluctuate alongside the emotions of the film. Nazimova moves constantly through it, but always slowly. And Haley Fohr’s composition mirrors the teetering, collapsing quality to her movements. I was on the edge of my seat.

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The Boston Globe urged newspapers around the country to run editorials today defending a free press. I can’t see theirs because it’s behind a paywall.

As a musician, I’m hyper-aware of the digital challenge to traditional media. Still, I feel it’s folly to demand that your audience pay for what they can get elsewhere for free. Galaxie 500 songs are streamed one million times a month on Spotify, not to mention via YouTube and all the myriad other ways people access digital music without paying the artist or label. Were we to somehow sequester all our online music behind a paywall, I don’t know whether we would see more money from it in the end. But I am positive that people would listen to it far, far less.

Which is the real choice for media in the digital realm, I believe: do you want to share it, or do you want to charge for it? I know newspapers are struggling, just as musicians are. But if the Globe’s point today is that people need to listen to what they have to say...then I would suggest they remove the paywall and let people read it.

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Annette Peacock, “I Have No Feelings,” title track from the album released on her own Ironic Records, 1986.

In a 2014 interview, Annette Peacock reflected on her career and said, “You know, I've achieved everything I've set out to achieve in my life except for two things. One is getting the timing right; getting something out that is appreciated at its time of release because if it's not I don't care much about it later on. It has no meaning to me then. And the other thing is being able to release records whenever I like...Sometimes I think that the world awards mediocrity more than it awards originality. That's a dispute I have with myself though and it's not based on anything that's relevant to anyone else though.”

That last sentence, with its two successive “thoughs” - coda to a coda, brackets around parentheses, modifying clause to a modifying clause - feels connected to Peacock’s unpredictable yet fluid songwriting. It’s the blurt of horns in the track “I Have No Feelings.” And maybe part of the originality that pushes her work out of its time, out of any genre, out of “in.” All of which has me glued to her recordings from the 80s, now that I have finally stumbled on them in 2018.

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August 8 1974 I was in a tent by a lake in Maine. There was a thunderstorm - each lightning strike registered as a burst of white noise on the transistor radio, and between those noises we heard the president resign.

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I almost never go to first-run theaters anymore, but Boots Riley’s “Sorry To Bother You” pulled me in (I’m glad it did).

However, a solid 25 minutes of ads and previews made me wonder if I’ll ever go to a first-run theater again. On a sound pressure meter (I use an app on my phone), those ads hit a peak of 97.6 decibels - that’s roughly equivalent to a jackhammer.

Make us stream, why don’t you?

[Footnote: a day after posting this, I learned I’m not the only crank with a db meter on their phone.]

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Those two personalized playlists up there look pretty right on, but...

Wrote about the meaning of “recommend” to Spotify, and “ownership” to Apple:

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/what-it-means-when-spotify-has-nothing-to-recommend-but-drake-op-ed/

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Seventy years ago today, June 21 1948, Columbia Records introduced the LP with two releases - one 12″ (classical) and one 10″ (pop).

Did the "American Century"/”Pax Americana” begin and end with the LP? Not claiming causality, but...I wouldn’t rule it out either.

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In a 2013 documentary about the Eagles (”History of the Eagles”), Don Henley explains that they stopped recording with Glyn Johns so they could work with someone who would mic each drum individually. They went on to record some of the most annoying music in the world.

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The previous post about Galaxie 500 streaming song plays attracted the interest of Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “Data Alchemist,” who looked at internal numbers and generously shared more info with me.

It seems the increase in streaming of “Strange” above all other Galaxie 500 songs started in January 2017 - the same time Spotify switched the “Autoplay” preset in every listener’s preference panel from off, to on (you can still turn it off but of course fewer people do). Autoplay selects “similar songs” when anything you have chosen to play - a playlist, an album, a song - finishes. At that point, Spotify’s recommendation algorithms take over and the system continues to provide music based on its resemblance to whatever you have been hearing. (Glenn explained that there are many, many acoustic categories involved in that calculation.)

In other words, it would seem that “Strange” started to be picked out by Spotify’s algorithms because they found it most similar to other bands’ songs than any other Galaxie 500 track.

Being more of a scientist than I am (though I would happily claim kinship with the alchemy bit), Glenn cautioned that this analysis was not conclusively causal - he would need to do more examination of data before going so far. But it makes intuitive sense to me. “Strange” is a touch faster, louder, with a more regular backbeat and a more predictable song structure than most Galaxie 500 songs. Compared to the singles from each of our three albums, for example - the songs that always had the most radio play - there’s no extended instrumental section like on “Tugboat” or “Fourth of July,” and no unusually slow tempo or quiet dynamics like on “Blue Thunder.”

Glenn confirmed that once “Strange” started to be played more than our other tracks, it became more likely that it would be recommended more frequently across the platform - the snowball effect I described in the previous post.

Might an unintended result of Autoplay, then, be the separating out and rewarding of the most “normal” songs in each band’s catalogue...? Smart speakers will I imagine exaggerate this effect. As albums are increasingly supplanted by playlists, and intentional listening of all kinds is increasingly replaced by algorithmic recommendations, “Play Galaxie 500″ may really come to mean, “Play the song by Galaxie 500 that most resembles songs by others.”

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Song streams by Galaxie 500 on Spotify, May 2018

Alert listeners to Spotify have been noting its failures when it comes to streaming albums in their entirety - gaps between songs might be changed or absent (the famous “Judas!” cry is missing from Dylan’s live recording in Manchester 1966); single edits of tracks are substituted for album ones; entirely different performances (live, or an alternate take from a later remaster) pop up in sequence instead of the original...

This emphasis on track over album seems to be baked into Spotify’s algorithms, as well. A given track is picked up for recommendation to individual listeners; if the track is received well (however that is determined), it is seeded to more recommendations; and so on.

I believe I can see the net result on the cumulative plays for different Galaxie 500 songs (Spotify shows artists this particular chart of their own material, though very little other data). “Strange,” a track off our album On Fire, is streaming far more than any of our other songs - roughly ten times as often as the songs that surround it in its original sequence on the album (”Snowstorm” and “When Will You Come Home”).

What’s especially surprising about this is that “Strange” was not a single for Galaxie 500, and hasn’t historically been among our most popular tracks. Even Spotify’s own editors haven’t selected it for any of their curated playlists, the most popular of which uses the much more predictable choice, “Tugboat”:

Yet anyone using Spotify is much more likely to hear “Strange” than any other Galaxie 500 song - it is the most frequently streamed of our songs via “Discover Weekly,” "Your Daily Mix,” and Spotify’s “Radio” feature. And I assume this will only become more and more the case. Now that Spotify’s algorithms have separated “Strange” from the rest of our catalogue, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that it will be streamed more than others because it is frequent use of this track that causes it to be seeded it into more recommendations, which increases the frequency of its use...

Where, meanwhile, are the listeners to On Fire? Judging by the numbers of streams of its other tracks, there aren’t many on Spotify (”Plastic Bird” had fewer than 7k streams in the same period that “Strange” had 210,000). If we want to preserve the album format, we are going to have to work to preserve other means of listening.

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Emma González’s silence at the March for Our Lives podium was almost precisely 4′33″.