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| Go to places like this and buy things. |
And, gang, buying records has really never been cheaper. I got used CDs of Sketches of Spain, Bill Evans with Joe La Barbera, and a Joey De Francesco record with Idris Muhammad, for $16. For $50 you could get enough of Miles Davis's catalog to occupy your listening for the rest of the year.
For the rest of the year— that's how you're supposed to listen: to one thing over and over for a long time, until it occupies a corner of your mind, soul, and musical ear. There's a limited amount of music you can take in that way. For a relative pittance you get all the music you can realistically absorb, and you're supporting an economy that is healthy for music.
And anybody serious about music needs to control their own library. You can't have your stuff be sitting on somebody else's server, with your access to it beholden to your internet connection, and the good graces of whatever corporate streaming platform. Beholden to the state of their licensing contracts, whether those are sufficiently lucrative for them. The streaming people don't care what business they're in, if they can figure a way of making more money without having to handle music, they'll take it, and you'll get stuck.
See Spotify— offering up virtual ownership of all the music in the world for $0 was a good way to drive everyone else out of business, but— shocking everyone— they can't figure out how to make that profitable. Right now it's dawning on them that they can do better with inflammatory podcasts, and are paying millions to broadcast “Joe Rogan” doing what he does. While cutting royalties for music.
They have a much better feel for that kind of “content” than for music, which is a more difficult product to predict. Listeners' attraction to music is less than tangible than a guy talking and deliberately trying to make you mad about nothing real in your life. Manipulating people to anger is a mechanical skill, and easily drowns out fulfilling, happiness-producing things like music.
See also the movie streaming platforms: having driven every video store in the country out of business, they've decided they don't like being in that business very much, and are cutting a lot of movies:
No s***.
“Consumers, the poor ridiculous saps, thought they'd be able to see what they want forever.”
No, they will screw you at the first opportunity, regardless of what promises they made about being “the future of movies” going in. The director Guillermo Del Toro recently made this statement:
So there's a larger picture. They tried to sell you an image of a future reality that benefitted them, where there would be no physical media, but then they decided there are easier ways of making money than giving you the things they promised. Thus you become stuck— potentially or actually— without access to art that is an essential part of your life.
You have to be a part of the money machine— you have to pay into it.
2 comments:
In his interview on the 80/20 Drummer Podcast (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUmXAZ_gFnA), Clarence Penn says that many of his younger students have trouble identifying the playing of canonical drummers, which he thinks might be because they aren't coming up listening to specific albums, holding the cover in hand and connecting the playing to a name.
I'll say for myself that over recent years having relied on streaming to access the canon, I can identify players but have trouble committing songs and their names to memory.
I've noticed that. Teaching some high school students in Washington recently, they played pretty well and were well informed about drumming, they just didn't know any basic names or albums.
Albums are still the thing, real artists make albums-- like actual CDs-- and think in album terms-- they're the thing that gets released, and physically sent in the mail to media-- press, radio.
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