 |
| Vacancy |
The rhythmical vibrations that move into my ear canal as I write this—
...these guys like to reduce music to that— empty data, oxygen, little more than an atmospheric disturbance. How could it have value?
—depend on a combination of incredible technical and economic features before they can successfully reach my brain. Set aside the two devices under my control that make the entire thing happen on my end (phone plus headphones), equally crucial is the streaming service (Spotify) and the hardware in their business that supply these sounds to me at the click of a button. (Let’s also ignore the background conditions of electricity supply and internet connectivity, and the general wealth and division of labor of my society that allows me to do this rather than eke out a subsistence farming a hostile Earth.)
Yes, incredible things are being done by the people who make his smart phone, headphones, his very wonderful and crucial streaming service, and a whole lot of other infrastructure. Many, many wonderful valuable people make it possible for him to fill his useless ears with whatever the hell people like him listen to [see below, and prepare for a shock].
Without the producers and musicians who created this specific song, I wouldn’t have had anything to listen to and all these other adjacent products and services lose some of their appeal.
Music: somewhat more appealing than just listening to dead air through headphones, he conceded.
Below all of this sits an economic relationship between all of us that permits this pleasant and concentration-enhancing consumption to take place. Modern global capitalism truly is astonishing.
Music: a pleasant and concentration-aiding enhancement to your meaningless mechanical existence in service of modern global capitalism.
There is plenty of economic value going on here, ultimately because I as a consumer value the state of affairs that comes from it enough to hand over other valuable resources to those who provide me with all of this. Hence I purchased the devices that let me do it, and pay the monthly fee to Spotify. In the background, they kick back some money to whoever maintains their servers as well as the artists who made the songs I’m consuming.
Lots of very valuable services being provided there. And my $7 monthly subscription which gives me virtual ownership of all the music in the world— astronomically below cost, because even Spotify itself only turned a profit for the first time this year— also, in a gesture of unfathomable beneficence, goes to pay even the artists who created the content at their own expense. The Spotify is generous.
But the individual song that currently streams directly into my consciousness (“The Hymn of Nivoria,” by NIVORO) has no economic value-
-perfectly illustrated at the end of its three minutes and seven seconds: Another song (“Your Gravity,” by Somna) takes its place.
After that, another and another and another until the playlist with all my favorite songs repeats — but even if it didn’t, I could keep going until I exhausted Spotify’s 100-million-plus songs (which would apparently take me some 300 years). I run out of patience, energy, or even life before I run out of songs. Ergo, the marginal song has no economic value for me. If I didn’t listen to this one, I’d listen to another.
It's a novel argument, that the music industry creates more music than I can ever listen to, therefore the product is valueless. Apply this same reasoning to cars, candy bars, or toilet paper to comprehend its staggering inanity.
It is also very important to this person's ideological project that music be non-specific. Spotify provides an unending river of stuff to go in my undiscriminating head holes, why should I value any individual item?
If, for whatever reason, “Hymn of Nivoria” had never been created or its creator had legally withheld it from Spotify’s catalog I would merely have consumed another, similar song. No big deal.
Yes, not all songs are the same, and I do suffer some marginal loss from never having heard Hymn of Nivoria, just as humanity as a whole would be shortchanged had Mozart never been born. But not really: We would have just listened to and admired something else.
Mozart is just a trademark to this guy. I don't know why he bothers conceding to bleeding reality that not all sounds are the same, just to say well, they really are all the same.
The specious reasoning is: if McDonalds didn't exist I could just go to Jack In The Box. Therefore McDonalds hamburgers should be free. And Jack In The Box. All hamburgers.
If marginal songs don’t have economic value, then their creators (i.e., musicians) are also disposable, a fact that is quickly dawning on the industry as music creation becomes yet another domain for large language models to conquer. Jeremy Engle for The New York Times asks the same thing: “Will AI Replace Pop Stars?”
And oh my God, what a glorious day that will be, when the all-conquering language models rightfully expel humans from every corner of capitalistic endeavor... except the one this guy clings to, with his little tech propagandistic blog posts. But he left a logical gap here, from music having infinitesimal value (see below) to it having no value, and transferring that from the musical product to the person who made it.
Strangely, it is also very important that music be made by people, and not business entities— which, in economic terms, it is. Individual humans are almost as devalued in this belief system as music is. Business entities exist and have rights. So music must be made by undeserving, no-rights having people.
Economically speaking, the pennies* the musicians earn per stream land somewhere between donations and rent-seeking.
* - Actually Spotify pays between 3-4 tenths of a single penny per stream for tracks exceeding a 1000 stream minimum threshold.
So, he is saying: Musicians, at best you are a beggar, at worst you are an encroaching exploiter, intervening between your music and its rightful listener with your demands for dirty money. These guys think they get to decide who gets money in this economic system, like they already claimed it.
I don't know why these psychopathic artist-hating freaks are always Swedish. Maybe they all live in the same apartment in Stockholm and infest each other's brains full time, intellectualizing about why they should get to profit off music for free. Sorry Sweden— I don't imagine there are a lot of them. 500 years ago cats like this would have occupied themselves devising ingenious methods of torture. Today they write this kind of stuff and fantasize about turning their brains into a microchip.
It all seems disturbing and weird because it is. Humans are repelled by this stuff. It's corporate propaganda servicing one narrow field of high tech industry, and the would-be oligarch human deformities that inhabit it. People like this dream of their money-spewing auto-jerkoff perpetual motion machine— software creating its own music endlessly for other software to listen to, lavishly spewing itself with software currency it invented. But human culture endures in the small way it always has.
Except it's not that small. There are still way more of us. Their hubris and their cluelessness about what humans want and need will be their end.
POSTSCRIPT: Spotify, having annihilated the music business as it once was, has decided it can't make enough money giving away all the music for free, and that it therefore does not want to be in the music business any more. Since spending money to develop and promote artists would be an absurdity to them (see above), they will instead give a quarter of a billion dollars to sweating right wing gashead Joe Rogan to shower the planet with addled inflammatory gibberish.
POST-POSTSCRIPT: Ha, I got self-conscious about my vitriol and toned down some of my language slightly. They don't call them rants for nothing. I'm just enjoying myself; language is a fun instrument for me, and I'll load it the hell up when I find a deserving target, like this particular creep.
10 comments:
Wow, just when you think you've seen it all, along comes another a**hole to prove that higher education (at least he claims to have degrees in Economics and Financial History from the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford) doesn't help you become a better person.
After all, if the music is of no value to him, why doesn't he just stop listening to it?
No, he wants to get it for free, just because he can.
Reminds me of Ayn Rand, who was on welfare later in life, despite her lifelong rage against it.
Just another hypocrite!
A few observations
1) From looking at his other articles, it looks like he’s a big crypto currency fan. of course he is. someone who thinks music is worthless also thinks abnormally large prime numbers are worth millions.
2) “this pleasant and concentration-enhancing consumption to take place.”
notice that music isn’t something you concentrate ON, it’s something that assists your concentration on something else, presumably japanese cartoons with school girls and tentacles in this guy’s case. This guy doesn’t like music. He doesn’t own a stereo. He’s never sat and paid attention to a song. Of course if i listened to the crap he listens to, i wouldn’t either.
3) He ends up endorsing merchandising as the proper way for musicians to make money. Your music is just an advertisement for your merch. There was a point when endless carping about who was or wasn’t a sellout was a real drag but we are completely the other way now. not only are you supposed to sell out, the music should be an afterthought to whatever crap you’re selling on top of it. I guess Kiss already did this but it’s still lame.
Michael-- I never figured that angle out-- "we want to listen to it, and exploit it commercially, but it's worthless!"
I tried to read Fountainhead once-- I hoped an "artist superman" like her would be not such a horrible writer. Got all her prose stylings from Stalin.
Xaque-- Yeah, he's on twitter and it's all crypto and standard libertarian/right wing stuff. You're exactly right about the level of his tastes.
That type of tech slimebag is happy to decree what's legitimate income for other people to make-- always in whatever area they haven't figured out how to expropriate yet.
Social security is not welfare. Ann Rand had a legitimate philosophical position. Enjoy your work
Have you read Ted Goia?
Sorry, you won't get much joy defending Ayn Rand around here. She did not agree with you about Social Security, she was philosophically opposed to it, but accepted it anyway. From an excellent piece on Open Culture, quoting the social worker assigned to help Rand when she needed lung cancer treatment:
Pryor was tasked with persuading Rand to accept Social Security and Medicare to help with mounting medical expenses.
I had read enough to know that she despised government interference, and that she felt that people should and could live independently. She was coming to a point in her life where she was going to receive the very thing she didn’t like.… For me to do my job, she had to recognize that there were exceptions to her theory.… She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world.… She could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn’t watch it. Since she had worked her entire life and had paid into Social Security, she had a right to it. She didn’t feel that an individual should take help.
Finally, Rand relented. “Whether she agreed or not is not the issue,” said Pryor, “She saw the necessity for both her and [her husband] Frank.” Or as Weiss puts it, “Reality had intruded upon her ideological pipedreams.” That’s one way of interpreting the contradiction: that Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, “has no practical purpose except to promote the economic interests of the people bankrolling it”—the sole function of her thought is to justify wealth, explain away poverty, and normalize the sort of Hobbesian war of all against all Rand saw as a societal ideal.
I haven't read much by Ted Goia, just some stuff online, and have interacted with him on twitter. Interested in his jazz standards book, haven't bought it yet.
Sorry missed your response. My
Mistake for not separating my response… Rands philosophy is legitimate. I might disagree but it’s a serious philosophical position.
Completely separate; SS is not welfare.
I hope you read Ted Goia be takes the Spotify , music issue seriously with some interesting insight
Counterpoint: It is not legitimate. Rand did not agree with you about Social Security, she believed it is welfare, but took it anyway.
Todd, your blog is fantastic. I’m an English teacher and bassist in New Orleans, and I find your musical savvy AND your prose style immensely satisfying. I’m convinced all these elements are connected: the rhythm of music, the rhythm of words, the rhythm of intelligent argumentation. Anyway, keep up the great work.
Thanks, you're very kind! Expressing myself with words has never been my thing-- I'm just learning how to do it, so I appreciate that!
Post a Comment