[FRIAM] Steaming services

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

Along the same lines as my comment on "gatekeeping" <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping> at vFriAM, I had an excellent conversation with a bartender on Saturday. When we got around to discussing the purposes of music, including a debate about moshing/dancing and how that physical activity, that kata, *interferes* [♯] with one's music processing, he suggested I try out Sunn O))) <https://sunn.southernlord.com/> [♭]. Along the same lines as Dave's rendering of mysticism, the rise of predictive processing, fixed state disorders, and audial illusions in understanding cognition, our expectations are the overwhelming drivers for how we listen to music.

In line with Jon, I feel anything that inhibits my access to interestingness as claustrophobic, including any pressure to "dumb down" or pander to those outside whatever clique I'm currently in. (E.g. I saw a metal critic poke fun at my favorite doom with "Are they trying to go as slow as possible?" -- If you don't grok doom ... don't listen to doom, you moron. Go back to your speed-growl and leave us alone.)

In line with Marcus, however, connection to the artist is obviously important to some subset of musical purpose. This bartender has written for 2 bands and considers himself a full member of 2 others. In promoting his music to me, he begged off telling me about his earlier work (he's a kid, actually ... like 25 years old pfffft), he said it was im-/pre-mature and not very good. But, in my mind, the arc of the artist(s) is way more important than the finished product, much the same way the compositional arc of a single tune is more important than any one part or voice. 

On-demand streaming services debilitate both those fulcrums. On the other hand, curation can go a long way to both expanding and homogenizing the paths through the graph. When curation starts sounding/feeling like promotion and marketing, I inevitably lose interest. But when the curator authentically digs what they're curating (even if it's only to identify why some thing is so aweful), I stay hooked.


[♯] By which I mean both reinforcing and inhibiting, transmission to and from, between the source and the receiver. Maybe "mediates" is a better word ... but I hate the way "media" is used these days.

[♭] I'm a big fan of interactive/live noise, not so much pre-recorded noise.

On 8/22/21 11:46 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> On 8/22/21 8:28 AM, ⛧ glen wrote:
>> It does both, perhaps counterintuitively. I'd argue it facilitates traffic between demes/cliques, but inhibits the content of demes/cliques.
> 
> I am a sucker for local AM radio when traveling... to put my finger on the pulse of the locals, as it were.  What music they listen to, what their news-of-choice leans toward, and what they are buying/selling/trading with one another.  "If you can hear this station, what you hear *might* be relevant to you *right now*"
> 
> When internet radio stations started popping up (KTAO in Taos being an early adopter), I found myself sampling these local stations around the world... one in particular being in Australia (forget the call sign/town) and having a strong familiarity to the myriad country AND western stations up and down the rockies and out into the plains of the US West, but with an Aussie accented DJ of course.    Unfortunately it didn't replicate the experience because I was patently NOT there... I could NOT plan a detour to catch the local farmer's market or check out a local joint (where there burgers would have pineapple and plum sauce instead of pickles and ketchup)...   But what I was most struck by was that they were playing 95% American Mainstream (C&W) music and referencing OUR icons of music deeply/exclusively.   Only occasionally would I catch a "local" artist (Australeonesia?)  I felt simultaneously expanded and constrained.
> 
> When I moved to a small city/big town on the border (DouglasAZ/Agua Prieta SA) our first neighbors were a Mexican American family who were one of the local bands that played every venue, mostly rock but with their own ranchera stylization often.   They would sit around evenings playing a wide range of music, including the father, a sister and a younger brother (maybe 5? too young to participate in the public events).   We moved away from that house within 6 months but I continued to hear them the whole 8 years I lived in that town, they probably played at both of my proms and any other public musical event I might have attended.   What never crossed my mind (until now) was that for the 4 years I was a Disc Jockey, I never heard them play on air, nor was I motivated/inclined to seek them out.  Why not?  Linda Ronstadt (100 miles away) was hitting it big from similar roots, why not them?   I guess because they weren't on the Billboard Top 100 charts they sent us every month,
> telling us what was hot and what was not?  They had no route to get known beyond the local bars and public venues.  
> 
> Both of my daughters partnered with aspiring musicians as they came of age.  There have been several bands involved and those partners even occasionally found time to make music together (though never recorded together).   These bands never made it beyond local recognition...   "Billy and the Belmonts", "Oktober People", "Weapons of Mass Destruction" all come to mind.   And yet one of them was going on a self-promoted tour of the west when we were in Berkeley, CA for a year and in fact, totally by coincidence, had gotten booked at an Irish Pub ("Starry Plough") just a short walk from our apartment (actually probably the closest watering hole to our apartment).   It was just off Telegraph, right on the Oakland border (as was our back fence)...  in what other world (pre/sans Internet) could a band like that find a pub like that?   While Terry (daughter's now husband) had the resources (as a Technical College instructor) to own a van, mix their own music on Garage Band, cut
> their own CDs and print their own T-shirts (aka Merch)...  They would have been sleeping in his van the whole way (instead of being gifted couch-stays by their nascent mySpace fan base) and would have had to make a LOT of phone calls and snail-mail inquiries to secure the venues they were able to do online through the digital social networks circa 2005.   Their music was out there for sampling on MySpace and while all that (the bands as well as MySpace) are all defunct and rotting away in digital history, it made it a lot further than I think it could have in the days of vinyl or cassette tape.   I do still have CDs of their music and it is ripped to my hard drive as well... but can't find any of it to speak of online 8 years after dissolution.  My t-shirts are all rags now, they were made on budget blanks I'm sure.
> 
> Terry (of WMD/Belmont fame) is now the bass player for Queen Chief in Portland OR.  Their preferred streaming platform seems to be bandcamp.com which seems to be *trying* to provide a direct route from artist to audience, but unspurprisingly Alexa doesn't support Bandcamp and while they also stream on Spotify, my understanding of that service is that they won't see any significant income from that stream.   I don't believe any of the band members depends on the band for a significant source of income, Terry certainly doesn't, though it may support his recording/instrument collecting habits somewhat.  
> 
> They just released a couple of singles this year.  A stoner rock rendition of Hank William's classic "Kaw-Liga <https://open.spotify.com/album/2U88jwoi9ZKRHjTgG1YIDu>" and their own In my Eyes <https://open.spotify.com/album/1oaVT5IS8jIm6xpJ2RlH2o>.
> 
> Spotify refers me right away to bands (I presume equally struggling/indie) like King Black Acid, Royal Fuz, RZRS, and Hurriah.    While I like QC's lyrics and musical "style" it is all too high energy for my old ears/soul, so I tend to listen to a new track or album a few times when it comes out, but don't have it ripped to my car sound system nor pull it up regularly (though In my Eyes is thumping/chanting away in the background as I type this)...
> 
> Mary's son (who edits bills for the TX legislature by day) is also a drummer in an indie band in Austin and they eschew streaming in favor of the (semi) classic medium of CDs and live-shows.   They gently dissolved last year after a 10 year run...  the quarterly live-shows in various dive-bars were what was keeping them going (emotionally/creatively?)...   and they also have all hit middle age.
> 
> Digital/Online/Streaming has definitely changed the fitness landscape for aspiring independent artists and for music buffs.  Mary's son is a total movie/music buff and shares his listening time between classic vinyl and the flood of new music coming to him over his own social networks from friends of friends of friends who are independent singer-songwriters/bands.
> 
> I like Glen's gesture toward analyzing this in terms of network/graph models...  I think the data is out there for anyone to gather/study up to a point.   Josh's (Mary's son) collection of vinyl and hand-cut CDs probably is hidden for the most part from any database, though he *might* not be astute enough to turn off Google/Android's "what music is playing right now" service... maybe what he listens to is being analyzed on some Google Brat's Friday Project right now?   He *hates* Alexa, Amazon, and especially Amazon Music.
> 
> It's a wild new world, even though everything feels pretty much the same (only different).


-- 
☤>$ uǝlƃ