A Year of Necessary Music

Last week I published an opinion piece in the Guardian about Spotify’s new minimum for paying out royalties – the subject of a post here on Dada Drummer Almanach a month ago. (You guys get everything first! Thank you for subscribing.) The response has been a bit intense. It reminds me of the first time I wrote about Spotify royalties, all the way back in 2012… not only cause I am once again surprised by the level of interest generated by the topic, but because the specific pushbacks I’ve been getting are almost exactly the same.

These complaints fall into a few categories - there are the, “You don’t know anything about the real music business” ones. The “90s are over get used to it” ones. The “Just don’t use streaming then if you don’t like it” ones. But in a way they all boil down to essentially this, which came in via the Guardian comments section:

Something along these lines is always among the responses I get to any critique I publish about streaming – the problem must be with my music, because if more people liked it I’d earn more. How can I deny it? But what this misses is the issue of scale. Not all music is meant for all people – that’s pop music, and that’s not what I make. Neither do most musicians. Music that isn’t pop is actually a thing – it’s not just unpopular pop. There are innumerable genres of music that don’t attempt to speak to everyone at once. Streaming technology can serve all these musics, but the way it is currently designed for compensation rewards only music that can function “at scale.” That leaves a lot of music without a sustainable platform in the current technological moment. And yet that music needs to be sustained – for different audiences’ sake, as well as the musicians who make it.

I could argue with these reply guys, but what I’ve learned is they don’t care about my answers any more than they care about my music. So perhaps a better response is simply to share more music for which they also probably assume there is “no audience.”

Regular readers of this newsletter know that at the end of nearly every entry, I include a link to some music I’ve been listening to. That means this is all music that has an audience. I can personally guarantee it.

John Cusack in High Fidelity

When I put the various 2022 links together, it made for a good weird playlist, my “wrapped” if you will. That seems an exercise worth repeating – so here’s a 2023 list of similarly necessary music. You’ll find experimental cello music, group improvisation, post punk, folk song, outsider classical composition, ambient electronics, and even some sad bastard music along the lines of my own brand of indie rock.

When the Roses Come Again, by Daniel Bachman

Vidrio, by Titanic

Kath Bloom and Loren Connors

Matana Roberts, Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden…

Night Visiting Songs, by Charlotte Grieg

Don Cherry, Eternal Now

I Am Not There Anymore, by The Clientele

My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, by Anohni and the Johnsons

Dredd Foole & The Din, Songs in Heat

Picture of Bunny Rabbit, by Arthur Russell

Archangel Hill by Shirley Collins

Jerusalem, by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru

Since Time Is Gravity, by Natural Information Society

Scree, Jasmine on a Night in July

Maria del Mar Bonet, Miró

Širom, Rural Underground

Under an Endless Sky, by Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States of Alchemy

Jon Hassel, Vernal Equinox

Meg Baird, Furling