CD sales were the optimal form of music distro because it was extremely easy to fence off stuff for kids and teens or send it to box stores versus stuff for adults, there used to be entire adult contemporary sections of stores. It was easier for artists to age into an adult sound if they grew out of their audience. Throwing everything online where there’s no barriers is just bad, it makes concerts bad, it makes artists unhappy with their own fans, it forces artists adults are supposed to care about to cater to 18 year olds forever, it’s just all wrong. Like I like Mitski, she seems to be an artist who has earned a real sense of maturity. Am I ever going to go to a Mitski show again? Probably not.
The vinyl resurgence sucks, we had a medium that was easy, cheap, profitable, and less damn wasteful than vinyl and we ruined it then took all the players out of cars so they’re obsolete to everyone but k-pop fans and parents who get music from Amazon algos. I’ll yell about the death of CDs forever because it exasperated a real death of adult culture and hope for a contemporary modernism. We’re never going to get another Norah Jones — Come Away With Me or Arthur Russell with this model and it doesn’t actually make anyone more money or even happier and it actively erodes the mechanisms of culture that are meaningful for distinctions between youth and adulthood.
The streaming era is cool because it’s a library of Alexandria, in literally no other medium of art would you expect to have access to almost every meaningful work in the western canon and far outside it too for $10 a month. It’s summarily terrible for actual music.
Someday soon they’ll wisen up and you won’t have access to complete catalogs or the search UI will stop working and you just won’t be able to digitally crate dig anymore. There will be some shitty “basic” streaming tier that’s for chart hits, contemporary, madonna, the Beatles, whatever else— and they’ll make you buy access to the good stuff ala cart via a “curator” tier. Or they’ll hide full access to the catalogs from everyone but employees who make payola playlists.
If you really like something you find online you have to start buying it or bugging labels for reissues. We’re just not going to have this forever, it doesn’t make anyone enough money. People used to make a living having shitty jobs in the record industry, not a great living but a real one, playing sessions for albums no one ever listened to or remembers but they still made more money than even popular records now because you had to buy them. When was the last time you heard a song on the radio that required a brass section of a live band?
We have to accept or go BACK to the acceptance that music is a medium that requires a pay-to-play component to make any sense for maintaining forward momentum or literally start like a New Deal era type of artists fund. Because this all sucks, it’s a joke, it’s insanely unsustainable unless the next 40 years is just going to be us talking about all the cool stuff that happened 40 years ago and music as a huge pillar of culture just falling off. I don’t want that.
Goddamn. Just give me back CDs. Give me newspapers. These things all worked 20 years ago. People could go to school and learn to play the saxophone or learn how to be a journalist and you didn’t have to be in the top 1% of your industry to make a halfway decent living. Music journalism only meant anything when it was an actual sales pitch, critics only had to be good when the risk was you wasting $15. I used to get so pissed when I picked up a CD with a cool cover and there was only one good song on it, now you only need one good song.
It’s all a pencil pushing scam. Like a cultural Ponzi scheme.
