Sage and Things

I'm not going to get into whether Spotify is evil here, but I viscerally disagree with the notion that easy and cheap access to All The Music* has been in any way bad for music as an artform

There is no generation in history with a broader musical taste than the generations who have grown up with and embraced the streaming model. Without access to a universal library of music, the musical lives of entire generations would be smaller and duller. Romanticising the era of physical media is fine and fun, but someone can record an album in their room and put it on the same global platform as the top-selling artists in the world with no need for a label or corporate contacts, and it can be listened to immediately by anyone in the world... that's the making of an artistic revolution.

Why would you want to go back to a time when people had ten cds? Why would you want to go back to a time when there were financial, locational, temporal boundaries, so many boundaries between you and finding the bands you love that in all likelihood you would never have overcome?

And to make it personal, people would never have found me and my music without the streaming model. So yes, it's a personal cause for me, but not just because I have the accessibility of the streaming model to thank for my livelihood. Almost all of my favourite music from the last ten years is made by acts I would never have found if it wasn't for streaming. That's why I don't romanticise the physical music era - I lived through the end of it, and it was more fraught with elitism and gatekeeping and corruption than the streaming era ever was.

we new albuming out here