How can we save music?

Orienting Questions
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As we increasingly move to digital spaces and trans-act in online economies, it’s essential that we don’t fall into habits of isolated consumption,
lest we forget there are human beings on both ends of every song: the people who make it and the people who listen to it, support it, and amplify it.

“The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.”‍ - Frank Zappa

Music has been a fundamental part of human life since time immemorial, pivotal to the way we form culture, convey feeling, and identify with one another.

Emotional exchanges and connections that happen through music remain irreproducible by anyone besides humans: chance conversations at record stores, the sweaty camaraderie of a punk show mosh pit, thanking an artist to her face, and conversely, hearing from a fan that your music means something to them. Add to that the power of human-to-human music discovery — the whispered lineage of “my god, have you heard this yet?” These are those eyebrows.

zappa optimized

But we live in an era where the convenience of tech shouts louder than our friends. Torrenting incited a paradigm shift that people still welcome wholeheartedly. Suddenly, people had the ability to access all music for free within the comforts of home, and that level of convenience is not so easily surrendered.

Streaming – the industry’s bid to recapture some of the immense value being lost to platforms like Napster and The Pirate Bay – formally cemented the notion that music should be free or almost free. In turn, the cratedigging hip-hop producers of yore no longer had to use actual records. Everything was available online, and now much simpler to sample and arrange.

Today, on the biggest streaming platform in the world, 98.6 percent of artists are earning an average of $36 per quarter.

“Many of [us] likely want to support artists, at least in theory, but they usually wind up falling short,” says Shawn Reynaldo in his excellent First Floor newsletter. “Why? Because they’ve been led to participate in systems that were set up to capitalize on their apathy.”

Streaming platforms promise listeners personalization but the tradeoff is isolation. By obscuring other people’s behavior in their platforms, they remove opportunities for shared meaning. They remove the human element that’s so inherent to music, and they force us to gather on exploitative social platforms detached from the music itself.

CURATION IS CARE

Apathy is made easier when platforms decontextualize the artists by prioritizing playlists and lean-back listening. It doesn’t matter what you’re streaming as long as you’re streaming, they say – the ‘who’ doesn’t matter so much.

Without the context, we lose the narrative thread – maybe we even forget there are people behind the music at all.

But for some reason, people still collect physical records, and that means something. Whether it’s the paradox of choice, the longing for something tactile, the restored context that’s abstracted by digital formats, the artwork, the higher sound quality, the collector’s mentality, the physical scarcity, better-than-streaming pay for artists, or an attempt to transcend the cursed algorithms that perpetuate our listening bubbles.

Economies are built around this essence of sharing and discovering music with other people. Record shops sell them, listening bars play them, selectors mix them on dancefloors, friends message each other songs.

Cratedigging is not simply an act of seeking and buying. It’s a hunt for DNA. It’s a belief that curation is care. It’s an adventure outside the closed walls of our streaming platforms and into the hearts and minds of other human beings.

Cratedigging is a lens into our collective love and appreciation for music – to share and discover with other people.

How can we unlock this deep-rooted love to deconstruct an extractive music industry and rebuild it with systems of care?

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MacEagon, it feels timely that just last night I finally read, “Sacred Servers,” which speaks of similar themes. he discusses the apathy, enervation, and isolation many experience due to the handful of centralized platforms we have learned to frequently pass our time with–in large part because we’re good at adaptation. Zach says:

I’ll be direct: we have given so much energy and intention to a handful of centralized platforms that it’s become metaphysically dangerous. These tech companies are like bootstrapped archons, drawing power from the passion and humanity we share to their sites, and from the continued illusion that this is how it must be…It’s not bad that we share what we do, as much as we do. It’s beautifully human. This need to share is something we’ve always had, now transposed to a digital space because humans are good at adaptation…But it is awful how our experiences are commodified, contorted, cut up, and traded. That we cannot share with one another intentionally, but must make an offer to a company’s algorithm. That this algorithm organizes everything into a feed whose curation and shape is intended to draw out our most intense emotions, with the intention to make us vulnerable and easy to manipulate…There’s something simple and pure in all that we give to these sites and the power that this raises. And there’s something simple and vile in the profane ways the platforms desecrate it.

While Zach largely references social media platforms here, music apps are subsumed under the category. (aside: I know GreyMatter is striving to bring back the unifying, participatory and communal ethos from which music comes and I would personally love to hear an update there - how is it going, where is the journey currently - maybe here or in another post, whatever feels right, relevant and sensible).

for me, in your post, and in Zach’s, i would argue the chasm that is screaming at me is a simple one: our body, our soma, and the critical bodymind* unity which we have learned to neglect, forget, reject while we utilize technology. technology is incapable of recuperating or imitating this phenomenon central to the human condition, that our body has thoughts and emotions too, not just our mind, and it not only requires recognition, but expression and affirmation too. You nod to it yourself:

the longing for something tactile, the restored context that’s abstracted by digital formats

there is so much power in lived experience when it is tactile, tangible. technology forces us to abstract our mind from our body, to fragment and fracture the bodymind unity, and it does so the most while we are using it. think about those of us who do remote work, or sit limp at a computer and desk most of the day while we work – how often do we include our body in our work (outside of a purely virtual movement class such as yoga or dance)? are we typically invited to include our physical body? in some spaces the breathe is called upon for a few moments, but largely my hunch is no - because if many of us listened to our bodymind’s messages, would we be conducting such work at all, or for the long hours that we do? if we did, we would largely be unable to complete and satisfy our remote work tasks and responsibilities and rationalize to our employer why we’re paid at all.

as a reasonably healthy 31 y.o., I regularly feel tension and pain in my neck, my shoulders, and my wrists from sitting at a desk and computer. what do we lose in ourselves, in our bodymind unity, when we neglect the discomfort, pain, and needs our bodymind is communicating? what does it indicate that it is common for people who work at a computer to set a ~30 minute timer throughout the work day just as a reminder to get up, stretch our bodies and our eyes, take deeper breathes, because they tend to be impaired and inhibited while at a computer. how do we reconcile that so many livelihoods rely on this pattern of work to not only earn well and support themselves, but make meaning in their lives too? Zach shares:

The web is intangible, but our bodies feel the full, physical weight of it: tired eyes, slumped shoulders, a racing heartbeat, and a dopamine rush from a buzz on our thigh.

for those of us who have learned to interact with technology in this limp yet rigid way, we’ve adapted and learned to neglect our bodymind’s messages, and this carries through when we listen to music digitally, often in isolation by ourselves at a desk. and music, which is such a visceral phenomenon, which alights vibrations within us that we can only expel through the sharing of dance, is not invited to such an environment. how many of us can still even surface the visceral urge to enjoy music in community, to enjoy music through dance because of the number of years or decades that have passed without it being a custom of the computer culture while we sit down to use technology?

what are the lasting effects of a relationship to technology that requires us to neglect our bodymind’s messages if we are to go on using it? and will the trend paralyze us completely - numb us - unable to listen to the bodymind messages because we can’t even read them? inculcated to ignore and push on? what does our lived experience miss when we listen to music digitally but cannot experience it with our bodies and in community with others?
my answer to this post is a cratedigging excursion to vinyl stores in Brooklyn and Manhattan this summer…

Respect and love and inspiration to movement practitioners in the Kernel community such as Reyna Perdomo, Antonio Maia, and Jeanne Bloch whose recent lifes’ works attempt to surface such awareness, and the discomfort and dissonance of the bodymind that technology has accelerated so greatly.

Note* I use the idea of bodymind unity from Dr. Gabor Maté’s ‘The Myth of Normal.’ According to Maté, the concept is to be used as one word, and ‘connection’ should not follow the term as it would suggest the capability and the idea that to detach or disconnect the two were possible.

Note I might come back to edit and refine this post to weave my thoughts together tighter, but here are first thoughts.

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Firstly @aliyajypsy I’m sorry it’s taken so long to respond to this wonderful reply. Thank you for engaging with these thoughts! The issues you invoke are so real, and I love the expansive connection from extractive tech platforms to the loss of the bodymind.

It reminds me of a meditation teacher I used to connect with, who suggested that humans tend to balance their attention toward the mind, with about 80% of our time spent in that space and only 20% within the body (and honestly even that ratio may be generous). He also suggested that the ideal split is likely a complete inversion of that ratio, which is essentially unattainable for those of us spending our days hunched and bothered in front of our computer screens.

I love this quote:

I share your concern and mourning of the ongoing loss of the bodymind (I like this pairing), and I commend your cratedigging excursion to vinyl stores as a response :slight_smile:

and this excerpt from Zach is amazing:

I fully agree. Music is wonderful because it can transcend ideological quarrels that are further polarized by tech platforms whose ultimate interest is more time, more attention, at any and all costs. Ultimately I think digital technology – the internet specifically – is an incredibly powerful connective tool (as music is), and at its best it can facilitate meaningful relationship that spans digital and IRL (hopefully with a focus on the latter).

That kind of speaks to my attraction to web3 + decentralization, and that’s my hope with the crate coalition, too, that it becomes a community/idea that spills into record stores, listening bars, music venues, elsewhere in our lives. Because I believe that music and the internet can bring us together in beautiful ways when structured and aligned toward equitability + connection. And removing music/art/ourselves from the purview of those extractive, centralized platforms is a paramount – though exceedingly difficult – endeavor.

Re: grey matter, it’s coming along :slight_smile: we recently received a small grant from lens protocol to integrate with their on-chain social graph, so we’re working on implementing that into the app. Our hope too is that the crate coalition can function as a community space that expresses the ways in which people – listeners, artists, curators, et al – like to connect, so that we can eventually move away from an imperfect home like Discord and create a less imperfect digital space that’s fully dedicated to music and the people that make/appreciate it :sunflower:

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What if technology could repurpose the role of listenership (our friends) in the music industry, enabling them to directly inform the market?

Streaming neglects the role that listeners play in artist development — artists need direct feedback from audiences in order to deliver more compelling narratives. Technology could be implemented in such a way that it enables a more direct feedback loop between listeners and artists.

If listeners were stakeholders in the music industry (they aren’t currently), this would certainly be true.

Token economies transform consumership into ownership, making user-owned networks possible.

Yes, I agree. Technology will never replace qualia or phenomenological experiences.

The concept of Enlightenment, which champions the rational understanding of the natural world, leads to authoritarian or fascist outcomes. This is because Enlightenment thinking is rooted in an anthropocentric worldview, one that equates human progress with the domination of nature through rational means. However, this perspective overlooks the essential truth that humans are intrinsically a part of the natural world, rather than separate entities seeking to control it.

The result of this epistemology? Human instrumentality as means to maximize profit.

This is a great idea! If @MacEagon were in Brooklyn, I’d suggest him to lead an excursion to Brooklyn Record Exchange.

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