I hate myself for loving you...
Free column today. If you’re one of my free subscribers, can you consider upgrading to a paid account? It really will make my Christmas (and yours) merry. $5 a month for access to all 3 columns a week. Plus 2 years of archives.
Deal? Please? Cool….
I don't like it when something or someone has power over me. It rankles.
Spotify has power over me. And I'm getting increasingly upset about it.
In many ways....Spotify is an absolute dream. It's every record store you ever visited in your entire life, in the palm of your hand. In seconds you can pull up just about any song or full album you'd care to name. You can have the music pour out of speakers at home, or in planes, trains, and automobiles. All for the less than the price of a single CD each month. It's a ridiculous bargain that of course comes with a catch. Which is that is has almost single-handedly wrecked the music industry.
And I'm not just talking about the obvious things. Like how the literal pennies it doles out to artists keeps them forever starving. What we're paying for is the salaries and infrastructure of the streaming services themselves....and things like $5 kerbillion dollars for Joe Rogan's bro-loving podcasts. Artists are essentially giving away their music for free. Even the CDs bands still hawk at gigs for gas money frequently go back in the van because most people don't have CD players to play them anymore. Spotify is Napster with a cleaner front-end and better lawyers. It's legalized robbery. Only 1% of the top 1% make anything more than fucking bar-tab money from these services. It’s organized crime.
And I subsidize it every single day.
I've got pretty eclectic tastes. Hundreds of different artists, in many different genres. I used to look forward to new music from just about everybody on my CD shelf. I knew when it was coming. I could hold it in my hands. Read the liner notes...the lyrics....see which songs the bass player wrote. Now? With the demise of music magazines and the music press in general, I have no idea what is getting released when. Announcements get lost in the fog of 24/7 social media. Artists I've followed for years have new records that I knew nothing about. And even if I find them with my thumbs...who wrote the songs? Who is playing the lead guitar on track 3? Where is that piano coming from? Who produced? Where was it recorded? There's no back cover anymore? No lyrics? No insert? How can I treat it as new when I don't have to pry the wrapper off with my teeth?
I mean...fuck Dickens and all that....but he was right. It's always the worst of times when it's the best of times. I used to stand in line. Now I wait for files to “drop”. Is that some lame-ass shit or what?
I'm old enough to still remember the days when record players were engineering marvels. You could pile half a dozen LPs on top of each other, and they'd hover above the record playing, and the needle would get to the end of the grooves and pick itself up, slide out of the way as the next record dropped, and magically find its place on track one. In the early 80s you even had vertical record players that could play both sides of an album....but these things were beyond the mechanical grasp of most stoners and nobody I knew ever bought one. I can remember guys coming home after seeing Bob Geldolf with no eyebrows in the Pink Floyd The Wall movie, and putting on the record in front of a large late-night bowl, only moving when Roger Waters decided to break the music into sides 2, 3 and 4, and could not imagine these guys today trying to find the record on their phones and figuring out how to cast it to a blue-tooth speaker. It might break their baked brains.
So I guess this is the "hey you kids get off my lawn" portion of the column, where I tell you how much better things used to be and how you used to be able to hear guitars on top 40 radio. The first gift I ever bought a girl was a cassette of AC/DC Back in Black. Gave it to her up in the bleachers at a basketball game. She was touched and it sparked a beautiful friendship that lasted at least a month, serious stuff back then. What can a poor boy do now? Send her a gift subscription and tell her to check her email?
We used to drive around with literal suitcases filled with cassette tapes for the car. Moods changed, and you had to be ready. We'd go to house parties and immediately zero in on the music collection. Should I stay or should I go? Access to another’s record collection is like being allowed to peer into their soul. If some strange dude nobody really liked owned a copy of Darkness on the Edge of Town or Quadrophenia we’d start making excuses for him. “Billy? Nah….you just gotta get to know him…he’s alright…”
But so much for all that. My OWN music is on Spotify, and I see firsthand how much money I don't make from it. So, with my own monthly membership, I am helping them rip me off, which is a bit like them telling me to go fuck myself and me trying to figure out how by googling "how do I fuck myself?"
And I am going to keep bitching about Spotify while my membership remains set on auto-renew.....so I'm basically what's wrong with the world. I'm why we can't have nice things.
As the great Joan Jett once said….
I hate myself for loving you…
And you don’t believe me you can pull the song up on Spotify and listen to it. Right this second. And if you do you’re gonna say “hey…..isn’t that the Sunday Night Football song?”
Why yes. Yes it is. And the reason Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Joan Jett allowed them to use and bastardize it into a charmless piece of chuff sung by as assortment of interchangeable blonds is because she needs to pay her bills, and she can’t because Spotify sucks.
In a bit…
—tf