Spotify Wrapped - Music - Forums : Best Ever Albums

LTSings

Gender: Female

LTSings wrote:
Who determines what is cool?

Skinny wrote: Me.

@Skinny

OK. I couldn't care less about whether anyone thinks I'm cool or not, but I was just thinking that different people might have different ideas and opinions about what is cool.

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

LTSings wrote:

LTSings wrote:OK. I couldn't care less about whether anyone thinks I'm cool or not, but I was just thinking that different people might have different ideas and opinions about what is cool.

I think you may be missing the point here a bit. I didn't mean to suggest that subscribing to Spotify was "uncool" in itself, or that it causes people to become uncool; rather it distorts your own perceptions of what is cool and what isn't by degenerating music into a mere service, after it was already degenerated into a mere commodity when physical formats were the only available option. The music industry is ultimately to blame for this, but the question of "blame" has little to do with the perceptual and cognitive distortion. Eventually you reach the point where you no longer perceive the music as having much worth in itself, and after that you stop seeing it as something that defines you and/or your personal aesthetic, and more as a convenient means of distracting yourself from other things.

That isn't to say it's better that music come in the form of a physical artifact, particularly since it's far greener for it not to. It does take an effort of intellect to treat MP3 or FLAC files as if they were physical possessions though, and that's unfortunate, especially since downloads are potentially the best deal for the musicians involved. But it can be done. Whereas, streaming services don't really give you that option — you get a vast selection, but that too distorts your perception of the music's value. There's too much available; you can't get your head around the sheer amount of it, it all gets lost in a huge sea of product. You begin to assume that anything you might become curious about will simply be there, and sure enough it usually is. Everything becomes common, and for most people, "common" is the antithesis of "cool," at least in terms of music and (arguably, other forms of) art. But again, your tastes haven't changed, your perception of music itself is what changed.

I'm also not saying that it's better to be a hipster snob and reject streaming services and only listen to hot-pressing vinyl on 70's-era hi-fi gear. I mean, sure, that's what I do, but nobody should treat me as some sort of exemplar. Still, folks should probably read some Albert Camus or (if you can stand it) Jean-Paul Sartre to help restore their belief in the transcendent quality of music, and perhaps art in general. And every once in a while, yes, absolutely, go out and buy an LP, or a CD, or a cassette, even if you're not sure you'll like it. (Don't buy flexidiscs though, those things are shit.) Maybe it will seem dumb and silly as you're doing it, but sometimes it's that feeling of having it that reaffirms your sense of its real value.

LTSings

Gender: Female

@MadhattanJack Whatever format people want is OK with me. I use Spotify, buy downloads, and sometimes buy CD's too, but I buy more downloads than CD's. And I'm very thankful for Spotify, because if it weren't for Spotify and YouTube I'd be exposed to a lot less music than I am, and I'd be missing out on a lot of stuff I really enjoy, and I'd also be buying a lot less music because I would never have heard a lot of the stuff I buy in the first place without Spotify and YouTube.

Skinny

birdman_handrub.gif

lol i just meant that drake and the counting crows (and craig finn and steely dan to a lesser extent) are dorks who make music for dorks
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craola

crayon master

Location: pdx

Skinny wrote:

lol i just meant that drake and the counting crows (and craig finn and steely dan to a lesser extent) are dorks who make music for dorks

embrace the dork, skinny. there's nothing cooler than a dork who don't mind.
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Arthurknight

Hi

Gender: Male

Age: 28

MadhattanJack wrote:

But again, your tastes haven't changed, your perception of music itself is what changed. I'm also not saying that it's better to be a hipster snob and reject streaming services and only listen to hot-pressing vinyl on 70's-era hi-fi gear. I mean, sure, that's what I do, but nobody should treat me as some sort of exemplar.

I'm sorry jack but this diatribe is a bit much don't you think? You posit that people using spotify represents a kind of total spiritual disconnection with the music they're engaging with, but that very argument has been recycled repeatedly, most recently before Spotify when people switched from CDs to direct download mp3s. Likewise, this was a commonplace criticism of people who didn't play "their" music in the car but absentmindedly chose a radio-station at random for background noise. While an apt descriptor for many a Spotify user, this characterisation has had capital for years and represents a kind of unwillingness to accept that to most people music just isn't that important.

I for one started using Spotify mid-last year after our government started aggressively blocking torrent sites and I had become dissatisfied with the iTunes -> Apple Music transition. I still have my local files library and I still buy digital albums off Bandcamp, because, unsurprisingly, Spotify doesn't have everything. However, I've actually really enjoyed making playlists on the platform, both because it has encouraged me to listen more broadly and because it's given me that sense of ownership you prize so highly in your vinyls (but yes, nothing will beat stumbling upon a rare favourite in a record crate).

The reality is that very few people proportionally deeply care about music like we do. Due to the intragenerational ways young people specifically engage with music nowadays being substantively different – having been brought up with the internet from a young age; everything being a fingertip away an absolute given to them – It can feel to us like something has been lost. It really hasn't.

Kids these days are still playing individual songs on repeat 50 times over, making little playlist (mixtapes) for friends, and wearing band t-shirts as a non-verbal way of trying to find their people at parties. Those of us here will continue to collect physical formats, talk about speaker specifications, make gimmicky lists and write articles for nobody about our favourite niche artists, but these instrumental differences in engagement have little to no bearing on the capacity of music (or art) to engender the sublime.

Skinny

birdman_handrub.gif

craola wrote:

embrace the dork, skinny. there's nothing cooler than a dork who don't mind.

Oh, I don’t mind. I’m extremely secure in myself. Not insecure at all. Not me. No siree! Here I am, just going about my day, all carefree. So secure.
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2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.

MadhattanJack

Just to end the list

Gender: Male

Arthurknight wrote:

I'm sorry jack but this diatribe is a bit much don't you think? You posit that people using spotify represents a kind of total spiritual disconnection with the music they're engaging with, but that very argument has been recycled repeatedly, most recently before Spotify when people switched from CDs to direct download mp3s.

I'm not so sure I do posit that, though. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you might become less invested in the music, and being less invested could lead to you treating the music as having less intrinsic value, and at that point you might experience something that could be described as a "spiritual disconnection," though that's not what I would call it. I'd probably go with something like "the kid-in-a-candy-store effect."

But the context here is much less dramatic than that — we're really only talking about how you might see your listening statistics and think you've lost something, whether it be "coolness" or maybe just that ephemeral feeling of belonging to a certain musical genre or trend or "movement," because you've been drawn into listening to too much unrelated stuff... even though that might actually be a good thing, objectively speaking.

As for me, I've done the free trials on Apple Music, Amazon Music Unlimited, and Spotify, and honestly, it was really nice being able to root around in there and listen to all those albums I either hadn't heard before, or hadn't heard all of, or hadn't heard in years. I could probably gripe about how all my activity was being logged and data-mined and fed into some obtrusive algorithm, but that didn't really bug me so much. (And for what it's worth, Apple Music doesn't even seem to bother with the algorithm, they basically just tell you what to listen to, so at least Spotify is better than that.)

Quote:

Those of us here will continue to collect physical formats, talk about speaker specifications, make gimmicky lists and write articles for nobody about our favourite niche artists, but these instrumental differences in engagement have little to no bearing on the capacity of music (or art) to engender the sublime.

You're almost certainly right about that. At the same time, I do think it depends a lot on the person, and in particular, how effective the streaming service might be at drawing the person away from something they might perceive as sublime or transcendent, if that's what it's trying to do — algorithmically or otherwise.

Arthurknight

Hi

Gender: Male

Age: 28

MadhattanJack wrote:

But the context here is much less dramatic than that — we're really only talking about how you might see your listening statistics and think you've lost something, whether it be "coolness" or maybe just that ephemeral feeling of belonging to a certain musical genre or trend or "movement," because you've been drawn into listening to too much unrelated stuff... even though that might actually be a good thing, objectively speaking.

I think this is a more reasonable position, albeit a much narrower criticism than your previous message suggests. I would preface though by saying that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations are considerably less intrusive than its critics often imply; it’s very easy to not engage with it at all. Some friends of mine who swear by “discover weekly” argue that it trains itself to your taste moreso than changes it, but I remain sceptical and actively avoid it completely.

But if we’re focusing our scope from “everyone” to the people who are in the know, who care, I can see how acquising even a little bit to having your music programmatically fed to you changes how you engage with it. You didn’t find that artist, you didn’t dig for it, it was just put into your ears by no-one. In such a world what you listen to doesn’t connect you with a community.

I do think this is a very outside-looking-in perspective though; this is not as prevalent a problem as it may appear. A more prescient criticism of Spotify’s ubiquity — a ubiquity represented by the advent of “wrapped day” — is how they and major labels fuck over musicians at every opportunity. In my view, music becoming a “service” changes very little for the listener — or at least what it does change can be easily resisted — but irrevocably crushes the livelihood of artists the world over.