My whole catalog, direct to you
Stream online or download for offline listening
In recent days, I’ve been lost in thought over three separate but related news bites:
The Walrus published this piece called The Death of the Middle-Class Musician. Some of my peers are directly quoted in it.
Spotify’s CEO just invested $700m in a military AI startup. In response, some bands are choosing to remove their music from the platform.
An entirely AI-generated band just released three albums in six weeks, and already has twice my monthly listeners. The music isn’t great, but it is passable. It’s like CCR meets Khruangbin. If you didn’t know it was AI, you’d think “huh - not bad”. And the model will only improve. There are currently ~20,000 new songs on Spotify every day. With AI’s capability to out-pace humans, how long before there are a million new songs each day? How will artists build a live following if they can’t cut through the distribution channels?
It’s upsetting that my music is helping to bankroll war machine profiteers, and that the streaming experience has become one big mood playlist… audio wallpaper.
I’m not in a position to remove my music from streaming platforms, but the water looks unsettled, and I want to give people another option, should they desire it.
I am frequently asked what method of purchasing my music is most helpful. I usually recommend ordering an LP from a local record shop, or directly from my label Arts & Crafts. But not everyone wants LPs, and downloading music is clunky. The truth is that streaming music is convenient - I do it all the time.
My music will continue to be available on all major streaming platforms for the time being, but should you seek another approach, we can sidestep the multinational corporations.
For all paid subscribers to this newsletter, I’ve decided to make my catalog available directly using an extremely well designed and easy to use music-sharing app called [untitled].
[untitled] works great and should tie into all your regular listening interfaces on your phone, computer, bluetooth stereo or what have you. The whole thing shouldn’t take more than 3-4 minutes to set up…
How to stream/download my catalog directly:
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