Not the best timing because I don’t want to come out critiquing Casey Newton and/or Platformer at this particular moment. He/it/they just made a brave move in abandoning Substack because the platform (this platform that I’m writing on and you’re reading on right now) wasn’t willing—to his satisfaction—to moderate content. (If you aren’t familiar with Casey/Platformer, I highly recommend the podcast he co-hosts, Hard Fork.)
Casey may end up being right about this one, so if we look up in a few months and Substack has turned into X, Parler, Truth Social, or the like, we can reevaluate the location of this very publication. But this post isn’t actually about that whole thing.
I actually want to take issue over a much less important topic, an argument Casey makes in his Jan. 18 article, “How Platforms Killed Pitchfork.” Casey is analyzing the reasons for the end of Pitchfork as we know it, and he makes the case that music criticism isn’t relevant in the age of streaming. He writes, “Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?” His point is that back when you had to gamble $18 on a CD to access new music—which was Pitchfork’s heyday—music journalism and reviews from a trusted source were valuable; they saved you money and the heartbreak of spending your limited funds on a bad album.
I think this argument is entirely wrong. Well, part of it is right. Reviews and criticism provided a valuable service in the pre-streaming era. Where the argument goes wrong is that criticism’s importance isn’t lessened in the streaming age. Casey presumes that because you can listen to anything you want virtually for free, you don’t need the Pitchforks of the world to guide your musical exploration. In my experience, the ability to listen to anything actually creates a whole different and more difficult echelon of challenge when it comes to finding new music (that you like).
Spotify, the other streamers, and the general relatively free availability of most recorded music past and present, leaves you lost in a sea of options, and finding new (to you) music (that you like) is more difficult than ever. There’s actually a part of me that misses the era when we each had a personal, limited music collection because that arrangement spurred/forced one to have a deeper relationship with the relatively few CDs you could afford. Of course it was really disappointing if you spent money on an album and it wasn’t good. But them’s the breaks; you pays your money and you takes your chances.
Spotify removes that financial risk, but it doesn’t obliterate the need for music criticism. If anything it makes it more necessary. You find yourself with practically (experientially, but not actually) infinite choice. It’s like being dropped into the middle of the ocean. You can swim, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a guided boat tour? A tour that shows you the parts of the ocean that are likely to appeal to you, and more importantly prevents you from drowning.
Music criticism = the boat
One objection to this point I can anticipate is that the recommendation algorithms do the job criticism once did. And maybe they will someday soon, but not yet. The algorithms up to this point are terrible at recommendations. If you, like me, have fairly specific musical taste (← understatement) Spotify’s recommendations are somewhere between useless and infuriating.
They are even, based on my anecdotal experience, racist. Like, Spotify can’t seem to process that I enjoy post-hardcore, pop, and hip hop. Spotify tries to keep me in my lane and it feels a lot like the way the music industry has always been highly racialized. Even as Spotify is holding the color line, it’s doing so poorly—serving me stuff that on a superficial level aligns to some other stuff I like, but that actually falls into the horrific uncanny valley of so-close-yet-SO-FAR-away. Example: that infuriating Camper Van Beethoven song—weird coincidence given the Substack’s Nazi problem alluded to above—which Spotify can’t seem to understand I don’t like. It’s TERRIBLE because the first verse is pretty okay, but then it hits that dumb novelty-song chorus and makes me want to die. Yet the bone-headed algorithm can’t seem to learn the subtleties of my taste.
I do find new music on Spotify, but it’s in spite of the algorithm, not because of it. My new music discoveries via Spotify have almost 100% of the time been by going to the “fans also like” section of an artist profile. I’m pretty sure that’s how I ran across Illuminati Hotties (for example) in the first place, and here’s a screenshot from the “fans also like” section of Sarah’s Spotify page:
And you know what? I do also like Remember Sports and Ratboys. Now there may be some algorithmic function here that aligns the recommendations I’m seeing based on my listening patterns, but I don’t think so. I think fans, i.e., people not algorithms, are creating the associations that generate these recs.
So…we need criticism to chart a path through the endless sea of music available to us. This is not a defense of Pitchfork, per se, as I only ever hate-read it to fill me with righteous indignation about how absolutely wrong they are almost all the time—except when they aren’t which is sometimes. But it is a defense of criticism, the death of which has much more to do with journalism’s greatly diminishing revenue prospects (a topic covered well on Casey’s podcast) than it does changes in the availability or price of music.
Am I just nitpicking? Maybe. Kind of. But I think I’m responding to Casey’s argument because one of the tings I intend to do on this Substack is a bit of music criticism, and in particular to create digestible playlists to introduce artists where I have greater than average knowledge and/or appreciation. That, to me, feels like a valuable service, one that I wish someone were doing for me and that I’m frequently trying to cajole my friends into doing.
More to come.
The need to bundle songs into a marketable package led to the “album” which led to the idea of the band essentially putting out a mix tape of new songs every few years or whenever the money ran out.
Now you can just skip forever among singles, which is fun! But there was more to the album format than just stacking radio hits together.
I always admired Pink Floyd for making that Animals album into a radio success. A 17 minute lead single ranting against A&E execs (what else), then two 10 minute psychedelic political diatribes. Radio gold!!!
Or Synchronicity from The Police which was a monster album in the 80s full of radio formatted hits but also had a theme and coherence that pulled it all together.