an extended meditation on presence (we also have chickens)
All the Spotify Wrappeds have dropped, so for the past week I've had at least one student a day show me theirs - and ask to see mine.
They get very confused when I tell them I don't have Spotify. They get even more confused when I tell them I don't pay for any streaming services at all.
"But...how do you get music?!"
They look like they don't quite believe me when I tell them: The radio. SoundCloud. Bandcamp. Buying actual CDs and vinyl.
One even asked me if all that was "legal." My students actually think there's something sus about *not* paying a streaming service for access to music without ever actually owning it.
I'm aware that I, a late Gen X/early Millennial, grew up in a golden age for creative music acquisition. I had a bunch of vinyl as a kid, which transitioned rapidly to cassette tapes - and more importantly, cassette recorders, which one could use to make bootleg copies of friends' tapes and to record songs off the radio. When I was in high school and college, everyone knew how to rip and burn CDs and how to access Napster. My musical tastes and facility with technology formed in a world where freeing music and sharing it with friends was simply what one did.
Lately I've been reloading my digital music archives onto my phone. Again and again, I remember an album I believed I owned, only to realize I don't. It's always something I listened to obsessively in the 2010s - more than enough to convince me I own it - yet I didn't. I streamed it the whole time.
This Christmas, I'm stuffing my own stocking with used CDs of those albums. It has to be used CDs; most of them are so obscure I can't find digital versions anywhere and new enough they never existed on cassette or vinyl. Fortunately, the average used CD costs about as much as a month of Spotify.
I'll preface this next part by saying: Yes, you can write the whole thing off as me being An Old. But it's not just that. I used streaming music services for over a decade. I know how they work; I know how danged convenient they can be. I'm not just getting old; I'm getting concerned.
What concerns me is how *seriously* my students take Spotify.
For example: One kid was bummed out for two days straight because his Spotify Wrapped guessed his age is 41.
"Who are your most played artists?" I asked him.
"Eminem and Green Day," he said.
"Dude," I told him. "That's why."
The same student absolutely took this year's "club" feature, with its prediction of who you'd be in said club, Extremely Seriously. He hasn't stopped talking about it yet. He's clearly made it part of his identity.
Granted, teens do this. I remember being a teen. Back then, I was obsessed with my horoscope and Myers-Briggs type (Hogwarts houses having not yet been invented); this is just that....
...and not. Sun signs and Myers-Briggs types may be bunk, but they're generalized bunk. They're not personalized bunk gleaned from a mountain of data you don't even know a corporation is downloading from your phone. My students all think they (or their parents) are handing over $8 a month for music. They have no idea they're handing over $8 a month and a *ton* of information that no sane parent would hand over to a corporation knowingly:
https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-tracking-how-to-stop-it/
According to my students, I'm "weird" because I don't have one answer to the question "What kind of music do you like?" I have no answer at all to "who's your favorite band?" For me, music is cold storage for emotional memories.
I am, in short, the ideal customer for an app that serves tailored ads and featured (read: paying) artists based on a user's mood. I know this. It's one of the reasons I don't trust Spotify.
Yet it's not just Spotify. The longer I go without paying a streaming service, the less likely I am ever to return to one. Paying money, month after month, to own *nothing*? When there's already more free and freely-available media in the world than I can ever consume in my remaining lifetime? Why?
Recently, the Internet had Opinions(TM) about Amazon's decision to dub Banana Fish episodes with AI:
(The episodes did not last long.)
The same day I heard about this debacle, I decided to rewatch Trigun - something I haven't actually done in about twenty years. But I didn't get online, hoping that some corporation felt sufficiently magnanimous to (a) make it available online instead of burning the contents of its own vault and (b) graciously allow me to give them money to be permitted to view it with a single set of human eyeballs.
Instead, I got out the CDs I've had since college, burned with bootleg fansub versions that I found online years before Trigun was commercially available in the US. Back then, you had to learn Japanese in your free time to appreciate anime!
(Not really. Also, I double minored in Japanese and French.)
ALSO also also - since I Yeeted Broadband, I'm hyper-aware of how many programs and apps just help themselves to one's Internet connection in the background. I've had more than one run out my hotspot data for the month, *when I thought they weren't even active.*
One of them was Windows 10, which now bugs me to install Windows 11 whenever I start up that machine. It can't auto-install because there's not enough room on the disk. (I download another 500 MB in random corporate K-10s from sec.gov every time it asks.)
If I'm not in control of my device's online behavior when I boot it up, I'm surely not in control when I'm streaming music or anything else. I don't approve. I don't need to record songs off the radio on my Kmart Blue Light Special Philco personal cassette player to find streaming a joke - and in poor taste at that.
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