“Are you okay?”
I don’t have reply to the query. Understanding full effectively that I’m speaking again to an algorithm — even one asking the identical query of everybody with a special band mad-libbed in — doesn’t soften the blow. Am I? Are we? Is anybody, actually?
On this case, it’s referring to Waxahatchee. I imply, yeah, I completely listened to loads of Waxahatchee this 12 months. Waxahatchee is sweet. Saint Cloud was one in every of my favourite albums of the 12 months. Katie Crutchfield’s music doesn’t exist within the Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen bin for me. It’s not time to ship up the sign flares while you see the band throughout my Spotify social feed.
The Spotify roasting AI that’s been making the rounds this week is a enjoyable train in music snobbery. It additionally could also be brushing in opposition to some bigger reality right here. One thing I believe all of us thought-about at the very least in passing this 12 months when Spotify provided its annual “Wrapped” 12 months in assessment.
What’s the soundtrack to the worst 12 months, ever? What will we hearken to whereas the world burns? In 2009, a former CNN intern stumbled throughout a video tape within the archives labeled with the title, “Turner Doomsday Video.” The minute-long video incorporates a band enjoying, “Nearer My God To Thee,” believed to be the ultimate track performed by the band on the Titanic. It carried the specific directions, “HFR [Hold for Release] until finish of the world confirmed.”
Barring any kind of last-minute shock, it appears possible we’ll make it by way of 2020 shy of a full-on apocalypse (despite, maybe, the most effective efforts of some). However for me, Spotify’s 12 months in assessment was a testomony to hell 12 months, simply as my Apple Watch train bars noticed a zeroing out in late-March and April, because the pandemic bore down on my house of Queens, New York and I handled some private well being points.
What was pitched as a celebratory aggregation of my listening habits over the earlier 12 months exited the machine as a testomony to the lengthy stretches of time the place participating with music felt like an impossibility. Ambient music and post-rock bought me listening once more when lyrics appeared like an excessive amount of to course of. And I’m positive I’m not alone in having listened to some consolation tracks with an alarming frequency.
Wanting again is a helpful reminder of the position music performed in what undoubtedly qualifies because the worst 12 months so far for a lot of. It could be an overstatement to counsel that music saved my life in 2020, however it definitely cushioned the blow of 1 too many emotional intestine punches.
“Music can carry us out of melancholy or transfer us to tears – it’s a treatment, a tonic, orange juice for the ear,” the late-neurologist, Oliver Sacks wrote. “However for a lot of of my neurological sufferers, music is much more – it may well present entry, even when no medicine can, to motion, to speech, to life. For them, music will not be a luxurious, however a necessity.”
Louis Armstrong put it much more succinctly: “music is life itself.”
It’s a merciless irony that, in a 12 months when music has meant a lot to so many, most musicians have struggled to make ends meet. The musical subject definitely isn’t distinctive in that respect this 12 months, however their struggles have been pronounced in an period when streaming revenues provide fractions of cents what musicians make in file gross sales, and touring has turn out to be a very powerful income stream for all however the largest names. For the previous 10 months, that each one however dried up.
“The pandemic completely decimated the live-music trade,” Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy famous in a latest interview. “There’s been virtually a complete 12 months now of completely zero income.”
In Might, a survey from the Musician’s Union famous that 19% of musicians mentioned they may find yourself giving up their careers as a result of affect of COVID-19. Seven months later, one wonders whether or not that determine might need been optimistic.
Tweedy provides, “There might be locations to play. However the panorama gained’t ever look the identical. I think about that loads of the extra intimate music venues might be gone, identical to loads of small companies and eating places.”
Bandcamp has been a beacon for a lot of. The service’s “Bandcamp Fridays,” which waive its income reduce, have raised $40 million so far. The positioning has promised to proceed providing the function at the very least by way of Might of subsequent 12 months.
This 12 months’s struggles have served to spotlight issues over streaming royalties. Spotify has understandably been the focus for this dialog, all whereas the corporate has spent lots of of hundreds of thousands to bolster its podcast programming. CEO Daniel Ek didn’t do himself any favors in July when he famous, “Some artists that used to do effectively previously could not do effectively on this future panorama, the place you may’t file music as soon as each three to 4 years and suppose that’s going to be sufficient.”
In October, Justice at Spotify rep (and Galaxie 500 member) Damon Kurkowski advised me “[R]esponse from sure corners of the trade has been as chilly as we anticipated: ‘You’re simply musicians and don’t perceive enterprise,’ is the fundamental gist of it. To which I’d say: The issue we’re calling consideration to is exactly that musicians have been disregarded of the dialog! We all the time come final in cost and in session — although our work is what the streaming enterprise is constructed on.”
The wrestle to outlive on music is nothing new, in fact. Jazz genius Thelonious Monk famously had a benefactor in Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. However simply because we’ve failed musicians previously doesn’t imply we are able to’t and shouldn’t do higher.
Am I okay? I’m nonetheless unsure, however listening to music appears to assist.