MANILA, Philippines - My favorite album of the year — “Cornish Pop Songs” by a little-known band called The Hit Parade — is an album that exists in my phone in the most abstract way music can possibly exist. It didn’t come from a CD. It has no physical origins. It’s not even a file that manifests itself in megabytes and file extensions. It’s just a series of sounds that emanates from my phone every time I play it through this app called Spotify, which, from the time it became part of my life early this year, I have hesitated to call a mere “app.” Google Maps is an app. Those real-time traffic guides are apps. Time-suck games are apps.
Spotify is a new layer in our atmosphere. It is the ether in which my lost fragments are still somehow floating about, stored in the music that I have loved for all my life, new songs discovered and old songs rediscovered, forming a singular memory that can now be summoned with unprecedented vividness with one thumb.
One cannot love an app because that makes one inhuman. So Spotify cannot possibly be an app. It must be a spiritual realm.
Taylor Swift knows a lot about love and, judging from her entire discography, seems incapable of thinking about anything unrelated to love. Even her defection from Spotify was explained in her editorial for the Wall Street Journal as a matter of the heart. “The future of music is a love story,” she writes. It all seemed so cute. But if you read her essay in its proper context, it’s really upsetting. Not because she’s using the “music fandom as love” concept against Spotify, but because she’s not really talking about love. What she’s talking about is money.
And hey, pop stars, movie stars, professional athletes, plumbers — basically every entity that makes money — have the right to talk about money. Taylor Swift may be the biggest music act to speak up against Spotify, but she’s hardly the first. The music streaming app has long been criticized by U2’s Bono and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who called Spotify “the last dying fart of a dying corpse,” whatever sense that makes. Spotify allows its users to listen to songs for a relatively meager monthly subscription fee (P129 in the Philippines) or for free (with a few inconvenient restrictions). Many artists feel that this isn’t enough compensation for a product that used to sell millions. But with digital and Internet technology flattening the music industry into a dystopian Wild West, that simply doesn’t happen anymore. Of all the albums released this year, none have exceeded a million dollars in sales. Except “1989,” by self-proclaimed music romantic Taylor Swift.
MOST BELOVED ARTIST
“1989” is so ahead of any other 2014 release that it’s not even funny: coming in at second place is Coldplay’s “Ghost Story,” a May release that has sold a paltry 383,000 copies so far. “1989” sold 1.2 million copies in its first week. Taylor Swift’s two previous albums — “Fearless” and “Red” — are still in the Billboard Top 200. If we go by sheer numbers, it’s easy to claim that Taylor Swift is the most beloved music artist of our time. So when she’s talking about ditching Spotify in the name of music love, it comes across as disingenuous.
She writes: “People are still buying albums, but now they’re buying just a few of them. They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart or have made them feel strong or allowed them to feel like they really aren’t alone in feeling so alone.”
She is equating love with record sales. That’s the old romantic fantasy, right? The record collector as fervent lover. It is also the ultimate record industry fantasy because the love is expressed in dollars. I have no doubt that most of those Spotify users who had Taylor Swift’s albums in their accounts love her. But that’s not the issue because love isn’t what’s really important here — it’s whether or not love can be a lucrative enterprise.
Popular art has always been the awkward interaction between passion and commerce, where the two take turns pretending to be each other. I have no problem with pop stars complaining about money, as long as they’re really complaining about money. But pretending that it’s about something else — and worse, something more important to the consumer than the artist — is frankly insulting.
BETTER ALTERNATIVE
I love The Hit Parade but their album “Cornish Pop Songs” isn’t available in local record stores. It isn’t even available on Amazon.com. I could probably order it through an indie CD distribution site based in the UK and pay onerous shipping costs and tax. I’ve been buying music since the title year of Taylor Swift’s hit album and have no problems continuing to do so. But when the alternative is instant, portable, and on-demand access of something you love, then spending money becomes meaningless. It becomes a mere vintage fetish — completely symbolic and devoid of functionality.
Music fans are fans of music — not of distribution channels, business models, audio formats, or technology. That the record industry feels cheated by Spotify is a problem of the record industry. To fans, Spotify can be a rich experience of pure fandom. It is a portable giant music library accessible in multiple devices, which means it is literally everywhere. It is the manualization of how music functions in our brain: as a running soundtrack, an impulse akin to conjuring a fantasy or recalling life moments. Spotify takes music away from the confines of business and audio formats and brings it closer to what it has always essentially been: a memory, a feeling, a sudden rush of yearning. That’s music in its purest form. That’s also what love is.
Taylor Swift can see love in anything, but as literally the only one left making huge money from music, she can no longer separate it from business. She’s the biggest-selling artist of 2014. So, of course, she’s the most cynical.
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Tweet the author @ColonialMental.