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Khoi Vinh wrote a great essay exploring What Streaming Music Can Be. He starts by describing some of the things that made buying CDs and albums a meaningful experience:

This is all trivia, to be sure, but it’s the kind of stuff that used to be such a meaningful part of owning music — and that makes one a fan for life. Having a record in your collection meant that you could spend time poring over its liner notes: familiarizing yourself with the names of musicians, producers, engineers, and managers; memorizing lyrics; and studying photos of musicians’ faces, stances and attire. These were the intangible qualities that made music more than just a service, but something to be collected.

But Khoi doesn’t just want streaming music services like Spotify and Rdio to copy the days of physical liner notes. Instead, he makes some suggestions on how these services can use metadata in fascinating ways to add meaning to digital music.

I’ve been a happy Spotify customer for a few months now, but everything Khoi says in his post makes sense to me. I’ve discovered some great music — and some great albums — but I tend to listen to those albums a lot less than when I used to buy CDs. The turnover is just too fast — there’s always something new to discover. And I’m hungry for it, incapable of resisting the lure of the next great song.

Apart from the missing metadata, there is something else that bugs me about streaming services (and digital music in general). Janko Jovanovic discusses this in the context of eBooks in his post Digital and physical, but it’s just as applicable to digital music:

When I buy a physical book, it starts to live a life of its own. After reading it for days or weeks, the book changes. It’s not brand new anymore. Edges of papers lose their sharpness. The cover becomes slightly bent and you can tell it was read just by looking at it. When I put a book on a shelf it becomes a part of the space I live in and it continues to change over time. This transience and decay of things around me remind me that I should use every moment of my life since I will go through the same lifecycle as that book. […]

All digital goods, be it ebooks, software, documents or images give me a sense of permanency and immutability. They are sterile. And that sterility prevents me from getting in touch with transience and gives me a sense of timelessness. Which is just an illusion.

I’m not going to end my Spotify subscription, but I do miss glancing over my CDs, observing the wear and tear of albums that have gone through so much with me. Those CD covers become more than the music they contain. They become reminders of a life well lived. And I do fear that I’m losing that now that I mainly listen to my (admittedly awesome) Spotify playlists.

Andrew Romano’s The Beatles Succeeded Through Talent, Ambition, and a Lot of Arrogance is part takedown of Malcolm Galdwell’s “10,000 hours” rule, part Beatles history:

The Beatles’ secret ingredient was arrogance.

I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. Arrogance — a kind of foolish, adolescent self-belief; an ignorant, intuitive certainty that your way is the right way — is the root of all great art. Without it, talent and timing aren’t enough. We all have a dash of it when we’re young. In middle school we write Whitmanesque poems; in high school we start a Beatlesque band. But then we weigh the odds and consider our options, and reality sets in. Sometime around 18 we begin to assess ourselves more accurately — to find our proper rank in humanity’s big talent show. Our ambition stops outstripping our ability. And then we stall out and settle down.   

The Beatles never did that. Unlike most of us, they remained arrogant until their ability finally matched their ambition.

It’s a highly entertaining read all the way through. Well worth your time.

Radium is a new way to listen to internet radio. It sits in your menu bar and stays out of your way. And it just works.

With its clean user interface and album cover display, you’re always just a click away from beautiful sounds. Add your favorite tracks to the wish list and check them out later on the iTunes Store. Take the sounds with you using Radium’s built-in AirPlay streaming support. It’s all there.

With the proliferation of services like Spotify and Pandora, why choose Radium? Because with Radium, you don’t have to build up playlists, constantly answer questions about your music preferences, or navigate a cumbersome user interface. Radium is all about the sounds. And these sounds come from over 6000 free stations, maintained and curated by real people like you.

Available for $10 on the Mac App Store. Check it out.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Arrive in the office, make a cup of coffee, open up your email, and turn up your favorite song. We know how it goes.

Check out Steven Jengo’s new single, summer of 2042.

Fresh tunes with a softly different touch; with that kind of familiar sound, simple and melodic, deep and lazy, freshly brewed for your listening pleasure.

Take care when driving at high volume. Find more at jengo.com.

A big thanks to Steven Jengo for sponsoring the Elezea RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Ivan Hewett did a write-up on some very interesting neuroscience research in Why your brain loves music:

When [participants] were willing to pay [for a song] there [was] a strong correlation with one brain region in particular, called the nucleus accumbens. This is the area responsible for the sensation of “pleasant surprise”.

It might seem surprising that people should enjoy having their expectations contradicted. But these results only reveal the physical basis for something we’ve known about for centuries. In the ancient world, teachers of rhetoric knew that one way to hold people’s attention was to set up expectations and then deny them.

“Pleasant surprise”. That does explain a lot. As a high school student with very limited budget, buying a CD was a huge deal, so I didn’t want to waste the opportunity when it did come along. One of my biggest criteria for buying a CD was this: “Will I be ok if this is the only album I can take with me to a deserted island?” The ability to listen to a CD over and over was a strong requirement to make the purchase worthwhile.

Anecdotally I can confirm that the albums I did end up listening to a hundred times over were the ones that were surprising in just the right ways. They were just pushing the boundaries of the sounds I was used to and expected to like. Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell immediately comes to mind as an example of this. It’s probably the same reason we like movies with a strong twist. Even though we’re technically being lied to for most of the movie, we kind of like it. As 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon said: “There is pleasure even in being deceived.”

See also: The tyranny of endless musical choice

I really enjoyed Michele Catalano’s Grimes, Pop Music, and Cultural Elitism, which starts with this quote from Clare Boucher (better known as Grimes):

I don’t see why we have to hate something just because it’s successful, or assume that because it is successful it has no substance.

It’s an article about our tendency to look down on pop music (and the people who like pop music), but it points to a much broader cultural phenomenon:

The elitism one shows when they dismiss pop music as vapid and those who like it equally vapid is a detriment to any open conversation. The defenders of pop – myself included – are often put on the defensive, made to offer up excuses as to why we like what we do. No one should have to defend their musical choices. No artist who worked hard to get where they are should be roundly dismissed because their music doesn’t fit some elitist standard.

This kind of elitism is something we all have to watch out for. I will probably never switch away from my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean that Android users are undiscerning losers. The best phone is the phone you like the best. That’s all there is to it. As hard as it can be sometimes, we have to decouple the things people like and don’t like from their value as human beings.

Mike Spies wrote a wonderful ode to the lost art of CD buying in Spotify and the Problem of Endless Musical Choice:

We seem to have created an environment in which wonderful music, newly discovered, is difficult to treasure. For treasures, as the fugitive salesman in the flea market was implying, are hard to come by—you have to work to find them. And the function of fugitive salesmen is to slow the endless deluge, drawing our attention to one album at a time, creating demand not for what we need to survive but for what we yearn for. Because how else can you form a relationship with a record when you’re cursed with the knowledge that, just an easy click away, there might be something better, something crucial and cataclysmic? The tyranny of selection is the opposite of freedom. And the more you click, the more you enhance the disposability of your endeavor.

I’m sure we all have stories like this, but I have such fond memories of my early music buying experiences. The endless hours spent in music stores, listening to 10, 20, sometimes 30 different albums before finally making a choice what to spend my very limited cash on. Then the relief of the decision, immediately followed by anxiousness during the drive home — the fear that maybe this isn’t the right choice, that maybe you’re going to hate it after one or two listens. And finally, the joy of discovery as you put the CD on repeat and immerse yourself in every little detail of the liner notes.

I miss the almost obsessive nature of that first few days with a new album, when you’re unable to focus on any conversation because your mind is filled to the brim with lyrics and melodies. It’s too easy (and too cheap) to get music these days. There is so much music at our fingertips that we grab a new album, devour it, and then move on quickly like the digital gluttons we’ve become. I try to keep up my vinyl habit, and I still love the experience of hunting for records, but it’s becoming a very small part of my life.

I don’t think digital music is a bad thing. But I think that as abundance increases, our ability to treasure what we have decreases. And that’s not good.

(link via Rob Boone)

An Elite for Everyone is another thought-provoking piece from Callum J Hackett, whose excellent blog I just recently discovered. He makes the case that maybe we should let go of this idea that everyone can be creative if they just try hard enough:

While monetary elites are deceptive and damaging, a creative elite is arguably essential to artistic culture. For art, literature and music to have any significant purpose in our lives, they depend on the relationship between a handful of creators and a much larger, consuming audience. I think this should be an argument against the incessant drive to democratise creative talent, and the trope that everyone has a novel in them, because not only is it likely biologically impossible (again shifting the blame from lack of possibility to individual failure), it’s also undesirable. I think there comes a time when we have to embrace our own mediocrity, and instead recognise our important place as part of the audience. This might seem bleak and self-defeating, but it sits more comfortably with the real world, and wouldn’t feel like such a bum deal if we weren’t continually titillated with the distant, unlikely prize of publication and fame.

Duncan J. Watts in Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?:

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.

Forget about that Justin — this finally gives us a satisfactory explanation for Bieber fever. Today, the universe makes just a little bit more sense again.