An Inconvenient Truth: Music ⭐

This is difficult to explain because I don’t understand it myself, but there are certain words and terms that just rub me the wrong way. And the list of those keeps growing, perhaps because I’m getting older or maybe it’s just that language is misused more these days. I don’t know, it could be both, and I suppose why doesn’t matter. It just is.

I see this all over, but in our little corner of the world, personal technology, there are too many examples to count. One particularly obnoxious example is “daily carry,” which I feel says more about the overinflated ego of the idiots who think that documenting what they carry in their pockets or in some man purse every day somehow elevates them to the status of a marine storming the beaches of Normandy in World War II. And then there’s one that’s a bit more closely tied to this topic. Self-hosting.

Like daily carry, self-hosting suggests both importance and expertise, as if the writer who uses this term is somehow doing something technical and impressive, when in fact it simply refers to the way just about all of us did things not so long ago. Things, in this case, meaning you have ownership and control of your media, documents, and other data. You know, like a teenager in the 1950s might have kept a record player and vinyl records in their bedroom, when their daily carry consisted of a few coins a Davey Crockett coonskin cap. So impressive.

In my lifetime, the world has evolved rapidly and in every direction, and it feels like that’s been escalating in recent years. (Which, again, may just be age.) Thinking just about music to keep things simple, we had radios with FM and AM stations we could listen to but not control, at home, in cars, and in portable players. And then there was a series of advances in media like vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, and audio CDs, with some of those advances crossing over into that daily carry category, meaning they were portable and could come with you, in a car or with some portable player.

These advances, some of which were two steps forward and one step back, were all about freedom to me and so many other music lovers. I bought my first 45s (singles) and 33s (albums) in vinyl form as a child, in my pre-teen years, and I was always thrilled to be able to play what I wanted when I wanted to hear it. I never got tired of this and I always wanted more.

Which worked out well because things kept getting better. Cassette tapes gave me the ability to mix and match that music, starting with an inexpensive Sears all-in-one home unit with a turntable and two cassette decks. In the summer of 1983, I would walk across the Francis Scott Key Bridge between our hotel in Arlington, Virginia and Georgetown on the edge of Washington D.C., listening to the radio on a portable player. By 1984, that had been replaced with my own music courtesy of a gorgeous yellow Sony Walkman cassette player. I could finally take my cassette-based mixes–what we would today call playlists–with me on the go.

My first car, a 1972 VW Super Beetle that I bought in 1985, the year I graduated from high school, had an aftermarket cassette player that let me really take that music on the go. My first big road trip, with a friend and a case full of homemade and store-bought tapes, took me across the country from Albuquerque, New Mexico back home to Dedham, Massachusetts over five days or so filled with sights and the sounds of music. By the time I was 21, I had purchased my first CD player after experiencing CD audio every day at a bookstore I worked at, and that technology came to my cars shortly thereafter. In time, those in-car players evolved into multi-disc CD changers that could support data CDs with far more capacity.

It never stopped, and at each stage of this evolution, my relationship with music improved. Maybe not universally, but inarguably. Audio CDs were more expensive than cassettes, but they had audio quality, capacity, and instant track selection advantages. There were roads not taken that I sweated as much as a younger man as I do today about far more weighty decisions, like the Minidisc and DAT formats that never quite made it, at least for me. And there were of course some downsides to format changes tied to all the content I still had on the things I was leaving behind. Cassettes and CDs coexisted until they didn’t.

I will never forget my first introduction to digital music in the form of MP3 files that a friend had ripped from CD on a computer and showed me excitedly. I was blown away by this for all the obvious reasons, but I also quickly discovered that a single CD album ripped to MP3 format at a reasonable quality level would take up most if not all the paltry small hard drives I then owned. This was an escalation in portability waiting to happen. And in time, of course, it did, with those those concerns fading away as digital music technologies improved and drive capacities exploded.

This shift from physical media to digital media was familiar and much like previous transitions between different physical formats. Both would coexist for some time in my home, on the go with portable players, and in my car. But in time, digital just won out, and for all the obvious reasons–the right reasons–and I relaxed my grip on physical things. Regardless, I had albums and singles, plus my own mixes, now called playlists. I had ways to play them at home, on the go, and in the car. And it kept getting better.

And then something happened, something different.

When Steve Jobs announced the original iPod in late 2001 as a device that could deliver “1,000 songs in your pocket,” it was revolutionary. But when streaming music services promised to deliver every song ever recorded in your pocket for a low monthly cost, that felt even more monumental. In this case, the concerns were different and tied to things like Internet bandwidth and the like, but they, too, would fade away, and having access to millions of songs, literally, felt like the greatest freedom of all for me and so many other music lovers.

But streaming services are fundamentally subscription services, something you never stop paying for. That I didn’t own the music I was listening to didn’t bother me too much, plus the early streaming services all let you bring your own digital music along for the ride anyway, so they could coexist, and I could still make playlists, but now with a bottomless supply of content. There were even offline capabilities so I could listen on planes or whenever I was off Wi-Fi. It seemed perfect.

And it was. Until it wasn’t.

Subscription services are a key form of what we now call enshittification, a word that does not rub me in the wrong way at all. And the reason for that, obvious to some who warned us of this issue just as they voiced their concerns about a lack of ownership, became obvious to me and others in time. Prices will always escalate, sometimes frequently and sometimes in egregious amounts. The thing that was at one time a “no-brainer,” as I like to say, became a more complicated relationship. And then a toxic relationship, one in which the price I kept paying every single month seemed incommensurate with the value I received from the service.

Or, I should say, services, as I now pay for so many monthly and annual subscriptions that I forget I’m even doing so in many cases. Which is a key component of this business model and another example of why the term enshittification is so apt.

Steve Jobs was not a great human being. But he did love music, and did imbue that love of music into Apple, his company. And when he introduced iTunes, and the iPod, and then the iTunes Store and even more iPods, even those who maybe aren’t onboard with the whole Apple thing would admit that the relationship there between us and our music as expressed through Apple products and services was good, or even correct. We could debate things like digital audio formats and DRM, and we might have chosen other ecosystems. But this felt right.

Spotify legitimized streaming music, but as so many have observed, this business was created specifically to drive advertising revenue and not out of a love of music. In fact, music was in some ways incidental, or at least coincidental, since the company was created just as Napster and other illegal music sharing services were being shut down (thanks, in part, to Steve Jobs and Apple). Had that not happened, it’s likely that Spotify would have provided streaming capabilities for other types of content.

This didn’t matter at first since Spotify was inexpensive and the value it delivered was enormous. It didn’t matter when Spotify became so successful that even Apple, now Jobs-less because of his death in 2011, launched a competing service, Apple Music, that seems a lot more predatory and about lock-in than about a love of music, in keeping with the general vibe of the Tim Cook era and the dawn of massive Big Tech abuses throughout the industry. But it matters now. I matters to me, at least.

I was never a Spotify fan, not because of the company or its motivations but because I never liked the user interface of the app or its weird limitations. That I bounced between every imaginable music streaming services over many years is perhaps defensible, perhaps not. But today, I pay for three music streaming services–YouTube Music (which is part of YouTube Premium), Spotify (because my wife and daughter use it), and Apple Music (because it’s part of Apple One, which I and the two kids all use). And that feels indefensible.

It also makes me feel helpless and stupid.

I love music. I listen to music whenever I can, and the only downside to working from home for over 30 years is that I would listen to music (and podcasts and audiobooks) during commutes if I just had one. Instead, I have to fit this in when I can. While shaving and showering. When driving in the car. When flying on an airplane. And on music nights when my wife and I listen to playlists I still create, often for these occasions, and sometimes edited on the fly as one of us will suddenly want to hear a particular song. A wonderful ability tied to the freedom I’ve often felt as these technologies improved over my life.

In From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️, I described how escalating subscription services and the escalating prices of those services had reached a breaking point and how I wanted to make changes, major changes, in the ways I consume music, other media, and other digital capabilities. I also described how daunting this was, and that as a world-class procrastinator, just getting started felt impossible. But this week, we are in Nashville, Tennessee with our kids, and I’ve already started the discussion about how we all do these things, and how the services I pay for are going to start disappearing. I will have more to say about all that soon, but the short version for now is that everyone is onboard with this. They get it, and they agree. This needs to change.

But music is difficult, and not just because I love music. My son is deaf, for example, but he can hear with cochlear implants, and he listens to music through Apple Music because of certain advantages that service has. Granted, he could pay for that himself, he has a good job and he is growing into a real adult. But the Apple One service that’s tied to benefits three of us, and it doesn’t cost more because he’s part of it. And that’s how decisions don’t get made, how you step through all the reasons to not do something and time goes by and you keep paying each month and resent it all.

So we’re going to talk about it. We will agree on what’s staying and what isn’t, on who is paying for what things and who isn’t. And we will make sense of this, together. This week. Starting with music but including video streaming services, Microsoft 365, Google One, and whatever else. I do have two NASes, sitting on opposite sides of a continent and keeping each other busy syncing their contents, and that can help. There is music on there. Not all the music I want, but not bad. So there is some solution out there. Maybe a half solution at first, some baby steps. We’ll see.

More soon. I feel like this is about to explode.