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Future
The world is undergoing a prolonged and profound shift in music listening, but the conversations and writing I follow are still tangled in some other timeline’s concerns: dead-end arguments about the American pop monolith at a time when American pop has never been less monolithic.
These changes are much bigger than assorted essays and news pegs—about extractive streaming platforms or broken charts or hollowed out scenes and livelihoods—which only reveal disjointed fragments of the full picture. Tackling it plainly in its bigness seems almost comically grandiose, but it’s also a little boring: at some level, it’s (still) just the internet.1
This new, changed everything has been a long time coming. It’s the gradual realization of an idea at least as old as the internet and maybe as old as the wireless: the proverbial celestial jukebox—that one magical, cosmic machine that contains every song you could possibly imagine (and just as many that you could never imagine)—finally ripped straight from the proverbs, as it were.
A lot of hype and interest around these transformations burned too brightly too early, in breathless or apocalyptic descriptions of the role the internet would have on people engaging with and listening to music, a few decades before we could see clearly the shape of things (par for the course for revolutionary and scammy technologies alike). But that doesn’t mean that what was clear then wasn’t true. Here’s Tom Ewing in 2002:
In 2002, CD reissues remove the barrier of time, internet mail order removes the barrier of space, and increasingly—though you need to be able to afford computer and connection—MP3s are removing the financial risk of just diving in and exploring any nook of music you like. Of course nothing—not even bulletin boards, alas—can replace the explosive vibe, vitality, and mystery of a scene in its big-bang stages, but those blue moons really should stop being the driving force of music criticism. Year by year, the ‘celestial jukebox’ becomes more of a reality, and we are all dilettantes now.2
Most of the formative critical voices I’ve tuned in to over the years, who always found “best years ever” going back much further than 2002, have always acted like the celestial jukebox is with us. They had to cobble theirs together from radios and mail orders and imports and swapped tapes and freebies and maybe sometimes even regular earthly jukeboxes, but they had the same hunger for music, as much of it as they could get their ears on. That process is just much easier now, so you don’t need to be a “formative critical voice” type, or even very terminally obsessed at all, to access it.
One of the effects of this emergent celestial age is more or less what I’ve argued in this series, which is that the shadow of American pop creates blinders not only for American cultural critics, but for just about everyone’s conception of what “pop” was versus what it is now that are hard to shake off. It really was different before, I think, and for quite a long time: there are few people currently alive who weren’t in some way shaped, even indirectly, by the world of a totalizing attentional black hole that is American mass popular culture’s global reach and insistence.
I think the rise (or fall) of A-pop is obviously worth thinking through in some detail, and I hope that people continue to take me up on this idea, including pushback, and not just for self-interested reasons. Many of the ideas are sketchy and speculative, but I think they’re useful ones to try out.
I’d like to end the series thinking more about the mechanism for these changes. As I said in the first installment in this series, my interest in this topic is as someone who is an American and loves pop music. I can’t really help being American, but the “loving pop music” part is a facet of my identity that I’ve cultivated more deliberately.
My work as a critic comes from a lifelong enchantment with music—listening to it and playing it and talking about it, compulsively and insatiably, for my whole life. I think about music, and about the conversations I want to be having about music, all the time. I often wake up with some cockamamie idea rattling around my head, perhaps in harmony with whatever tune is lodged in there, or just a delayed, urgent response to a friend with a similar affliction.
I’d like the conversations I participate in to avoid getting stuck in their old ruts. These conversations have gotten better over time, with many more people of different experiences and backgrounds continuing to write great criticism. So many people contribute great ideas, insights, and jokes, usually for little to no pay or prestige, on blogs and niche websites and in comments and on social media, despite it being harder and harder to gather everyone in the same place to talk to each other. But the world keeps getting unavoidably bigger (to which I might hedge and add: always has been), so even these improvements seem to fall further behind the pace and promise of the rest of the world.
Because the availability of music has expanded so much and in so many different directions all at once, the individual music listener in this landscape making sense of any of it inevitably takes on the responsibilities of any halfway decent music critic—wide listening, curiosity, research, organization, juxtaposition—with few institutional edifices for paying for or rewarding this work. My own critical circles and the many friends and strangers I turn to for music are like thousands of curators in search of a museum.
People are always critics, of course: “doing criticism” isn’t some optional component of encountering art. The more access you have to more and different kinds of art, the more you need to manage an anthropological drive to understand as much as possible in context alongside the personal drive to make sense of it all for yourself. And these two things can be in some tension—constantly working to turn a “them” into an “us,” or at least relate it to a “me,” even when some differences seem unbridgeable: I don’t speak the language, I don’t have the background, I just don’t get it.
A lot of analysis about connecting disparate geographical communities online focuses on affinity and a sense of belonging—of finding your people. I’ve certainly done that. But in my experience, music also has a funny way of revealing things to you that you couldn’t have previously imagined. Music is a place where you constantly encounter difference, even among those who are in some ways already “your people,” and are put in a position of figuring out which version of you has emerged as a result.
It’s simple enough to ignore, deny, or reject difference. Some of my most agonizing re-imaginings of my taste and sometimes my identity have started with the tiniest incongruous bit of evidence from a song that I resisted, a sharp little puzzle piece that didn’t seem to fit comfortably anywhere, leading to a fraught resolution between two incompatible selves. First the thing can’t fit, you maybe don’t want it to fit, and then it does, and you’ve changed, even if you always carry the old pieces, too.
The internet has expanded my understanding of what art is, who people are, who I am. I don’t know that it’s a categorical difference from what came before—I think finding art and finding other people who make or enjoy it just does this. But there was a sort of unspoken cultural crutch for me in growing up with so much music that spoke my language, literally and figuratively. Now it’s easier to find music, but much of the music requires more translation and contextualization, and I frequently struggle to get my bearings. Who are these people and where did they come from and what on earth are they doing are questions I now ask on a weekly basis rather than once in a blue moon.
I find this work incredibly exciting, but it is work. I understand why a lot of people don’t take it on, and instead settle for retracing old patterns, or letting the machine decide, or not bothering at all.3 It’s OK just to like all the old stuff, too, or to focus on one special thing and get really good at it.4 And there’s plenty of novelty and excitement in the past—that’s yet another vista that access opens up. But I happen to think the present is an incredible time for music, and I want to live in the future that’s even better. The hardest work ahead is simply to describe what’s already happening, and not to feel like those descriptions are happening in a vacuum.
Friction
My first memory of music and the internet goes back to before I even knew something like the internet existed. It was my dad giving me a set of fan-curated novelty music cassette tapes that he’d been sent in 1988 by what I imagined at the time was a pen pal, and sort of was: it was a guy he’d met on a message board through our early CompuServe connection he used for work.
By the time I was in high school, I was already downloading from Napster, even as one of my close friends got ensnared in an RIAA dragnet and settled out of court for thousands of dollars (he was fourteen). Two years later, I was a committed music nerd who both collected and pirated music prodigiously, and frankly saw little difference between the two. I found music from seemingly endless lists of artists and albums I should know, kept meticulously organized in big lists and small fonts, recommendations culled from databases and review sites and message boards and old paperback record guides and the many people I met along the way.
For me the archive—the idea of knowing all the music, having a mental and when possible literal catalog of it—was always ultimately of more interest than the convenience of immediate access. I liked having music on my shelves (still do), and thought of the search for music as related to, but still different from, the more settled enjoyment of listening to it.
In 2011, after a decade of finding any music I’d heard about in any available physical or digital corner I could, I formed my only solid general opinion about the idea of new streaming platforms like Spotify, an opinion that hasn’t really changed in the intervening years: this makes what I’m already doing a little easier. I had been “streaming” for a long time already; this was just the major labels getting in on the action of what would in most cases otherwise be music piracy, making my life less onerous or potentially treacherous. (I also assumed it wouldn’t work in the long run, that the major labels would retreat to silos, like what was happening in streaming television.)5
In the most thorough academic treatment on the streaming era I’ve found, Streaming Music, Streaming Capital, author Eric Drott provides a helpful snapshot of the political economy of major streaming platforms—a colluding oligopoly riddled with predatory behavior, surveillance, and rent-seeking. He sharpens his axe for the grubby business of the big streamers, which masquerade themselves as a sleek and intuitive music-lover’s paradise. And it’s true, these companies all seem pretty awful.
But the axe is more than sharp enough for hair-splitting, too. In the first chapter, Drott frames his argument with the observation that Spotify isn’t truly “frictionless” as the company markets it to be, and proceeds to use “friction” in both a pedantically technical and too-cutely metaphorical sense, mostly as table-setting for his more substantive and often convincing critiques in the rest of the book. He points out, for instance, that you have to log in to Spotify, accept their terms of service, and pay a subscription fee or agree to ads. (These seem like minor frictions as far as the internet goes.) And then—into metaphor we go—you also need to overlook their business practices that cut artists out of revenues, not to mention the environmental impact of their servers, and on and on.
Even setting aside the much higher bar for cognitive dissonance I regularly clear to, say, eat meat or wear clothing or maintain a middle class white American family of four, this is just not what most people mean when they think of “friction.” The amount of friction one experiences in the music-finding process is the amount of effort it takes to learn of a song’s existence and then hear the thing for yourself.
By that definition, the current digital environment—which includes not only the major streaming platforms, but also minor streamers like Bandcamp, self-streamers like Soundcloud, multipurpose upload megasites like YouTube, and both legal and illegal downloads—is about as close to zero friction as we’re ever likely to get. It is effectively zero for an enormously high percentage of all recorded music. You can dial up just about any song that has ever existed and listen to it immediately. It’s a miracle, albeit one with strings attached, which seems to be how most terrestrial miracles go.
An “enormously high percentage of recorded music” is certainly not all, though. When I do historical dives into databases for retrospective pieces, I would say that about half or less of the music I find is available on the major streaming platforms. The other half that’s not on the streaming platforms is usually available as a YouTube upload. The remaining songs are usually available through other channels with a bit of digging, or through piracy channels that are still very much intact if you haven’t checked in on them in the past twenty years or so. The fraction of music that I’ve seen documented evidence of existing but is genuinely not available to hear in any digital format must be far less than 1% of all music I’ve ever looked for, and we’re talking about many millions of songs.
For new music, these numbers require fewer asterisks, because the vast majority of it is on the major streaming platforms.6 But perversely, the easier it is to access songs in the present, the more likely it is that they’ll vanish completely in the future. Archival databases like Discogs or any number of sites and blogs that do niche archival accounting work, which I treasure and am endlessly thankful for, are all but useless for music made well into the 21st century. It wouldn’t surprise me if my playlists and spreadsheets and occasional ramshackle digital copies, usually burned in poor quality from my computer’s sound board, will someday be the only remaining evidence of many of these songs’ existence.
In the event of a major label arms race and the serious degradation or even collapse of streaming platforms (an outside but real possibility), many if not most of the songs I’ve collected over the past decade might be gone forever, as they have no physical footprint and a tenuous digital presence. When I write about them, I am at least contributing to the archival acknowledgement of their existence. But it would be a bummer to see them go.
How do we keep track of all of it? Should we be keeping track? There are whole historical eras worth of artforms that have ascended and then vanished, even within a century-plus of electronic mass media. Much of radio history and the early history of television left no trace, and there are huge swaths of film and multimedia art that we can only dimly imagine from spotty archival documentation. Maybe the wider global output of pop music now is less like a disc to be filed away and more like hearing a talented busker on the street, sharing the special moment and moving on.
I admit I find it difficult to conceptualize or accept music in this way. There is some sense in which pop music specifically is supposed to be frivolous, ephemeral. It’s not built to survive for posterity, unless “posterity” is the kids listening to it in the present, maybe out of earshot of their annoyed ancestors (parents). But I don’t make hard distinctions between pop and the rest of culture. I want to preserve what I like, even when the task of preservation seems impossible.
End (or Beginning)
So is this whole celestial jukebox thing a monkey’s paw deal or what? Was it a blip that we ever thought we could wrangle and catalog all of the world’s culture? Are we forging bold frontiers in global cultural exchange, or is it all just a phase, growing pains to some geopolitical epoch we can’t envision yet? Dealing with technology means struggling to hold on to the lessons of a rapidly obsolescing past while facing an unpredictable future, one we can only hope will occasionally be unpredictable in good ways even when we can only seem to notice the bad ways.
It’s hard not to think about all of these things without also thinking about the “A” in A-pop, America—so many American institutions are eroding, with so much of our progress stunted and so many of the best of us under attack, with the feeling of an ending underway and no clue as to what another beginning would even look like.
What I will say is that my ideas about the relatively diminished global role of American pop as the rest of the world ascends to equal (-er or -ish) footing have been germinating for much longer than the United States’ descent into embarrassing autocracy.7 In my first installment, I pushed back on the idea that the “fall” part of “the rise or fall of A-pop” was synonymous with the end of Pax Americana. But that doesn’t mean that A-pop and the end of Pax Americana don’t rhyme.
When America wanes, one question is who, if anyone, is going to wax to compensate—admittedly a question of more urgency in the realm of, say, international aid or medical research than pop music. The answer might be nobody. This feels like an element of the current global pop and political era, where many promising regional scenes compete without really dislodging a tarnished US from its stubborn but newly tentative leading position. Things can change rapidly when you’re in freefall. I try to keep my mind on the more hopeful question—not “what will happen to America?” but “what will happen everywhere else?”
The thing I like about America is that it is ostensibly built on the promise of a multicultural democracy, one that we know we haven’t lived up to. It’s good to have higher ideals than you currently exhibit; “more perfect,” etc. We can always preserve the spirit of this promise even while reckoning, perhaps dramatically, with the stubborn failure to move faster on it, or as we backslide further away from it. The promise is the promise, and I take the promise seriously.
Music’s not going to make good on the promise itself, but music does give you a quick and simple glimpse into our fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence. Even if you’re mostly just, say, looking for novelty songs by a wild woman in the Philippines who raps on the inhale, you’ll still stumble into territories unknown to you, and make them some tiny percentage more known. You’ll learn something if you can help it—step up your vocab, as a wise man once said.
It’s probably a good thing on net for humanity that we have the big jukebox to soundtrack whatever world this ends up being. The jukebox’s job is to make every part of the world more accessible to every other part of the world, which seems like it should be a precondition of saving the damn thing. And if it isn’t, it’s still probably better than the alternative, especially if you happen to really dig a lot of different music.
So hello (and farewell) to “A-pop.” It’s all just “pop,” obviously, or “music” if you’d prefer—I would—or maybe we should give up and call it something else, anything but “content.” Let’s call it “yeah!” or at least “…huh!” The hyphen is an enemy, a bothersome little border. A-pop points in its negative space to the dream of a world that no longer has any use for hyphens. Whether things are better that way—whether this makes you better—is an interesting question, one I’m not in a position to answer with any more authority than you are. And anyway, I’m not really equipped to make prescriptions or predictions. I’m just telling you what I hear. What I hear is that it’s happening, now.
Technologies often take longer to reach full adoption than the discourse around them makes it seem, even in wealthier countries with more technology infrastructure. E.g., cable television finally got to 80% of US households only in 2000, with its peak at 90% in 2010. Global internet connectivity (hugely boosted through smartphone adoption) finally passed 50% in 2018, still very unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas, and smartphones have also been one of the most rapidly adopted technologies ever. But widespread global connectivity is a pretty recent phenomenon, its impacts are less than 20 years old, and it will still take a long time to reach true universal internet adoption.
This 2002 post is also the jumping off point for either the coinage or at least the formalized resurgence of the word “poptimism,” which Tom writes about in more detail in this recent post. It has much less to do with the “pop” part and much more to do with the optimism, that there is always something exciting happening somewhere.
I haven’t really talked about “discovery algorithms” in this series. I don’t use them (qua discovery tools) very often, and while they’re relevant for the political economy of streaming, they’re not especially relevant to one’s ability to find new music, a process you can do without them. I think of streaming platform algorithmic listening as a sort of micro-broadcaster, like an automated radio—occasionally useful for chance encounters, but not systematically very useful for search. The algorithms that are useful for search of a sort are usually the “dumbest” ones, which just look at what a bunch of other people who liked one song also liked, preferably by unique geographical data.
I do, however, think it’s a mistake to think that deep but narrow subject area knowledge is in some great conflict with sharing generalist impressions. It’s also not as difficult to gain meaningful knowledge about cultures you’re curious about as it used to be—music isn’t the only information that online access has opened up. Even the most minor artists I find have a social media presence, and often share local interviews or PR profiles. That means they are also usually pretty accessible to talk about their work to just about anyone, even if you need to hire a translator. (Tone Glow does great work along these lines, all with a budget based mostly on the disposable income of a high school teacher.)
Lots of writers accurately ascribe uniquely rancid practices to the streaming economy. But streaming platforms didn’t kill the music economy alone; the broader technologies of the internet did, slowly but probably inexorably. If the major streaming platform ecosystem collapsed I would find other ways to discover music, as I always have. At a much bigger level, though, I have trouble imagining a humane tech infrastructure in today’s world, and often resort to the admittedly convenient and self-serving cop-out that we have to hope that we’ll figure it out tomorrow, probably with more technology. I’m persuaded by Elizabeth Kolbert’s line of argument around environmental engineering as an awkward and endless series of kludges in Under a White Sky, which I found much less pessimistic than reviewers did at the time. “Here’s to technology: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”—but for real.
Last year I compiled every track mentioned in a year-end social media challenge that hundreds of players contributed to, totaling about 1,650 songs mentioned. (For scale, this is a little over half the number of songs I churn through for my newsletter every single week and about as many songs as were uploaded to streaming websites while you’ve been reading this.) Of these, only eight were not available on Spotify, and all but one of those was available on Bandcamp or YouTube. One was a charity song that was technically available online—but I wasn’t going to be a jerk and illegally download a charity song.
The major streamers are very bad for certain scenes, though, especially as they get further toward an underground of self-released material. Despite finding hundreds of Brazilian funk tracks that are available on major streamers for the past few years, there are still hundreds more that are only available on YouTube or Soundcloud that I miss. But these aren’t exactly obscure as platforms go—I just don’t spend a lot of time on them. Other critics do, though.
For the record, my first use of the term “A-pop” dates back to 2013, when I used it to describe will.i.am’s album #willpower.
Regarding the celestial jukebox: everything is so clouded; the dust has yet to settle. Or will it ever settle? I've experienced many exciting new sounds via your weekly playlists and elsewhere, things that give me hope, well hope in the vaguest sense. Then, I'll also encounter things like seeing a Nepali trap video at a Nepali restaurant and aside from the difference in language and the Himalayan backdrop, it sounded just like dull American trap. But if lack of originality is my only gripe, it's not a bad one to have.
The dumbest algorithms are indeed the best. The Spotify algorithm that told me that ppl who liked Lana Del Rey also liked Ängie changed my life and brought me here.
The algorithms supposed to make Spotify frictionless though, those are making it frissonless.