Kyle Devine, in his recent book, “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” writes “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.”
He goes on to analyse the true cost to the environment, pointing out that in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions, which is about forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000. This includes the cost of powering servers, making streaming devices, and servicing the internet that carries the streamed music. That’s not to mention the social costs of near slave labour factories in the Far East used to manufacture your shiny handhelds.
Streaming has also had profound cultural and artistic effects. Back in the day, I would buy an album or CD on the strength of hearing maybe one or two songs, often getting home with my purchase to find much of the album was comparatively poor, with half a dozen “padding” tracks making up the bulk of the album and just one or two headliners meeting the standards I expected.
The other side of that coin is frequently the album would not reveal its true glory until I’d played it several times. A case in point is the classic album by Bob Dylan, “Blood on the tracks”, which to my ears contained one song of merit on first hearing, the wonderful, “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” Quite honestly, the rest sounded a bit meh and I thought Dylan was just treading water, but as time went on and I listened, and I mean REALLY listened to what was going on, I realised it was actually a masterpiece with no duds at all. It grew on me. I can think of many albums with which I have experienced similar revelations after time. Some of these, admittedly, were chemically aided (more or less anything by Steve Vai), still others because of my evolving tastes, such as Bob Marley’s “Exodus” and Radiohead’s “Kid A”.
Today, artists have no choice but to put out ONLY their best and most immediate work, because listeners just will not play their subtle, grow-on-you stuff, at least not until they are established enough to have a fan base which is willing to give the less commercial music a chance. Going back to “Blood on the Tracks”, the headline track “Tangled up in blue” did not appeal to me at the time, so if I had listened to it via a streaming service, that would have been the last I heard of it. Instead, my mate Laurie insisted I listen to the whole thing in his East London bedsit, so I got to hear Lily, Rosemary et al and persuaded myself that the track was worth the price of the album. Had I not bought it, I would never have had the many, many hours of enjoyment it has given me. There are dozens of albums like this. If streaming results in the end of the album, how much great music will be lost?
The effect of streaming focusing on just the most commercial tracks has an effect on the pockets of artists too. It’s well known that streaming services pay artists a pittance and you have to get millions of plays to earn enough to live off. This means that only the top artists get a good living out of streaming. The middle and lower tiers can’t rely on sales to pay for even a modest lifestyle. I read an article in the Guardian a few years back that had a startling revelation: a band who had a number one rock chart hit album still had to have daytime jobs just to pay the bills. This was largely because it takes very few album sales to get genre chart success, while their streaming income was negligible, because they just weren’t getting the exposure. More importantly, streaming was clearly impacting on their album sales, but even more importantly, the music had become disposable. If you own an album, you will play it again and again, if you just stream songs, you move on to the next new thing within weeks, if not days. That means there is a funnelling of artistic endeavour. By this I mean artists wanting success will eschew artistic merit and focus on commercial demands. Tubular Bells would never be made these days and even if it was, it would not ship the gazillions of copies that allowed Mike Oldfield artistic freedom. Admittedly, it was artistic freedom he never used to any great effect, but the same applies to Dark Side of the Moon, the Six Wives of Henry XIII, OK Computer and many others. Just like the fifties and sixties, the three minute thirty second song is king and anything longer than five minutes that’s not in the key of C major, with a Verse-Chorus format will not see the light of day. Unlike the fifties and sixties there does not appear to be an avenue for platforming new, exciting music in a long play format. There still is a CD market, and Vinyl has made a bit of a comeback amongst audiophiles, but it is shrinking daily. In ten years will you be able to buy a cheap device on which to play CDs? Probably not. Certainly not one that has not been built in Far East sweat shop.
The worst part of this is the way streaming is affecting the buying habits of consumers, who are quite happy to part with seven or eight quid a month to mega-corps like Google to listen to their streaming services uninterrupted, but will not shell out ten quid for an album they will own forever and come to appreciate the subtleties of less commercial tracks with time.
One thing is certain, streaming is not going to go away, but the big brains of the music business need to get their thinking caps on and find a way to make albums and permanence a feature of the music buying public’s thought processes again. Because if they don’t we will lose culturally as the whole music business turns in a homogenised lump of beige.
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