What now?
We Have All the World's Music.
What Do We Do Next?
Excerpt from ‘You have not yet heard your favorite song - How streaming changes music’, by Glenn McDonald, former Spotify data alchemist and creator of Every Noise at Once, a music discovey website.
‘So where does all this leave us? Or find us, if we are to be more found than left? Of all the things we could confront or contemplate or cultivate, which ones are most urgent, or point us towards better futures? What uncertainty can we tolerate, and what questions must we insist on answering before we do anything else?
These are not, of course, new questions.
What Next? sits on top of our alarm clocks, watching us while we sleep, and thus we brush against it with our hand every time we are recalled from dream-ing. Big, nameable changes like the advent of streaming music are rare, and can feel like they have their own plans to which we can only react, but this is an illusion of perspective. We are the ones who make them happen. We made this one happen by all of our actions, artists and fans and engineers and opportunists and thieves. We determine how it evolves, sometimes collectively or indirectly, but sometimes by stubborn personal insistence and earnestly intransigent belief.
And maybe there are no new questions, really, just variations of these two that never go away no matter how many times they're answered: What do we do with this fear?, and What do we do with this joy?
We build social structures to mitigate fear.
Or we build them for other, less noble reasons, and then we try to adapt them to serve useful sentinel purposes. This is the systemic moral imperative: away from hoarding power towards its distribution. It would thus be insanely naive to imagine that capitalist structures like labels and streaming companies (especially public ones), which hoard power by their inherent nature, will automatically align with the collective human interest in the future of music by pursuing their individual commercial interests. That has generally not worked for anything. But self-interest can be marshaled into collective interest through laws. The music business probably needs more laws. And as a global structure, the music business probably needs world laws, and thus governments who are good at laws have an opportunity to lead by example. Laws operate by offering us excuses to act morally, in spirit as much as obedience, and thus we also need mores.
We build social structures to amplify joy. This is the eudaemonic moral imperative: away from misery towards joy. If laws against fear operate paternalistically, through the communicative frameworks of authority, the structures of joy are usually less literal and more personal, arising from what we allow more than what we prevent.
This starts with us, with you, with how you walk down the street, with what you tap on a screen. But it really flourishes when individual behavior aggregates into social incentives. Leave your car home and walk or bike somewhere. Walking encourages sidewalks, sidewalks encourage taco trucks, tacos encourage more walking. Biking encourages bike lanes, bike lanes reduce noise and traffic, music flows into the acoustic spaces vacated by noise. Nicer cities encourage shared spaces and juxtaposed cultures, and exposure to difference fosters mutual understanding and mutually-reinforcing curiosity. Music invites us into each other's hearts, into each other's hopes.
The spaces in which our hopes aspire are sometimes physical, sometimes notional, but just as real in both cases. Bringing all the world's music together brings all of us together in conceptual spaces that can themselves help or harm us. But these are not natural phenomena, they're human constructs subject to the epistemic moral imperative: towards better knowledge about structures, power and joy. Ignorance obstructs, transparency clarifies. We are right to question the hidden motives and unobservable actions of technologists, whether we are among them or not. We are right to legislate accountability, right to demand answers.
So what now, what next? Everything. The best answers don't try to settle a question, they invite it on an adventure. Listen, sing.
Keep the world from melting. Hear the next song like it might change you. Allow yourself to be changed. Understand that love is not a reduction, and the search for your favorite song is a spiral leading outwards, not inwards. The future I want for music is not a known point towards which we are converging. This is clearly not a workbook for simple provable steps. You don't find your new favorite song by itemizing its presumed qualities, or navigate the labyrinth of sound by simply following the right wall.
So in the face of all of these intractable unknowns, what should we do as listeners right now, today? As musicians? As people working on music technology? As human beings? How exactly will you find your new favorite song? Only you can answer these questions for yourself, but maybe I've shown you a little about how I try to answer them for myself. I try to find things I don't understand yet. I try to understand them. I try to savor not understanding them yet. I try to use math to multiply joy and love. I try to remember that there are ways to do less wrong even when it's not clear what's right. My goal is not to teach robots an increasingly precise notion of some one thing we love best, it's to get them to understand progressively more expansive notions of all the things we want to love more. I'm sure every noise matters, and that they all matter at once. And that's what I want for you and for everybody: I want us all to be sure of this together. I want us to feel liberated, to feel like we are liberators, to feel like music is not just a medium but an expression of our purpose, to feel like we have purpose. I want us to share songs we would not have shared, to explore when we might have stayed home, to understand our own potential by hearing transformation in others, to open our hearts, and then to fill them, and thus to be a chorus of hearts full of music and love.’