🆕 Never Post! The Sound Files of Summer

Howdy, Never Posters! What we have here for you is our Summer Vacation Special: an episode-long staff round-table about music, streaming, and music library management, with special guest Meghal Janardan.

You can listen on the website (if you're not already), and wherever you get your pods. Members: there is of course an ad free version of this ep waiting for you in your feed.

I hope everyone is having a great June! We'll be back in the feed on July 3rd with a brand new, 2-segment episode. See you then!

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure

Friends, hello, and welcome to the 1st annual Never Post summer break special. A chill vibes only episode long round table where the Neverpost staff and a special guest talk on some topic decidedly dog days. Before we get into it, let's go around the call and say who's here. I'm Mike, never post host. My favorite ice cream flavor is black raspberry, and I'm here.

Georgia just looks horrified at having to answer this question. So I'm gonna go ahead and call up Georgia first.

I'm Georgia producer for Never Post. I have so many favorite flavors of ice cream.

I don't think that's how favorite works.

I will just say a lovely scoop of chocolate.

Classic.

Sensible.

Elegant.

Oh. Hi. I'm Jason, Never Post executive producer, and my favorite ice cream is a classic strawberry with the little semi frozen chunks of strawberry in it. It's delightful textural surprises. It's just good.

It is

it's just good.

I'm Hans Bussow. I'm the senior producer. So last year, I got my wife for her birthday, an ice cream maker. And let me tell you, the difference between homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream with real fresh mint Yeah. And real cream and real sugar opposed to anything you could buy in any store is shocking.

So

we're all

on our way to Minnesota right now.

The porch is lovely. The birds are singing, and the ice cream is fine.

Joining us as special guest is a friend of the show and member of the charts and leisure extended universe, New York Internet ceramicist, and Georgia Hamptons pal from college. Yeah. Megal Jarnarden. Megal, it is very nice to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Hello.

Tell us about your favorite ice cream, please.

A new favorite, which also was homemade that my sister and I made for a friend's dinner, was hojicha and soba cha ice cream. Woah.

Woah. What?

Yeah. Hell yeah. It really hits. It's so good.

Oh. Walk me through the flavor profile of that.

Soba, I think, is buckwheat, and hojicha, like, is roasted green tea leaves.

Woah. So this is like an earthy

Earthy smokey.

Yeah. But still a little herbal.

Yeah. Yeah.

If you guys have ever had Earl Grey ice cream, you would like this. Yeah. But a tea based ice cream, essentially.

Man, I just said chocolate.

Yeah. I was gonna say chocolate, and then I was gonna say strawberry. And then you both took it.

Oh, okay.

There you go. Fine.

So you had

to come up with some extremely fancy remote answer.

Yeah. Like, I'm gonna start real quick.

Soul nowhere. I was gonna say black sesame, but I was like, what kind of asshole says black sesame? I should get that to myself, which I said black sesame now. Okay. Shockingly, this is not the topic that we are having.

The vibes are already very strong. So onto the matter at hand, the lot of us, we were all hanging out recently when Georgia graced us with her presence in New York City.

Why now, why did you say it like that?

Just Now, why would you say that? Yeah.

What a choice you have made.

I don't know. Hans was talking about Primus earlier and it really put me on

the moon. Yep.

Jason, you know the answer to that question. It's because I've been inhabited by the ghost of Les Claypool.

You have Primus Adjacency Syndrome.

Yeah. And Magle asked a question that we got so invested in answering that we decided to do the most terminally podcaster thing and stop the conversation in its tracks so that we could reconvene later and record it. So here we are. Magle, I see the remainder of my time in the floor to you. Take it away.

Alright. I realized that every year around this time, spring summer, along with my regular apartment spring cleaning, that I also do a digital spring cleaning. And I was thinking about how I organize all of my music files and curate all of that and how it's something I used to spend a lot of time on when I was younger and had my iTunes library. And that's not really the case anymore with Spotify. So I was wondering, how does everyone organize their music Now and before.

Is spring cleaning to you? So, like, are you, like, taking things out to the dustbin? Just like, nope. Don't need that song. Primus, keep it.

Anything non Primus, get rid of it.

I realized because I now have, like, Spotify, like an app for all music stuff, and it's not like I have my physical CDs that I'm putting into my laptop and then downloading and importing into my Apple Music library that the process of organizing my music files is kind of already done for me in a way. And now, it's more like I organize playlist where I am like, that playlist, that is from when I was friends with people that I'm no longer friends with. Let me delete that. It's just like too triggering in a way. It's like bad memories.

Wow. That's where I am now. Whereas before, I would like organize. I would, you know, put my killer CD into my laptop, import the files, make sure it showed up in my Apple Music, and then that everything's working. And I would make sure that all of the songs match the back of the CD where you could see the list of the songs, and it was all correct.

Just somehow, like, metaphorically pour one out for when iTunes was good.

Oh, boy.

Like, I did the exact same

thing. Yeah.

As soon as I had a computer that had an optical drive that could rip CDs, I would spend so. I would rip every CD. I would I would very lovingly do all of the metadata. Keep it all organized inside iTunes. And now, it's just things have changed.

That's not the main purpose of that software anymore. No. But man, I I miss it.

And I realized it almost, like, I've been saying Apple Music. I'm, like, yeah. No. It's iTunes. Yeah.

It was. Yeah.

Because I didn't it wasn't Apple Music. It was iTunes. ITunes. No. It's just

the program that comes up when I accidentally misclick and double click an audio file that I have not routed to something else. And then I have to get through 8 pop ups of Apple Music telling it to shut up and go away before I can get back to whatever I

just clicked.

Also, the hubris to call your app music. Fuck off.

I mean, I even used to, like, remember I would have my iTunes library. And then when I first had, like, a smartphone where I could put music from my iTunes library to my phone, the way I could just, like, click my favorite artist in the when I plugged my phone in and then make sure everything was synced

It was so good.

So easy.

In high school, I would go to the town library and go to the CD section, and you could take out 10 CDs at a time. And multiple times a week after school, I would go and pick up 10 CDs and I would take them home, and then I would lovingly burn them into my computer and make sure all the metadata was right, and then I'd bring them back later that week and do the same thing 2 or 3 times a week and expand my horizons based on what they had there. It got me deeper into jazz, deeper into salsa, deeper into all sorts of odd things that you just pulled out of the library bin because it looked cool enough to take a gander at and was free. So 1, hell, yeah, libraries, support libraries. 2, the exact curation that you're talking about, Mabel, was, like, a huge part of my interaction with media.

But, Jason, when you're importing all those, how many did you go back and listen to? What is the distinction between the importing and archiving versus the listening experience? Because with that much music coming in, and I'm guessing you weren't on a laptop, and I'm guessing you didn't have a device then you would have to sit at your computer to listen to it. Correct. So how much of that music was collecting, and how much of that music was appreciating, enjoying, and listening?

So they would all go into a playlist that I called work, weirdly

enough. How old were you?

I was a child. And the work playlist would be on shuffle. And when I was hanging out and wanted to be doing the work of expanding my horizons, I would have that playlist on shuffle. And when something came on that I wanted more of, I would then play the whole album of that thing I wanted more of, and it would graduate into some sort of other playlist of things that I knew what to do with, and I appreciated, and I liked. What really happened to them is they got the star ranking.

So they would get between 15 stars, and so that is how they had been curated into my library in a way where I knew how much I appreciated that album, and they be pulled out of the work playlist, and they were now just in sort of active cataloged library.

We did it folks. We found the one person who used the star feature in iTunes. You used

the star ratings? All I remember was accidentally rating things and being so pissed that I had to, like, unrate it.

No. I I used them. And and, you know, so I could pull up at a moment's notice a playlist of just every song that I thought was 5 stars, and that is an exciting thing to be able to do.

Wow. Describing, you know, putting in CDs, making sure the metadata looks normal. I didn't do that second part

ever. You're just a goblin ferreting through their hoard of treasures.

I'm so sorry.

Just dumping dumping songs on songs.

Just a real god is dead, eat trash, be free attitude.

Listen, it's true

though. Listen, I respect it. I I do. Feel like, whatever whatever works, you know?

I'm an all or nothing person, and so nothing is a valuable choice.

Well, I just vividly remember being in 8th grade, making a new friend, and she gave me like a thumb drive of, I don't know, maybe like 200 songs that was a mix of music she had clearly actually, you know, downloaded from the iTunes store or ripped from CDs or whatever. And then other songs that were probably from, like, Limewire or ripped from some other website or whatever, which is how for years, I thought flagpole sita was a Blink 182

song. Okay.

That is I love that. I love that episode.

I just trusted her. By the

way, 5 star song. Pull

up pull up the rating right now and Yeah.

Let's pull it up.

Where do we think the desire for correct metadata in our local music files comes from?

So one of the most impressionable things that I was told as a child, which is good and bad. I think my dad told me this that, like, when you have an album and you have your, like, I don't know, 10 to 12 songs in it, the artist made it an album. You have to listen to it together. So it's all complete together. And I think that, in my head, was like, this is why the data and everything needs to be correct so it's the correct representation of an album.

And that somehow in turn affects my listening experience. And also, I just like like things to match.

An organizational impulse. That's hard to deny. Yeah.

See, this this makes sense.

I feel pretty similarly. I think for me, the the central driving factor is like, I wanna know as much about the music that I'm listening to. Especially the music that I like as I can. And so it's just like, I wanna know who produced it. I wanna know the year that it was recorded.

I wanna know where. Like Mhmm. All this stuff feels like it's like context that I like to have when I am listening to things. And there was a point at which I realized I could get that and include it in all of the individual files, which is probably the same organizational impulse. It just feels nice.

So Mike, how did you survive the Napster era?

I so I mean, this is related to my next question which is like, I'm really curious what everybody's kinda like file sharing lineage is. Because mine is like specific and very related to this. I got out of Napster as soon as I could for this reason.

Because what would happen is you would you would queue up 45 different things to download. You'd go to bed and you'd wake up to, like, 350 new songs. All of which were mislabeled.

On top of that, everything sounded bad. So, like Right. The encodings were were bad. Yep. And this was this was in the heyday of bad encodings.

So, you know, worst of a bad bunch. I also I mean, like Megal, I much prefer albums over playlists. So I always was wanted a full album, and Napster was very much like you were getting individual songs.

Yep. One song at a time. Yes.

So, like, I would go and I would want, like, all 12 tracks from whatever, you know, and wouldn't be able to find it. And I was, like, well, this isn't even useful to me anymore.

Yeah. Again, as an as an all or nothing person, as I described my work playlist, I either like albums or a playlist of every single song that I have. I don't I don't like mood specific playlists. I like complete randomness.

It sounds like a lot of our organizational ideas around our music libraries are informed by a disorganization that was foisted upon them by file sharing. So, like Yes. Did everybody start at Napster? There like, no. Where do we

LimeWire was never used Napster. LimeWire was the girl.

Yeah. Yeah. I

don't know her.

Yeah. Because I went from Napster to Limewire, and then went to college where there were 2 methods of file sharing. 1 was soul seek, which I still use to this day, because it's where you get where you can get weird music. But it also had a local sharing option, but then also the local file sharing. Do you remember this Hans?

I absolutely Mike and I went to college together. Absolutely remember this.

And everybody in the entire campus was just on the same network.

And had all their files on the same network. Sometimes, you'd have stuff password protected, but mostly, you could just be, like, oh, I wonder what Mike's music library is. And you would go and you would worm your way in, and it would just

So there was this norm that you would set your you would set shared folders of media that you wanted to share with the rest of the campus. Yeah. Woah. And that you could just, like, sort of browse around the network and see what people had. Just in the shared folders, like, network thing.

Yep. Yeah. This was also something that iTunes could do when it was good.

When it was good. When it was good.

That. And so you saw everyone's iTunes playlist that they wanted to share on the whole campus, and you could just select and copy it over to your library.

Yes. So this that norm was developed because of the iTunes library sharing. Right? You would listen to something that you liked. You would go and grab the files using the shared files feature.

And then after college, I went to all of the like private trackers. If you mislabel something, you get kicked off. You have to maintain a 2 to 1 seater to download a ratio. Mhmm. You have to contribute a certain number of records per year.

Nice. Like, very high

I forgot about all this.

Yeah. Oink. Yeah. Oink. Yeah.

Waffle god. Waffles. What? What CD? Yeah.

Gazelle. There were a bunch of them.

It changed the nature. What it did is it changed the nature of what it meant to belong to a musical community. The gatekeeping got really shifted from being this, like, open world of, like, utopic, everyone has access to everyone's things, to this very much, like, if you don't contribute, you don't get to participate.

So when it was in it's, like, heyday where you could just kind of search the network and find stuff, did you, like, meet people through this?

A 100%.

Totally. You would run into someone at a party.

Oh my

god. Like, I'm Brent. And you'd be like, Brent m? And then they'd be like, holy shit, dude. Like, I just ripped 30 albums off of you.

What's up?

My god.

Or they would message you and be like, hey, bro. I see that you're taking all the all the primus. Good move.

Good move. Yeah.

And I was in my room, like, slapping my base being like, oh, hell yeah.

Wait. Okay. Now, I have a question. Uh-huh. So in this scenario, were people making more, like, vibes playlist as we're describing or more just, like, albums?

People were not making playlists. These

my memory, Mike, you can correct me. My memory is these were not playlist based. The

The playlist the playlist in in my estimation, the rise of the playlist is directly related to Spotify. Not even streaming in general, but Spotify specifically.

I would disagree. I would disagree because this is very much of the tradition of making mixtapes and CDs.

I think that's I think that's different. I put those in 2 separate categories. Really? Yeah. Because maybe this is just, like, personally informed.

But I think of those as just 2 different things, that, like, the physical experience of especially making a mixtape, making a mix CD just feels very different to me to making a playlist. They just

I guess the distinction is, are you or how much are you using a playlist as an organizational tool versus an experiential tool? Because a mix CD is a curated experience. A playlist can be that, but can also be an organizing

I will say my my very polemic opinion on playlists at large right now is that, like, really, like, the the only appropriate times for a playlist for me are it's like, admitting your love to someone with a physical object, and there's no other way that you could possibly capture your feelings, or going on a road trip. Otherwise, I'm not a Chipotle. I don't need a playlist. I can just choose music that I wanna listen to. Oh.

That was a low blow.

Unfortunately, I'm furious.

I don't even like playlists, and I'm with you, Georgia.

I do think you're right about the experience of a playlist being different if you are not trying to order it, like, where you listen to it in order. I think that that is definitely different with something like a Spotify playlist where you could put, like I have a playlist that's collaborative that has, like, 38 people in it and over 50 hours of music. This playlist is called the invention of music, and the only metric is that any song you put in it has to be a perfect song. I don't care what genre it is. I don't care who it's by.

It just has to be a perfect song. And it's incredible. Like, I I love vibe playlist for this reason. I think it's such an interesting way of organizing, and it can be such an interesting collaborative experience. I have multiple collaborative playlists with friends because we are both trying to make, I don't know, some sort of vaguely vampiric at night under the moonlight kind of music, or I have a playlist called the sound of boot cut jeans that is supposed to evoke the experience of, like, early 2000 girlhood probably trying on pants that don't fit you right under the fluorescent lights of, like, you know, t j maxx.

I think there's a taxonomy question happening here though that, like, what you're describing, Georgia, feel like libraries to me, not playlists.

But so here's my question for Georgia then. How often do you listen to them in relation to how often you collect for them? Like

I think this is the distinction.

Yeah.

So something like the invention of music is very much a collection. Like, it's not something I would really wanna listen to on its own. I've tried to, and it is the most, like, overwhelming experience.

Yeah. It sounds it sounds extremely intense.

It's Yeah. I've had multiple friends tell me they tried to put it on shuffle and that someone else was like, what the hell is this? But there are other playlists I have that are very vibe specific that I would absolutely still consider a playlist and I do listen to if I want to be in that kind of mood. And they may still be very long, but I I think the listenability might be crucial here.

George, I think what you're saying is the thing it is intended for is a listening experience versus an organizing experience because you describe that playlist of, like, the perfect songs, and we can go, like, oh, that's a cool idea. Like, I would scroll through that as a way to look at something, but but it's not built for a listener experience versus a playlist that is built for a listener experience where the goal or the object of it is to consume it.

Yes. But I will say the sound of Bootcut Genes, the other playlist I have that is collaborative that has like a 1000000,000,000,000 songs in it, I do listen to. Because I'd say that theme is specific enough where the listening experience feels cohesive. I think you're right, Hans, that, like, the intention of this organization determines what is actually happening.

It reminds me of it seems like this playlist, the invention of music, is almost like that's the network library that Mike and Hans would go through and find people's music and what they were like Oh, god. Meet public.

Yep. Yeah. You're totally right. Completely. Mhmm.

This is so interesting because, like, for me, I always think of my height of music knowledge and what I was listening to and what I was interested in was when I was, like, 12 to 14 where I knew a lot of music. And because of, how I was downloading music and importing it into my iTunes and everything, I was, like, excited to, like, seek out new music. Whereas now, I don't do that. It is so overwhelming. I also, like, barely listen to music now.

Okay. That feels like new territory that we are gonna have a lot to say about. Let's take a brief break, a little respite. I will apologize to Georgia off camera for suggesting that she is a Chipotle. We'll be back in a couple minutes.

Okay. Before we took our break, Miggle was, starting to say that music discovery at this point is overwhelming. Maybe, you know, in the era of file sharing, when it was much more prevalent, you spend a little bit more time looking for things. You get a little bit closer to the files and the music that you're listening to. There's sort of an excitement of discovery.

And now that everything is in front of you, available, at all times through a search bar on Spotify or Apple Music or wherever else, it's much harder to figure out what it is you wanna listen to or to find new things to listen to. And I was thinking about this in relationship to the conversation that we're having about file sharing and especially tagging and organizing and metadata. Just like think one of the other reasons that I moved to the more like snooty gatekeeper y, torrent trackers was, you know, say what you want about the militants of maintaining correct metadata. It meant when you searched for stuff, you could find it. It made things really searchable.

That felt like I was getting closer to music. But what's weird is that the same thing is true of Spotify and Apple. It's all really well tagged. It's all correct. It has to be.

It's uploaded by the publisher, and yet it feels much further away. Mhmm. Why? Why? Why do we think that is?

Like, is that related maybe to how you're feeling, Meghal?

I'm just so aware that Spotify has everything that I don't know where to go anymore. Like, I know Joe, last week, made my first playlist with the help of my partner in years. They got my Spotify. I had a playlist set. I call it, like, Bend It because it's like my Bend It Like Beckham playlist.

I had just like 10 songs on there. So they took that playlist, and they were playing the suggested songs. And then they were saying, Maybelle, do you like this? Yes or no? And then they would add it or not add it and move on to the next song until I had a few hours in music on there.

Because that is maybe the only one of 3 playlist that I have. Which is when I when I was, like, much younger, I remember I would read, like, a magazine and see a new artist feature, like, a little side article.

Mhmm.

I would look them up and be like, oh, I like this, and, like, look up everything about them and either buy their CD or download it, rip it, whatever, and add it to my library. And, like, I just don't do that anymore. I don't know if I'm just, like, too aware of, like, marketing and, like, what's being pushed onto me, whether it's, like, from a marketer, like, or an algorithm where it just doesn't feel like I'm discovering it or I'm kind of, like, seeking something out. And I used to listen to music all the time when I was younger, and I like my kid my friends, like, it's like a thing. They know I don't listen to music.

It's really weird.

And is and is the the feeling of being overwhelmed the main

a

one thing that jumps out at me is, like, a few of us have kind of said, yes, Spotify has everything, which is 1 not true. But 2 Right. Much like Google right now, it presents like it has everything and then withholds everything from you, much like dating, Georgia.

Oh, my god.

Oh, no. It's telling you it has everything and then only showing you the things that it would really, really like to show you. And so you might be responding to your suggested feed feeling even as your partner is helping you get some suggestions from it, like it is being forced on you and that you are not able to discover the things you would like to discover, because there's no way that those things are surfaced even if they are indeed on Spotify.

And it's so interesting too because when we were, like, making this playlist, I was like, oh, no. Now my Spotify algorithm is gonna think that this is the only genre of music that I listen to. And this playlist is very, like, early 2000, late nineties type of stuff. And I was like, oh, then I now I now I'm thinking my head, like, I gotta make, like, a 2020 pop album. So I get, like, all the pop music I listen to or, like, I gotta get make an email album so I get all my email stuff.

So when it's, like, my suggested playlist on Spotify recommendations for new music is actually correct and pulling from the right info. But that No. I'm not gonna do that. Like, I'm I'm not gonna do it. Like, there's no way.

I'm just too far gone.

I think you pretend that Spotify doesn't exist in this equation.

Yeah.

Like, when I when I listen to Georgia talking about these playlists, I wanna, like, look at these playlists. I wanna see what people are putting in, which is akin to going to the file share and seeing what people are listening to. Like, there are good playlist in Spotify. They're all human curated and a little bit hard to find, but that there are still people doing the people work of curation that can give you more of what you want.

That's what I will do is, like, every once in a while, I'll, like, search for a playlist on Spotify or listen to a friend's playlist where they've already kind of curated the vibes or the genre.

I I think Spotify does a great job, of doing many terrible things. And one of them is, like, it turns quantity into a kind of quality. Like it presents you with so much at once that it changes the quality of all of those things. All of those things no longer become individual works that an artist has labored, you know, extensively on in order to capture a feeling and communicate it to an audience. But I think maybe there is another conversation to be had about whether or not certain portions of pop music are even trying to do that anymore anyway.

Either way, it just homogenizes a lot of what's out there. And when everything is just this gray field of available sound, it makes sense that you feel like, what? You know, like, where even am I? At the same time, and I see this I don't use Spotify, but Molly Molly uses Spotify and I see, like, the emails that she gets and I see, like, you know, if we're driving and I'm using her phone to put on music, I see the pop ups and the playlist and stuff. Spotify really seems like it guilts people into not knowing about music.

There are so many things where it's like

That's actually really good.

A date on the newest pop hit. Fuck off. Like Yes. This is not this is not breaking world news. It's like what I wanted to play in the background while I'm eating breakfast with my family.

Like this isn't work. It's not something I need to keep up with. Like this is an enriching activity for me as a participant in the world, And when it puts this stuff in your face of like, keep up to date. Make sure you know what the latest, the hottest, the most popular, whatever. That completely changes your relationship to what you're looking at and adds so much pressure to it that, of course, you're then gonna be like,

I feel like I do find using a platform like Spotify only really enjoyable when I don't pay attention to it, like, when I pretend it doesn't exist. So like most of my playlist actually, all of my playlist are either ones I made, ones my friends made, or ones that my friends and I made together. And I I find that there are still spaces in which you can find new music in an interesting way. A lot of the music I listen to, I found on TikTok. Like, I think Yeah.

TikTok basically got me into Ethiopian jazz.

Oh, hell yeah.

And then, you know, the many branches off of that. And lots of funk music and, like, groove music I found on TikTok and other avenues. But it is kind of this it's just a different thing because you have to kinda go through your for you page. You have to go through.

And then also, it's like, I've sometimes, like, see things on TikTok, and it's not on Spotify.

Yeah. Mhmm.

And then I'm like, where do where does it go? And it kinda stops there, and I forget about it, and it goes into the Internet.

I would love to give a qualified shout out to Bandcamp. Oh my god. Bandcamp daily, insofar as it still exists, does a great job of curating very manageable selections of really great music by genre and then across the whole site. You know, the qualification is that it appears as though Songtradr was perhaps successful in busting a union. So

I think what we're circling is this idea that a lot of Internet companies want to be your one and only and all encompassing.

Yeah.

Right arm, left arm, also your legs, possibly your head Mhmm. In all things. I mean, I think it hearkens back to Mike's frustration that Apple calls its app simply Music, which implies that it is your all encompassing it is your relationship to music rather than a tool for playing music, which are 2 very different things. And I think that everything about the marketing, everything about the tool itself is to hide the fact that it is a tool and make it more of a lifestyle or make it more of a an all encompassing way of being in the world,

which for music specifically, the app is even more reinforced by the fact that, I have a huge MP 3 library. Like, I still have tons and tons of local music. I I get most of my music from Bandcamp and I download it and I have it on my computer. And I don't put it into music. I use a completely separate other

Yeah.

Player because, I have an Apple Music subscription. And if you have an Apple Music subscription and local files, in order to meaningfully use Apple Music, you have to turn on a feature called sync library

Yep.

Which ingests all of your local files, uploads them to the cloud, and then relabeles them based on Apple's standards, which I am Woah. Not interested in.

Yeah. I'm gonna defend Apple Music for a moment.

Yeah. Please.

And say that I have figured out ways to use the things that are inherent, echoing the things that you all have said, which is just completely ignore the front page. Like, the front page is just a wall of noise that I move past as soon as I possibly can.

Yeah.

Because who gives

a shit?

I have to bring something to it and when I bring something to it, it will give me a lot. Every Saturday night, my wife and I have a date night. We don't have children, so it's a little bit easier than I think for other folks. We've gotten into with the pandemic, we got into wine a little bit, experimenting with wine. And so we get a new bottle of wine that we've not had before.

We read all about the grape. We try to figure out, and then we sit down. We make a meal that we think goes with it, and we listen to music that we don't know or specifically music that we might not know or we realize that we actually don't know that well. And so we pick an artist or we pick a genre or we pick something that we're, like, you know what? I think I know Paula Abdul's music, but I'm not really sure.

Her name is

Paula Abdul. And so what you do, do, you then go to Paula Abdul, and you go to her as an artist, and almost every artist then has an essentials playlist

Yeah.

Which is simply ranked by how many times those have been played. And you get this really wonderful experience of the you know the first 3, maybe 4. If you're really into it, maybe 15. And then you start getting into deep cuts by the time you're a bottle into it's a very half bottle into the wine.

Molly Molly and I call these listening projects, and it's how we we learned that everything anybody has ever said about Jethro Tull is true.

It's a wonderful way to go in and experience the things, but you have to have an intentionality going in. You can't let it

tell you what

you want. You have to tell it what you want as a person and come to it with an idea and not take your ideas from it. And I think that's the distinction.

I think that is the core tension in these things, that they are all presenting you ways in which they're saying you don't have to do any work to get everything, and the most meaningful way to engage with music is to do a little bit of work. And they are taking away the impetus to do the very thing that is gonna help you enjoy and remember this and have the experience you want. This is how we create memories, this is how we create meaning, is you invest a little something. You do a little bit of work. Like, the the the time that we spent, all of us, clearly, not just me, going through and making sure that every single song title was capitalized when the files you download weren't capitalized.

Yeah.

Yeah. But, like, that time was actually, you know, putting your hands on the material and getting to know it a little bit better and doing a little bit of work, and that's why you formed a relationship with it.

And it also, like, creates kind of a living memory of what your library is because you're you're reading the title over and over again and double checking, and you understand the names of the songs, which I used to remember a lot, and now I don't. Because I think, like, sometimes now when I use Spotify and I find a new artist and I see their, like, most played songs at the top, I first click on those. And that kind of prevents me from then going to the album and looking at the album as a whole, and I just look at the hits. Whereas before, I would download the whole album, and I would take time to look at every single song

Mhmm.

In the album.

I think there's also just this missing of, like, for lack of a better word, this tactility, this this tactile quality of feeling like the music that you're downloading has fingerprints all over it. Yeah. There's a Does that make sense?

There's is it John Kirschenbaum talks about, like, digital materiality.

Yeah.

That there is, that there is very much a material nature, like, literally a material nature to your files even though you think of them as ephemeral. But that there are there are ways that like the stuff that we use and the stuff that we interact with, we start to ascribe an even more material nature to it the more we interact with it. Yeah. Mhmm. I think about that a lot.

Like there are m p threes that I've moved from multiple computers, and though they are not the same object, in my mind, I think about them almost like my record collection to some degree.

Yeah.

Or the, like, I spent $16 on this. I gotta figure out how to like it.

You know, that's interesting that you say that because I think that's also that in combination with, like, being told that a album is made as an album was why me as a child, when I listened to an album, I would have to listen to every song once. And that the plays in Itune were really cursed for me. That make sure all my plays were equal in an album.

This is

Oh. Yeah. Incredible.

I feel I feel that.

I feel that. And so when I accidentally clicked on a song, it was so upsetting because I was like, shit. I have to listen to the entire

album now. Loyalty to the album.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I would also then, like, when I got a new CD, like, at least once, listen to the entire CD.

Of course.

Like, I would fully listen to it, which when I list find new artists, I can't say that I do that. You know? Like, I just find the one song that I like, and there's so much information that I'm missing out on.

That's a good point. When I I share music with my dad a lot, and I'll send him a song and be like, I think you'd really like this. And then he'll get back to me in 2 hours and be like so I listened to the rest of the album, and I don't really like the rest. But I like this one song, and

I was

like, oh, right. I didn't even think to do

that. I think a lot of that can be laid at the feet of music streamers because there's I think there's a lot of work that they do to to make it feel like you are as close as you possibly can be to having as much music as you could ever need or want. But really, they, like, obfuscate a lot of it. They push it slightly further away. They put multiple veils that you just have to push through.

Yeah.

You know, between you and access to things. It feels like it should be access, but really it's just like jumble, like big big heap. And I think that's I think that's very much by design.

Part of what I'm taking away from this is that I think we do want to do the work. We do wanna go find something. We wanna go forage. We wanna discover. We wanna take back.

We wanna curate. We wanna have an I wanna work on.

Like, I want to. Yeah.

You want a project. You want something that you're compiling, that you put together, that you've labored on, that you care about, that you have touched, and that a lot of the ways we are being offered access to music is taking away our ability to feel the agency over that curatorial project. And, like, at a certain point, I, with my thousands of gigs of music library, stuffed it on an external hard drive, and never plugged that hard drive in again, and have never picked up that project, because it felt like it was no longer a valuable project for the world, in some sense. For me, this was no longer a relevant artifact because everything was available to everybody, and therefore, why would my little corner of that project be meaningful? And that was 10 years ago, and decades of work just sit there with their star ratings and their playlists, and all of this combined wisdom and care and love I put into this is now just in a box collecting dust, and it might never get picked up again.

That makes sense to, like, let go of all the, like, features in the app and just use it as let's listen. Like, look at the music itself. Listen to music.

And on that note, I wanna close with one question. What was the last thing everybody listened to?

Mine was Cannonball Adderley.

Oh, nice.

Mhmm. Just just before coming on here, I was listening to Cannonball Adderley. Which which one? Honestly, the essentials playlist on Apple Music.

There you go.

Just going through

going through

stuff here.

Like, I I feel like I should know more about a Canon or more Adderleys, deep cuts. Mhmm.

May I also recommend, Adderall Canyonly?

Yeah.

I just love that. I have no idea about 70% of what y'all are talking about.

Megha, we'll make a playlist of the things that we're all listening to you after this Yeah. After we're done recording and sending you.

Can I make it?

Yeah. It's

all gonna be Primus.

Right. The last the last thing that I listened to was this record Late Morning by Michelle Moeller, m o e l l e r. It's this really amazing, like, piano and

last night was their song, Humming. Last night was their song, Humming.

The last thing I was listening to was Ernest Tubb. Ernest Tubb is a country musician, primarily forties fifties who just does the good stuff.

I opened up my Spotify to see what was playing the last time I opened Spotify, and it is Take A Chance On Me.

Oh, hell yeah.

But Hell yeah. It's good. Solid. Very good.

Okay. I think that's I think that's good. I think that's everything that I think that's I think we've solved it is really what I'm trying to say here. We did it. I did.

We figured it out. Yeah.

It was that easy.

It was that easy. Megal, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure to have you. Yay. Thank

you for having me on the podcast as the least avid music listener.

I didn't realize we were all here to help you, but I'm happy we