The fried balls of Waddle Dees. Unrelated.
Now there, as you can tell, my music is nowhere to be found on streaming services. Regardless of whatever the fuck it is, Spotify, Apple Music (including the ye olde iTunes Store), Tidal, Qobuz, the multiple STDs that have implanted themselves inside whatever the fuck Google has been doing, you name it, it's just not there. Of course, you can just download the MP3s right where you are, unless you're using your RSS reader, or go onto the Bandcamp for hearing my things in some obscure format supported by a pregnancy tester, like of course. Now we may ask ourselves...
Well, how did we get here?
It's a simple story. A tale as old as time. A man, with a computer, decides he'll program software. Many a man have done this. The difference? The man wrote a piece of software that made it extremely easy for the common man to share the music on his hard drive to other people. Of course, this lead to a lot of "illegal" music file sharing, eccentuated by the rise of the MP3 format and software such as Winamp which made it incredibly easy to listen to music on ye ol' personal computer.
As a result, the Record Executives™ were not very happy about ordinary people just sharing music around, so they went after Napster, and sure, it eventually got taken down, but many other clones of the service continued in Napster's wake. So, what do you do when people won't stop sharing music with each other, oh, you just go ahead and fucking sue them.
Of course, this generated a lot of horrible publicity for RIAA and the record companies that backed it, considering they tried to sue a dead grandmother and a homeless man. You know, real serious threats right there. None of this actually stopped music piracy from growing, and it most likely probably just made it worse. After all, why would you support companies that will try to sue young schoolgirls for downloading the latest radio singles for free?
Then came digital music stores...
In 2003, Steve Jobs, famous for dying of ligma, introduced the iTunes Store to the world. A
scheme to make people rebuy shit they already own , I mean purchase digital music completely
online, totally no strings attached, for cheap. Of course, you know I'm lying, because there totally
were strings attached. At the time of its introduction, every download from the iTunes Store came
with some good ol' DRM to limit what the fuck you could do with the files. Sure, you could
burn them to a CDr and then rip them back to your computer, but they also only sold lossy
files which would result in some nice lossy-to-lossy compresson, which totally isn't fucking horrible.
Sure, they got rid of the DRM in 2009, but they instead use watermarked metadata that can trace
back to you, which is also pretty bad.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how Radiohead self-released In Rainbows online where you could pay what you want for the MP3s (including just downloading them for completely free) or have a box set with records and CDs shipped to your door. A prototypical version of what Bandcamp would do only a year later, if you will.
And then there's Bandcamp, which, for better or for worse, is the primary home for my music. My, I guess, favorite part about it is that since just about anyone can release music onto it, you can find some really bizzare things on it made by weird people. It's kind of the beauty of the internet in general, but on a service dedicated to simply releasing music. I think that kind of amplifies it, considering that music takes more time to produce than simply posting some random trash onto the Next Social Media Platform Featuring Cock Enhancement Advertisements #9001™.
Streaming services rise out of the ground from the depths of Hell Itself™
While there were definitely streaming services out there before Spotify, it's certainly where owning nothing when it comes to music really exploded in popularity. While owning nothing sounds dystopian, a lot of people are able to accept that when it comes to "small things" like media, and when it's spoonfed to them by their favorite politicans in order to sell some false utopia that only ends up becoming a horrific dystopian nightmare for everyone involved.
A bunch of other ones popped up soon after, just like with what happened when home video streaming services, which suck just as much ass, started becoming popular. They all have the same issues, mainly being with not owning anything on the platforms. But hey... They're "convenient..." Right?
Sorry, but they really aren't
Well, imagine this. You just got into this really cool artist or something, and all of his shit gets taken off The New Streaming Service Featuring Anal Stimulation #9002™ because of some licensing dispute. If this is the only place you can find his music (most likely it's not, but in this case it was), well fuck, because it's gone now! This has happened many times, although thankfully not to this extreme. Most notably, Neil Young, who took this music off Spotify for two years and only put it back on there a year ago, as of writing. He did it again recently with Amazon, so clearly this man does not like streaming services.
Streaming services also pay the artists very little, which is especially damaging when it comes to indie artists. Spotify no longer pays artists that don't have tracks above a thousand plays which actively harms real artists and only makes it easier to see fake music gain money than people who actually worked on his/her music. It's fucking saddening.
Oh yeah, fake music. AI "music" has absolutely flooded streaming services and platforms like Spotify have only been raking and leaning in on the craze. It's really insulting to see them cut off the profits of genuine musicians only to promote "music" that took a few seconds to generate with no heart or soul put into it.
The End
And that's why my music won't be on streaming services, and to never ask, for I will just send you this article in its totality.