I jumped into Spotify 10 years ago because it sounded too good to be true.
All my favourite music in one place at the touch of a button sounded magical.
No more racks of CDs and stacks of vinyl and packs of cassettes taking up space and gathering dust in my loungeroom or in boxes somewhere under the bed or in a wardrobe.
Music has always been a carrier of emotion and memory moving through my lifeblood like haemoglobin.
Everything that made me cry and smile and wish and dream and sway or punch the air or play air guitar and soar like a bird or just float like a feather, could now be on my phone, drifting somewhere in a stream for ever.
All I had to do was jab a finger at my phone screen like Captain Kirk to make it so.
Forty-five years ago I spent hours making playlists of my favourite songs, recording them from vinyl on to tape cassettes.
I listened to them on a Sony Walkman with earbuds inside my helmet as I rode a motorcycle around central London delivering news and film.
They were long dreary days of exhaust fumes, rain and passing parades of pale John Brack faces getting on and off buses and trudging along cold pavements to be swallowed by stairs leading to the underground.
My carefully curated playlists of musical haemoglobin were the only things that coloured and softened this hard world.
They delivered the lifeblood of beauty and dreams that kept me breathing.
Now, data scrapers in quiet offices deliver playlists of my favourite music to me every day.
It’s wonderful and slick and shiny and so easy.
Too easy.
Because behind every shiny thing lies a darkness.
And the darkness in digital music streaming lies with the people who collect the data.
They’re not music lovers.
They are driven not by the messiness of mystery and emotion, but by the certainty of numbers and money.
Of course, money men have always played a part in delivering music to the masses.
Brian Epstein, John Hammond, Albert Grossman, Andrew Loog Oldham and Peter Grant helped bring us The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Springsteen, but they at least had an emotional investment in the musical world they managed.
The builders of music streaming platforms are not invested in anything but numbers.
Music is a tool to increase numbers and profit.
They could stream digital baked beans and be just as emotionally invested.
So there comes a point where you have to make a choice.
And because I am a radical left-wing lunatic and as woke as a screaming baby, I’ve chosen to dump Spotify and look for somewhere more ethical to go swimming in the slipstream.
Why?
Well, Spotify’s chief executive Daniel Elk has invested his money in AI drones that kill people; the platform is becoming saturated with AI music taking space from real musicians; all platforms pay musicians peanuts, but Spotify pays them in the shells of peanuts; in the US it promotes ICE recruitment adverts; its algorithms produce dull playlists.
That’s enough to be going on with.
Ironically, digital music streaming hasn’t delivered a shiny future for musicians at all.
It’s actually turned the clock back to a time when the only way for musicians to make a real living is by playing music live in front of real people.
We have a chance to step out of the bland, shiny stream at the Grounded Festival at Dookie Quarry on Saturday, November 29 where real musicians will play in front of real people.
That’s a real blast from the past.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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