Cut out Amazon. Quit facebook and twitter. What else, though? If the mighty dollar reigns supreme, and I wanna vote with my spending, what small steps can the average person make to disrupt the patterns of the nihilistic ego tripping energy vampires who are willing to burn it all down so they can live forever?
Slow tech. I recently transferred my music library from my laptop (mostly ripped CDs) to my phone. Love having offline access to my music. Listening to entire albums. Not paying money to Spotify that shills for ICE and is ripping off artists by creating AI music.
Going to buy a cd player and/or cd-rom and buy more CDs, or buy digital albums directly from artists.
A lot of people are buying iPods to do something similar, but your phone will do the same thing if you just remove the streaming apps.
I always heard about Spotify ripping off artists and thought “well, it can’t be worse than YouTube’s random demonetisations, can it?” but what’s this about it shilling for ICE?
“Shilling” isn’t quite right but they ran ICE advertisements.
Ah, yeah that’s a yikes
This week I went to a concert, bought the vinyl there and it came with a download code to get the FLACs.
I won, the artist won, the middlemen got shafted. Great success.
I vote for listening to full albums as well.
As a youngster I used to have a massive playlist, only my favorite songs on it… These days I only listen to full albums, bad/weak songs and all. Its so much better. I’ve realised that a lot of the “bad” songs that I didn’t want to listen to as a youth, are not that bad actually.
I think there’s something to this. Even if the album isn’t great, simply sitting with it and experiencing it is instructive.
It’s strange to think, but in the late 90s, albums were a bit of a cynical play. “I like this band or performer, let me get all that they have to give. I will spend $20+ on an album where a $5+ single might have given me the best they had to give.”
Which is not a knock against the concept album. I quite like those. The Who; or more recently The Mars Volta.
But wrapping around to my point about slow tech — if you put an album in a CD player and listen to it start-to-finish — has something been gained? I would say yes. This is what the performer wanted you to hear. Good or bad.
Yeah thats the thing. The artist has to be interested in making a album not just making a few hit songs and then filling up space. Luckily thats mostly a issue with pop music, the stuff I listen to tends to be more in line with creating a package.
One of the best things an album can do is put you into a sort of a trance, where you just listen and sink into the music. Only when the album ends you snap out of it, wipe the drool off your face and chest, get up and try to deal with life again lol.