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Music Discovery: Qobuz vs Spotify

Jul 6, 2023 | 2 comments

I’m not going to get into a discussion about the relative merits of streaming services based on how much they pay artists or whether that is a fair or sustainable business model. Lots of other people have already done that and the consensus seems to be it’s not and it isn’t.

But while we still have them, I wanted to say something about these services as a way of discovering and experiencing music from the perspective of a (specific) listener and purchaser of music in physical form.

I pay for both Spotify and Qobuz and while they have extraordinarily similar catalogues (distributors being what they are), I use them very differently and they create a very different impact on my musical world.

Let me start by saying that Spotify has exceptional algorithms, and Qobuz has terrible ones. Spotify’s Discover Weekly routinely suggests music that I already own on vinyl and have never listened to digitally (is it psychic?) and Qobuz’s My Weekly Q is so often so wide of the mark it’s offensive (The Eagles?! Is this how little you think of me?).

But Qobuz is my preferred platform, and it’s not about ethics – or even the high resolution streaming audio (though that is a plus). It’s two things:

1) The album and not the track is the atomic unit of music on Qobuz. You can listen to mixed playlists, and I do, but the interface absolutely prioritises whole albums – and that is the vast majority of what I like to listen to in that environment. I am a huge fan of playlists and mixtapes, but (call me old-fashioned) I still very much like the idea that artists present a body of work made up of a group of songs and interludes intended to be experienced in a particular order.

2) New album releases are highlighted on the front of the website and app every Friday. These are curated by people (actual human people) who, like knowledgeable record store proprietors, know what their customers might like and what might indulge their curiosities and broaden their horizons. I LOVE this. Qobuz assumes I’m interesting. Spotify assumes I am predictable.

Where Spotify will happily create endless playlists of stuff from the past 50 or more years that I might like (and usually do), these are for ‘having on’. Qobuz will suggest a list of new albums that came out TODAY and are worth my time to listen to.

Thanks to Qobuz, I would say a good 60-70% of all music I listen to was released in the last few months. I find things that surprise and challenge me, and I listen to music that does not merely replicate the music that I already like. My tastes are not merely indulged on Qobuz – they are expanded.

And so quite often, discovery on Qobuz leads me to my other regularly used music platform: Bandcamp. I will frequently listen to an album by an artist I have never heard of on the day it comes out, live with it over the weekend, and by Monday I have been to Bandcamp and bought the vinyl.

What Spotify is mostly for, these days, is playlists made by other people. Sometimes those playlists are souvenirs of places. Sometimes they are sent as gifts or to respond to self-imposed challenges (e.g.: imaginary Now That’s What I Call Music album from a year when those compilations were not being made). One of my favourites is a communally-created memorial for a musician friend who passed away a few years back, and friends and fans have added songs that remind them of him – both from his own catalogue and from his history as a champion of other people’s music.

And this too is what Twitter is for. There are people on Twitter who either create or re-post links to Spotify playlists curated by smart specialists. My most recent ‘favourite’ is a very good curated selection of ambient music by someone who has gone very deep and spent a lot of their time thinking and broadcasting about that particular musical universe. You don’t really get that on Qobuz.

Quite often I’ll listen to someone’s playlist on Spotify. That will throw up a track that sticks. I’ll research the artist and album on Qobuz and add it to my favourites there. And again, sometimes repeated play on Qobuz will result in a vinyl purchase on Bandcamp – or failing that, Discogs. Naturally, when possible, I also go to record stores, but I live in a relative vinyl wasteland and usually have to travel in order to treat myself to the physical browsing experience.

It’s also worth mentioning that the vast majority of listening is on decent Sonos speakers scattered throughout the home, on headphones as I walk the dogs (or, as I mentioned, travel), and in the car. I am very rarely not listening to something.

But do I wish all of this could happen in a single, equitable online environment that suitably recompenses artists and labels? Of course. I’m paying two full subscriptions for services that operate at varying levels of exploitation. Add in the price of vinyl, postage and often import duty too, and the whole arrangement suddenly seems unsatisfactory. But at the same time, I have never been happier with the experience of discovering, listening to and purchasing music.

So there’s that.

Wetlands documentary

Apr 20, 2022 | 2 comments

Late last year I spent some time in Aveiro, Portugal filming a short documentary, which was released officially last month. 

Wetlands has already been accepted to three major international film festivals (Venice, Paris, and ‘Life Screenings’ in Florida) and is shortlisted for several more including the UN Habitat Better Cities Film Festival.

It’s about the real culture of Aveiro, and how the city is affected by the imminent threat of ocean rise due to climate change and by the loss of cultural heritage and traditional industries.

I’ve had some fantastic feedback about the documentary, and it’s also been used as part of Aveiro’s bid to become the European Capital of Culture 2027. So far, the city has made it into the final 4 and will be presenting again to the jury in the coming months.

It’s here for you to watch free online. Hope you enjoy.

Cryptoskepticism

Mar 17, 2022 | 2 comments

A colleague of mine is at SXSW right now, and sent me a link to $STREAM, a new tokenised research framework for the music industry.

$STREAM is led by Cherie Hu, whose work I know fairly well, we’ve spoken online on occasion, and I have a lot of respect for her as a writer and thinker about the intersection of new technologies and the music industries. There aren’t very many people doing digital music business analysis well, but she’s by far one of the best. If anything was going to make me think that a project like this deserves to be successful, it’s her involvement.

One thing she has read correctly is the overlap between consumers of music tech news and semi-early adopters of cryptocurrencies and Web3 technologies. I’m afraid I’m not among them, and I have not yet seen a use case that improves things for the cultural and creative sector at a macro level. I’ve seen some good projects and some positive results for individual creators, but if pressed, I would say that on balance they are largely harmful to creators and certainly to consumers in the long term – and that’s without considering the catastrophic climate implications of the technology.

What I’m hearing from SXSW is an absolute mainstreaming and (suspiciously) well-financed promotional push of Web3 hype. This is not a grass roots development. Perhaps if I was there, someone could persuade me that all of this is a good idea, but studying blockchains and related technologies closely have not made me a Web3 enthusiast.

I’m yet to be convinced that DAOs provide a compelling alternative to cooperatives – and I’ve come to regard the word ‘tokenisation’ as a red flag, because of its near-total correlation with unregulated financial speculation. This is the same thinking that gave us all those websites in the early 2010s that thought that you could improve the music industry by making it more like the stock exchange, the casino or both at the same time. It’s what happens when you start from a position of Right-Libertarian philosophy, which almost all of these projects do.

There will of course be early winners in this game, but that is how pyramid schemes work. Not all Web3 projects are scams or opportunistic parasitism, of course – and to be absolutely clear, Cherie’s certainly won’t be – but none of the ‘problems’ addressed by $STREAM actually requires any of these technological solutions.

If the last 50 years of the internet has taught us anything it’s that open contributions to research, citizen science and communities of interest don’t really need to be gamified or incentivised with tokens. If, for instance, Linux, Wikipedia or Zooniverse had been established as DAOs with Wikibucks, Zootokens or Linuxcoins used to bribe contributors, I seriously doubt it would have improved those things.

If I thought it would be of benefit to either of us, I would probably give Cherie a shout once her SXSW commitments are behind her. If anyone could persuade me that Web3, DAOs, cryptocurrencies and NFTs are a net positive for society, it would probably be her. But I suspect we both have other things to focus on, and I wish her the best of luck.

I’m going to return now to being someone who does NOT write blog posts about cryptocurrency on the internet.

Analog Journalist

Jul 7, 2021 | 1 comment

The Covid-appropriate pleasures of listening to music you don’t know, curated for you by polite strangers with impressive record collections.

Listen to this blog post

My favourite YouTube channel, if I can be said to have one, is My Analog Journal.

The premise is fairly simple – a DJ plays records, usually in their own apartment. The sets are often ‘exotic’ in some way: Indonesian funk, 60s Japanese jazz, Turkish disco, Italian rhythms, Peruvian cumbia – though sometimes they are simply a well curated selection of music I am more familiar with, such as contemporary British jazz or Brazilian tropicalia.

The music is always on vinyl, the DJs never speaking – only holding the sleeve up to the camera suspended over the decks. The sets are generally between 30 and 60 minutes so they never outstay their welcome, and the selections are uniformly tasteful, interesting and, for want of a better word, unobtrusive – a characteristic I often prioritise these days.

It’s perfect pandemic fare: a polite DJ in your living room or on the second screen of your ‘work from home’ setup, playing music that is generally interesting enough to capture your attention, while being perfectly comfortable as background fare.

The DJs sip herbal tea, occasionally have a bit of an involuntary wiggle before remembering they are on camera (though more recently, some of the guest DJs dance performatively as part of the experience), and absently fiddle with the knobs on the mixer or go and choose another record just off screen.

You are, by and large, unlikely to own or even have encountered the vast majority of the music featured regardless of where you’re from, just by the nature of the broad, international scope and the range of specialist DJ guests. Some of the records are quite rare – and the visits to Discogs to try and track down vinyl copies of the featured music can often result in a sharp intake of breath and the closing of the browser.

But, for the most part, it’s just a quiet delight – which, in my book, is the best kind.

This week, while migrating some of my playlists from Spotify to Qobuz, where I am, generally speaking, much happier as a music enthusiast, I came across a playlist someone had made by locating, where possible, all of the tracks featured on the video series (minus some of the more confrontational Lithuanian punk or Azerbaijani hardcore or whatever) and assembling them together into a single 900-song, two and a half day non-stop listening experience.

And that is now the shuffled soundtrack of my working life. Along with my own digital mixtapes, I’ve migrated that list over to Qobuz, which seems to have had about 90% of the songs that Spotify had, and I think that was already only about 90% of the music that the DJs had in physical form, but it’s still a lot of music.

It’s perhaps not the same as having a vinyl selector in your dining room playing records and showing you the album artwork, or dancing amid their pot plants, charity shop vintage armchairs and decorative wicker baskets, but it’s a damn sight better than Default FM for innocuous workplace music.

And when I say ‘my favourite YouTube channel’, there aren’t any competitors for that title. This is really my only YouTube channel. Go subscribe.

Reggae Nation(s)

Feb 27, 2021 | 0 comments

I’ve had a Flickr account for around 16 years, and while I haven’t done so for some time, occasionally I’ll send it a bunch of my photos, many of which I make publicly accessible.

I tend not to think of it as much more than off-site storage; it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of ‘social media’ in the way that Instagram does, and I use it entirely differently. But every now and then, something interesting happens there that makes me glad I haven’t entirely walked away from the platform.

About a year ago, I received a Flickr message from a Dutch reggae fan who was writing a book about Bob Marley’s influence around the world. He asked me if he could use a photo that I’d taken while in Uganda some years back during a concert by Burundi band Lion Story. I could think of no good reason to say no.

Last night I received an email from him to let me know that the book was finished and was launching on Kickstarter.

“As a global history of reggae and a reggae travelogue rolled into one, The Reggae Nation takes readers on an extraordinary and unique journey through time and space. From the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the frozen heights of the Himalayas in Nepal, and numerous places in between on all continents; the book takes readers to the roots and along the routes of reggae and Rastafari to make sense of the pioneering work of Bob Marley and the Wailers. In doing so, The Reggae Nation bears witness to and celebrates the enduring vibrancy of reggae music and its global spread.

“The Reggae Nation is a striking and one-of-a-kind 420-page publication in large format, which allows the nearly 300 photos and illustrations to really stand out. The book is beautifully, colourfully, and richly designed and illustrated by graphic artist Maria Papaefstathiou, co-founder of the International Reggae Poster Contest. Many of the photos are by renowned reggae and pop music photographers from around the world, including Lee Abel, Adrian Boot, Murray Cammick, Kim Gottlieb-Walker, Gijsbert Hanekroot, Marcello Mencarini, Ebet Roberts, Mitsuhiro Sugawara, and Rob Verhorst. With a foreword by none other than Roger Steffens, acclaimed reggae archivist and author of So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley. ”

Looking forward to reading it – and seeing in print a snapshot that, in my defence, I took long before I learned anything about photography.

I come from a reggae nation myself, and it’s something I’ve always loved. New Zealanders have a strong connection with the music – and Bob Marley’s birthday happens to coincide nicely with a national public holiday in the middle of summer, which conveniently lends itself to outdoor concerts by the country’s many reggae and reggae-adjacent artists.

It’ll be interesting to see how much of a mention the likes of Fat Freddy’s Drop, Katchafire, Herbs and Black Seeds manage in the book – though I’m encouraged by the inclusion of my fellow countryman (and proper exhibition quality photographer – not to mention my former boss) Murray Cammick ONZM in the ‘credits worth mentioning’ above. He’ll certainly have taken some great shots of some key artists.

And of course, after leaving NZ, I spent a decade in another hotspot of reggae. Birmingham boasts UB40, Steel Pulse, Musical Youth, Friendly Fire, Overproof Sound System, Rockers Hi-Fi and, of course, a rich seam of Ska and 2-Tone for good measure.

These days, I’ve ended up somewhere in the world where reggae is probably considered more ‘niche’, but it’s still a significant part of my musical DNA and operating system, and its influence is unlikely to go anywhere at this point.

I remember really enjoying the Lion Story gig, and spending a lot of the time up the front dancing and taking pictures. Very much my sort of thing. They’re on Soundcloud and Spotify.

Have a listen:

Check out The Reggae Nation on Kickstarter.

Social Progress Cities Summit

Jan 16, 2021 | 0 comments

On December 14th 2020, I hosted the second European Social Progress Cities Summit here in Umeå. It brought together policymakers and political leaders from cities and regions at the top end of the new European Social Progress Index to discuss ways in which good practice can be shared and promoted to encourage positive and progressive social change.

The conference focused particularly on gender equality and climate action, and of course naturally raised the challenges and new ideas that had come about because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

From the conference outline:

2020 has been a very challenging year. The Covid-19 pandemic, with profound effects on our cities, has changed the world as we knew it. But we know that difficult times can also act as a driver for change. Difficult circumstances often underline the need for conversion, and it is also during a crisis when the greatest propensity for change occurs.

The covid-19 pandemic takes place at a time when we know that even more serious crises are at risk down the line, if we do not decisively address the challenges we face. The recovery plans of the pandemic are now driving large investments worldwide. We can choose to see these as possibilities. We are the first modern generation that have it within our reach to convert to a socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable society.

This digital conference between mayors of Social Progress leading European cities, continues the discussion about how the EU Social Progress Index can help cities work together and develop strategies to improve the real quality of life for their citizens and be a driver towards climate neutral cities.

We all have new experiences and insights about a society that has readjusted and changed in a wide range of aspects, in way that has never occurred before. We need to ask ourselves what has worked, what we can learn from and how we gear up our collaboration around social sustainability for a just transition to a climate neutral society?

Speakers include representatives from the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy, the Social Progress Imperative, and mayors from European Social Progress Leading cities.