Great reflections from Jamie Brooks on the current state of music:
Furthermore, the qualities you like about streaming services––the convenience, the selection–– were only offered to you in the first place because the record business was forced to compete with piracy. They had to offer you a better user experience than piracy. We collectively negotiated those benefits by threatening to leave their entire business model, as listeners, en masse. You had leverage then. You have none now.
And on what music can (and should) be:
I want people to have the opportunity to learn to love music and play music with other people at school. I want more people to understand and experience all the things I love about it that have nothing to do with making money or going to parties or becoming famous. Music can just be about learning to be more comfortable with your body, or about having a way to make new friends as you get older, or about finding ways to connect with our predecessors when they’re no longer around to guide us themselves. A song can be like a storage container for memory that begs you with its very essence to find something truly spectacular to fill it with. We can do these things for each other. That is so wonderful to me.
Jamie is responsible for main pop girl 2019, one of my all-time favorite Bandcamp finds.