Tag: spotify

Audio Responsibility

Who is responsible for the music you listen to? And the interviews you hear? Who decides when your voice gets recorded or not?

In a post industrial world, we have more choice than ever as to how and when we consume things. Take your music streaming service of choice – it likely has ~50m songs to choose from at the tap of a button. This can be overwhelming, which explains the success of Spotify and its algorithms. These ‘tailored playlists’ take the responsibility away from you and the music you hear.

The idea of audio responsibility then, asks us to behave in a more engaged way around music and anything else we feed our ears.

A couple of tips to get started on the road to audio responsibility:

  1. Read about it before you listen to it. This forces you to be an active participant and it makes the experience so much more satisfying. Check out this book to get started: Link
  2. The equipment you use makes a difference. Headphones, amplifiers and speakers are the best places to start investing (responsibly) in your audio experience.
  3. Nobody knows what you want to hear better than you. Not even Spotify.

Here’s to taking responsibility. 🙂

Romanticising travel

By all accounts, my next guest on the podcast was smart about her move abroad – Even though she did it in part for love!

It is tempting to romanticise travel. The grass is always greener on the other side of the Pacific – so the saying goes.

Here’s the thing – travel and moving your life is TOUGH. The simple reality is that when you move, you necessarily are uncomfortable. The fact that you are no longer in a place of comfort hits you from all sides as soon as you touch down. Romanticising a move, and lying to yourself about why you are traveling only makes this worse. So what to do about it?

It helps to be as specific as possible about the reasons for your move. It helps to define this explicitly before you travel. This creates alignment.

If you don’t pay attention to your reasons and to your own desires for travel, you might fool yourself and end up not being true to yourself. This can bend your life in all sorts of ways.

Sounds dramatic – but Rachel got this right. In my opinion, She’s in Denmark for the long haul and for the right reasons.

Tune in to the podcast (now on iTunes and Spotify) this Friday to hear her Romantic story.

Streaming music

I like to think about the music industry.
For my streaming needs I oscillate between Google Play and Tidal depending on how pretentious I feel about streaming quality, and how much cash I have. In reality there is not much difference though – all of the major streaming services have an impossibly huge library, the convenience is amazing too. What is most interesting to me is the angst it brings me – Whenever I stream something I think to myself “am i doing this right?” – with LPs and CDs it was far more clearcut how best to listen to music. Now nobody knows.
Which is the best streaming service? It’s not an obvious answer or even an obvious question – Best for the listener? Best for the artist?
I live in South Africa and don’t have access to Spotify or Youtube Red (or whatever Youtube’s subscription options are) it seems to me that Soundcloud was trying to be the Youtube of music, but failed to make money – why? The music industry seems capable of flicking a switch and making an artist centered service like Soundcloud disappear almost overnight.
The whole streaming genre has taken a grip on my brain – it’s such a vast universe and there are so many ways to listen to music now – Which hardware is the best to use?
I follow it with interest and compulsion.