Spotify is no bridge to the future.

Trevor Exter
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read
Photo credit: Whitney Browne

I’ll give credit where it’s due: Spotify healed me.

I had come to an emotional nadir of sorts, lost homes, jobs, people, communities, family and direction. Living in my car, alone in the world.

Which happens, but I couldn’t stand the alienation I felt from myself. It was 2010, 11, 12. Jmmy and I had a decent little touring operation but no financial traction and shaky creative footing (not writing new songs, just playing the ones we already had into the ground.) I got sick, destitute, had real trouble looking in the mirror and regularly contemplated suicide.

Enter Spotify, a psychic godsend. A musical pharmaceutical. Royalties be damned, in a dark moment I could dial up an obscure record from my childhood to reconnect with a lost part of myself. Maybe Praxis, Pete Townsend, Ahmad Jamal or Ravel or Pat Benatar or Mingus Ah Um or Naked City or “Cakewalk Into Town” or “Is That All There Is” or “Summertime Blues”.

The healing kicked into high gear when I began to connect the dots between the new stuff I was chasing and the music that had formed me. Soon I could recognize myself in the mirror again and move ahead with my life, eventually becoming the crackerjack model of success and humility you see before you today.

Right place, right time. Thank you Spotify.

But that was then, now is now.

Spotify is a gleaming window into the past but it is no bridge to the future.

To a complete musical passenger, a streaming service *like* spotify definitely has a place, albeit one with better sound quality and fair compensation to creators.

But discovery on the platform is hugely flawed and because there’s zero sense of community in addition to the very real infringements (theft!) in its fundamental model, nothing of value can grow there.

If this is not obvious to you now, I hope it will be soon.

I only use it for work now, learning requests or preparing the christmas album we’re recording tomorrow.

“But Trev” you may ask, “where can I find a bridge to the musical future I dream of, where vital young sounds mingle with each other, and it’s exciting, where an open minded culture is brewing right before my ears, where it’s all at the tip of my fingers but the model is also a fair one?”

The Bandcamp weekly.

Put your past on pause for a minute and give it a listen. It’s like a conscious radio station, but you get to skip the wack tracks. And if you like em, you buy em. There are also interviews. I feel like a fan again. It’s a community AND it’s growing, so this is the future. Niche varieties are still underrepresented but it’s a start.

The Bandcamp weekly. Check it out, thank me later

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