a brief Q&A with me, a guy who’s been carrying roughly the same massive itunes library from computer to computer for well over a decade
2,000 albums; 8 computers; 1 music library i can’t seem to delete purchases i made in high school from
i know a couple weeks ago i threatened to force you all to read hashtag-content i’ve been cooking up honoring a decade of 2013 being a year that’s transpired, but due to the pressing matter of what is probably the most heartbreaking piece of news totally unrelated to genocide that’s been looming over the online circles i lurk around, i’ve decided to hold off on that.
the heartbreaking news: bandcamp, what feels like the last vestige of agency in independent music distribution, after having been sold to an extremely questionable buyer a few years back, only to be sold to an even more questionable buyer earlier this year, suffered significant layoffs after their new owners broke their promise to maintain the status quo. half the staff was let go the other day, probably not coincidentally the most unionized faction of the team. meanwhile, the future of a vital service just about everyone among the non-money-grubbing/actually-likes-music faction of the music industry uses in at least one capacity just about every day feels precarious.
i use the term ‘what feels like’ here very intentionally because despite all the good graces the service has placed itself in (they seemed to be the only ones who stepped up when the industry (the faction that doesn’t actually like music, as far as i can tell) dropped the ball in summer 2020 with whatever on earth the Industry Day Of Silence or whatever was supposed to be; also, we all somehow became complete freaks for bandcamp friday very quickly), at the end of the day they’ve always been a tech startup with questionable—if not weirdly evil—hiring practices, or so i’ve heard from numerous sources regarding positions across various departments. also one time a staffer on the editorial side called me a ‘ding dong’ for reasons that were never made especially clear.
that said, i think the way i want to approach this loss is as a symbolic gesture of the crumbling infrastructure many of us rely on as music consumers rather than as a justifiable screed against corporate greed leading to the constant disappearance of all of our favorite corners of the internet over the years (may i direct you to a much more level-headed version of that essay), while a pour-one-out elegy for the platform i go on to monitor which demented noise albums soccer mommy is currently purchasing feels a bit premature.
the specific sense of dread this all makes me feel reminds me of apple’s reveal several years ago that they were ditching itunes in favor of something called ‘apple music,’ which i’d perceived as a firm shift from personal music libraries to the more desirable streaming catalog model (i think that’s how they advertised it, though i didn’t learn until much later that ‘apple music’ is literally just itunes with a new name and a worse layout). i felt anxiety because at that point i was confident that i’d never buy into the whole streaming thing because, as i’d already learned over the course of being online for a decade at that point, the internet giveth and the internet—without warning, generally—taketh away.
(side note: if i’m trying to create some synergy here between this loose post and my series of forthcoming 2013 posts like the branding genius that i am, i would mention here that i have DMs on last.fm from that very year wherein i traded album files with literal strangers who were unable to find the music they saw i was listening to literally anywhere on the internet—crazy to think that was the case even 10 years ago!)
so here i am in 2023 with probably over 2,000 albums in my personal apple music (henceforth ‘itunes’—i’m just gonna continue to call it that, it’s fine) library. it would obviously be a tragedy for a major population of creators, consumers, and critics of music if bandcamp ceased to exist in the imminent future even beyond the symbolic implications addressed above, but in a sense i feel like i’ve been preparing for this moment ever since i bought the djent LP orange mathematics by frontierer in 2015, evidently my first-ever purchase on the platform. i feel like the insane guy with the fully stocked storm cellar when the dark clouds finally start rolling in.
which isn’t meant to sound self-righteous or braggy, but rather to advise you to do the same if your music library is predominantly digital. as it continues to become clearer everyday, there’s no reassurance that your favorite albums will still be available to hear anywhere online a decade from now. even in the relatively short period the publication i work for has existed, posts from our early years have corroded into a mess of dead soundcloud links and deleted youtube uploads—all heavily patrolled as of late by lawyers, incidentally, demanding figures so large for the usage of copyrighted images on decade-old posts nobody ever even looked at that it could quite literally sink our independent publication any day.
anyway, whether this is helpful or not, i’ve included a pseudo-FAQ below for anyone wondering what it’s like to be in possession of an absolute sistine chapel of shitty blog rock album covers from approximately the year 2009.
how long have you been maintaining your personal music library?
i’ve downsized significantly over the years as new music comes in but i still have plenty of the stuff i pulled from the computer in my family home as a teenager. i would say some of the albums i still listen to were first ripped from CD back in 2004, since that was the first influx of indie rock releases my oldest brother brought into the house, and i know i’m still listening to those copies of good news for people who love bad news and the franz ferdinand self-titled (though the file for the song ‘michael’ mysteriously went missing a few years back. i think i just youtube-to-mp3’d the track as a temporary fix and then never really did anything more permanent about it).
wow, then how many computers have you transferred it across?
by my estimate 8—there was (1) the family desktop, (2) my first laptop i took to college, (3) the laptop that replaced that laptop a few months later when my across-the-hall neighbor pushed me onto my bed and my enormous juicy and huge ass smashed it, (4) the weirdly tiny one (presumably very cheap) i bought to replace that laptop five years later when i got a virus while trying to play yoshi’s island in a hotel room in iowa, (5) the way-more-normal-sized laptop i got to replace that one because i don’t know why it was so tiny, (6) the laptop i inherited from work when i realized i should probably switch to macs (the shells seem much more juicy-ass-proof), (7) the laptop i bought to replace that laptop because that laptop was ancient, and (8) the laptop i bought to replace the laptop i bought to replace the work laptop because it turned out that replacement laptop was even ancient-er and literally i couldn’t go on most websites anymore.
so do you just store all your files on itunes?
i know this is evil and am vaguely conscious of it being the same planet-destroying technology as that which fuels non-fuggetaboutit tokens or whatever, but i’m currently backing everything up on icloud. just had to switch to a family plan because apple maliciously only offers two options: (1) probably too little space for one person and (2) way, way, way too much space for one person.
how’s that working out for you?
pretty good except for the fact that on transfer #8 the file for the first track of roughly every tenth album mysteriously fucking vanished. fortunately a ton of these were bandcamp purchases i could easily re-download, though i spent like a year re-purchasing albums i already mostly had (in part to support the artists, since i probably didn’t do that the first time around) and am still pissed that one or two aren’t available on bandcamp and i haven’t worked up the will power to log back into my amazon music account or whatever to purchase them there.
so you use amazon music too?
is this a gotcha question? yeah, that’s the one thing i use amazon for (aside from prime video, which i’m using my other brother’s account to access), but i only use it when an album isn’t on bandcamp (or available via the public library—sometimes i rip CDs from the library like the tech-noir villain i am). i’d buy music on itunes but i have bad memories of them, like, making it impossible to remove the ‘explicit’ bar from songs among other weird and extremely inconvenient things. i think it was impossible to delete an item from your personal library if you got it on itunes? which sucked when i spent a year or so downloading the weekly free track itunes posted circa 2008 when free music you could own was a mainstream concept and not just a crime thing.
what do you use bandcamp for exactly?
because i have everything uploaded to my itunes library it’s really just a way to purchase digital music as directly from the artist as i can while having a cumulative count of releases i’ve purchased as a constant reminder of how much money i’ve thrown away on NCFs (non-corporeal files; that sounds like a real computer term, right?). so really if bandcamp disappears it won’t affect me too much beyond making the ever-difficult endeavor of maintaining a personal music library slightly more difficult, mourning the loss of work for my peers in an ever-shrinking editorial job pool and the opportunities they once provided a now-equally floundering freelancer pool (to say nothing of the artists and labels themselves losing an invaluable platform for DIY distribution), reminding me yet again that tech-boneheadedness won’t stop spreading until everything i hold dear in this lifetime is gutted for the sake of whatever non-product or pre-existing free service they’re currently paywalling, and just generally signaling yet another unignorable death knell within the industry i’ve made enough of a living within over the past six years to purchase several laptops and nearly a thousand releases on bandcamp. so nothing beyond that, really.
what about spotify, do you use that?
i think about a decade ago i flirted with the idea of switching over to spotify from my personal itunes library when my oldest brother got a family plan (as you can see the answer to not supporting evil corporations while still benefitting from their services is ‘have many brothers’). my biggest thing at the time was—and still is—that so many of the albums i love were made by independent artists who wrote one weird record in their dorm room, sent it to a bunch of blogs, and then peaced out forever before spotify came along, so their music never made it to streaming. someone told me you could upload music onto some sort of private library on spotify back then and i tried it and it was terrible and made no sense. i hated it. i still hate it. can you even still do that? who cares.
now, i mostly just use spotify for familiarizing myself with music i wouldn’t otherwise actively listen to or purchase on a whim, as well as to unfairly judge new music based on whether it holds my attention stripped of the context of the album it was made to be heard within. also these label profiles i occasionally post on here would likely be much harder to organize without this vast music library and an easy way to organize it (though these, too, are limited by what the streaming trough has to offer).
if i have room for one more gripe about spotify it would simply be that the platform sucks; it doesn’t work. i’m not gonna explain how exactly it doesn’t work, because it seems like there’s a different glitch i’m dealing with on a weekly basis (is it on purpose that the songs on my playlists all quickly fade out and then back in really quick at the end or is that an accident?). though i like to think there’s a certain romance to the thought that the love of my life is out there somewhere looking up at the same unhelpful error message preventing us from playlisting songs for some reason. any songs on any playlists. for some reason.
why…..why do you do this to yourself with such a large music library?
because it is absolutely worth it, dude. i’ve probably asked myself this question all seven times i’ve transferred my entire library to a new computer (especially in 2021 when i had to do it twice), but to be able to browse and immediately access my own personal music collection—to be able to put all of my albums on shuffle!—feels like a miracle in the year 2023 when my infirmary of sickly wheel-era ipod models that are actually big enough to house all this music malfunction for various reasons.
plus it beats having to move one hundred thousand pounds of vinyl during an actual physical move, which i’ve certainly undergone more than seven times in my adult life.