🎼 August 2024: Songwhip is Dead; Long Live… iTunes?
Another acqui-kill gets me mulling on how to share music better; and the weird necessity of analyzing my own compositional ideas.
Hello!
It is the end of August in the Year of Our Lord 2024, and I, Chris Krycho, working composer, return to your inbox with a missive about the future of music… links. And also, of course, actual music links, and some musings about the interplay between inspiration and perspiration as cashed out in analyzing my own compositional ideas from 3 years ago so I can actually turn them into something.
🎼 On the craft
When I started drafting this issue, I planned to share music links via Songwhip, a service I have used for years to create links which people could use to get music at whatever service they used. Songwhip shut down in July, though, so that was not an option.1 That proved a good opportunity to reflect on those kinds of links more generally. On the one hand, Songwhip was a nice way for me to share a link and be relatively confident that something I was listening to via Apple Music (or, often enough, purchased via iTunes!) could equally well be listened to on Spotify or Tidal or Qobuz or YouTube Music or… wherever. From the point of view of serving whoever I am sharing links with, that was a good tradeoff. From the point of view of serving the musician whose music I am ostensibly supporting, I am not so sure.
Spotify is notorious among musicians for how little they pay out, and the company has lately stopped payments to all musicians under a certain cutoff (spoilers: yes, that includes me) in the name of stopping spam. Meanwhile, they are flooding user-curated playlists with algorithmic injections meant to… juice engagement, I guess?… and of course there is no way to purchase music from Spotify. (Apple seems to want you to stream from Apple Music, but will happily let you buy music the old-fashioned way from the iTunes store.)
It turns out that I am just as happy not directing people to Spotify or other streaming-only services which pay pennies, if that, to the artists who made the music.2
Even before Songwhip went offline, I was moving toward sharing Bandcamp links3 or even links direct to the publisher of a given album. (Even finding such a page is often quite the travail! Publishers: make it easy for people to find the music you publish and easy for them to buy it, too!) At this point, I am pretty much committed to only sharing purchase links.
This is not a “clean win”. It may mean that some music I recommend simply does not get listened to at all, given the minor—but real—hassle for someone I share music with. It is, however, one little nudge in the direction of paying musicians for their work.
Here is an experiment you might try: turn off your streaming music service. Then see how much of the music you really love, music you would be sad never to listen to again, music that moves you, music which has taught you something or shaped you in some way, is still available to you, because you own a recording of it.
And then start working on changing that, because for nearly all of us, the answer is “far, far too little.”
🎵 Other notes
I have had little time or energy to engage with or explore other contemporary composers in the past month, full as it has been with work that I expect will lead into a new full-time role in my pays-the-bills job as a software engineer.4 Along the way, though, I followed a recommendation from Alan Jacobs and gave this recording of Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 in D major a serious listen. I was (as usual with recommendations from Jacobs!) well-rewarded, so I commend it to you.
Also from Jacobs, this utterly wonderful story from a student of his about a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers. Read it! Really!
If you like what you read in this email—essays on music (and art more generally), links to my own ongoing composing work, and recommendations of other composers to go listen to—you can subscribe to get more like this every single month!
🎤 Links, updates, &c.
This month, I am glad to say, I did make some progress on composing. The major progress I made was pulling back up the first 31 bars of the third movement of the large orchestral work I am writing and spending several hours analyzing it.
Why the need for this kind of analysis? Well. I am glad you asked.
🎼 On the craft (yes, again and even more)
For one thing, I wrote these bars three full years ago. For another, I wrote them in a spurt of inspiration that generated the core thematic material for all four movements of this work in the span of just a few months. That kind of burst of intuitive is rare for me; but one of the consequences in this case was also that I had no idea what I did in a formal or theoretical sense. I had good musical ideas, so I got them onto the digital page5 as fast as I could. If it sounded right in my head and right enough in the digital playback, that was enough. The time for analysis and understanding was later.
Which means, of course, that the time for analysis and understanding has been “on the regular ever since that burst of creativity ended in roughly October 2021,” including August 2024. Every time I am ready to dig into a new section of the piece—in this case, a new movement, but in previous cases, even just subsections of the movements—I have to sit down with pencil and paper and figure out what the heck I did.
This is, to be clear, a good kind of problem to have. Those bursts of ideation are extremely rare in my experience, so I just tried to hold on and write as much as I could when I was in that phase, knowing two things: first, that I could come back and do this analytical work later; and second, that the real work is not in the inspiration but in building on and refining that material into something good.
The difference is the difference between a very good shower thought and a fully-formed essay. However good the thought, it requires structure and elaboration, argumentation and evaluation, to make it a good essay. The same thing is at play with a piece of music. A good sketch of an idea is a wonderful thing. However good the musical idea, though, it requires structure and elaboration, development and iteration, to make it a good work.
👋🏼 Happy August!
September is likely to be a very busy month for me, but I will be back here at the end of the month anyway, with (if things go as planned) a few thousand words of back-and-forth launched by a footnote in the July email, and also I hope a good report of many bars of this third movement written. Onward!
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After being sold to Sony Music/The Orchard, apparently? It continues to boggle my mind that a company would acquire a useful service like Songwhip and then more or less immediately kill it. ↩
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And yes, of course, labels take far too much of the reward for music and artists as a rule see far too little for their work. That they are nonetheless very often still better than a pure-streaming play on Spotify is telling on just how bad Spotify’s economics are! ↩
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Bandcamp’s own history is a strange and somewhat sad tale, but as things stand under its most recent management, it is I think still the single best place for someone to sell music. ↩
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Lest I be mistaken: this is not a case of “I only do that to pay the bills and wish I could compose full time.” The truth is something like: “I wish I could be paid to do both of these, and to write as well.” ↩
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in a weird mix of Dorico and StaffPad which made for a huge pain when I pulled everything into Dorico to serve as the “canonical” source for everything but which perfectly suited the way I was working then. ↩