After reading about it in Damon Krukowksi’s newsletter, I downloaded the new Cindy Lee album Diamond Jubilee earlier this week. I have been listening to it the last few days and it is pretty good.
What bugs me is all the weird hype around this album. I mean, it’s good and I have enjoyed listening to it a few times, but their whole business with “It’s not any streaming services!” and “You have to download it from a janky website that looks like it’s from 1997!” is annoying.
I will note that while it is available for streaming as single super-long track on YouTube, it’s broken up by a bunch of ads. Still gotta monetize, I guess.
What I don’t like about the download-only and painfully retro website is that it seems like a deliberate pose designed to appeal to people who miss a previous era of music listening.
I feel like this kind of stuff is designed to appeal to people like me. “Remember when you had to go find weird record shops and dig through the bins and take chances on stuff? This is like that! You should remember this!”
But the thing is, they’re trying to replicate something that doesn’t exist anymore. Like it or not, there are streaming services and music is easy to get. Making it seem like none of that is the case feels tryhard and kind of fake.
While there are certainly plenty of problems with the current business models of music, protesting that by creating fake obstacles seems silly. It feels like they are using the web and streaming platforms to try to reproduce a previous era’s challenge of hunting down an obscure new album and get a copy of it.
It all seems artificial to me. And unnecessary.
It is unnecessary because, despite the web and streaming services, finding good and interesting music remains as challenging as it has ever been. You can settle for the canned or generated playlists on Spotify and have the contemporary equivalent of picking among whatever the three local radio stations were back in the day.
Or you can spend as much time and energy as you want finding reliable and adventurous music websites to read and review accounts to follow. You can talk to people, check out bands you haven’t heard of, figure what music those bands were inspired by and what other bands were inspired by them.