It’s an Amazon world and we’re just streaming in it…

Black Friday. I was standing inside Found Sound, an actual Record Store, brick and mortar, with a heavy, rattling glass door, with actual vinyl you could hold and touch and smell (and, if you paid seven or eight bucks to Ray at the counter, could actually take home and spin on your turntable; flip it over and play it again if you like…).

Renowned Record Promoter Tom Gelardi was giving a special in-store seminar on anything and everything he’s learned in his 50 years working in the industry, how it’s changed for the better and for the worse (more so the latter) and how it can get itself back on the right track – namely – the preservation of these brick and mortar stores, the revitalizing of the singer/songwriter as an integral component to any sustainable business strategy (presupposing any big label is at all invested anymore in what real music listeners think).

And another thing integral to music as an industry is the ardent support of the fan. The  passionate fan. Like me and the fourteen other people who were muddling around inside this cozy woodfloor space, itself resembling a hollowed out loft space flanked with multi-thousand sheaths of wax sardine-snuggled onto purple shelving units.

But then I picked up a Rolling Stone nearby the cash register and flipped over to a news article on the swelling of Streaming services being offered from various providers – as small as Spotify LTD or as gargantuan, now, as Amazon…

Amazon, yes, the same place where you can buy vacuum cleaners and Doc Martins and oven mitts and electronic-PDFs files of popular books digitized-down for your Kindles… The epicenter of Cyber Monday, the mega-retail site that’s a major player on the stock market and ranks in the top 50-something of the Forbes 500… Log on and stream the new Ke$ha or Memory Tapes or Tim Hecker maybe…

Amazon was already like the Big Brother of online retail with its enticing targeting-marketing, personalized email-updates showing you something else you might like based on something else that recently purchased by someone else just who’s just like you…

…and yes, this week it turns out I am one of those assholes who only just finally reading Orwell’s 1984 for the first time and is thus flush with drummed-up poetical doom-sayings and now able to see dystopia-tropes in everything, everywhere, even a record store like Found Sound.

“Nothing exists …except an endless present…” (Yes, I’m quoting 1984; Yes, I know it’s cliché and ostentatious).

But with Amazon incorporating itself upon the latest aural-dietary trends, I foresaw (…because any newly idealist-amped reader of Orwell feels newly gifted with prescience)…foresaw music, songs, specifically, (the bedrock of the artistic experience and the enriching currently of the cultural exchange integral to “music” as being any kind of feasible industry)…songs…ever more so as purposeless unites… trundling along this conveyor belt, streaming-along if you will…

In one ear and out the other.

Because it started hitting me. Yes, I knew that the new Crystal Castles album was streaming up on Spotify… So I then could go there (on my computer…my laptop, or, whatever you’ve got) and log on to the streaming service and hear some songs and log off and go about my day. This Sweden-born (now worldwide) subscription service doesn’t allow you to buy or download these songs…

“You can’t take it with you…”

…but you can still hear them. The artists, (their works ostensibly hear-able for the world by means of a knotty proprietary licensing approved by their respective parent-entity major labels,) get comparably piddly royalties in return for all this ear-centric ephemera.

You will not buy the new album by Pink but you can hear her songs for the 30-minutes or so that you’ll be sitting at your computer and then you can log off, sated with songs, and perhaps feeling assured that you’ve just about gotten what that album’s all about and can now go into your next social circle, at the show or at the record shop or at the café or onto a blog-facilitated comment forum and snip away at what the album sounds like with an almost absolutism.

Google-Music and also iTunes… and, yes, Spotify…but now…Amazon? Xbox?

There’s big business, now, it seems, in streaming… Is that as scary as it sounds? Or am I just scared of everything having just read 1984?

I’ve listened to Nirvana’s In Utero 39-some-odd times and know almost all the lyrics. I had listened to Neil Young’s After The Goldrush vinyl LP about 12 times before someone stole it from me. I know the words to every Pavement song and every Beatles song and I have even worn out my vinyl records of old surf rock instrumentals like the Ventures…I am that ardent music fan, the passionate (potentially pathos-inviting) soul who skulks through Record Stores and seeks out new loveable, life-enriching, mind-expanding pieces of art, chockfull of new favorite “songs.”

Black Friday. And everyone does their X-mas shopping on Amazon. That is the new norm. When something like Amazon can give comparable corporate retail giants like Target and Wal-Mart proverbial runs for their proverbial money – than that’s pretty scary… (Again, 1984-echoes in me, but still). Imagine when something that formidable gets into considerably invested in your…YOUR…music listening behavior.

How will you react? Will you even realize it when you shift?

More so, will you remember that song you just streamed? Is there enough room for it before the next crest of “streams” (read: “songs”) babbles through like a digital brook, through your ears… In and out. On and off. Stream-and-done.

The takeaway: It reminded me to follow Gelardi’s advice and, at the very least, continue returning to these local record stores. Continue keeping a keen eye on the local talent (something Gelardi is particularly distinguished in doing throughout his career as a Promoter). Continue reminding myself that, unlike Spotify, I can actually “download” the songs of LOCAL talent who are putting their songs up through other, more modest means…

…like, yes, the innocuous Soundcloud or Bandcamps.

So I’ll save my money from these un-downloadable subscription services and instead opt to pack my PayPal account a bit more so that I can buy some Bandcamp goodies…

It’s a thought. And thoughts ain’t a crime yet, are they? I just think that all this streaming will risk further devaluation of the “song” as an experience, a piece, a world to be wondered through or a statement to be unpacked and translated. Songs could slink into the realm of eavesdropped conversation serenaded from some nearby table that you only half-remember later on as you recall your bustle through the ear-o-torium.

I’m listening…