"There was a little navy-blue, wooden loft in the backyard of Silent Barn—kind of a punk treehouse—where you could climb up a ladder and sit and watch everything. This was my favorite place to hang out at Silent Barn, maybe my favorite place to hang out in the world. Amid the chaos, this small perch seemed to acknowledge that at a place like Silent Barn, a person might want to take 10 minutes to be alone. I would sit and stare at the stringed lights and the spray-painted colors and the kids, I’d hear the moving parts of Silent Barn all humming together—someone recording in the studio, a show in the main space, a kitchen performance seeping down from the window three stories above, cars on the street, people milling about between it all. It was a great New York movie in real time. It changed constantly."
Jenn on Silent Barn
Presenting “Discover Weakly: Sexism on Spotify”—a talk on gender bias, playlists, advertising, and how algorithms reproduce inequity—at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle last month.
Snapshots from Silent Barn 4/16/18
Thanks for coming ♡
What some people are saying about “The Problem with Muzak”
“One of the best articles on the plight of music today and tomorrow.”
- Kim Gordon
“One of the year’s most significant projects in music journalism has been Liz Pelly’s ongoing investigation into the mechanics and implications of the playlistification of pop.“
- Slate
“We already knew that Spotify’s royalty rates were objectionable, and we knew that its algorithm-generated playlists often feel like mix tapes made by bots. Then, in December, thanks to an outstanding article in the Baffler by the music journalist Liz Pelly, we suddenly knew a lot more.”
- Washington Post
“There seems to be another, deeper motive for streaming companies to eliminate existing context for recordings: They want to replace it with their own. The rise of playlists, recently analyzed in a superb piece written for The Baffler by Liz Pelly, makes the platform itself the primary context for any music on it.”
- Pitchfork
“A fascinating, widely discussed dissection of how the algorithms employed by major streaming services — particularly Spotify — are changing music.”
- The Verge
“Most music venue operators I’ve encountered are familiar with M.A.R.C.H. to some extent—it’s part of the vocabulary of running a venue in New York City. But its inner workings remain obscure, even to many of the venues the task force threatens; most known information about the M.A.R.C.H. operations is anecdotal or else pieced together from first-hand experience.”
I wanted to learn about the NYPD’s opaque “Multi-Agency Response to Community Hotspots” task force that has routinely shut down music venues, bars and restaurants around NYC, so I filed some FOIL requests.
"When you subjugate something and call it content, that means it’s contained. I don’t want art to be contained. I want it to be free and to run around and be weird and messy."
Jesse von Doom in our interview for the third and final installment of the Protest Platforms series for Shadowproof
Conversations around my article “The Problem with Muzak: Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry”
Flyer from when I DJed at Happyfun earlier this month (01/04/18)
no gods, no masters, no music discovery algorithms
"Centralized influences and centralized incentive models create boring ass music. It creates boring ass culture. If you design a system that privileges back catalog, you’re going to get a lot of music that sounds like back catalog. You’re going to get a lot of pop music that sounds like pop music from the 80s. We run this risk of making music so bland it’s of no political consequence anymore. I fear that to some extent has already happened."
In conversation with Mat Dryhurst for the second installment of Protest Platforms, my ongoing look at organizations and artists advocating for alternatives to the corporate streaming status quo
Best of 2017
Reading my sister’s book
Seeing the Raincoats play at the Kitchen 2x
Moving to an apartment with windows
Road trip to All Power to the Imagination conference
When the van broke down and we got stuck in Florida for a week
Silent Barn & The Media still exist
Riding the NYC ferry in the summer
Being on social media less, writing for places I like more
My first successful FOIL request
Abandon recording
"Spotify also presents a new and complicated extension of hyper-commercial webspace, and it’s a development that could prove to be particularly harmful for musicians: the corporate-branded playlists. This ‘feature’ could be explained as the platform’s interpretation of corporate personhood, where paid-for brand accounts can create their own profiles and make playlists in the manner of the platform’s regular users. This has led to a proliferation of playlists made by brands. For example: the 'Coffeehouse Pop’ made by the official Starbucks page, or the 'Running Tempo Mix’ created by Nike Women. So long as corporations have at least twenty songs on their playlists and don’t include an artist more than once, they’re good. In the past, such an arrangement would require a given artist to sign a licensing or advertising deal, and it often appeared transactional, hence the traditional notion of 'selling out.’ Today on Spotify, artists often have no idea they’ve been added to these playlists. I only managed to discover this phenomenon upon plugging a friend’s band name into a tool called Spot On Track, which uses Spotify’s public API to present the different playlists where specific artists and their tracks appear. My friend’s band was completely unaware of its inclusion on the Nike and Starbucks playlists, and the band receives no additional compensation beyond the usual streaming royalties sent to labels and rights-holders… We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid."
From my latest critique of the streaming economy, “The Problem With Muzak: Spotify’s bid to remodel an industry,” for the December issue of The Baffler. I wrote about Spotify’s obsession with “chill” playlists, the way Spotify attempts to imbue corporate-branded playlists with editorial integrity when in reality they are actually advertisements, how Spotify is trying to make labels irrelevant, the implications of the music press embracing the platform, and other topics.
Protest Platforms: Music Streaming Cooperative Restores Agency To Artists
I’m doing a three-part series for Shadowproof titled Protest Platforms, focusing on organizations and individuals working to give agency back to musicians online. For the first installment, I wrote about Resonate, platform cooperatives, the new centers of power in music, and why we need alternatives.
i love this album + reviewed it for Bandcamp