Month: April 2018

For my last piece of the semester, I think it only makes sense for me to touch on the way that we consume music and what it means to be a responsible fan. The industry has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades, and it has created a very different landscape for consumers and artists alike. As such, being a responsible music fan in the world we live in now means something very different from what it used to.

At this point, I’d like to ask my FBI agent to stop reading. When I first started to expand my taste in music, before the advent of streaming services, I torrented albums off of the internet without a second thought. My Itunes library was completely filled with music I’d stolen. The reasoning for this was somewhat sound; I was not about to pay for an album I wasn’t sure I would like and might only listen to once. Once my tastes started to take shape however, my rampant theft became something that I thought about a little bit more. Foster the People’s Torches  and Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City did a lot for me over the course of a couple of months, and I came to the realization that despite the amount of mileage I had gotten out of these records, I had done nothing for the artist. This made me feel a little guilty, so I made a point of purchasing pieces of merchandise from both acts. I tried to continue to do this for the artists that I felt did the most for me, but far too many fell by the wayside. For a barely employed high schooler, this was simply all I could do.

With streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music now taking center stage, supporting artists becomes a little more of a grey area. Sure, whichever streaming service you pay for pays the artists, but more than 99% of audio streaming that takes place is exclusively streams of the top 10% of most streamed tracks. This is a normal geometric distribution, sure, but that fact offers little solace for the band making mere dollars for the thousands of streams they are receiving. At the same time, top artists are making an absolute killing in this environment. Lil Uzi Vert even delayed the release of Luv is Rage 2 because the lead single was making him absurd amounts of money on a daily basis. Why release the album when the one single you released is netting you more than the cost of four out of state years at PSU?

The most popular artists will always make more money, this goes without saying. That being said, many would argue that the rise of streaming has only increased the disparity between the superstar and the up and comer. In this sense, streaming services are failing consumers of independent and underground music by paying these artists peanuts for the material they work so hard to produce. The statistic that I brought up earlier really drives this home, and raises some interesting concerns. If 99% of what people are streaming is only the top decile of popular music, what incentive do services have to carry the bottom 90% of music on their platform? One could argue there isn’t much of an incentive outside of the odd one hit wonder out of left field that could blow up from the massive catalog, but it is a very real possibility that some of our favorite artists could be dropped from streaming services in the future for simple lack of mass appeal.

So while streaming music is undoubtedly here to stay the primary medium of consumption, make a point of buying that concert ticket and ordering that t shirt you’ve been eyeing. Artists are relying more and more on tours and on merchandise to survive, and your streams are not enough to keep your favorite bands going.

Listening: Donald Trump, Avian, Dang!

Pennsylvania’s own Mac Miller is one of the most interesting case studies in hip hop. Hailing from Pittsburgh, Mac released his first project at age 15 under the name “EZ Mac”. he gained a following quickly, and was signed to Rostrum Records. He sold out his first tour which accompanied the release of his K.I.D.S mixtape, and appeared to have a future as a pop rapper. He released his first full length LP, Blue Slide Park in 2011. It was the first independently distributed debut album to achieve the Billboard 200 number one spot, and I credit the record for introducing me to the hip hop genre. I had been exposed to hip hop before Blue Slide Park, but it was the first album to really click for seventh grade me.

However, the record’s critical reception was nothing short of horrific. It caught a 1 out of 10 from Pitchfork, and experimental Detroit rapper Danny Brown went as far as to call him “The worst guy around”. Mac was labeled a frat rapper and largely written off, doomed to go the way of Mike Stud, Asher Roth, and Sammy Adams. But Mac proved to be far less one dimensional than the aforementioned, and rather than continue to do what he was doing he took the criticism and reinvented himself, but not without struggle.

Mac took the rough reception of Blue Slide Park to heart, and found himself struggling with opiate addiction. This reaction is understandable given where Mac was in his career. It was his first project and he had poured everything he had into it, and it sold in record numbers, yet it was so poorly received and he found himself lumped into a category he wanted no part of. In the throes of his drug problem, he released the much more introspective Watching Movies the the Sound Off. His critics did a full 180, and Mac was able to shed the frat rapper label which was haunting him so much; it was not the artist he wanted to be.

Kicking his addiction however proved more difficult, though he did eventually succeed in November of 2012. Since then he has been on a tear of consistently good releases and numerous collaborations with big name artists, and is held in high regard within the hip hop sphere. Mac is probably the only example of a rapper who has been able to change lanes so dramatically and succeed at it, so it is unsurprising that the initial criticism weighed so heavily on him; he knew he was capable of better.

Some of the highlights of his later career are tracks like Weekend, which ditches the fast pace and bouncy grooves that Miller relied on in his early career in favor of slower instrumentals and the spacey, left field production which is a staple of his post Blue Slide Park career. Dang!, off of his most recent album The Divine Feminine is an extremely funky collaborative effort with R&B artist Anderson .Paak, (another personal favorite), and it went to further prove Miller’s talents as a versatile vocalist and rapper. He also has proven himself as a very skilled producer under the alias Larry Fisherman, and has released projects under numerous other aliases to varying degrees of success.

It is very rare to see an artist grow as much as Mac did, and I feel a little bit as though my taste in music grew alongside his skill progression. I remember being extremely put off when his Macadelic tape dropped following Blue Slide Park because it was too much of a departure from his old style for eighth grade me to handle, but as I aged I grew to appreciate his more experimental style of music more and more, and I found myself preferring experimental varieties of hip hop by and large. Mac is still relatively young and still has much to come, and it is safe to say he has saved the legacy he was so concerned about at age 19.