Hello everyone, and welcome to issue #90 of Crow’s Nest. This is going to be a bit different than a typical issue, not as demanding on your ears though about the usual length in words.
First, a reminder: I’ll be returning to the online airwaves this Tuesday, September 16th, at 4 PM PST, on particle.fm's Just A Dilettante show, alongside regular guest sold. I’ve got my hour of material selected, still need to get it sorted, but I’m getting excited. Check out this snazzy flier sold whipped up for the occasion:
(And yes, for those unable to catch it live or who want to relive it afterward, the show should be archived and available online. I’ll be sure to post that as well, once ready.)
Second, I have an update from my personal life: I finally did it. No, not that; I have stopped using Spotify and switched to an Apple Music subscription. The process was simple enough and took me about an hour to complete. The new transfer tool partnership that got fairly loudly trumpeted in the press made it simple: a handful of tracks and items I’d marked as saved in Spotify weren’t available in Apple Music (including, funnily enough, an album whose mp3 files I already have in my Apple Music library), and the rest populated after a short while.
The impetus for this, besides having the free time and motivation to sit down and actually make the switch, was the news that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had raised hundreds of millions of Euros and become chairman of military AI startup Helsing. I’ve not looked into what, exactly, the firm does, but feel reasonably confident that it’s something I wouldn’t support based on my prior sentence’s words. I’m inclined to think you feel similarly, as you’re someone seeking out hobbyist music recommendations in 2025. Foreign Exchanges, one of the publications I trust for international news and commentary, quoted the Wall Street Journal in detailing how the Ukrainian (and, separately, American and Israeli) military has been pioneering development along one vector for this technology:
“Military experts say the so-called swarm technology represents the next frontier for drone warfare because of its potential to allow tens or even thousands of drones—or swarms—to be deployed at once to overwhelm the defenses of a target, be that a city or an individual military asset.
Ukraine has conducted swarm attacks on the battlefield for much of the past year, according to a senior Ukrainian officer and the company that makes the software. The previously unreported attacks are the first known routine use of swarm technology in combat, analysts say, underscoring Ukraine’s position at the vanguard of drone warfare.
Swarming marries two rising forces in modern warfare: AI and drones. Companies and militaries around the world are racing to develop software that uses AI to link and manage groups of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, leaving them to communicate and coordinate with each other after launch.
But the use of AI on the battlefield is also raising ethical concerns that machines could be left to decide the fate of combatants and civilians."
[commentary FX:] “The US military has tested this technology and the IDF claimed to be using it in Gaza in 2021 but then stopped talking about it for reasons that are unknown but probably not good. The Ukrainians have so far used this technology with only small drone squadrons but have plans to ramp up to groups of 100 or more devices at a time. For now all concerned insist that a human being is always involved in the decision to kill someone, but even if we assume that’s true now it’s hard to imagine that militaries won’t eventually embrace AI autonomy if it really becomes workable.”
Sounds unpleasant! Imagine, say, an AI-powered autonomous swarm of drones targeted at you, where you’re reading this, right now. Maybe they’re programmed as suicide bombers—imagine a swarm of robot bees programmed to ram into you or detonate plastic explosives a la the IDF’s pager attack on Hezbollah, or ones the size of RC toys armed with grenades. Or a multi-wave assault that can, say, penetrate the building you’re in during the first wave, followed by a second wave to deliver the lethal payload against you. And that’s just what I can think of off the top of my head. With AI at its core, the possibilities are endless!
That’s kind of the stuff of nightmares! How would you even defend against such an assault? This is what Spotify’s CEO is examining and investing his money in—made in part through your subscription payments—to develop and bring into existence. It’s little wonder this was the final straw for principled progressive voices like Deerhoof, other notable acts like Xiu Xiu and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, and a constellation of other artists relatively big to small to pull their music from the platform.
While years of negative coverage, analysis and advocacy means it’s no secret to anyone moderately paying attention to the music business that Spotify is not a force for good for the vast majority of artists on the platform, this newest revelation resonated in a way previous ones didn’t. I suppose the constant stream of news about Spotify making it harder to be an artist, being bad for music as a whole, and generally enshittifying, has been a kind of normalized background noise over the years. We knew it was bad, but nevertheless the convenience of the service to supply an endless stream of sound at a bargain price relative to the money and time spent buying and otherwise organizing a personal collection is an offer that’s pretty damn hard to refuse. And even if you can’t really make money directly off the platform, isn't the exposure helpful? How else are fans going to find you if you don’t exist on Spotify, the music app?
I recall first downloading the Spotify app back in 2013. I don’t think I gave it much thought. I was pretty big on pirating music back then as I was a college student whose ‘full-time job’ was studying, so the idea of spending a decent chunk of my limited spending money for the ‘convenience’ of not listening to ads between songs was not appealing when a free option worked with a bit more effort. Some of the outlets I followed for music news embedded track streams through the platform on their site, so when I could not otherwise locate a place to listen, I opened the app. I continued this up until I landed stable full-time employment, at which point the convenience argument won out, and the desire to spend a good amount of my now much more limited free time continuing to pirate and manage an mp3 library lost its appeal. I still continue(d) to listen mostly through Bandcamp tabs and music websites on my laptop at home, but the benefits to a subscription while on-to-go made it worth it to me.
The convenience factor has made people incredibly lazy about accessing media. You can find people online describing something not available on a mainstream streaming app as “lost media” even when it’s available for purchase from the first page of search results. I’ve written before how, for many, Spotify is the music app, and the idea of going anywhere else to listen is unthinkable (to say nothing about actually buying it). Even for me, someone who doesn’t didn’t consider Spotify their primary music-listening platform and doesn’t really make playlists, the idea of needing to rebuild the playlists I have in a new platform felt intimidating enough to hold off on making the switch until an easy to run automated process came around.
I’m not writing any of this as praise for Apple/Apple Music. Arguing ‘Spotify bad, Apple good because …’ would be failing Socialism 102. That I could even think this switch could count as a political action shows how narrow and constrained political activity under the late-stage neoliberal capitalist realist surveillance state app platform gig economy skibidi rizz Dubai Chocolate matcha pilates Labubu Psycho Right-Wing Capitalism Fascist Industrial Death Machine blah blah blah has become. Nevertheless, under the rules imposed on us by whatever we might think is the society we live in are, there is still some amount of consumer choice out there. While Apple Music subscriptions are no doubt a decent revenue stream for Apple, the big money is made elsewhere. I find that to be a good thing: what I’ve gathered about how things (don’t) work at Apple from a friend (and Crow’s Nest reader) employed there is that the ranks of folks running the service aren’t too interested in rocking the boat. Focusing on keeping the show going and not trying to squeeze that much more profit out of a fixed, secondary revenue stream seems better than just about any of Spotify’s innovations in the industry. Apple Music just seems like a better option to support over Spotify.
Better ≠ good, of course. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who’ve deployed socialist cliches like “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” to cynically justify their own laziness or lack of willpower to exhibit even mild restraint or difference-making in their consumption. I had a coworker tell me to my face last year that it was ok to listen to R. Kelly provided you “separate the art from the artist.” Coming back from a recent therapy appointment, I had to navigate my way through crowds around Wrigley Field for a Chris Brown concert that evening. I’d like to think years of living nearby has inured me to Wrigleyville chaos, but that was unpleasant. (Do you know what isn’t lost media? The police report of Brown assaulting Rihanna.)
Well-meaning critiques of consumer consumption as political practice have become wan hand-waving dismissals of even attempting to exercise minimal discipline. ‘Who gives a shit? He’s got bops, and actually the fractions of cents that he gets from my streams really aren’t supporting him, when you think about it,’ you might say, to which I might reply, ‘Well, yes, you’re right about that, but he’s still got ~60,000,000* people who stream him monthly on Spotify. Even if the majority of those people also think it’s no big deal to listen to him because he’s got some jams, that adds up! Anyway, why are you even defending him? There are plenty of folks who’ve got hooks that hit just as hard without the right hooks to match.’ So, yeah, I don’t think the fact that there’s no truly good option out there absolves you of the responsibility to at least try to choose the least-bad option. (Yes, migrating Crow’s Nest off of Substack is on my to-do list.) Some of them don’t end with your money financing the next-gen weapon system slaughtering perceived enemies of the fascist state coming soon to an imperial core near you—all because it was too hard to switch to a different spot on your phone to listen to your tunes.
*~58.8 million as of 9/4. For reference, Taylor Swift had ~88.5 million monthly listeners at the same time.
Alright, that about does it for this issue. Y’all heard that new James K record? Excited to see her perform it live in Philly next week:
RIP Hermeto Pascoal as well.
Right, that’s all for now, thank you for reading and listening as usual. Hope to catch y’all tuning in on Tuesday, and I’ll be back soon enough with another issue of music and more to come.
Late in saying this, but wanted to tell you that I think the way you framed this is spot on; certainly much more eloquently than I could’ve!
Even just looking at it through a financial lens, Spotify keeps raising its prices w/no uptick in quality. They’ve locked everyone in and are now weaponizing that to make people pay more and more for less and less.
As someone that makes a lot of playlists, it’s tough—I want to meet readers where they’re at— but the company keeps making leaving more appealing.