Happiness Starts With Dancing

“Apple and Google know better than you do what you watch, read, buy, whom you meet, when and where. Spotify owns a record of your musical preferences more complete than the one stored in your conscious memory. And behind them all are countless others, invisibly gathering, monitoring, sifting and trading your activity for information about you. With every day that passes, some cloud-based corporation, whose owners you will never care to know, owns another aspect of your identity.”

– Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism; What Killed Capitalism, P. 72 – 73

Upon discovering Yanis Varoufakis’ concept of technofeudalism, my awareness of the impact of digital, cloud-based technologies on humanity, our behaviours and evolution, was resparked and heightened. In the passage this read opens with, a dark truth about our internet usage is curtly stated by Varoufakis. And whilst I could write a critique on the   exploitation of our attention spans for the sake of profit by cloudalists (i.e. Google), I would like for this piece to be something that is somewhat more inspiring and positive.

Our consumption of music is one of good nutrient; sound is an essential sense to the hearing human, musical sound a way we control our sound intake. The music we listen to, the music we love, could be considered by many a key part of our identities. So when Varoufakis lets on that “Spotify owns a record of your musical preferences more complete than the one stored in your conscious memory,” we become aware of how our identities are being shaped by Spotify, and other tech giants who own our digital spaces. Having grown up amidst the digital age, owning an iPhone since I was 11, this scares me deeply. How much of my sense of self has been dictated by my media consumption? How much of my music taste is actually mine, or just what the algorithm has pushed me to listen to? I believe there is a way we can take back control of the shaping of our identities, of the shaping of our music preferences, through a practice I have been engaging with for the past four years. This practice would be the art of crate digging, and by extension, the practice of turntablism. 

There is already a growing awareness of the exploitative nature of Spotify- artists are only paid around £0.04 per stream (Music Marketing and PR Agency). And with the amount of new artists releasing new music on Spotify every day, this monetary amount is only ever decreasing. Alternatives such as Bandcamp have become favourites for independent artists across the world. But using services such as Bandcamp still closes a person off to the majority of the music in the world, not to mention that Bandcamp has its own ethical concerns. After its acquisition by Epic Games in 2022, it was sold off to Songtrader, who proceeded to fire 49% of Bandcamp’s staff, including a large proportion of their writing staff. The nature of digital streaming services is consistently shown to be one that prioritises profits over the support of artists, particularly independent artists. Crate digging and buying records can be an ethical alternative to streaming services. With a physical product such as a vinyl record, a much larger proportion of the money used to purchase it goes to the artist than if you were to access their music via streaming sites. This comparison also displays another great reason for purchasing records rather than subscribing to a streaming service- ownership. Relying solely on streaming services to listen to and discover music essentially means that you are renting the music as opposed to owning it, as you would with a vinyl record. The first big issue this poses is that if the artist or music label decides to remove the music for any reason, you will no longer have access to it if you only had access to it through streaming. The second major issue this poses is to do with the idea of rent in itself.

The concept of renting music lends itself to a feudal nature- or technofeudal, to be more accurate to modernity and where our socio-political landscape is teetering towards. Where we are essentially renting the music we listen to from streaming services, we are never gaining any ownership over the product (the music), retaining us within this cycle of paying a monthly subscription fee, that will eventually total well over the amount that the music would have been if you had just bought it outright to begin with. This allows the rich to stay rich, and the poor to stay poor. As most social models are designed. Those who own the streaming services have a constant inflow of money from you and their millions of other subscribers, whilst every month for the foreseeable future, you know that a portion of your earning is going straight to said owners’ pockets. The rent we pay to these cloudalists and tech giants is more than just the subscription fees we pay to use their services. In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis offers the idea that traditional capital has evolved into “cloud capital”, and that its purpose has shifted from a “produced means of production” to a “produced means of behaviour modification”. What this essentially means is that the more we use digital and online technologies, the more their owners can gather information about their consumers, us, which they can then use to curate our digital feeds in a way that pushes their products and services to us. This is where the “homogenised human” is created. This is the term I attribute to the result of the behaviour modification that Varoufakis writes about. The digital and online technologies we use use algorithms to learn every detail about us, and then use those same algorithms to suggest products, news, memes, and on the note of this article, music back to us. But the purpose of suggesting us these things isn’t just to give us more of what we like, but to slowly curate us into beings of particular tastes, preferences and opinions, to the benefit of the owners of these digital and online platforms. Using streaming services therefore only strengthens the agendas of those at the top. 

Whilst there is no perfect solution to combat these effects that capitalism and technofeudalism have on us and our identities, we can do small things to take back control, such as crate digging. Crate digging is a beneficial art not just to curate more personalised music preferences for ourselves, but also to our social engagement. Communities of like minded individuals are brought together at the record shop; audiophiles browsing music can learn from those doing the same, and the experts that work in the shops. Solely using streaming services severs us from our physical space, at a time where connectivity in physical proximity is already dwindling. And though record shops will typically only have a limited range of music available, something that may keep one restrained in the shackles of online streaming services, a deeper connection is forged with the music when crate digging. The “limited range” of music in record shops is simply combated by visiting a plethora of record shops- then you’ll be finding music that you’d never be able to find via online streaming. This is the main reason I love crate digging, it has expanded my tastes, and allowed me to become obsessed with music that predates my birth. Highlighted below are some of the standout record shops which have provided me musical nourishment and education: