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Seventy years ago today, June 21 1948, Columbia Records introduced the LP with two releases - one 12″ (classical) and one 10″ (pop).
Did the “American Century”/”Pax Americana” begin and end with the LP? Not claiming causality, but…I wouldn’t rule it out either.
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In a 2013 documentary about the Eagles (”History of the Eagles”), Don Henley explains that they stopped recording with Glyn Johns so they could work with someone who would mic each drum individually. They went on to record some of the most annoying music in the world.
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The previous post about Galaxie 500 streaming song plays attracted the interest of Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “Data Alchemist,” who looked at internal numbers and generously shared more info with me.
It seems the increase in streaming of “Strange” above all other Galaxie 500 songs started in January 2017 - the same time Spotify switched the “Autoplay” preset in every listener’s preference panel from off, to on (you can still turn it off but of course fewer people do). Autoplay selects “similar songs” when anything you have chosen to play - a playlist, an album, a song - finishes. At that point, Spotify’s recommendation algorithms take over and the system continues to provide music based on its resemblance to whatever you have been hearing. (Glenn explained that there are many, many acoustic categories involved in that calculation.)
In other words, it would seem that “Strange” started to be picked out by Spotify’s algorithms because they found it most similar to other bands’ songs than any other Galaxie 500 track.
Being more of a scientist than I am (though I would happily claim kinship with the alchemy bit), Glenn cautioned that this analysis was not conclusively causal - he would need to do more examination of data before going so far. But it makes intuitive sense to me. “Strange” is a touch faster, louder, with a more regular backbeat and a more predictable song structure than most Galaxie 500 songs. Compared to the singles from each of our three albums, for example - the songs that always had the most radio play - there’s no extended instrumental section like on “Tugboat” or “Fourth of July,” and no unusually slow tempo or quiet dynamics like on “Blue Thunder.”
Glenn confirmed that once “Strange” started to be played more than our other tracks, it became more likely that it would be recommended more frequently across the platform - the snowball effect I described in the previous post.
Might an unintended result of Autoplay, then, be the separating out and rewarding of the most “normal” songs in each band’s catalogue…? Smart speakers will I imagine exaggerate this effect. As albums are increasingly supplanted by playlists, and intentional listening of all kinds is increasingly replaced by algorithmic recommendations, “Play Galaxie 500″ may really come to mean, “Play the song by Galaxie 500 that most resembles songs by others.”
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Song streams by Galaxie 500 on Spotify, May 2018
Alert listeners to Spotify have been noting its failures when it comes to streaming albums in their entirety - gaps between songs might be changed or absent (the famous “Judas!” cry is missing from Dylan’s live recording in Manchester 1966); single edits of tracks are substituted for album ones; entirely different performances (live, or an alternate take from a later remaster) pop up in sequence instead of the original…
This emphasis on track over album seems to be baked into Spotify’s algorithms, as well. A given track is picked up for recommendation to individual listeners; if the track is received well (however that is determined), it is seeded to more recommendations; and so on.
I believe I can see the net result on the cumulative plays for different Galaxie 500 songs (Spotify shows artists this particular chart of their own material, though very little other data). “Strange,” a track off our album On Fire, is streaming far more than any of our other songs - roughly ten times as often as the songs that surround it in its original sequence on the album (”Snowstorm” and “When Will You Come Home”).
What’s especially surprising about this is that “Strange” was not a single for Galaxie 500, and hasn’t historically been among our most popular tracks. Even Spotify’s own editors haven’t selected it for any of their curated playlists, the most popular of which uses the much more predictable choice, “Tugboat”:
Yet anyone using Spotify is much more likely to hear “Strange” than any other Galaxie 500 song - it is the most frequently streamed of our songs via “Discover Weekly,” “Your Daily Mix,” and Spotify’s “Radio” feature. And I assume this will only become more and more the case. Now that Spotify’s algorithms have separated “Strange” from the rest of our catalogue, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that it will be streamed more than others because it is frequent use of this track that causes it to be seeded it into more recommendations, which increases the frequency of its use…
Where, meanwhile, are the listeners to On Fire? Judging by the numbers of streams of its other tracks, there aren’t many on Spotify (”Plastic Bird” had fewer than 7k streams in the same period that “Strange” had 210,000). If we want to preserve the album format, we are going to have to work to preserve other means of listening.
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Emma González’s silence at the March for Our Lives podium was almost precisely 4′33″.
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All, formerly, bookstores in my neighborhood.
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The most mind-blowing book I read this year is A Million Years of Music, by Gary Tomlinson. It was also the most difficult - I had to look up at least one word on every page. But then I got to ask the author all my questions! His answers make a good crib to his argument:
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/prehistory-music
For the full vocab lesson though, get the book.
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The Grateful Dead in front of their “Wall of Sound” PA system, 1974.
There’s an excellent new documentary about the Grateful Dead called (a bit predictably) Long Strange Trip, but were it an academic book a useful subtitle might have been: “Study of a Rock Band as a Function of Scale.” The Dead, like so many bands, started as a group of friends playing music together in a shared house. But unlike most everyone else, as they moved from the sitting room to the stage they refused to alter their techniques of working as a group. To the end they performed without set lists, without formal cues, without any of the usual trappings of a “show” that accompany professionalization in music.
It didn’t stop their audience from growing, however. And that increase in scale meant the band had to continually try and adapt to maintain their informality on stage. In the early 70s, it led them to construct a PA system they dubbed their “Wall of Sound” (pace Phil Spector). Placed behind each musician (instead of in front, as is usual) was a stack of speakers that projected only their individual instrument (instead of a mix, as is usual).
The idea was that each player’s sound would emanate from their particular position, just as it would around the sitting room of a Victorian in The Haight. But a lot louder. So loud that each could be heard a mile away in an open field.
It worked, after a fashion. It also weighed four tons, and took all day to assemble and all night to dismantle. And it required a unique, out-of-phase double vocal mic set-up to cancel sounds from the speakers behind each singer - not the most flattering way to amplify voices.
After a year, the “Wall of Sound” was scrapped. And the Dead went on hiatus. I wonder if, among other issues, they felt they had hit a limit of scale.
But when they returned a few years later - using more conventional PAs - the audiences got bigger again. So big that in the late 80s, as the band started playing stadiums, devoted Deadheads stopped buying tickets altogether and started gathering outside the arenas instead. There they could continue the community practices that had developed at a smaller scale.
“Has success spoiled the Dead?” Jerry Garcia was asked in a formal press conference during this period. “Yeah!” he answers - and laughs, along with everyone in the room, like they’re hanging out.
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My book was recently translated and published in Spain, so the Madrid paper El Pais asked me for a list of albums best heard on LP. I had to rephrase the question a bit, but here’s my answer:
I have written a book called The New Analog, so It might surprise you that sound quality is not usually the main issue for me, in choosing an analog or digital format for music. But actually my book never takes up that old question of which is better, LP or CD… in fact I deliberately avoided it, because it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere very interesting! Some say one; some say the other; some (I would be in this camp) say it depends – could there be a duller answer? However, I am very interested in other, perhaps more fundamental aspects about the changes we are experiencing in the ways we share music. Here are a few LPs I am listening to now – as LPs – that might help illustrate some of those issues.
Morio Agata, Otome no hakana yume (Japan, 1972)
I just got home from a tour of Japan, where there are still a lot of great record and CD stores. And I brought this album back on LP because that is how I found it – the owner of a psychedelic specialty shop in Osaka, Forever Records, talked to me about what kind of music I am interested in, pulled a stack of used LPs for me to hear, and this one hit the mark. The musician, Morio Agata, is quite famous in Japan but was unknown to me. And this album – among his earliest – is gorgeous, emotional singer-songwriter recordings, on piano and guitar; I have played it nonstop since I got home. I am sure I will now hunt down more of Agata’s work – on LP or CD or even download, I might not care! But I would never have found any of it were it not the way a record store owner can share old LPs with an interested customer.
One of my favorite shops in the town where I live, Cambridge Massachusetts, specializes in jazz. It is so specialized, in fact, that the owner is a collector of rare 78s, and isn’t very interested in later compilations of those recordings on LP – as a result, he puts albums like this one in the $1 bin. (This one is actually a double LP, and I see from the sticker still on it that I paid $1.99, accordingly.) I have made many discoveries of older music I love by taking chances on these cheap LPs – I might never have discovered how deeply Jimmy Noone’s playing could effect me, had I not had the opportunity to find it on such a cheap format! Favorite track: Sweet Lorraine. (I guess that would be the 78 I would own, were I collector…)
Here is a favorite artist of mine, the American singer-songwriter Tom Rapp, on his first LP originally released by the great New York label ESP in 1967. I already have all of Tom’s records – but this one has a checkered release history which makes me grateful for a new LP reissue on Drag City. ESP was a brilliant but erratic record company, not very careful with their master tapes or formats (or contracts). In the case of this one, although the original was mixed by the band and its producer in mono, the record company altered the mix to make it a stereo release. And later CD reissues added insult to injury, swapping left and right channels from the original LP. So this is a case where I am very happy to hear a new reissue LP (and it’s only available on LP, as is often Drag City’s practice), even though I have the ESP original (and, yes, the CD). Is it about sound quality? In a way – but it’s really about wanting to hear the music the way the band intended. Which, in this case, was mono!
Milton Nascimento, Milagre dos Peixes (Brazil, 1973)
This is another instance where the intention of the artist feels tied to a particular version of the release – but here it is less about the audio than the fantastic packaging and presentation of the original LP. This album was recorded under a military dictatorship in Brazil, at a time when all lyrics had to be submitted to the government for approval. As I understand it, Milton Nascimento’s response to the situation was to make this largely wordless album – but such a lush, gorgeous one, lacking nothing but its notably absent lyrics. Milton is one of my favorite singers, and so I have sought out a copy of the original LP both to try and better understand this album, and for the pleasure of its presentation. And it really must be seen to be believed – the cover folds out into a giant, poster-sized photo of Milton as a child. The LP itself is housed inside a separate, beautifully colored set of pages, with a single page devoted to each song. These pages – nearly all of which lack lyrics, and are therefore largely blank – seem like Milton’s deliberate presentation of missing words. And… there is a 7” EP tucked inside, with three more songs. Because they didn’t fit on the LP? Because these have lyrics on them? Puzzles for the listener/critic. But how else to begin to solve them, without this LP package in hand?
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“I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” (Irving Berlin), Billie Holiday and her Orchestra, 1937.
Among the miracles of 20th-century jazz was its ability to pluck a run-of-the-mill tune off the hit parade and turn it into high art. Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson (piano), Ben Webster (tenor sax), Jonah Jones (trumpet), Edgar Samson (clarinet), Allan Reuss (guitar), John Kirby (bass), and Cozy Cole (drums) made this landmark record the same year Irving Berlin’s song debuted in the film On the Avenue, where it’s a forced comedic number for Dick Powell and Alice Faye:
The film version is all clichés. Billie Holiday uses the same words - but you feel the cold, and the heat.