My beef with Bjork

#Bjork is great. There's no denying her unique talent. David Bowie  is one of my all-time favorite musical acts.  David Byrne, of Talking Heads and Eno collaborations (amongst others) is brilliant. All three are horribly wrong about streaming music. They say it's an outrage that they don't get paid more for the times a user on Spotify plays their songs.... which, if they did, would be a cost that would come back to me... the user..  paying out again, even more, to simply listen to their music. 

Here's  the thing.. . I don't listen to Spotify to hear things I've heard before. Everyone I know uses it for music discovery. In my case,  what I find on there has often ended up with a purchase on vinyl. I've discovered some great records I never would have been exposed to otherwise. And, in the end, the band did and dies get paid. 

One of my favorite bands right now is  #Protomartyr. They don't get radio play. I found them on #Spotify. I bought their record.

With #Bowie, and I hate to say this, he puts out a lot of shit... self-absorbed  shit. So, I'm tired of paying for it. I've owned several of his albums several times. He's gotten what he's gonna get from me. I just bought his new Greatest hits record... which is exactly the same record he put out in a different package years earlier. I think one song  is different. They're even in the same order. That's bullshit..... expensive bullshit.  

So, he needs to shut the fuck up. I've been buying his records since 1969.

I don't  know if Bjork understands what people like myself are into doing. We like new music all the  time. It's the reason I discovered Sugarcubes . Back then they had college rock radio. They played obscure stuff all the time... which, in many cases, ended up being very popular music. That's how we found new music. 

So, Spotify is college radio, in a sense. I doubt college djs are reporting  their playlists. No one is getting paid directly.

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So, I'll continue to support streaming music. It's the freedom music listeners have always wanted. Discovering a new band, even at my age, can be really exciting. In my younger days, it was life changing some of the time.

So, Bjork, Bowie, and the Talking Heads,

lay off. Make music people want to pay for. It's that simple.