Good morning. Hello. How are you? #576

A hundred million dollars. A Hundred. Million. Dollars.

Good morning! Hello, there. Crap. It’s Monday. Oh well. We will live. How are you? Did you have a nice weekend? I hope so. Mine was pleasant. Didn’t do much.

I spent a bunch of time trying to get off of Spotify. It is… a challenge. I have a LOT of playlists—hundreds. I’m going to try and use Apple music for a few reasons: first, I am already paying for it, so I may as well try and save a little money in this whole process. Second, Apple music works fantastically with all the HomePod Minis I have scattered throughout the house (which is why I am already paying for it). And third, I am already giving Apple my money, lots of it, so the drop in the bucket extra for Apple Music makes no difference, especially since I am already paying for it. Apple’s no angel and they continually piss me off and try and kill my company off through hypocritical, self-serving, disingenuous moves in the name of “privacy,” all while breaking their own rules, but they do not give a hundred million dollars to an anti-vaxer. Yes you can find awful content in Apple podcasts, but they do not pay those people, they do not host those podcasts, they just have a podcasting app. There is a difference. Giving Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars is awful. I really feel like people are overthinking this. He is a person that says bad things, and Spotify is taking your money and giving it to Joe Rogan instead of the musicians that you are listening to. A hundred million dollars. I ask you. Who else would give Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars if Spotify would not? Fox pays Hannity $25 million a year. Joe Rogan himself said that he only did this deal with Spotify because they finally offered him more than he was making himself on YouTube. Joe Rogan would not have taken the deal if it was not more money than he could make elsewhere, so that means if Spotify stopped giving Joe Rogan a hundred million dollars, no one else would pick up the slack. It would be an undeniable good. Because, and this is just an opinion here, but Joe Rogan does not need to make a hundred million dollars, and this world would be better off if Joe Rogan did not make a hundred million dollars.

The CEO of Spotify is obviously feeling the heat from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and the like, and he put out a totally 100% disingenuous bullshit statement that said, and I quote, “Personally, there are plenty of individuals and views on Spotify that I disagree with strongly” and “You’ve had a lot of questions over the last few days about our platform [emphasis added] policies and the lines we have drawn between what is acceptable and what is not.” This gives away the game right here, indicating that this entire statement is complete bullshit because Daniel Ek is trying to pretend that Joe Rogan is just another person using the Spotify platform, who uploaded his content himself, and has nothing to do with Spotify the company, as if he’s just like, 2 Live Crew or something. But of course that is not the case. Joe Rogan is the person Spotify decided to give more money to than anyone else ever in the history of Spotify. Joe Rogan is the person Daniel Ek decided to give a hundred million dollars. You know what there are absolutely not at spotify? Many people with whom Daniel Ek disagreed and has also given a hundred million dollars. At most, that might number one person: Joe Rogan.

I have justified my Spotify use through these years because a) I buy a couple grand of albums a year directly from artists and labels and any listening on Spotify was additive, b) I am an asshole, c) I am a mostly failed artist with profoundly unpopular opinions about artists and compensation who feels like artists don’t actually automatically deserve a fair living and if I have to have a job while trying to make art everyone else can as too it’s not like I’m confined to the fifth circle of hell or something because I don’t make money off my art, d) their Mac app is really good. All of these are mostly still true but it’s not about any of them anymore, now it is about giving an alpha mail bonehead profoundly toxic asshole a hundred million dollars.

I’m not saying the government should ban the guy. This is not a free speech argument. If Joe Rogan goes back to being a normal-ass podcaster who has to find a place to host his podcast file on some server like the rest of us plebes and people still listen to him, that is a shame but a hundred percent legal. But I am absolutely morally against a company giving this guy a hundred million dollars, espcially when I am giving them money. We do not need to overthink this.

If you want my opinion Neil Young and Joni Mitchell just did one of the best things any boomer has done in, like, a decade. That is hyperbole. They didn’t invent a free vaccine for the third world or pass a historic climate change bill. But man. Having two boomers do something that, so far, a bunch of far more wealthy Gen X and Yers has not? Really showing em up.

Anyway, technically, for me to move to Apple Music is kind of a pain. I have a mammoth iTunes library—actual music files that I own that are on my computer in my library. And unlike Spotify, iTunes is both a local-music-file player and a streaming service. Ideally never the twain shall meet on these two functionalities, but it appears that this is not the case. I mean, it is the case, until you want to sync your playlists between your computer and your phone, which I do. So I in activating the playlist sync functionality, Apple music is like “hey to use this you have to use a thing called iTunes cloud sync to sync songs in your playlists [emphases added].” Those last words were important, because I knew I was undertaking significant risk turning this feature on, lest it decide to try and sync my entire library to itunes cloud, which would take forever. Those emphasized words gave me the confidence that it was only going to try and sync the songs on playlists and not all my music, so I went ahead and clicked it.

Nope.

It then churned away, with a little status note at the bottom of Apple Music saying “syncing with iTunes cloud” for two days. On a 1000Mbps up/down connection. BUT this morning, it was done, and the two playlists from my phone showed up on my computer. So, now, I only need to sync, like, 250 more playlists. Thank you, Gavin, for alerting me to SongShift, it is doing the trick quite nicely.

So, for you guys, I think maybe by… the end of this week? Next week at the latest?.. I should be fully off Spotify and using Apple Music playlists. Fingers crossed.

On a related topic, the latest version of my podcast is up. I pay for hosting myself and I do not make a penny off of it. No one has given me a hundred million dollars. No one has given me one dollar for it. I do not get famous guests to interview. This one isn’t even a particualarly good episode, except for the part about fun HOA drama. But it’s better than a Joe Rogan podcast, jesus.

My copy of We Are But Your Children: An Oral History of Club ManRay by Shawn Driscoll arrived this weekend and I have alredy just about finished it. I sat down Sunday and read it for three hours. What a “trip down memory lane,” as it were. That place really was something special. I especially enjoyed the first few chapters talking about the club in the years before I showed up on the scene in 1990. There are whole scenes, whole groups of people not represented in the book, but on the flipside, there are just so many amazing voices represented, and how could you ever completely capture everything in a community that had thousands, tens of thousands of people pass through its doors over the decades. It really brought back how welcoming that place was, what a safe space it was for everyone. And the smell. And it did this without getting too much into the interpersonal drama, which I suppose could have cattily been fun to remember, but, honestly, yeah, I’m content to leave that part in the past. It was a remarkable place, I will miss it forever, and the book is a great memorial to it.

Wow I had a million other topics in my notes—great thing about the weekend is that the topic list gets longer and not shorter. But I guess this is getting long. I will confine myself to one other thought this morning.

The Ewan Roy subplot of Succession has a lot more that can be done, and I feel like they made some mistakes with it this season. In a previous season, there was a shareholder vote deciding on Logan’s fitness to run the company after his stroke, and Ewan still very clearly owned his shares, I think he was still on the board. His vote mattered a lot, and Logan had to eat some crow to get his liberal, self-loathing brother back into the fold and shore up his vote. This time round, in Logan’s succession battles, no such shoring up was needed. He still needed to shore the vote up, wheeling and dealing with the ex wives and Adrian Brody. But this time he either seems to have taken his brother’s vote for granted—which would have been better served with at least a passing line (or did I miss it?)—or, even more intriguingly, Ewan has already donated his shares to Greenpeace, which would just be so great of a plot point, and yeah, departing from reality a bit, but imagine if fucking Greenpeace owned 5% of Fox it would be the greatest thing ever.

Here is today’s playlist, which is still on Spotify because right now SongShift is cranking through my 6,000+ song playlist “All the good,” so I can’t migrate over one of my in-progress playlists. Soon, soon. I promise. This one’s justa mix. It has Boy in Static on it, aka Alex Chen. I wonder how that guy is doing, miss that guy. And Amusement Parks on Fire, they were so good I wonder what… oh shit looks like they had a new album in 2021. Well there’s another reason to quit Spotify their release radar is garbage and they could have told me that. And that Shins song came into my head the other day, really one of their best, and a late career masterpiece. And more Pooka. And the Mary Chain re-released Damage and Joy so I’ve been listening to it a bunch, really a solid album, that one.

Happy Monday! Talk soon! On a much more wide variety of topics this week, I promise.