The Digital Revolution and Mea Culpa
Among all the revolutions in cultural consumption in the digital era, possibly the music industry has made one of the most radical.
Since I already have some decades of life, I was born listening to vinyl discs. I grew up with K7 tapes, and I became a teenager with CDs. Now, like all people on planet Earth who have an Internet connection, I listen to music online.
I confess that I need to do a mea culpa in accelerating these changes. After all, most of the books I buy are Kindle, and the music I listen to is digital, either through streaming or through our old CDs that I convert to MP3 files.
Digital has its advantages, and a good example was Primephonic.
Primephonic: The Union of Convenience and Curation
Primephonic was an app entirely dedicated to classical music and the like. Here is a summary of the features it offered:
- Industry news curated by experts.
- Weekly recommendations based on your taste.
- Playlists of world music from various countries to escape Eurocentrism.
- Essential selections from leading composers.
- Several podcasts with classical music history, insights, and interviews.
- Rarities, lesser-known songs, and recommendations out of the commonplace, like familiar composers in unusual versions.
The songs were rich in metadata, that is, associated information. Also, the search engine was phenomenal, with lots of filters. The results included the editor’s choice for that composer or work (in the case of the most important), history, context information, and songs ranked according to various options:
- Most popular versions.
- Alphabetical order, ascending or descending.
- Newer or older recordings.
- Longer or shorter music time.
It was possible to customize our playlists or browse the catalog, which features selections by:
- Composers.
- Regents.
- Orchestras.
- Instruments.
- Soloists.
- Periods.
- Genres.
- New releases and so on.
We could also create our radio, combining four factors: period, genre, instrument, and ambience (calm, energetic, etc.)
Finally, if my memory serves me correctly, the app claimed that it gave approximately the 60% of the subscription revenue to the producers and suppliers of its musical content. If this statement corresponds to reality, it seems a more generous agreement than conventional streaming.
Usability, information retrieval, business model, and context information are part of the experience. All of this was remarkably off Primephonic.
Unlike physical record stores, which sprang up decades before succumbing to the digital revolution, Primephonic was short-lived: it lasted just 3 years. Life online has changed the way time counts. The new calendar runs at the pace of bits and bytes.
Now the entire Primephonic music catalog is available on Apple, but the app has disappeared, and we need to access this content by using Apple Music.
Drowning in Apple Music
Someone said that before we died of thirst in the desert, now we drown in a flood of information and content. Curation is a keyword in this digital age.
The Apple Music app is all together, all musical styles. And this fact, punctuated as positive by Primephonic’s farewell release1, is actually the biggest problem with this merger. Let’s take a practical example.
I searched on Apple Music for Gregorio Allegri. In Artists, Apple returned me a result without a photo of the Baroque composer, no explanation about him, and the indication of one track, which the app classified as “top music.” Click on the image to listen.
That’s right, dear reader: the algorithm’s indication is a “gangsta rap” version of Miserere. I was afraid to search Bach, and then Apple suggested the Butantan Vaccine Remix2 to me.
Nothing against popular musical styles because I’m a super eclectic person. I listen to practically everything. The point is that I don’t need stimulation to like rock or pop, for example, whose presence in all media and exciting beats have a natural, almost instinctive appeal.
Concentrating the classical music experience in one place, Primephonic created a perfect invitation to cultivate something different. A less trivial aesthetic experience.
At Apple Music, this experience is seriously compromised, as Apple Music has thrown us into the impossible hunt for a needle in a haystack.
At the Mercy of Printed Classical Music Guides and SEO
With the end of Primephonic, I’m left with only “classical”3 music books and guides, with all the inherent outdating of paper. In addition, books generally don’t have specific indications of recordings. Also, they have a finite space. Therefore, they turn more to what will appeal to the public, which is already established, limiting the potential for discoveries.
Not that I’m an avid listener of classical music. And I’m also far from being a connoisseur who only listens to sophisticated or obscure composers. On the contrary, and that’s ok. For me, classical music is not a mere currency of cultural capital. It is a genuine pleasure. In this sense, Primephonic leaves a gap, so far, unfilled.
Primephonic was robust and centralized, had a broad, dynamic repertoire, updated in real-time, and powered by algorithms trained by a niche audience. In this case, despite all the problems associated with the algorithms, it did me excellent service.
What is the alternative now? Maybe we can look for magazines, blogs, and specialized websites. Then we are left in the hands of knowledge googlezation. Again, in command of the economic power of those who can afford its SEO.4
In other words, we ended up in the hands of the GAFAM companies one way or another.
The Insatiable Tech Giants GAFAM
GAFAM is an acronym for the technology giants: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. These new East-India Companies are colonizing the entire Web, building monopolies. Their CEOs are the new emperors, setting the course for everything that seems to govern our ordinary lives, from the vote to the ear.
The medium is the message.
Marshal McLuhan
The factuality of McLuhan’s famous phrase is quite evident when algorithms command the medium.
Thus, we are witnessing, simultaneously, two critical phenomena:
- The worldwide mass diffusion of cultural products that have greater public appeal or greater economic power behind them. These dominate various media and search results, influencing the production and consumption of culture on a planetary scale.
- The incredible democratization of cultural product’s publishing, which previously depended on the approval and investment of the big media gatekeepers, such as publishers, record companies, television stations, etc. Today, everyone can post or access whatever they want on the Web. Therefore, having a varied cultural consumption in contemporary times depends mainly on consumers. In this sense, autonomy and access have also expanded.
Consuming Access and Not Products
In today’s economy, we often buy access, not products. When I buy a book from the Kindle store, it’s not on my shelf but my Amazon account, while Jeff Bezos reigns supreme.
This new business model implies the imminent risk of the digital service or product in which we invest time going out of the market. This investment may be in facing the learning curve or information we add to this content. For example, the quotes we mark in a digital book on the e-reader or the playlist we save in a streaming app. Not all services allow a complete export of user-created content.
In this sense, Amazon, being the power it is, is both a blessing and a curse, as its survival guarantees that my library and all the information added to it will remain at my disposal. However, this monopoly has its implications for the publishing market, as we will see in other posts dedicated to the subject.
At least, with the merger of Primephonic with Apple Music, we were able to transfer our playlists from one app to another. Still, customers have been left adrift in many technology or platform closures cases. The website of my first professional home office, published in 2004, could be visited on the Wayback Machine until recently when Adobe ended support for the Flash format.
“Websites like Killed by Google show how the company focuses on product development and undervalues product maintenance. Critics say this trend can make the company unreliable. An example of this occurred during the launch of Stadia, a game streaming created in 2019. During the project’s presentation press conference, a journalist asked the general manager of Google what the estimated end of the streaming was.” 5
Killed by Google lists no fewer than 243 projects that Google started and ended, including Google Reader (2013) and Google Play Music (2020).
In the case of Primephonic, it is also clear that GAFAM will not be satisfied simply by destroying physical competition or taking over the big markets. They will also swallow small digital companies and niche startups.
All this without giving us the guarantee that they will continue the service. To make matters worse, the impact of these algorithmic monopolies on our taste and cultural consumption patterns will be drastic. It is already. At least for me.
Now Primephonic is just memory, like so many others we’ve collected in this digital age.
Memories of Places in Danger of Disappearing
Video Rental Shops
A film occupies two hours of our lives in front of the screen. Thus, having a cinephile employee to help with the choice makes all the difference. We could find them in the best video rental shops.
Victim of piracy, Videomania, the first video rental service in Belo Horizonte, could not resist and closed its doors in 2013. The others also gradually disappeared, one by one. The demise of video stores has left fans of the seventh art at the mercy of Netflix and Amazon Prime.
I like Asian movies. I can’t find The Scent of Green Papaya, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, or Raise the Red Lantern on these streaming services. Furthermore, I’m adrift in these new algorithmic seas, where practically only North American film productions sail.
Bookstores
Beto was late to pick me up from drawing class. A huge, beautiful package was waiting for me on the seat when I got into the car. It was the ressoné catalog of Debret, edition of Capivara publish house. I’m in love with old travelers.
I ask, surprised, what the occasion is. He replied that the occasion was me. He was immediately forgiven for the delay! After all, he was at the jewelry store, I mean the bookstore, buying this gem from the famous Belgian bookseller Van Damme.
The Van Damme store closed its doors in 2016 after 47 years of activities. Mineiriana, Status, and Ouvidor, three other traditional bookstores in Belo Horizonte, also closed their doors.
The night was falling, and Van Damme found himself alone in his bookstore, now quite silent. He sought to define what he felt. “You have to accept, let’s put it this way, the change of things, of times.” He said with a cavernous, low, choked voice.
Johan van Damme, in the bookstore that bore his name.6
Booksellers who understand books are going extinct, along with independent bookstores.
A third of Amazon’s revenue now comes from people who pay to have their books featured in the online store.7 So, the company’s recommendations are not at the mercy of algorithms that map to our taste. As a matter of fact, they are not at the mercy of any taste but of finance capital: whoever pays the most wins this war.
Record Shop
The year was 1999, at the end of the last millennium. I vividly remember when I got out of the yellow cab in New York and entered that world called J&R Music. Imagine a music-only mall, with each “inside store” dedicated to a specific genre! I opened the door to the classical music section with my father’s order list in hand, amazed. A nice guy with big glasses came to help me discover those and other finds.
Equally unforgettable in my collection of travel memories were the visits to Modern Sound8 in Copacabana, a mandatory stop on every vacation we spent in Rio. Its 1,200 square meters were a meeting point for musicians and artists. It offered a unique selection of rare records, which we could mine under the sound of the carioca (person from Rio) shop sellers’ squeaky accent.
I read the “Billboard,” the “Cashbox.” We brought rarities from Latin American countries, Italy, England, and France. I usually concentrated all orders in Paris, sent them there, and everything came on a ship to Brazil. In the store, we had salespeople specializing in all genres: classical, progressive, rock, jazz…
Pedro Passos, owner of Modern Sound9
Modern Sound appeared in a Wim Wenders documentary about the world’s best record stores. It wasn’t just a store. It even had an auditorium for lectures and courses and a bistro with live music. At night, we sometimes stayed late, listening to a jazz performance.
“It’s the only place in the world where you can hear fabulous music for the price of a Coke. How can such a place die?“10, wrote a columnist for the Folha newspaper, a year before the fait accompli. More than half a century after its opening, Modern Sound closed its doors in 2010. Pedro, its founder, nicknames the Internet the “tool of evil.”
Crime Without Punishment
As with these places in danger of disappearing, Primephonic has been sorely missed. This app saved me a precious commodity: time. I already have little to dedicate to studying classical music, given many other priorities and interests. This impressive app made this process fun, even more so for me, a technology lover. Now I will need to reconfigure my music education processes.
The merger FAQ says that Apple will provide a new equivalent app with all the features of Primephonic and more. It won’t be the same. Primephonic was an independent and charming app, dissociated with the tech giants’ (un)ethical questions.11
Anyway, until further notice, I remain skeptical. With all my heart, I hope to be wrong and witness Apple investing in its own classical music app. Seeing is believing, as the company may just try to ensure that Primephonic users migrate to Apple.
In my case, it won’t make a difference because I was already a subscriber to both, but (former) Primephonic customers got six months of free access to Apple Music. Steve Jobs’ daughter is trying to appease us and diminish our anger. She won’t succeed on that.
As far as classical music was concerned, Primephonic was my bookseller, cinephile employee, and Modern Sound specialist. Apple just killed him. And I can’t forgive this bitten apple for that.
Notes
Post published on my Portuguese blog on December 4th, 2021.
Please help me improve my English by submitting your suggestions through this contact form.
1 – Primephonic’s Farewell Release.
2 – Cultural plurality, Brazilian funk music on the Web, and government subsidies for symphony orchestras.
Funk is a Brazilian music style that, like hip hop, has a strong beat and, frequently, sexist and money ostentation lyrics. KondZilla is a funk YouTube channel and one of the biggest music channels in the world, with over 65 million followers. Important notice: I don’t follow, I don’t listen, I don’t recommend. I mention it here in this post because the song Bum Bum Tam Tam by MC Fioti, both the original and its vaccine remix, generated numerous reports, controversies, and discussions by including an excerpt from Bach’s work at the beginning (Partita in A minor for flute BWV 1013). Some people said that Bum Bum Tam Tam is more complex than Bach.
The song Bum Bum Tam Tam (maybe I can translate that as “crazy ass”), with highly sexist video and lyrics, had 1.7 billion views. As the song’s title sounded like Butantan Institute, a Brazilian research institution that contributed to the development of CoronaVac, MC Fioti made a remix of this song called Butantan Vaccine. In the new version, the lyrics encouraged vaccination, and the video was recorded at the Butantan institute with its employees’ participation. As I publish this post, the video has over 14 million views.
The singer also produced an English version of the original song, mixing Brazilian funk and North American rap and hip hop. The video already has more than 4 million views on the singer’s channel. The video with the song alone passes 57 million.
In addition to the official videos of the versions, countless videos of the choreography of this song accumulate views, like this one in hip hop style with more than 70 million views and this one in fitness style, with more than 83 million views.
Many insist that classical music is elitist and privileged and does not need government subsidies. However, I report all this here to remind you that pop culture is doing quite well, but classical music performed in Brazil really needs help to survive.
Here is my reflection note. Cultural plurality matters: #ClassicalMusicIsAlsoCulture
3 – “Classical” music, “erudite” music, or both?
The broader term for the Primephonic musical style would be erudite music, as “classical” music refers only to the Classical period. Two famous examples of classical composers are Mozart and Haydn.
However, the term “classical” music entered the popular grammar and became synonymous with erudite music, a term nowadays considered more elitist.
For me, it doesn’t matter. Linguistic innovations don’t bother me, as our language is alive and dynamic. I put the note here, so I don’t receive angry emails from “purists” or “vanguards,” outraged because I used either term.
Displeasing Greeks and Trojans, I use both!
4 – Googlization and SEO.
Contrary to what many may think, Google search results are not neutral. This topic certainly deserves a specific post, as information retrieval on the Web is part of my academic research. A quick and good introduction to the subject would be this TED by Eli Pariser:
Beware online filter bubbles (TED by Eli Pariser).
5 – Killed by Google.
6 – Van Damme Bookstore.
Van Damme sai de cena: Vai-se uma livraria em Belo Horizonte (Portuguese Article)
7 – Co-op advertising – episode of the Akimbo podcast with Seth Godin.
On November 16th, 2021, Seth Godin elaborated on several issues associated with ads, not just on Amazon, but in the marketing industry, from the days of print catalogs to the algorithms that govern our culture and drive our tastes. This Amazon data I extracted from the episode. Worth listening to it.
8 – Modern Sound.
Images and testimony by Pedro Passos about Modern Sound (Museu da Pessoa – People Online Museum).
Video with images from Modern Sound to kill the longing!
9 – Quote from Pedro Passos and the history of Modern Sound.
E a ‘modern’ virou ‘old sound’: do auge ao fim da gigante dos discos (Portuguese Article).
10 – Watching Top-notch jazz at a Coca-Cola price at Modern Sound.
Com a Modern Sound na cidade, não precisávamos viajar em busca de discos (Portuguese Article).
11 – Ethical dilemmas involving GAFAM companies.
There are many dilemmas associated with GAFAM companies, from the business model to the invasion of our privacy. To learn more about the topic, I recommend:
The Great Hack (Netflix Documentary).
Surveillance Capitalism – Shoshana Zuboff (Full Documentary on YouTube).
Acknowledgments: Alberto Nogueira Veiga, Paulo Rocha, and all who gave me their precious feedback, thank you for your comments and suggestions. I’d like to thank my English teachers, Maria D., Dr. Vince L., and Alex Russell.
Images: Records and tapes (Narstudio, Adobe Stock), Classical Music Books (Ana Cecília Rocha Veiga), Cellphone and coffee (Leszek Czerwonka, Adobe Stock), VHS tapes (DS stories, Pexels), Books (Dayvison de Oliveira Silva, Pexels), Vinyl Record (Elviss Railijs Bitāns, Pexels), Bitten Apple (Alexandr Podvalny, Pexels).
