Jul 9

Jul 9 Pulling the Plug & Packing up the Music Blahg

As someone who has successfully run an unsuccessful music blog for over a decade, the thought of officially pulling the plug on the whole operation has been something that has been at both the back AND front of my mind for almost the entire time. I guess that’s just something that comes with the territory of consistently doing unpaid part-time/full-time work that pretty much amounts to having a long-running publicly shared hobby where people send you new assignments every day.

Over the last few months, however, the thought of packing the music blahg up entirely has been one of my main overriding thoughts.

True, I had already stopped accepting music submissions back in the Spring of 2022 (I wrote a long essay about the reasoning behind that decision and will try not to re-hash too many of the same points here), so the writing has been on the wall for quite some time, BUT, up until the end of 2023, I was still updating mix cd playlists and sharing digital mix tapes and putting together blog posts and Q&As on the weekly that gave the impression that I was still a functioning music blogger participating in the music blog game.

But since getting back from my Christmas/European vacation at the start of February 2024, with every new music PR email I receive, I can’t help but be hit with the hard realization that my continued involvement in the music blog world, in any form, is never going to have a net positive effect on my ability to earn food and rent (nor is the music blog work I do contributing anything of value to help change society from a rigged system built around exploiting people’s basic needs… which makes needing to earn food & rent a never-going-away problem forever in need of solving). I’m just another potential contact for potentially helping someone’s latest art project reach a few more eyeballs and/or earholes (and all the while we all keep struggling to stay afloat as the world becomes a little bit more unliveable for the majority of us, financially and environmentally and spiritually) — which feels like a net negative in regards to my time spent.

Over the last few years especially, I’ve found myself frequently thinking of Terence McKenna’s lectures about how ‘the culture is not your friend’ — and seeing as how we all seem to be stuck competing amongst each other on a loop for finite spots of hierarchical success in a culture built around further propagating colonial/imperial capitalist consumerism, I’ve found myself being pulled more & more to wanting/needing to work on stuff that feels less & less like helping prop up that very culture.

And with Spotify declaring that they will no longer be paying out small artists who do not accumulate more than 1000 streams per year on their tracks (which is just a further example of how artist unfriendly they are as a company), the idea of continuing to use their service to push my little digital mix cds (that not that many people listen to anyways) has started to feel like an even more empty effort than it previously did (and it was already feeling pretty empty, especially seeing as how few people click away from their socials to visit a blog post). Besides, who needs slow human strangers to share their subjectively curated music taste when everybody has access to fast learning algorithms and an infinite amount of music they can use to curate their own playlists based on their own subjective tastes & discoveries (ie. even I can see how there isn’t much monetizable value to what I’ve been offering as a “music blog” in this modern world)?

So I’ve decided to cancel my Spotify subscription and exit the stream.

And since I don’t plan on signing up for any of the other music streaming platforms (as they all seem to offer a similar path towards further artist/art exploitation that I really don’t want to help normalize and contribute to any longer, even if just in my small insignificant $10/month ways), this will also put an end to all of my digital mix cd playlist making and updating and sharing.

And since I’m also not all that excited about the direction that Bandcamp is heading as a company anymore (ie. I’ve started to lose track of how many times the company has been bought & sold and how many attempting-to-unionize staff have been let go), I don’t see much point in trying to reconfigure things I’ve been doing (ie. like my MOUN.TOWN/FM idea) around playlisting that is currently possible through Bandcamp urls, as I think that would just be another delay of the inevitable (and, to clarify, that inevitable is: the time/effort that I put into music blogging never leads to anything that I can hold in my hands). I suppose I’ve tried the ‘just put my head down and do the work in my head and maybe that work will be recognized/rewarded’ thing too many times in the past to have any steam left to give it another go with a different variation of the same ideas (at least when it comes to music blogging, as I know where ‘independent music blogger’ falls on everybody’s list of ‘Things We Help Support With Our Money’… and I say that as someone who also doesn’t have any extra money left over to help support other independent music bloggers).

So, when factoring in all of those factors, unfortunately, it doesn’t leave me much reason to keep on keeping on with being a “music blog” and continuing to do “music blogger” tasks (besides the strong inertia I feel to keep plugging away at things because I’ve already plugged away for so long and it feels slightly tragic to stop now… but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to keep at it anymore). Besides, it won’t be too big of a transition for me to go from saying “I’ve successfully run an unsuccessful music blog for over a decade” to “I successfully ran an unsuccessful music blog for over a decade”, and sometimes that was all the value my music blogging was providing me in the real world when I would try to find paying gigs that make use of my limited online skillz.

To paraphrase Chris Cooper’s character John Laroche from one of my all-time favourite movies ‘Adapation’:

“Look, I'll tell you a story, all right? I once fell deeply, you know, profoundly in love with tropical fish music blogging. I had 60 goddamn fish tanks thousands of tracks in my house library. I'd skin-dive scour the internet to find just the right ones. Anisotremus virginicus Cut Worms, Holacanthus ciliaris Frog, Chaetodon capistratus Scallops Hotel. You name it. Then one morning, I woke up and said, “Fuck fish music blogging. I renounce fish music blogging, I will never set foot in that ocean part of the internet again.” That's how much ‘fuck fish music blogging.’ That was 17 years days ago and I have never stuck so much as a toe in that ocean part of the internet. And I love the ocean that part of the internet.”

Now, I don’t plan on packing up my blahg life entirely—for example, I still have a ‘mutually beneficial employment’ idea to play around with in connection to running a local events calendar in the mountain town I still live in (although this is also a project that struggles to find support)—so everything “music blog” that I’ve done up to this point will still exist and remain online for those that know where to look (but expect some website changes/updates over the next couple months), I just don’t plan on doing anything further when it comes to “music blogging” content (which has started with me replying to my daily music PR emails with a more official “I am no longer a music blog” reply instead of my previous “I stopped dealing with music submissions, but I still sometimes share music” reply).

Not sure the exact direction this HI54.BLOG website will take now that I’ve started working on shedding the “music blog” coat I’ve worn for so long, but, hopefully, it will be something that people will still be interested in visiting every now and again (and, to be fair, it’s not like that many people were visiting this site for “music blog” reasons anyways… besides looking for a way to send me more music submissions).

I would like to thank everyone who has supported and appreciated the “music blog” stuff that I’ve done over the years (it has meant a lot and helped fuel me going as long as I did, well, that and my general disinterest in most of the other ways one can spend their working days on earth) and I hope we can all continue to bump into each other out in that big ocean of internet (and maybe out in the IRL too).

Until then… cheers for the ears over the years 🍻

JEREMY / @HI54LOFI