February GUNK
are you accidentally outsourcing your music taste? & shows & more
I Accidentally Outsourced My Taste in Music
Sam Tiesworth
To prepare for 2025, I finally took the leap and cancelled my Spotify subscription. Here’s why you should too.
With an administration looming that embodies questionable values, many of my peers are struggling to figure out how to prepare and take meaningful action. Here’s a big one: Exercise your power as a thoughtful consumer.
Life can be uncomfortable without Amazon, Spotify, Target, and the rest of the gang. But it is valuable and concrete and necessary to move away from this dependence in an effort to curb monopolization, union-busting, price-jacking and our own suffering as working class Americans.
I cannot deny that convenience and a top tier user experience had me hooked. I chose to prioritize this for years. I don’t blame anyone else for doing the same. But gradually I started to realize that I wasn’t really in control. And listening to music had begun to lose some of its power and meaning.
Like an iPad baby being spoon fed formulaic entertainment, my autonomy as a consumer was stripped away to make room for the dystopian nightmare of content creation and advertising that dominates the music industry today.
Not to mention, my identity and pool of inspiration as an artist had surely been shaped and beaten by this constant stream of trendy digital information. What is truly inspiring? Surely it is not my doomcore bubblegaze desiderium twee thursday afternoon, but what else am I exposing myself to? How can I create something that is truly innovative and fulfilling when this is all I know?
Are my actions alone going to have any real impact on huge corporations, their actions, or their bottom line? No. But the least I can do is hold myself accountable to demonstrate my values and hopefully inspire others to do the same.
I am done outsourcing my listening decisions to companies whose most pressing interest is maximizing profits.
A friendly self-reminder: nobody is forcing me to use and be a part of the streaming conglomerate machine, where consumers have been lulled into valuing unlimited access to music at a whopping $10/month - plus my eyeballs for advertising.
And a friendly reminder to any artist who spends their days demanding higher royalties from the soulless oligarchs at Spotify (though I recognize that many of us feel trapped by these systems - I do empathize with you and I too wish the system was better) - nobody is forcing us to distribute our music through this privately-owned company that lines the pockets of a defense-contractor-investing billionaire CEO. May we have the courage to exercise our freedom to create for the sake of creating and not solely to feed this mind-numbing algorithm that will chew us up and spit us out.
As consumers, we have more power and awareness than we are led to believe. I want to exercise that power while I still can.
In 2025 I will be more mindful of my music consumption. I will be more aware of what I listen to and utilize platforms such as bandcamp where I can (almost) directly support artists.
This choice comes with real personal benefits too. I predict that listening to full albums or projects on bandcamp or physically as opposed to an algorithmically generated playlist of “vibes” will somehow, someway, at least slightly cure my shortened attention span, my desensitization to new sounds, inspire me to create and innovate myself, and let me hold a more sacred emotional space for the art that people create.
In 2025 music will be a special occurrence of art with ritual and meaning - no longer a fuzzy backdrop that constantly fades into the periphery.
A look at your first few February shows… <3
Want to be one of the first people to get your hands on physical GUNK? Interested in connecting with a community within the GUNK team? Join our distro team! We meet to collate and fold GUNK as well as pick up stacks to distribute in our respective neighborhood. Shoot us an email if you want to be added to our WhatsApp Distro chat!
There will also be a GUNK hang/show on Feb 17th at Night Club 101 featuring music from Mutual Benefit, Alice Does Computer Music, and Sister. (GUNK’s editors’ own band). There will be grid.nyc DJ’s spinning tunes before and after the event. It’s hosted by GUNK and our friends at Mtn. Laurel Recording Co., so you can be sure it’s gonna be a good night. Come hang out with us and grab a GUNK :) tickets here.
Some hot new releases (truly too many for me to single out but i will say new lily seabird has really struck a chord…..)
after a particularly dark month of an administration making changes that are affecting so many members of our DIY community, we are finding light and hope in spending time and energy organizing and brainstorming ways to continue to forge real-life & people-centered interactions. to the people that have approached either ceci or i IRL about GUNK, thank you for reaching out & connecting. thank you for volunteering your time and excitement into our music community and DIY scenes beyond NYC and across the US. It has been paramount to realize how many of us stand together.
xoxo always
Hannah & Ceci
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Go Sam!!!