I Missed Spotify? A Thanksgiving Playlist. Surprise Chef. Tortoise. Discogs Store. Karate for $5.
Hi everyone. Today is the Monday before the Thanksgiving holiday and I’m thinking about Spotify…
I was an early adopter for Spotify here in the United States. The day it was available to download, I signed up. As a music lover my entire life, the idea that millions of songs were available to stream for one small fee per month was heaven. I signed up for a family plan and my boys grew up using Spotify to discover music and make playlists. We all loved it.
And then…Spotify screwed up. In short, Spotify is appealing an appropriate 44% royalty increase to songwriters. When you stream a song, two parties are paid…the record label who released the music and the publisher who represents the songwriters who actually wrote the songs. Record labels were able to strong arm Spotify into higher royalty rates before they came to market in the U.S., but the publishing companies were not able to negotiate a fair market streaming rate due to consent decrees set in place with PROs like ASCAP and BMI. I will not bore you with those details but last year Spotify, Google and Amazon all appealed the rate increase for songwriters. Apple Music did not.
I live in a town full of songwriters and know a lot of people who worked hard for the pay increase and I took this appeal personally, cancelling my Spotify account and moving us over to Apple Music.
Apple Music may pay songwriters properly, but their interface and app is far inferior to Spotify’s. First, Apple Music seems to have been built on the iTunes store foundation and is just slow and clunky. The application on my computer crashes constantly. If you want to make a playlist you have to save the song to your library then move the song from your library to your playlist. One night I made an entire playlist only to realize something went wrong and none of my songs saved properly. Did I mention Apple Music constantly crashes?
I finally decided to go back to Spotify and everyone in our house is much happier. Spotify’s music discovery tools are much more advanced than Apple Music. The app never crashes and I can make a playlist with my eyes closed. I often make playlists on long walks around the neighborhood which Spotify just makes it easy to do so.
Do I wish Spotify would drop their appeal to pay songwriters a better royalty? Yes. But I also wish Apple Music would use their deep pockets and fix their interface issues to retain users. You are Apple. Figure it out.
Why all the fuss about Spotify vs Apple Music? Well, I have to thank Spotify for the below music discovery…
On one of my long walks, Spotify recommended I check out a band called Surprise Chef from Melbourne, Australia. I was immediately drawn in by their laid back jazzy jams and actually ordered their LP from Mr. Bongo during my walk! If you like Tortoise or any other 90’s jazz influenced instrumental band, you have to listen to Surprise Chef, especially their new album, All News is Good News.
Speaking of Tortoise, Thrill Jockey have been reissuing their catalog on beautiful colored vinyl this year. For some reason, I always had Tortoise CDs, but none of their LPs in my collection. I’ve been listening to a lot of Tortoise as these reissues keep arriving and forgot just how great albums like TNT and their self titled album are. If you are new to the band, start with TNT and enjoy. I would’ve been the old guy on your lawn telling you bands today weren’t releasing music like this if it hadn’t been for Spotify recommending Suprise Chef!
One final note about Spotify, I made a Thanksgiving playlist a few years ago. Basically I took any song that had the word Thanks (or some version of) and threw it into a playlist. Of course it has classics like Sam & Dave’s I Thank You and Andrew Gold’s Thank You For Being A Friend, but also has some random jams by Blood Orange and My Morning Jacket as well. I can’t suggest blasting this at the Thanksgiving dinner table, but it was fun to find songs about giving thanks and putting them all together.
Discogs Store!
I’ve been adding records to my Discogs store and currently have over 300 listed. My goal is to get over 500 in the store as I feel that will keep sales coming in on a regular basis. Right now there is a very strange mix of records listed, mostly left over from a collection of 2,000 that I bought this summer. I finally got organized and have been boxing up the records for better storage now. Thanks to my friend Mike, a subscriber here, for the recommendation on storage boxes.
I still have about 10 more boxes full of records to list so hitting 500 in Discogs shouldn’t be an issue. I did finish going through the 2,000 records and sorting out all of the $1 records that would be too hard to sell online. I pulled them all out onto the driveway on a Saturday and had a socially distanced record sale at my house. I had a great turnout and sold $350 worth of records. Now, I wish that meant I sold 350 $1 records but the reality is I had some available from a record show in October that were priced higher which also sold well. But making $350 on Saturday morning was fun and we were able to put the money on a home repair loan that we’re trying to pay off by next year.
Records can be found anywhere…
The CMA Awards were on Wednesday, November 14th and due to COVID, most of my colleagues and I were self quarantining at home to ensure we weren’t exposed before show day. After the show, I had a major case of cabin fever and one Friday afternoon just had to get out of the house for a quick trip to a local antique store and see if they had anything interesting to buy. They didn’t have anything interesting, but on the way home I noticed a pawn shop and stopped in before heading home. There were records in the back with high prices but I decided to flip anyway.
While flipping I found the above Karate record and actually said, “No way”, out loud when I saw it. I immediately took a photo and posted it online for all the 90s emo fans out there. I NEVER find Karate records and neither does anyone I know. That’s probably why they sell for $100+ these days and I found this one in a pawn shop in Smyrna, TN for just $5.
That’s part of the fun of looking for records. You never know where they are going to pop up. It’s why I get an itch to stop in every thrift store or antique shop, just in case. I rarely find anything worth buying, but when I do, it’s often some surprising like the Karate record that makes me keep going back time and again.
Here’s hoping we all stumble on more interesting finds soon.
Happy Thanksgiving!