Never Post

An episode-long staff round-table about music library management with special guest Meghal Janardan.

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Become a Never Post member at https://www.neverpo.st/

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
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Creators & Guests

Host
Mike Rugnetta
Host of Never Post. Creator of Fun City, Reasonably Sound, Idea Channel and other internet things.
Producer
Georgia Hampton
Producer
Hans Buetow
Independent Senior Audio Producer. Formerly with Terrible, Thanks for Asking and The New York Times
Producer
Jason Oberholzer

What is Never Post?

A podcast about and for the internet, hosted by Mike Rugnetta

Mike Rugnetta:

Friends, hello, and welcome to the 1st annual Never Post summer break special. A chill vibes only episode long round table where the Neverpost staff and a special guest talk on some topic decidedly dog days. Before we get into it, let's go around the call and say who's here. I'm Mike, never post host. My favorite ice cream flavor is black raspberry, and I'm here.

Mike Rugnetta:

Georgia just looks horrified at having to answer this question. So I'm gonna go ahead and call up Georgia first.

Georgia Hampton:

I'm Georgia producer for Never Post. I have so many favorite flavors of ice cream.

Mike Rugnetta:

I don't think that's how favorite works.

Georgia Hampton:

I will just say a lovely scoop of chocolate.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Classic.

Mike Rugnetta:

Sensible.

Hans Buetow:

Elegant.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Oh. Hi. I'm Jason, Never Post executive producer, and my favorite ice cream is a classic strawberry with the little semi frozen chunks of strawberry in it. It's delightful textural surprises. It's just good.

Hans Buetow:

It is

Mike Rugnetta:

it's just good.

Hans Buetow:

I'm Hans Bussow. I'm the senior producer. So last year, I got my wife for her birthday, an ice cream maker. And let me tell you, the difference between homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream with real fresh mint Yeah. And real cream and real sugar opposed to anything you could buy in any store is shocking.

Hans Buetow:

So

Jason Oberholtzer:

we're all

Mike Rugnetta:

on our way to Minnesota right now.

Hans Buetow:

The porch is lovely. The birds are singing, and the ice cream is fine.

Mike Rugnetta:

Joining us as special guest is a friend of the show and member of the charts and leisure extended universe, New York Internet ceramicist, and Georgia Hamptons pal from college. Yeah. Megal Jarnarden. Megal, it is very nice to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Meghal Janardan:

Hello.

Mike Rugnetta:

Tell us about your favorite ice cream, please.

Meghal Janardan:

A new favorite, which also was homemade that my sister and I made for a friend's dinner, was hojicha and soba cha ice cream. Woah.

Mike Rugnetta:

Woah. What?

Meghal Janardan:

Yeah. Hell yeah. It really hits. It's so good.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Oh. Walk me through the flavor profile of that.

Meghal Janardan:

Soba, I think, is buckwheat, and hojicha, like, is roasted green tea leaves.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Woah. So this is like an earthy

Hans Buetow:

Earthy smokey.

Meghal Janardan:

Yeah. But still a little herbal.

Hans Buetow:

Yeah. Yeah.

Meghal Janardan:

If you guys have ever had Earl Grey ice cream, you would like this. Yeah. But a tea based ice cream, essentially.

Georgia Hampton:

Man, I just said chocolate.

Meghal Janardan:

Yeah. I was gonna say chocolate, and then I was gonna say strawberry. And then you both took it.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Oh, okay.

Meghal Janardan:

There you go. Fine.

Hans Buetow:

So you had

Mike Rugnetta:

to come up with some extremely fancy remote answer.

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah. Like, I'm gonna start real quick.

Mike Rugnetta:

Soul nowhere. I was gonna say black sesame, but I was like, what kind of asshole says black sesame? I should get that to myself, which I said black sesame now. Okay. Shockingly, this is not the topic that we are having.

Mike Rugnetta:

The vibes are already very strong. So onto the matter at hand, the lot of us, we were all hanging out recently when Georgia graced us with her presence in New York City.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Why now, why did you say it like that?

Georgia Hampton:

Just Now, why would you say that? Yeah.

Jason Oberholtzer:

What a choice you have made.

Mike Rugnetta:

I don't know. Hans was talking about Primus earlier and it really put me on

Georgia Hampton:

the moon. Yep.

Mike Rugnetta:

Jason, you know the answer to that question. It's because I've been inhabited by the ghost of Les Claypool.

Jason Oberholtzer:

You have Primus Adjacency Syndrome.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. And Magle asked a question that we got so invested in answering that we decided to do the most terminally podcaster thing and stop the conversation in its tracks so that we could reconvene later and record it. So here we are. Magle, I see the remainder of my time in the floor to you. Take it away.

Meghal Janardan:

Alright. I realized that every year around this time, spring summer, along with my regular apartment spring cleaning, that I also do a digital spring cleaning. And I was thinking about how I organize all of my music files and curate all of that and how it's something I used to spend a lot of time on when I was younger and had my iTunes library. And that's not really the case anymore with Spotify. So I was wondering, how does everyone organize their music Now and before.

Hans Buetow:

Is spring cleaning to you? So, like, are you, like, taking things out to the dustbin? Just like, nope. Don't need that song. Primus, keep it.

Hans Buetow:

Anything non Primus, get rid of it.

Meghal Janardan:

I realized because I now have, like, Spotify, like an app for all music stuff, and it's not like I have my physical CDs that I'm putting into my laptop and then downloading and importing into my Apple Music library that the process of organizing my music files is kind of already done for me in a way. And now, it's more like I organize playlist where I am like, that playlist, that is from when I was friends with people that I'm no longer friends with. Let me delete that. It's just like too triggering in a way. It's like bad memories.

Meghal Janardan:

Wow. That's where I am now. Whereas before, I would like organize. I would, you know, put my killer CD into my laptop, import the files, make sure it showed up in my Apple Music, and then that everything's working. And I would make sure that all of the songs match the back of the CD where you could see the list of the songs, and it was all correct.

Mike Rugnetta:

Just somehow, like, metaphorically pour one out for when iTunes was good.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Oh, boy.

Mike Rugnetta:

Like, I did the exact same

Meghal Janardan:

thing. Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

As soon as I had a computer that had an optical drive that could rip CDs, I would spend so. I would rip every CD. I would I would very lovingly do all of the metadata. Keep it all organized inside iTunes. And now, it's just things have changed.

Mike Rugnetta:

That's not the main purpose of that software anymore. No. But man, I I miss it.

Meghal Janardan:

And I realized it almost, like, I've been saying Apple Music. I'm, like, yeah. No. It's iTunes. Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

It was. Yeah.

Meghal Janardan:

Because I didn't it wasn't Apple Music. It was iTunes. ITunes. No. It's just

Jason Oberholtzer:

the program that comes up when I accidentally misclick and double click an audio file that I have not routed to something else. And then I have to get through 8 pop ups of Apple Music telling it to shut up and go away before I can get back to whatever I

Meghal Janardan:

just clicked.

Mike Rugnetta:

Also, the hubris to call your app music. Fuck off.

Meghal Janardan:

I mean, I even used to, like, remember I would have my iTunes library. And then when I first had, like, a smartphone where I could put music from my iTunes library to my phone, the way I could just, like, click my favorite artist in the when I plugged my phone in and then make sure everything was synced

Jason Oberholtzer:

It was so good.

Meghal Janardan:

So easy.

Jason Oberholtzer:

In high school, I would go to the town library and go to the CD section, and you could take out 10 CDs at a time. And multiple times a week after school, I would go and pick up 10 CDs and I would take them home, and then I would lovingly burn them into my computer and make sure all the metadata was right, and then I'd bring them back later that week and do the same thing 2 or 3 times a week and expand my horizons based on what they had there. It got me deeper into jazz, deeper into salsa, deeper into all sorts of odd things that you just pulled out of the library bin because it looked cool enough to take a gander at and was free. So 1, hell, yeah, libraries, support libraries. 2, the exact curation that you're talking about, Mabel, was, like, a huge part of my interaction with media.

Hans Buetow:

But, Jason, when you're importing all those, how many did you go back and listen to? What is the distinction between the importing and archiving versus the listening experience? Because with that much music coming in, and I'm guessing you weren't on a laptop, and I'm guessing you didn't have a device then you would have to sit at your computer to listen to it. Correct. So how much of that music was collecting, and how much of that music was appreciating, enjoying, and listening?

Jason Oberholtzer:

So they would all go into a playlist that I called work, weirdly

Hans Buetow:

enough. How old were you?

Jason Oberholtzer:

I was a child. And the work playlist would be on shuffle. And when I was hanging out and wanted to be doing the work of expanding my horizons, I would have that playlist on shuffle. And when something came on that I wanted more of, I would then play the whole album of that thing I wanted more of, and it would graduate into some sort of other playlist of things that I knew what to do with, and I appreciated, and I liked. What really happened to them is they got the star ranking.

Jason Oberholtzer:

So they would get between 15 stars, and so that is how they had been curated into my library in a way where I knew how much I appreciated that album, and they be pulled out of the work playlist, and they were now just in sort of active cataloged library.

Mike Rugnetta:

We did it folks. We found the one person who used the star feature in iTunes. You used

Meghal Janardan:

the star ratings? All I remember was accidentally rating things and being so pissed that I had to, like, unrate it.

Jason Oberholtzer:

No. I I used them. And and, you know, so I could pull up at a moment's notice a playlist of just every song that I thought was 5 stars, and that is an exciting thing to be able to do.

Georgia Hampton:

Wow. Describing, you know, putting in CDs, making sure the metadata looks normal. I didn't do that second part

Jason Oberholtzer:

ever. You're just a goblin ferreting through their hoard of treasures.

Georgia Hampton:

I'm so sorry.

Hans Buetow:

Just dumping dumping songs on songs.

Mike Rugnetta:

Just a real god is dead, eat trash, be free attitude.

Georgia Hampton:

Listen, it's true

Mike Rugnetta:

though. Listen, I respect it. I I do. Feel like, whatever whatever works, you know?

Jason Oberholtzer:

I'm an all or nothing person, and so nothing is a valuable choice.

Georgia Hampton:

Well, I just vividly remember being in 8th grade, making a new friend, and she gave me like a thumb drive of, I don't know, maybe like 200 songs that was a mix of music she had clearly actually, you know, downloaded from the iTunes store or ripped from CDs or whatever. And then other songs that were probably from, like, Limewire or ripped from some other website or whatever, which is how for years, I thought flagpole sita was a Blink 182

Jason Oberholtzer:

song. Okay.

Mike Rugnetta:

That is I love that. I love that episode.

Georgia Hampton:

I just trusted her. By the

Jason Oberholtzer:

way, 5 star song. Pull

Mike Rugnetta:

up pull up the rating right now and Yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

Let's pull it up.

Mike Rugnetta:

Where do we think the desire for correct metadata in our local music files comes from?

Meghal Janardan:

So one of the most impressionable things that I was told as a child, which is good and bad. I think my dad told me this that, like, when you have an album and you have your, like, I don't know, 10 to 12 songs in it, the artist made it an album. You have to listen to it together. So it's all complete together. And I think that, in my head, was like, this is why the data and everything needs to be correct so it's the correct representation of an album.

Meghal Janardan:

And that somehow in turn affects my listening experience. And also, I just like like things to match.

Mike Rugnetta:

An organizational impulse. That's hard to deny. Yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

See, this this makes sense.

Mike Rugnetta:

I feel pretty similarly. I think for me, the the central driving factor is like, I wanna know as much about the music that I'm listening to. Especially the music that I like as I can. And so it's just like, I wanna know who produced it. I wanna know the year that it was recorded.

Mike Rugnetta:

I wanna know where. Like Mhmm. All this stuff feels like it's like context that I like to have when I am listening to things. And there was a point at which I realized I could get that and include it in all of the individual files, which is probably the same organizational impulse. It just feels nice.

Hans Buetow:

So Mike, how did you survive the Napster era?

Mike Rugnetta:

I so I mean, this is related to my next question which is like, I'm really curious what everybody's kinda like file sharing lineage is. Because mine is like specific and very related to this. I got out of Napster as soon as I could for this reason.

Hans Buetow:

Because what would happen is you would you would queue up 45 different things to download. You'd go to bed and you'd wake up to, like, 350 new songs. All of which were mislabeled.

Mike Rugnetta:

On top of that, everything sounded bad. So, like Right. The encodings were were bad. Yep. And this was this was in the heyday of bad encodings.

Mike Rugnetta:

So, you know, worst of a bad bunch. I also I mean, like Megal, I much prefer albums over playlists. So I always was wanted a full album, and Napster was very much like you were getting individual songs.

Meghal Janardan:

Yep. One song at a time. Yes.

Mike Rugnetta:

So, like, I would go and I would want, like, all 12 tracks from whatever, you know, and wouldn't be able to find it. And I was, like, well, this isn't even useful to me anymore.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Yeah. Again, as an as an all or nothing person, as I described my work playlist, I either like albums or a playlist of every single song that I have. I don't I don't like mood specific playlists. I like complete randomness.

Mike Rugnetta:

It sounds like a lot of our organizational ideas around our music libraries are informed by a disorganization that was foisted upon them by file sharing. So, like Yes. Did everybody start at Napster? There like, no. Where do we

Georgia Hampton:

LimeWire was never used Napster. LimeWire was the girl.

Hans Buetow:

Yeah. Yeah. I

Meghal Janardan:

don't know her.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. Because I went from Napster to Limewire, and then went to college where there were 2 methods of file sharing. 1 was soul seek, which I still use to this day, because it's where you get where you can get weird music. But it also had a local sharing option, but then also the local file sharing. Do you remember this Hans?

Hans Buetow:

I absolutely Mike and I went to college together. Absolutely remember this.

Mike Rugnetta:

And everybody in the entire campus was just on the same network.

Hans Buetow:

And had all their files on the same network. Sometimes, you'd have stuff password protected, but mostly, you could just be, like, oh, I wonder what Mike's music library is. And you would go and you would worm your way in, and it would just

Mike Rugnetta:

So there was this norm that you would set your you would set shared folders of media that you wanted to share with the rest of the campus. Yeah. Woah. And that you could just, like, sort of browse around the network and see what people had. Just in the shared folders, like, network thing.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Yep. Yeah. This was also something that iTunes could do when it was good.

Mike Rugnetta:

When it was good. When it was good.

Jason Oberholtzer:

That. And so you saw everyone's iTunes playlist that they wanted to share on the whole campus, and you could just select and copy it over to your library.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yes. So this that norm was developed because of the iTunes library sharing. Right? You would listen to something that you liked. You would go and grab the files using the shared files feature.

Mike Rugnetta:

And then after college, I went to all of the like private trackers. If you mislabel something, you get kicked off. You have to maintain a 2 to 1 seater to download a ratio. Mhmm. You have to contribute a certain number of records per year.

Mike Rugnetta:

Nice. Like, very high

Hans Buetow:

I forgot about all this.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. Oink. Yeah. Oink. Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

Waffle god. Waffles. What? What CD? Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

Gazelle. There were a bunch of them.

Hans Buetow:

It changed the nature. What it did is it changed the nature of what it meant to belong to a musical community. The gatekeeping got really shifted from being this, like, open world of, like, utopic, everyone has access to everyone's things, to this very much, like, if you don't contribute, you don't get to participate.

Meghal Janardan:

So when it was in it's, like, heyday where you could just kind of search the network and find stuff, did you, like, meet people through this?

Hans Buetow:

A 100%.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Totally. You would run into someone at a party.

Meghal Janardan:

Oh my

Jason Oberholtzer:

god. Like, I'm Brent. And you'd be like, Brent m? And then they'd be like, holy shit, dude. Like, I just ripped 30 albums off of you.

Jason Oberholtzer:

What's up?

Georgia Hampton:

My god.

Hans Buetow:

Or they would message you and be like, hey, bro. I see that you're taking all the all the primus. Good move.

Mike Rugnetta:

Good move. Yeah.

Hans Buetow:

And I was in my room, like, slapping my base being like, oh, hell yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

Wait. Okay. Now, I have a question. Uh-huh. So in this scenario, were people making more, like, vibes playlist as we're describing or more just, like, albums?

Georgia Hampton:

People were not making playlists. These

Hans Buetow:

my memory, Mike, you can correct me. My memory is these were not playlist based. The

Mike Rugnetta:

The playlist the playlist in in my estimation, the rise of the playlist is directly related to Spotify. Not even streaming in general, but Spotify specifically.

Georgia Hampton:

I would disagree. I would disagree because this is very much of the tradition of making mixtapes and CDs.

Mike Rugnetta:

I think that's I think that's different. I put those in 2 separate categories. Really? Yeah. Because maybe this is just, like, personally informed.

Mike Rugnetta:

But I think of those as just 2 different things, that, like, the physical experience of especially making a mixtape, making a mix CD just feels very different to me to making a playlist. They just

Jason Oberholtzer:

I guess the distinction is, are you or how much are you using a playlist as an organizational tool versus an experiential tool? Because a mix CD is a curated experience. A playlist can be that, but can also be an organizing

Mike Rugnetta:

I will say my my very polemic opinion on playlists at large right now is that, like, really, like, the the only appropriate times for a playlist for me are it's like, admitting your love to someone with a physical object, and there's no other way that you could possibly capture your feelings, or going on a road trip. Otherwise, I'm not a Chipotle. I don't need a playlist. I can just choose music that I wanna listen to. Oh.

Jason Oberholtzer:

That was a low blow.

Georgia Hampton:

Unfortunately, I'm furious.

Jason Oberholtzer:

I don't even like playlists, and I'm with you, Georgia.

Georgia Hampton:

I do think you're right about the experience of a playlist being different if you are not trying to order it, like, where you listen to it in order. I think that that is definitely different with something like a Spotify playlist where you could put, like I have a playlist that's collaborative that has, like, 38 people in it and over 50 hours of music. This playlist is called the invention of music, and the only metric is that any song you put in it has to be a perfect song. I don't care what genre it is. I don't care who it's by.

Georgia Hampton:

It just has to be a perfect song. And it's incredible. Like, I I love vibe playlist for this reason. I think it's such an interesting way of organizing, and it can be such an interesting collaborative experience. I have multiple collaborative playlists with friends because we are both trying to make, I don't know, some sort of vaguely vampiric at night under the moonlight kind of music, or I have a playlist called the sound of boot cut jeans that is supposed to evoke the experience of, like, early 2000 girlhood probably trying on pants that don't fit you right under the fluorescent lights of, like, you know, t j maxx.

Hans Buetow:

I think there's a taxonomy question happening here though that, like, what you're describing, Georgia, feel like libraries to me, not playlists.

Jason Oberholtzer:

But so here's my question for Georgia then. How often do you listen to them in relation to how often you collect for them? Like

Georgia Hampton:

I think this is the distinction.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

So something like the invention of music is very much a collection. Like, it's not something I would really wanna listen to on its own. I've tried to, and it is the most, like, overwhelming experience.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. It sounds it sounds extremely intense.

Georgia Hampton:

It's Yeah. I've had multiple friends tell me they tried to put it on shuffle and that someone else was like, what the hell is this? But there are other playlists I have that are very vibe specific that I would absolutely still consider a playlist and I do listen to if I want to be in that kind of mood. And they may still be very long, but I I think the listenability might be crucial here.

Hans Buetow:

George, I think what you're saying is the thing it is intended for is a listening experience versus an organizing experience because you describe that playlist of, like, the perfect songs, and we can go, like, oh, that's a cool idea. Like, I would scroll through that as a way to look at something, but but it's not built for a listener experience versus a playlist that is built for a listener experience where the goal or the object of it is to consume it.

Georgia Hampton:

Yes. But I will say the sound of Bootcut Genes, the other playlist I have that is collaborative that has like a 1000000,000,000,000 songs in it, I do listen to. Because I'd say that theme is specific enough where the listening experience feels cohesive. I think you're right, Hans, that, like, the intention of this organization determines what is actually happening.

Meghal Janardan:

It reminds me of it seems like this playlist, the invention of music, is almost like that's the network library that Mike and Hans would go through and find people's music and what they were like Oh, god. Meet public.

Georgia Hampton:

Yep. Yeah. You're totally right. Completely. Mhmm.

Meghal Janardan:

This is so interesting because, like, for me, I always think of my height of music knowledge and what I was listening to and what I was interested in was when I was, like, 12 to 14 where I knew a lot of music. And because of, how I was downloading music and importing it into my iTunes and everything, I was, like, excited to, like, seek out new music. Whereas now, I don't do that. It is so overwhelming. I also, like, barely listen to music now.

Mike Rugnetta:

Okay. That feels like new territory that we are gonna have a lot to say about. Let's take a brief break, a little respite. I will apologize to Georgia off camera for suggesting that she is a Chipotle. We'll be back in a couple minutes.

Mike Rugnetta:

Okay. Before we took our break, Miggle was, starting to say that music discovery at this point is overwhelming. Maybe, you know, in the era of file sharing, when it was much more prevalent, you spend a little bit more time looking for things. You get a little bit closer to the files and the music that you're listening to. There's sort of an excitement of discovery.

Mike Rugnetta:

And now that everything is in front of you, available, at all times through a search bar on Spotify or Apple Music or wherever else, it's much harder to figure out what it is you wanna listen to or to find new things to listen to. And I was thinking about this in relationship to the conversation that we're having about file sharing and especially tagging and organizing and metadata. Just like think one of the other reasons that I moved to the more like snooty gatekeeper y, torrent trackers was, you know, say what you want about the militants of maintaining correct metadata. It meant when you searched for stuff, you could find it. It made things really searchable.

Mike Rugnetta:

That felt like I was getting closer to music. But what's weird is that the same thing is true of Spotify and Apple. It's all really well tagged. It's all correct. It has to be.

Mike Rugnetta:

It's uploaded by the publisher, and yet it feels much further away. Mhmm. Why? Why? Why do we think that is?

Mike Rugnetta:

Like, is that related maybe to how you're feeling, Meghal?

Meghal Janardan:

I'm just so aware that Spotify has everything that I don't know where to go anymore. Like, I know Joe, last week, made my first playlist with the help of my partner in years. They got my Spotify. I had a playlist set. I call it, like, Bend It because it's like my Bend It Like Beckham playlist.

Meghal Janardan:

I had just like 10 songs on there. So they took that playlist, and they were playing the suggested songs. And then they were saying, Maybelle, do you like this? Yes or no? And then they would add it or not add it and move on to the next song until I had a few hours in music on there.

Meghal Janardan:

Because that is maybe the only one of 3 playlist that I have. Which is when I when I was, like, much younger, I remember I would read, like, a magazine and see a new artist feature, like, a little side article.

Hans Buetow:

Mhmm.

Meghal Janardan:

I would look them up and be like, oh, I like this, and, like, look up everything about them and either buy their CD or download it, rip it, whatever, and add it to my library. And, like, I just don't do that anymore. I don't know if I'm just, like, too aware of, like, marketing and, like, what's being pushed onto me, whether it's, like, from a marketer, like, or an algorithm where it just doesn't feel like I'm discovering it or I'm kind of, like, seeking something out. And I used to listen to music all the time when I was younger, and I like my kid my friends, like, it's like a thing. They know I don't listen to music.

Meghal Janardan:

It's really weird.

Mike Rugnetta:

And is and is the the feeling of being overwhelmed the main

Meghal Janardan:

a

Jason Oberholtzer:

one thing that jumps out at me is, like, a few of us have kind of said, yes, Spotify has everything, which is 1 not true. But 2 Right. Much like Google right now, it presents like it has everything and then withholds everything from you, much like dating, Georgia.

Mike Rugnetta:

Oh, my god.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Oh, no. It's telling you it has everything and then only showing you the things that it would really, really like to show you. And so you might be responding to your suggested feed feeling even as your partner is helping you get some suggestions from it, like it is being forced on you and that you are not able to discover the things you would like to discover, because there's no way that those things are surfaced even if they are indeed on Spotify.

Meghal Janardan:

And it's so interesting too because when we were, like, making this playlist, I was like, oh, no. Now my Spotify algorithm is gonna think that this is the only genre of music that I listen to. And this playlist is very, like, early 2000, late nineties type of stuff. And I was like, oh, then I now I now I'm thinking my head, like, I gotta make, like, a 2020 pop album. So I get, like, all the pop music I listen to or, like, I gotta get make an email album so I get all my email stuff.

Meghal Janardan:

So when it's, like, my suggested playlist on Spotify recommendations for new music is actually correct and pulling from the right info. But that No. I'm not gonna do that. Like, I'm I'm not gonna do it. Like, there's no way.

Meghal Janardan:

I'm just too far gone.

Jason Oberholtzer:

I think you pretend that Spotify doesn't exist in this equation.

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Like, when I when I listen to Georgia talking about these playlists, I wanna, like, look at these playlists. I wanna see what people are putting in, which is akin to going to the file share and seeing what people are listening to. Like, there are good playlist in Spotify. They're all human curated and a little bit hard to find, but that there are still people doing the people work of curation that can give you more of what you want.

Meghal Janardan:

That's what I will do is, like, every once in a while, I'll, like, search for a playlist on Spotify or listen to a friend's playlist where they've already kind of curated the vibes or the genre.

Mike Rugnetta:

I I think Spotify does a great job, of doing many terrible things. And one of them is, like, it turns quantity into a kind of quality. Like it presents you with so much at once that it changes the quality of all of those things. All of those things no longer become individual works that an artist has labored, you know, extensively on in order to capture a feeling and communicate it to an audience. But I think maybe there is another conversation to be had about whether or not certain portions of pop music are even trying to do that anymore anyway.

Mike Rugnetta:

Either way, it just homogenizes a lot of what's out there. And when everything is just this gray field of available sound, it makes sense that you feel like, what? You know, like, where even am I? At the same time, and I see this I don't use Spotify, but Molly Molly uses Spotify and I see, like, the emails that she gets and I see, like, you know, if we're driving and I'm using her phone to put on music, I see the pop ups and the playlist and stuff. Spotify really seems like it guilts people into not knowing about music.

Mike Rugnetta:

There are so many things where it's like

Meghal Janardan:

That's actually really good.

Mike Rugnetta:

A date on the newest pop hit. Fuck off. Like Yes. This is not this is not breaking world news. It's like what I wanted to play in the background while I'm eating breakfast with my family.

Mike Rugnetta:

Like this isn't work. It's not something I need to keep up with. Like this is an enriching activity for me as a participant in the world, And when it puts this stuff in your face of like, keep up to date. Make sure you know what the latest, the hottest, the most popular, whatever. That completely changes your relationship to what you're looking at and adds so much pressure to it that, of course, you're then gonna be like,

Georgia Hampton:

I feel like I do find using a platform like Spotify only really enjoyable when I don't pay attention to it, like, when I pretend it doesn't exist. So like most of my playlist actually, all of my playlist are either ones I made, ones my friends made, or ones that my friends and I made together. And I I find that there are still spaces in which you can find new music in an interesting way. A lot of the music I listen to, I found on TikTok. Like, I think Yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

TikTok basically got me into Ethiopian jazz.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Oh, hell yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

And then, you know, the many branches off of that. And lots of funk music and, like, groove music I found on TikTok and other avenues. But it is kind of this it's just a different thing because you have to kinda go through your for you page. You have to go through.

Meghal Janardan:

And then also, it's like, I've sometimes, like, see things on TikTok, and it's not on Spotify.

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah. Mhmm.

Meghal Janardan:

And then I'm like, where do where does it go? And it kinda stops there, and I forget about it, and it goes into the Internet.

Mike Rugnetta:

I would love to give a qualified shout out to Bandcamp. Oh my god. Bandcamp daily, insofar as it still exists, does a great job of curating very manageable selections of really great music by genre and then across the whole site. You know, the qualification is that it appears as though Songtradr was perhaps successful in busting a union. So

Hans Buetow:

I think what we're circling is this idea that a lot of Internet companies want to be your one and only and all encompassing.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah.

Hans Buetow:

Right arm, left arm, also your legs, possibly your head Mhmm. In all things. I mean, I think it hearkens back to Mike's frustration that Apple calls its app simply Music, which implies that it is your all encompassing it is your relationship to music rather than a tool for playing music, which are 2 very different things. And I think that everything about the marketing, everything about the tool itself is to hide the fact that it is a tool and make it more of a lifestyle or make it more of a an all encompassing way of being in the world,

Mike Rugnetta:

which for music specifically, the app is even more reinforced by the fact that, I have a huge MP 3 library. Like, I still have tons and tons of local music. I I get most of my music from Bandcamp and I download it and I have it on my computer. And I don't put it into music. I use a completely separate other

Meghal Janardan:

Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

Player because, I have an Apple Music subscription. And if you have an Apple Music subscription and local files, in order to meaningfully use Apple Music, you have to turn on a feature called sync library

Hans Buetow:

Yep.

Mike Rugnetta:

Which ingests all of your local files, uploads them to the cloud, and then relabeles them based on Apple's standards, which I am Woah. Not interested in.

Hans Buetow:

Yeah. I'm gonna defend Apple Music for a moment.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah. Please.

Hans Buetow:

And say that I have figured out ways to use the things that are inherent, echoing the things that you all have said, which is just completely ignore the front page. Like, the front page is just a wall of noise that I move past as soon as I possibly can.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah.

Hans Buetow:

Because who gives

Jason Oberholtzer:

a shit?

Hans Buetow:

I have to bring something to it and when I bring something to it, it will give me a lot. Every Saturday night, my wife and I have a date night. We don't have children, so it's a little bit easier than I think for other folks. We've gotten into with the pandemic, we got into wine a little bit, experimenting with wine. And so we get a new bottle of wine that we've not had before.

Hans Buetow:

We read all about the grape. We try to figure out, and then we sit down. We make a meal that we think goes with it, and we listen to music that we don't know or specifically music that we might not know or we realize that we actually don't know that well. And so we pick an artist or we pick a genre or we pick something that we're, like, you know what? I think I know Paula Abdul's music, but I'm not really sure.

Meghal Janardan:

Her name is

Hans Buetow:

Paula Abdul. And so what you do, do, you then go to Paula Abdul, and you go to her as an artist, and almost every artist then has an essentials playlist

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah.

Hans Buetow:

Which is simply ranked by how many times those have been played. And you get this really wonderful experience of the you know the first 3, maybe 4. If you're really into it, maybe 15. And then you start getting into deep cuts by the time you're a bottle into it's a very half bottle into the wine.

Mike Rugnetta:

Molly Molly and I call these listening projects, and it's how we we learned that everything anybody has ever said about Jethro Tull is true.

Hans Buetow:

It's a wonderful way to go in and experience the things, but you have to have an intentionality going in. You can't let it

Georgia Hampton:

tell you what

Hans Buetow:

you want. You have to tell it what you want as a person and come to it with an idea and not take your ideas from it. And I think that's the distinction.

Jason Oberholtzer:

I think that is the core tension in these things, that they are all presenting you ways in which they're saying you don't have to do any work to get everything, and the most meaningful way to engage with music is to do a little bit of work. And they are taking away the impetus to do the very thing that is gonna help you enjoy and remember this and have the experience you want. This is how we create memories, this is how we create meaning, is you invest a little something. You do a little bit of work. Like, the the the time that we spent, all of us, clearly, not just me, going through and making sure that every single song title was capitalized when the files you download weren't capitalized.

Mike Rugnetta:

Yeah.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Yeah. But, like, that time was actually, you know, putting your hands on the material and getting to know it a little bit better and doing a little bit of work, and that's why you formed a relationship with it.

Meghal Janardan:

And it also, like, creates kind of a living memory of what your library is because you're you're reading the title over and over again and double checking, and you understand the names of the songs, which I used to remember a lot, and now I don't. Because I think, like, sometimes now when I use Spotify and I find a new artist and I see their, like, most played songs at the top, I first click on those. And that kind of prevents me from then going to the album and looking at the album as a whole, and I just look at the hits. Whereas before, I would download the whole album, and I would take time to look at every single song

Mike Rugnetta:

Mhmm.

Meghal Janardan:

In the album.

Georgia Hampton:

I think there's also just this missing of, like, for lack of a better word, this tactility, this this tactile quality of feeling like the music that you're downloading has fingerprints all over it. Yeah. There's a Does that make sense?

Mike Rugnetta:

There's is it John Kirschenbaum talks about, like, digital materiality.

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

That there is, that there is very much a material nature, like, literally a material nature to your files even though you think of them as ephemeral. But that there are there are ways that like the stuff that we use and the stuff that we interact with, we start to ascribe an even more material nature to it the more we interact with it. Yeah. Mhmm. I think about that a lot.

Mike Rugnetta:

Like there are m p threes that I've moved from multiple computers, and though they are not the same object, in my mind, I think about them almost like my record collection to some degree.

Meghal Janardan:

Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

Or the, like, I spent $16 on this. I gotta figure out how to like it.

Meghal Janardan:

You know, that's interesting that you say that because I think that's also that in combination with, like, being told that a album is made as an album was why me as a child, when I listened to an album, I would have to listen to every song once. And that the plays in Itune were really cursed for me. That make sure all my plays were equal in an album.

Jason Oberholtzer:

This is

Hans Buetow:

Oh. Yeah. Incredible.

Mike Rugnetta:

I feel I feel that.

Meghal Janardan:

I feel that. And so when I accidentally clicked on a song, it was so upsetting because I was like, shit. I have to listen to the entire

Jason Oberholtzer:

album now. Loyalty to the album.

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah. Yeah.

Meghal Janardan:

But I would also then, like, when I got a new CD, like, at least once, listen to the entire CD.

Georgia Hampton:

Of course.

Meghal Janardan:

Like, I would fully listen to it, which when I list find new artists, I can't say that I do that. You know? Like, I just find the one song that I like, and there's so much information that I'm missing out on.

Georgia Hampton:

That's a good point. When I I share music with my dad a lot, and I'll send him a song and be like, I think you'd really like this. And then he'll get back to me in 2 hours and be like so I listened to the rest of the album, and I don't really like the rest. But I like this one song, and

Meghal Janardan:

I was

Georgia Hampton:

like, oh, right. I didn't even think to do

Mike Rugnetta:

that. I think a lot of that can be laid at the feet of music streamers because there's I think there's a lot of work that they do to to make it feel like you are as close as you possibly can be to having as much music as you could ever need or want. But really, they, like, obfuscate a lot of it. They push it slightly further away. They put multiple veils that you just have to push through.

Georgia Hampton:

Yeah.

Mike Rugnetta:

You know, between you and access to things. It feels like it should be access, but really it's just like jumble, like big big heap. And I think that's I think that's very much by design.

Jason Oberholtzer:

Part of what I'm taking away from this is that I think we do want to do the work. We do wanna go find something. We wanna go forage. We wanna discover. We wanna take back.

Jason Oberholtzer:

We wanna curate. We wanna have an I wanna work on.

Mike Rugnetta:

Like, I want to. Yeah.

Jason Oberholtzer:

You want a project. You want something that you're compiling, that you put together, that you've labored on, that you care about, that you have touched, and that a lot of the ways we are being offered access to music is taking away our ability to feel the agency over that curatorial project. And, like, at a certain point, I, with my thousands of gigs of music library, stuffed it on an external hard drive, and never plugged that hard drive in again, and have never picked up that project, because it felt like it was no longer a valuable project for the world, in some sense. For me, this was no longer a relevant artifact because everything was available to everybody, and therefore, why would my little corner of that project be meaningful? And that was 10 years ago, and decades of work just sit there with their star ratings and their playlists, and all of this combined wisdom and care and love I put into this is now just in a box collecting dust, and it might never get picked up again.

Meghal Janardan:

That makes sense to, like, let go of all the, like, features in the app and just use it as let's listen. Like, look at the music itself. Listen to music.

Mike Rugnetta:

And on that note, I wanna close with one question. What was the last thing everybody listened to?

Hans Buetow:

Mine was Cannonball Adderley.

Mike Rugnetta:

Oh, nice.

Hans Buetow:

Mhmm. Just just before coming on here, I was listening to Cannonball Adderley. Which which one? Honestly, the essentials playlist on Apple Music.

Jason Oberholtzer:

There you go.

Hans Buetow:

Just going through

Georgia Hampton:

going through

Mike Rugnetta:

stuff here.

Hans Buetow:

Like, I I feel like I should know more about a Canon or more Adderleys, deep cuts. Mhmm.

Mike Rugnetta:

May I also recommend, Adderall Canyonly?

Hans Buetow:

Yeah.

Meghal Janardan:

I just love that. I have no idea about 70% of what y'all are talking about.

Mike Rugnetta:

Megha, we'll make a playlist of the things that we're all listening to you after this Yeah. After we're done recording and sending you.

Georgia Hampton:

Can I make it?

Hans Buetow:

Yeah. It's

Jason Oberholtzer:

all gonna be Primus.

Mike Rugnetta:

Right. The last the last thing that I listened to was this record Late Morning by Michelle Moeller, m o e l l e r. It's this really amazing, like, piano and

Georgia Hampton:

last night was their song, Humming. Last night was their song, Humming.

Jason Oberholtzer:

The last thing I was listening to was Ernest Tubb. Ernest Tubb is a country musician, primarily forties fifties who just does the good stuff.

Meghal Janardan:

I opened up my Spotify to see what was playing the last time I opened Spotify, and it is Take A Chance On Me.

Georgia Hampton:

Oh, hell yeah.

Meghal Janardan:

But Hell yeah. It's good. Solid. Very good.

Mike Rugnetta:

Okay. I think that's I think that's good. I think that's everything that I think that's I think we've solved it is really what I'm trying to say here. We did it. I did.

Mike Rugnetta:

We figured it out. Yeah.

Georgia Hampton:

It was that easy.

Mike Rugnetta:

It was that easy. Megal, thank you so much for joining us. It was a pleasure to have you. Yay. Thank

Meghal Janardan:

you for having me on the podcast as the least avid music listener.

Mike Rugnetta:

I didn't realize we were all here to help you, but I'm happy we