[Here’s an unfinished draft post I’ve had for awhile now that I figure I’ll post as it is.]

We all like music, yeah? Some people don’t mind leaving anything on in the background, but I like the ones who are a little passionate about artists, who look up lyrics, study movements, read liner notes (past tense of “read”), and get more involved in the stories behind the tunes because they felt something and just needed to respond.

I’ve always wanted more ways to take those feelings and do something with them, while recognizing that musicians only garnered a tiny fraction of the profits from a CD or iTunes sale — think 10-20% — with the rest going to labels and distribution. When CDs and record stores were still a thing in my younger days, I’d sometimes buy two copies of an album I liked, and if I met someone who might appreciate it too, I’d pass the spare along. That was the only way to “do my part” as a fan, apart from evangelizing bands every chance I got.

These days, with album sales barely a thing that musicians rely on, it’s a bit harder to know what one should do as a fan. Share Spotify/Apple Music links on social media? Start a botnet to stream their songs on repeat? Buy tickets if they drop by to play live? Gigs just don’t scale.

I’ve had a foggy idea for years that there’s room for a live performance streaming platform, where any artist can play intimate shows in a studio and let people tune in, sort of like the annual iTunes Music Festivals that Apple used to do, and charge a nominal fee and/or allow donations. Even if they just did it once in a regular tour schedule, it should be almost pure profit from their most dedicated followers, with logistics and event management out of the picture. And these days we’re pretty much there, what with Twitch, Patreon, and live-streaming baked into a dozen other apps. It should be a more common way to spend an evening in front of a computer.

A couple of months years ago, an indie artist I randomly found online and fell hard in love with announced he was putting out a new album. Instead of pre-ordering on iTunes, I decided to try messaging him directly on Instagram to ask if he had a PayPal account. After all, I already pay for Apple Music and would stream it when it was out. Could I just send him the money I would have paid for the album, and he’d get 100% instead of 10%?

I shouldn’t have been surprised to get a reply, but I come from a time when you just didn’t get many chances to talk to your heroes. He offered a couple of other ways to give him money, which would get me physical goods in return, but in the end I was happy to PayPal him and got something pretty priceless in return: scanned lyrics to the earlier song that had made me a fan, that I had never been able to figure out. That was a better-feeling transaction than the music publishing industrial complex had ever been able to give me in the past decade.

[Present day]

I should mention here the phenomenal soundtrack to the video game Sayonara Wild Hearts, by Daniel Olsen and Jonathan Eng, with vocals by Linnea Olsson. It might be the endorphin association talking, but I think this might be my album of the year. Every song takes me right back to the experience of playing the game (one weekend afternoon on a lumpy hotel couch in Manila a couple of months back when I was there for work; in all honesty not a memory that gives this soundtrack any bonus points), but also stands on its own as really fine music.

A couple of weeks after coming out, the soundtrack disappeared from Apple Music and the iTunes Store for a couple of days and I was in a panic. I scoured Twitter for information and found the musicians and developers equally bewildered, answering other concerned fans who were missing their hit of electro Clair de Lune. That was a community moment right there. Anyway, it turned out to be some copyright fuck up that got fixed the following week, but my immediate thought at the time was, “I sure wish I’d bought this on iTunes so I’d still have it now.” One day we might all feel this way about a lot more things.