Friday, July 04, 2014

Are you ready to be heartbroken, Lloyd Cole fans?

Lloyd Cole is thinking about withdrawing his music from Spotify for artistic reasons:

“I think I am going to withdraw from Spotify and use it for what it is good for, sampling. If they (record buyers) like it they are going to need to buy it somewhere.”
It's not entirely clear how Cole fans are going to sample his music on Spotify if, erm, he takes his music off Spotify.

But then he doesn't really seem to understand how streaming works:
But is streaming good for the music business?

“So much of our culture is technology driven, it’s ‘I can, therefore I do’ but when your hard drive crashes and you have no back up you might wish you had bought those files as CDs.”
If your hard drive crashes, why would that cause a problem if you're subscribed to a service that streams music?

But it's not really that Cole is worried about the potential wiping out of people's collections. This is about money. Sorry, art. It's about art:
Downloading and then streaming just isn’t the same, he laments.

“The order people listen to a record is very important. Can you imagine Sgt Pepper’s in any other way?”
Yes, I can, because skipping Mr Kite entirely is what everyone does, Lloyd.
Lloyd remembers how he met some of his earliest band members.

“They bought ‘Never mind the bollocks’ (Sex Pistols) when I was about 14, ripped up the sleeve and then safety pinned it back together and then carried it around all day. The way it should be.”
Hmm. It sounds like your band mates had taken a product produced by an artist, and reassembled it in a way that they thought was better. Why is it so bad when people approach a tracklisting in the same way?


1 comment:

Darren H said...

I also love the implication that the "correct" thing to do with Never Mind the Bollocks is "carry it around all day"

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