There’s a Better Way to Listen to Music
Strong “singlenote” performances: The Ramones (I Wanna Be Sedated), Brian Eno (The True Wheel), and Drake (Furthest Thing).
Source: Getty Images (3)
A few months ago, I signed up for Apple Music. As part of the introductory process, it asked what artists I like. Drake? OK. Future? Sure. John Coltrane? Definitely. Based on this cursory exchange, Apple started recommending music to me. I got a torrent of the latest rap and a lot of jazz from the late ’50s. The problem was, I already knew most of it. Where was the new stuff I really wanted to hear?
Ben Ratliff, a jazz and pop critic for the New York Times, has the same concern about music-streaming services. As he writes in Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), you can easily find any bit of recorded music on the Internet, whether it’s on Apple Music, Spotify, or some other streaming service that licenses music from record labels; on YouTube, which relies on its audience to upload tracks; or on one of the many illegal download sites.