Hack Music Theory

Your Favourite Album Might Vanish Soon.

Music can (and does) disappear from Spotify, Apple, etc.

I love music in all genres, and I have my all-time favourite albums in all those genres. Recently I had a craving to listen to one of my favourite hardcore albums. It’s titled “Baptism Of Fire” and was released in 2007. As far as I know, it was the only album by that band. Despite being an awesome hardcore band, they sadly never got the success they deserved. If you’re into hardcore, you may remember them. They were called To The Lions, and I think they were based in Ontario, Canada.

So anyway, I opened Spotify and searched for the album. Nothing. What?! Maybe I spelt the name wrong? Nope. Okay I thought, well maybe I’m going crazy and I’ve somehow gotten their name wrong. Maybe they were called For The Lions, or something else Lions.

I did a quick online search, and although I was happy to have my sanity confirmed by the fact that I’d gotten both the band name and album title correct, I was utterly shocked to realize the album had been deleted from Spotify. I’d listened to it on Spotify just a few months ago, so I know it used to be there. Just for interest, I searched the other streaming platforms. It had vanished from them, too.

I have no idea why this album was taken down, and I don’t really care if it’s a licensing issue or whatever else, all I care about is the fact that I can’t listen to one of my favourite hardcore albums anymore. And that sux ass, to put it poetically!

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This isn’t the first time it’s happened either, because my favourite album from childhood is Still Cruisin’ by The Beach Boys. Hey, don’t judge, it was the ‘80s. And to be fair, even if it wasn’t, Kokomo is a classic! Despite being such a legendary album from the ‘80s, though, it’s also nowhere to be found. I still check Spotify regularly to see if it’s finally appeared, but as of today, still nothing.

And that brings me to the point of this essay. Do you own your all-time favourite albums, or are you merely being granted temporary access to them? If it’s the latter, I recommend buying the CDs (or vinyls) now. Don’t wait, do it today. Seriously. Your all-time favourite album could disappear from the streaming platforms tonight.

And yes, most of these albums can be found on YouTube, but the quality of those uploads is questionable at best. Besides, we’re old-school, we want the CDs on the shelf. We want to enjoy the artwork that instantly transports us back to a simpler time.

So I went on Amazon and searched for that hardcore album. There was one copy left. That’s it. One copy! I couldn’t click the “Buy Now” button quickly enough.

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If your favourite album is old, all the more reason to buy the CD as soon as possible, because most record labels aren’t manufacturing CDs anymore. And sometimes it doesn’t even matter if the artist is super famous. I searched Amazon for that Beach Boys album, and there’s also only one copy left. But, it’s $146. So unfortunately, I won’t be owning that CD. It’s already too late to get my hands on my all-time favourite childhood album. For old-school music lovers like us, that’s heartbreaking.

I’ve also noticed that lots of the albums I loved in the ‘80s and ‘90s have been remastered, and the original versions have vanished. Remastering is great, and of course the albums almost always sound better from it. But, it’s not the original album. When you’ve listened to an album literally hundreds of times, like we used to back in the day, it’s stored in our bodies. When it’s remastered, it doesn’t reignite that original spark and the associated feelings, because it sounds slightly different.

On a different but related note. Over the last few years I’ve noticed the exact same thing happening with books. It seems like most of the books I buy nowadays are either out of print, or going out of print after the current run. Then there’s the suspicious replacing of properly manufactured books with Amazon print-on-demand books.

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And don’t get me wrong. I love the whole print-on-demand thing that Amazon is doing, because it’s allowed all the independent authors (who are too “spicy” for the publishing companies) to get their writing out. My music theory book on Amazon is print-on-demand. I love it. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that many older books are being tweaked to bring them in line with current ideologies, which is problematic for so many reasons. But most importantly, changing what a writer originally wrote should be illegal. If we disagree with what they said, good! Reading books by people we disagree with makes us think about different perspectives. That’s healthy, and that’s how we can live peacefully. If there’s only one approved way of seeing things, and all the publishers are exclusively publishing books that are in line with that ideology, then anyone who disagrees with the mainstream narrative has no public voices on their side who they can reference in support of their perspective. No good comes from a world like that.

Also, ideologies are continuously changing, so tweaking old books to make them palatable to a modern audience will never work, because the goalposts keep moving. It’s ridiculous, and we end up with no record of our past!

And just imagine how different these books are going to be in a hundred years from now. I thought the idea of writing a book was to capture the author’s words and preserve them? If every book is essentially a shared Google Document that publishers can continually edit in whatever way they see fit, what’s the point of writing books anymore?

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So, be sure to buy paperback or hardcover versions of all your favourite books too, because even if they are still available in the future, who knows how much of the text has been changed. And they’ll probably end up using AI censor robots. It would be so easy to simply get AI to tweak all the texts in all the books on a daily basis, in order to keep the herd brainwashed with the most up-to-date ideologies. And with AI voices narrating most audiobooks nowadays too, those are definitely not safe either.

Okay, that’s my message for today: Build your physical library. Start small. Just buy your all-time favourite album on CD or vinyl today. Then next week buy your all-time favourite book in paperback or hardcover, if you don’t already own it. And then the next on your list. One physical item at a time.

Hmmm… now I’m wondering: Is this prepping? Is this how music nerds and book nerds prep for the AI apocalypse? Maybe. Oh well. Either way, start today!

Photo by Mart Production

 

 

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About.

 

Ray Harmony is a multi award-winning music lecturer who’s made music with Serj Tankian (System Of A Down), Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine), Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), Devin Townsend (Strapping Young Lad), Ihsahn (Emperor), Kool Keith (Ultramagnetic MCs), Madchild (Swollen Members), and more. Ray is also the founder of Hack Music Theory, a YouTube channel with over 10 million views and over 255,000 subscribers learning the fast, easy and fun way to make music without using AI, cos it ain’t no fun getting a robot to write “your” songs! Everything here is 100% Human and 0% AI.