Welcome to the 𝙿𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚌 stream of Rashomon Blues. You can opt in or out of this and the two other RB streams (𝙰𝚕𝚝 𝙸𝚗𝚏𝚛𝚊 and 𝙻𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙶𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚙) on the account page. To recap, since this site is a bit idiosyncratic: 𝙿𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚒𝚌 contains updates on my own work, 𝙰𝚕𝚝 𝙸𝚗𝚏𝚛𝚊 deals with questions around loving music in a fragmented digital landscape, and 𝙻𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙶𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚙 presents monthly thematic mixes.

I'm going to write some personal reflections on industry stuff below, but since this stream is meant to be where I provide updates on my music, here is a summary of releases I have made or contributed to over the last year or so:

Tony MF, inter-loper
SOYUZ, Калі ты запытаеш (If You Ask)
Local Group, Pair of Swallows / The Sequel
Toro y Moi, Daria
AETC, The Funny Man Is Laughing With You
AETC, Professional Void
AETC, Mind Out Wandering (re-press + instrumentals)
Andre Mateo & Anthony Ferraro, A Fuchsia Moon

Additionally, my music and that of Local Group has been used in two artist documentaries this year, one on Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa for his ICA show and another on Woody De Othello for Art Basel. You can view the latter here; the one on Samayoa will be available once distribution is sorted. I greatly admire both of these artists and encourage you to seek out their incredible work.

On the performance front, I played a few reunion shows with the original lineup of AETC to celebrate the Mind Out Wandering re-press & 10 year anniversary. There is one more AETC show this year (11/23 in SF, opening for Khruangbin), but this one will be a solo performance with string trio featuring mostly non-MOW material.

OK, on to the reflecting...

I am nearly done with the process of removing all my music from Spotify. I've been meaning to write something in response to the comments & DMs from listeners, but life has been full tilt lately (I am working on opening a neighborhood bar in January) and spare time hard to come by. Anyway, here is my best effort at explaining what has been going on.

As a listener, I left Spotify sometime in 2024 upon seeing reporting about CEO Daniel Ek's heavy investment in an AI military technology startup called Helsing. This investment has since grown to 694 million euros, and Ek has become chairman of the startup. Ek, of course, would have no such fortune if it weren't for Spotify, and it should be absurd to anyone that we can draw a straight line between music and war.

Add to this the litany of other extractive practices that have been well-documented at Spotify: a skewed royalty system, pay-to-play algorithmic promotion, ghost artists, complicity in major label cartelization, the marriage of emotional surveillance + targeted advertising. And most recently, the announcement that they are working with the big three major labels to roll out AI music at scale.

This is to say nothing of the UX itself. The conflation of music & podcasts (the last time I logged in to Spotify, the first thing I saw was Tucker Carlson's face). The foregrounding of quantified reach in the form of playcounts, monthly listeners, etc. – which does nothing good for music itself but does help their bottom line by inducing artists to hop on an ever-accelerating treadmill of metric optimization. The increasingly generic and aesthetically soulless editorial design language. I could go on.

Many of the above complaints can be made about streaming writ large, but they are thrown into high relief at Spotify. It has made itself an easy target. And the cartoonishness of AI military drones being funded by music profits is something out of Philip K. Dick or Pynchon.

Artists that have left Spotify in 2025 include Deerhoof, Massive Attack, Xiu Xiu, King Gizzard, Chat VanGaalen, Cindy Lee, and club music label Kalahari Oyster Cult. I am happy to join them and hope that consciousness continues to grow.

In case it's useful to anyone, I was making about $400-500 per month from Spotify, with a monthly listenership that hovered in the 60,000 to 100,000 range. This is not a traumatic loss, and it's also not nothing.

More important perhaps are the other externalities of leaving Spotify. The music industry has become dependent on its metrics and its algorithms. It's much easier to get a favorable guarantee if you can show that you have 20,000 monthly listeners in LA. And well-connected managers – not all, but most – will be allergic to managing you if you have ethical hangups that affect the bottom line. Understandably: their paycheck is a literal function of your revenues.

These incentives might change. Maybe it is ever-so-gradually becoming a liability to be on the platform that incidentally funds war. Slowly at first, then all at once.

I will write more soon on the general topic of "opting out." I'm working toward reducing my interaction with the industry & social media, focusing instead on what feels alive, what new infrastructure is possible that accommodates the sacredness of music. During this phase of withdrawal, my intention is that this website becomes my lifeline to communicate with whoever may care. You can sign up via the ??? menu above if that includes you.