Holla!

Don't Stream It, Be It

“He who has a thing to sell and goes and whispers in a well, is not so apt to get the dollars as he who climbs a tree and hollers.” —Author Unknown

I can’t remember if it was a fortune cookie or a Bazooka gum comic that alerted me to this fine piece of doggerel. But it was my mantra for a little while. My work wasn’t going to sell itself. Yet we all felt some kind of guilt about it, calling it “shameless self-promotion,” when there was nothing shameful about it.

It’s hard to climb a tree and holler these days, especially when the trees have been usurped by billionaire monkeys who have enough money to cover every leaf and limb and advertising that stalks your every internet move. And Amazon and Walmart make it so easy for you to give up your money.

I’m not shaming. Money’s tight, and it’s made tighter by retaliatory tariffs and an AI-replaced job market. Who can afford to pay the cover price for a book when $10 off comes with free delivery tomorrow?

But we’re talking about music today. This week, I canceled Spotify. The circumstances surrounding the boycott are complicated, but they’re also pretty simple: Daniel Ek became a billionaire by selling a way to stream music without paying for it. And he doesn’t pay for it, either.

Brian Aubert of Silversun Pickups trying to figure out how to pronounce the word on my necklace: Fuquinay.

I spent a few years cultivating a robust indie playlist that features, prominently, Lucy Dacus, Boy Genius, The Shins, and Silversun Pickups. I packed up and moved it all to Tidal, another unethical streaming service owned by a conglomerate.

While they do pay artists the most money, that big haul amounts to a whopping $0.013 per stream. You don’t have to do the math: that’s a single dollar in the pockets of musicians for every 77 times one of their songs gets played.

There is no ethical way to stream.

But there used to be. In 2021, iTunes offered Mac users a terrific music manager. We could copy physical CDs we’d bought directly from the artists or from the Columbia Record Club or from a local store and load those MP3 files into iTunes. It was quick and painless—and free—and the artists got paid by us.

And it was mobile, too. We’d simply plug the phone into the computer or laptop and sync our iTunes.

(Can a tech-savvy entrepreneur invent another platform that will play music we own?)

Cover art by Utah Miller. San Junipero is Utah Miller, with special guests Graham vonBriesen on bass and Jakob Coburn on drums.

In the meantime, here’s another idea: Bandcamp. You can buy music and stream it on their platform. Alas, you won’t find Taylor Swift there, but you know who’s there? Lucy Dacus, Boy Genius, The Shins, and Silversun Pickups.

You know who else is there? San Junipero!

(Here’s the part where I holler because I’ve got a thing to sell.) Cherry Pit was released yesterday, and it’s just nine bucks. GO BUY IT.

Cherry Pit’s official release is January 6, 2026. That’s when it will be on everything except Amazon Music and Spotify. So buy it now, and use one of the other streaming platforms (including Bandcamp) to listen in your car!