How I Listen

to music

whats up.

yeah it’s mine

First today, an advertisement:
I’m playing in California pretty soon. Santa Barbara just sold out but there are still a few tickets left for Pasadena. Morgan Nagler has been added as support for there. I’m looking forward to it. Acoustic guitar and singing babyyyyy!!

Thurs. Feb. 19th, 2026 - Santa Barbara, Cal. - the Whale House (with Priestussy) SOLD OUT

Fri. Feb. 20th, 2026 - South Pasadena, Cal. - Sid the Cat Auditorium (with Morgan Nagler)

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also:

I just added a little zine book booklet pamphlet brochure magazine chapbook to my website store. It’s a short-print-run, just-for-no-reason, goof edition of some haikus that I tweeted (twote?) in 2015/2016 mostly. I’m seeing if they look like real haikus on paper. Check it out!

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personal words:

I’ve been enjoying paternity leave from my computer. Now when I come back to it I realize that this nagging thought of “aw damn, I should post more” is totally absurd. Nobody should post more. I sometimes think that when I write on here (substack) it should start with “sorrrryyy!!!! I’ve been so busy haven’t been able to give you guys an update!”, that’s the feeling I arrive with.

But if I pause and let that feeling pass, the real feeling underneath it is: I don’t want to get better at posting, at responding to emails and texts promptly, at being more on top of the wide thin web of correspondence that I’m supposedly part of. OPPOSITE! I want to get worse at it! I want to get more rooted in the here and now. I know this can often feel like “ghosting” from the other side, but I have reached an acceptance of this little friction. It’s worth it, to have peace and focus in the moment. So, not sorry that so many months pass between these newsletters. I have been living!

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but I do have a topic:

How I Listen To Music

Can you believe I thought you’d give a rat’s ass about how I listen to music? If you do, read on. If not, throw your phone to the ground hard.

I get the sense that I have a reputation out there for being kind of a “mr. goody goody does things the “pure” way, crusty old timer ‘things were way better back in my day when it was slow and difficult’” type of guy. Only listening to fair trade vinyl albums on my dumpstered speakers through my grandfather’s inherited tube amp, but mostly not listening to music at all and just contemplating the music in the poetry of the wind. That’s fair, I can take responsibility for maybe painting myself in a certain light.

The real truth is that mostly, yeah, I do listen to just vinyl when I’m at home. I have a big record collection built over decades slowly. (nerds: I have a U-Turn turntable with a Grado cartridge and a Sprout simple amplifier and 2 good speakers I found at the thrift store.) I like the slow way, not passive. I like putting a record on on purpose and noticing it while it plays. That’s mostly how I’ve listened. Or in the car, from my phone, the 12,000 songs that I have the downloaded files of, MP3’s from back in the day of downloading, ripping CDs, and modern day bandcamp purchases.

But: a few years ago I was doing a big archiving/reorganization of my own Microphones/Mount Eerie catalog online, making sure it looked good and correct. There are a lot of releases and there were some weird errors and gaps. In order to see from a user perspective I got a Spotify account and also an Apple Music account. Maybe I did Tidal too? After checking it I cancelled the accounts, but kept the Apple Music one for no big reason. I guess I just indulged the ease of exploring whatever pop music my daughter wanted to play on the drive to school in the morning. It kept autopaying for years and I just let it slide.

That’s the life of the me that listens to music in a house and a car, as a parent and a hearer. The other part of me is a song maker, a recorder, a record label guy. This guy is concerned about money and sound quality.

Money (a.k.a. do artists deserve to live?)

I’ve definitely preached about this here before, and I’m one of the least eloquent people about it. There are some excellent writers elaborating on the gnarly time we’re living in when it comes specifically to the sick economy behind music streaming. Damon Krukowski and Liz Pelly are at the top of the list.

Basically, what I think is that artists DO deserve to live, as do all humans and non-humans. (Maybe even I think especially artists, but that’s slippery.) This means that the current way that most people consume music, through a flagrantly evil streaming app without thinking about it very much, is unsustainable, morally wrong, culturally harmful, etc. etc., and needs to be redirected. I’m just a dweeb trying to make songs and record them, not a policy wonk. I know there are some blessed wonks out there doing their sacred work and I put my trust in them and bow down.

ooops! I got sidetracked!

Yes, streaming is shitty for artists’ money survival, and for many other way worse reasons, and everyone should know this by now and it should all be clear. Now’s when people either change their habits or not.

What I actually was supposed to bey typing about is How I Listen To Music:

Recently I finally unsubscribed from Apple and did some very rudimentary googling about alternative streaming services. I signed up for a janky sounding alternative streaming service called Qobuz because they were at the top of streaming services ranked by how much they pay artists. It seems like they pay like 5 times more than Spotify for example. Also they prioritize high res audio, not the mashed compressed slop that Spotify and the others push through. Then I went deep on reddit about “high res audio” and changed our home stereo so it can connect via Wifi (rather than bluetooth) and actually stream from Qobuz at really high bit rates.

The difference was shocking. Hearing familiar songs that we’ve been blasting on MP3 through bluetooth for years, finally at higher than CD quality, wow! It reminded me of the first time I got glasses when I was 19 and was just blown away by the beauty in the clouds, the trees, the traffic lights, as I drove home from the optometrist. Massive perception upgrade! and for music!!!

Turns out music is a pretty incredible and powerful force. It is so beautiful now! I feel nourished and educated and inspired. I’ve been exploring albums and artists I’ve never heard of, voracious like a teenager. I’m so pumped. I’ve been telling all my friends about the epiphany. “Listen to high quality audio! It’s WAY better!” I clobber them over the heads like an evangelist. Plus, 5 times more money to the artists! (And yes, to be clear, 5 times more than Spotify’s criminal skimping is still almost nothing, but it’s a start. And Qobuz isn’t investing zillions of our dollars into AI weapons like Spotify.)

This isn’t hard information to find, but I’ll put it here again.
The best ways to support the artists you give a rip about, the best ways to listen to their music are, in order:

1. be wealthy and send them a million dollars for literally no reason, expect nothing in return

2. buy their music directly from them (merch table, artist website) in physical form (LP, CD, whatever)

3. buy their album digitally directly from their artist site if they sell it there

4. buy their full album on bandcamp, download high res audio versions, keep it on your phone or ipod or whatever

5. if you gotta stream, find a good service (I’m loving Qobuz so far) and consider it only as an exploratory tool to discover the releases you’ll later purchase

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Tech specs: I upgraded our home stereo from the Sprout amp which was starting to die after many many years of never being turned off, to a NAD 3050, a splurge for sure. It has a module for something called BluOS which is the way that it accepts wifi audio and not just squished bluetooth. I also upgraded the speakers to some Klipsch ones with pretty copper cones. Record player and cartridge stayed the same.

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“but why is your music still on Spotify?”

I understand why you’d ask. It probably looks confusing for me to be so anti- them (and other streamers) and still have my work be available there. We hear about artists taking a stand and removing their catalogs from these bad services and putting out beautiful statements, like Deerhoof’s for example.

It’s the trap of capitalism! (Liz Pelly’s book goes deep on this, highly recommended, also her podcast.) Spotify has grown to such an oppressive scale that the alternatives have been squeezed almost dead. A streaming service built on an ethical payment model would have to charge people a little more than Spotify, and wouldn’t have the infrastructure and muscle they’ve accumulated and would wither away under their monopolistic boot. It has happened repeatedly, I’m sure. So, Qobuz exists, it’s somewhat better for artists. It sounds WAY better. But my music brings in 1/100th of the income from Qobuz than it does from Spotify. It’s not popular to do it the slightly better way.

Me and my family actually rely on that money, as tainted and unfair as it is. It hurts that this is true. There are enough streamers using Spotify to listen to the Glow pt. 2 (mostly) that it does add up to be a bug chunk of what we need to live. I really wish I was in a place in my life to leave in protest and ramp up my non-stop touring to try to bring in enough money, but I just can’t. I’m old as hell and we have a new baby. I admire the punks that can draw that line and grind it out at the merch tables. It is disheartening and embarrassing to be trapped like this, but aren’t we all? I’m doing my best to subvert and vision toward a new world. I look forward to the day that I can afford to align my income totally 100% with my ideals. I’m inching toward it.

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The baby is a little sick and my back is out. Firewood supply will probably last us through this winter just fine, it’s so weird and warm. The car’s tires are getting bald. I gotta make sure I still have health insurance. I can’t figure out how to stop getting emails.

That’s the dispatch from the end of the dead end road. I’ll go back to relearning old songs on guitar now and writing new ones.

bye,
Phil