Digital Dark Ages

The streaming economy—and much of the discourse around it—is based on a simple promise: all of the music. Not some of the music, not most of the music, but ALL of the music being available to stream on-demand. But as we all know, the cloud is far from complete. Artists from De La Soul to Aaliyah have long been absent, while entire eras of music blogs, mid-aughts mixtape culture and MySpace emo bands are simply unavailable, perhaps forever (RIP to the glory days of G-Unit, Dipset and your high school's best Dashboard Confessional impersonator). And while there are a few outlets still holding it down (insert prayer emoji for DatPiff), there is a sense that they are consistently under threat of soon disappearing as well. So on this episode, Sam and Saxon decide to take a look at music streaming from its margins, trying to think through what musical erasure can tell us about the future of listening, fandom, history and more.