Music Streaming Billionaires
Is music streaming a positive advancement for the consumption of music? Or is it a problem? Or is it both? I argue it is a little of both. Music streaming is beneficial because we can, in fact, access everything now as long as the servers' switches remain powered.
A billion written in numerical form looks like this: 1,000,000,000. Yes, that is nine zeros. Three songs from the modern musical canon come to mind that make reference to billionaires: Travie McCoy along with Bruno Mars claimed ten years into the new millennium that they wanted to be “billionaires so fucking bad” in their collaboration, titled none other than “Billionaire.” Jeremy Messersmith’s 2026 release Fox/Coyote opens with a song called “Billionaires” asking, with a dash of satire, in its refrain: “What if we were billionaires, everyone, everywhere, without a care, what if we were billionaires?” And Kathleen Edwards makes an analogy between a feeling and currency, prophesying that “if this feeling were a currency, I would be a billionaire” on the title track to her 2025 release, Billionaire. These three songs may suggest a connection between non-billionaire musicians wanting to be billionaires, or at least fantasizing about the prospect of this status. And it makes sense as a billion is such an abstract amount of anything, whether it be pebbles of sand on the beach, stars in the night sky, or the volatile balance of a brokerage account. Sometimes the best way to make sense of abstraction is to pen a tune about it.
It goes without saying that a billionaire can essentially purchase anything they desire: a deep sea fishing boat, a Porsche, a Leica, 98% of The Pineapple Island, and all the Baskin Robbins ice cream their hearts desire. However, one dilemma may plague the modern billionaire: the paradox of choice. Imagine being able to acquire whatever the heart may desire as you swipe or tap your no-limit credit card. Sounds too good to be true? That is likely because it may just be. This is arguably similar to what happens when we open up the portal to a music streaming service. The paradox of choice is presented by way of an empty search bar and a question asking “What do you want to play?” Streaming services grant you instant access to almost the entire oeuvre of music, more than the largest record store in all of California could even think to begin to display on their shelves.
According to one Internet search, Spotify hosts over 250 million tracks. This number is expanding by the hour, one day to certainly hit the elusive billion mark. Thus, for those that subscribe, we are well on our way to becoming music-consuming billionaires. This sentiment is nothing new and has even been sung about by Arcade Fire in their 2017 song, “Everything Now.” And their take on this paradox of choice sums it up perfectly: “Every song that I’ve heard is playing at the same time it’s absurd”. And perhaps absurd is the best adjective to describe having access to everything…now.
All this begs the question: Is music streaming a positive advancement for the consumption of music? Or is it a problem? Or is it both? I argue it is a little of both. Music streaming is beneficial because we can, in fact, access everything now as long as the servers' switches remain powered. We can listen to obscure records from the 1940s and beyond without having to spend hours scouring record stores or paying a premium for used vinyl. On the other hand, it is all a little ridiculous. Something tells me we should not have access to all of this content at the tap of a button, but then again I grew up when new music came out on Tuesdays and the anticipation for a physical release was so palpable it had us trying to outpace our best friends from the mini-van to the Hot Topic CD rack for the best selection. But this is change. I embrace all things physical and digital: vinyl pops, CD skips and the empty search bar. However, I am not sure I completely love this musical billionaire status all of the time.
Stumped by My Morning Jacket in a Small Apartment in Honolulu
Fast-forward 12 years and I am standing in Hungry Ear Records, a cozy record shop in the Moiliili district of Honolulu. I am there to purchase the new Mumford and Sons, but as I am browsing, this vibrant-looking record is staring at me as I stare up at it on the wall in the NEW RELEASE section. It’s the new My Morning Jacket, titled The Waterfall. I am intrigued. I had not taken a chance on a new record in quite a while.
I was introduced to My Morning Jacket in the fall of 2003 while watching Late Night with Conan O’Brien during my ninth and final semester at the greatest university on Lake Superior, the University of Minnesota-Duluth. They played the tune “One Big Holiday” from It Still Moves in all its five-minute-plus rocking glory. Conan’s reaction to their performance was something along the lines of “I AM GOING TO BUY THAT ALBUM!” Anyway, I was hooked from that moment and immediately requested It Still Moves for review (I was editing an online music site called 30music.com at the time), and fell in love with it while having a Moosehead Canadian Lager in my room after Monday night class. Since then, I have always enjoyed MMJ. They are a band that pushes boundaries with their near-hypnotic blend of folk, rock, and sometimes simply bizarre jams.
Fast-forward 12 years and I am standing in Hungry Ear Records, a cozy record shop in the Mōʻiliʻili district of Honolulu. I am there to purchase the new Mumford and Sons, but as I am browsing, this vibrant-looking record is staring at me as I stare up at it on the wall in the NEW RELEASE section. It’s the new My Morning Jacket, titled The Waterfall. I am intrigued. I had not taken a chance on a new record in quite a while. Typically, before I buy a record, I will preview it on iTunes or Amazon or just find a YouTube stream if I desire to hear it in its entirety. But this time I wanted to go old school. I wanted to take a chance on a band that I knew I at least liked enough to take a chance on. So I dropped the 20-whatever dollars it was on the double gate-fold vinyl and carried it back to my apartment with that sense of excitement I used to get after spending $100 on compact discs at Cheapo in Uptown Minneapolis on payday.
After a spin-through of the new Mumford, which is quite good (and still holds up), I place The Waterfall on the turntable and wait with anticipation for the needle to drop and the music to pour out of my JBL Bluetooth speaker. The opener, “Believe (Nobody Knows),” starts slow with a fairytale-type sound leading into some very, very interesting vocals. I know Jim James is known for pushing the envelope vocally, but what I am hearing is so unusual that I feel he has either lost the plot entirely or found some insanely potent marijuana and recorded the entire record completely stoned out of his mind. The vocals are deep, slow, nearly slurred—definitely not the Jim James falsetto-ish vocals I am used to enjoying. But I try to accept this new direction he is taking his art. He has every right to. A career this long, what else is there to prove? As the record progresses, this slow, echo-y, distant, and just very slurred vocal style is found on every song. While I still cannot quite accept or wrap my head around it, I hear melodies in the songs that make me realize this album will just take some getting used to and, if I give it four or five spins, perhaps I will learn to absolutely adore it. So, I get to the fourth side of the album, and at this point I am about ready to give up on not only this album, but MMJ altogether. I cannot take it anymore. It was OK for a while, but now it is just downright annoying and I have thoughts of selling the album back to the record store for whatever it is they will give me—peanuts, I don’t care.
I then have a thought that maybe, just maybe, I should play the record at 45 RPM even though it is a 12-inch record to help speed things along, so I switch it to 45 RPM and.... BAM!... it sounds almost too fast, but the vocals are immediately normal and coherent!
Turns out the suggested play speed of the record is 45 RPM instead of 33 RPM, which I assumed it was, as every single one of my 12-inch records plays back properly at this spin rate.
I feel like a fool and start it over at the proper spin rotation, and am blown away with how simply great this record sounds (at proper speed).
I doubt something like this will ever happen to me again because so many elements had to come into play—a perfect musical storm—to even begin to make this ridiculous story a possibility, but it is something I will never forget. And from now on, when I purchase a record I have never heard before, I am going to check the little label to confirm whether it spins at 45 RPM or 33⅓ RPM. Interestingly enough, nine years or so later at Banana Records in Kobe, Japan, I come across a used copy of S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinu TNT by Akron/Family that has the suggested speed of 45/33⅓ for its final track. God is in the details.
Relive the moment Conan O’Brien falls in love with My Morning Jacket
The Dillinger Four Time Machine
In April 2026, Twin Cities melodic punk veterans Dillinger Four returned to Japan for the first time in over two decades, bringing their always-infectious, at-times downright fierce melodies to a sold-out crowd at Live Bar FANDANGO near Osaka Bay. There was blood. There was sweat. There were tears. And there was unity.
My first memory of seeing Dillinger Four was either at the Foxfire Coffee Lounge in the Warehouse District of downtown Minneapolis or at the Whole Music Club on the University of Minnesota’s West Bank campus. Both shows would have been in 1997 or 1998, during my third year of high school. It was a time when three-quarters of my bi-weekly supermarket carry-out paychecks went to purchasing CDs at Extreme Noise, Treehouse, Cheapo, Best Buy, Circuit City, and/or Mutant Pop mail-order. The remaining quarter went toward putting enough gas in my car to get to those record stores and venues. And Marlboro Lights. To be frank, music was the only thing I truly cared about. It was a way of life, and everything felt fresh and exciting, as a now-legendary scene of Midwest emo and melodic punk unfolded before our very eyes. In hindsight, it seems impossible to have kept up with all the music and all the shows back then, but then again, I was a 17-year-old high school student—and admittedly not quite the autodidact I eventually grew into.
What I recall most fondly about that time period was finally etching my outline in the world, and with that came one of my most cherished identities: a show-going, record-collecting, punk rock T-shirt–wearing musichead. I could walk into the Foxfire Coffee Lounge, order a Jones Soda, head to the back room where the stage was, and just exist in this fantasy world of punk and roll while enjoying a puff with my comrades—truly a place apart from the MTV generation and recycled radio programming that was important in its own right but often difficult to escape.
Seeing Hot Rod Circuit at Foxfire blew the hat right off my head, and I rushed to their merch table to dish out ten dollars for a copy of If I Knew What I Knew Then. Jimmy Eat World, Pedro the Lion, and Alkaline Trio were also highlights from Foxfire-era Minneapolis, and the list goes on. But there was one show in particular at Foxfire that has been tattooed on my heart and mind: Dillinger Four and Lifter Puller. While I don’t recall much about Lifter Puller beyond the sense that they were a band to keep your pulse on, I remember vividly D4 putting on a show for the ages—one that brought the hardcore kids, the pop-punk kids, the emo kids, the metal kids, the hip-hop kids—everyone—together. We all sang along. Together. Dillinger Four haven’t left my rotation since. Their melodic punk-and-roll goodness has followed me to Edmonton, Japan, Honolulu, back to the Twin Cities, and back to Japan again, always bringing me back to that feeling of freedom in the late 1990s.
When I learned D4 was coming to play in Osaka this spring, I quickly secured my ticket (yes, a physical ticket!) and let the countdown begin. As time tends to pass more quickly with each year that melts away, the show snuck up on me, and suddenly it was D4 day—time for my maiden voyage to Sakai City in the south of Osaka for a midlife punk rock adventure. Admittedly, I was more excited for this than most recent shows. I couldn’t believe the band that helped shape so much of my listening in late high school was actually performing just an hour down the road.
Needless to say, Dillinger Four did not disappoint, and the idea that they might have was the furthest thing from my mind. They brought it all and left nothing on the table. An absolute epic performance—as good as, if not better than, the first time I saw them in the late ’90s. It’s not often you get to rediscover your 17-year-old identity, but when you do, its best to embrace it with an open heart and simply be grateful for the experience.
Montage of D4 at Livebar FANDANGO:
You can order Dillinger Four’s latest release, This Shit Is Geniuser, at Imakinn Records (Japan) and Anxious and Angry.
Observation + Imagination = Evocation
As photographers, we need to be constantly observing our surroundings, noticing the things others perhaps glance over, or hanging a left when others are venturing right. Through this continuous practice of observation, we can begin to anticipate scenes unfolding much like an author describes the intricacies of the protagonist, the battles with the antagonist, and all the details of each particular scene.
On countless walks through central Kobe, Japan, I’ve taken thousands of photographs. Most days I am left skunked, but rarely am I disappointed. Alex Webb said that 99% of photography is failure. Wayne Gretzky said that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. And what is it that Thomas Edison said? Something along the lines of instead of failing, he simply found 10,000 ways that did not work. With this in mind, I keep framing shots, pressing the shutter button, adjusting the ISO, and trying to place any potential disappointment in the backseat. If anything, a good photo walk will yield about eight to 10,000 steps and a chance to breathe some fresh air. It will also yield around 100 frames, depending on caffeine level, light conditions, and subject matter.
While out photographing the world the other day, I was listening to a lecture series about writing fiction by author and professor James Hynes. At one point Hynes mentioned “observation plus imagination” in regard to character development in fiction writing. While my current bucket list does not include composing a novel, I do find these lectures quite intriguing. I’ve started to draw parallels between attempting fiction writing and trying to become more effective with my photography. As photographers, we need to be constantly observing our surroundings, noticing the things others perhaps glance over, or hanging a left when others are venturing right. Through this continuous practice of observation, we can begin to anticipate scenes unfolding much like an author describes the intricacies of the protagonist, the battles with the antagonist, and all the details of each particular scene. However, simple observation may not quite be enough to yield a photograph that brings joy and satisfaction. We need imagination as well. Imagination in photography could be attempting new perspectives, using a softer focus, intentionally over or under exposing, slowing the shutter speed to portray some sort of movement, or even breaking every rule of composition ever written and framing a subject barely coming into or escaping the frame.
Hynes also poses that fiction writing needs to not only be descriptive, but also evocative. One can easily describe a scene or a character with a handful of carefully chosen adjectives, but to evoke takes writing to the Nth degree. And maybe that is what the best photography does as well. It stirs something within us so deep that we cannot quite explain what makes the photograph stand out. We simply know it does.
Keep observing. Keep imagining. Strive for evocation.
Central Kobe | February | 2026
