Not long ago, while skidding through the melodious hall of mirrors that is Spotify, I had the urge to play a half-decade-old EP by an independent Dublin rapper I’ve long been a fan of. But there was a snag. Upon arriving at their artist page, I found it was no longer available to stream. Searches of SoundCloud and other platforms yielded the same result. All traces of the EP seemed to have evaporated, as if the music had never existed.
This was not the first release I’d looked for that turned out to have been deleted. It makes you feel helpless, the music permanently out of reach, lost to listeners forever. The EP had never been released physically, and I’m unsure it was ever available to download. Its accessibility, it would appear, was entirely at the whims of its creator, who had apparently decided it no longer spoke to their artistry.
This is a consequence of the streaming era: as critics have often pointed out, you don’t own the music.
John Lennon once said that music is everybody’s possession. Traditionally, you might say, artists have ceded the spiritual ownership of their recordings to their fans. Every seven-inch single they released was locked into their catalogue and became part of their legacy.
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But the concept has become flimsy as music has evolved into something less tangible. As neatly as a body of work appears on an artist’s Spotify page, it can be clipped, altered, rearranged. This raises moral questions: should it be acceptable for musicians to constantly primp their discographies as if they were bonsai trees, removing what they no longer like, retroactively shaping their legacies? Or once a work is in the world should it stay out there forever?
Digital expungement more broadly has been a tool in the writing, or rewriting, of recent history. When Donald Trump became US president for the second time, his department of justice deleted information from its website about the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021. It was the first of many official erasures. The New Yorker magazine soon remarked on the symbolism of Trump firing the head of the US National Archives and Records Administration, an institute guided by the motto “The written word endures”.
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I’m uncomfortable about music deletion as an artistic practice. I dislike the thought of musicians hindering fans’ access to their work – and an artist’s release history should stay intact, for better or worse. But music has always been heavily shaped by technological advancement. The emergence of formats such as cassette tapes and MP3s provided exciting new ways for artists to record music and get it to their audiences. Streaming has opened up new possibilities, too, and many in the business enjoy testing the boundaries.
The talented, and entirely independent, Dublin-based rapper Jehnova is in complete control of his music and the way it is released. In his mind a body of work is malleable, susceptible to his whims.
“It’s to some degree like an art show or art gallery,” he says. “If you’re curating an art show it’s not necessarily about that one piece all the time. It’s about everything together, and the context of everything. So you can rearrange certain paintings. ‘Maybe this painting doesn’t fit by the door. Maybe I’m going to put it deeper in [the gallery]’ – further back, to where people can start with the old, end with the new. Curation is an art form as well. So how you put this stuff out, how it’s presented, is a huge part of how I tend to interact with stuff like that.”
Jehnova says that removing some of his music has helped to foster a deeper connection with diehard fans: if they get in touch about missing tracks, he’ll send them the music directly. Being independent allows this. It’s not such good news when corporations get involved. I’ve heard of labels that order new signings to delete their early recordings; the past must be expunged so every move can be plotted carefully.
Some artists take advantage of the streaming format by changing music they’ve already released – re-recording vocals, tweaking the mix, editing the order of songs – which again runs counter to the traditional idea of music being finished once a track or an album has been signed off. This makes music more like software to be patched and updated.
“There are definitely merits to it,” says Dave McAdam, a one-time musician and producer. “If I write a song, release it and then go, ‘Okay, no, I’m not too happy with that drum beat,’ if I redo it and then swap out, am I doing something artistically against my integrity? I don’t think so. I think as long as it’s an artistic choice, or just a decision by an artist to change things that they put out there, or maybe take things down they just feel don’t represent them, that’s totally valid.”
This feeling of impermanence, of fleetingness, reflects a broader issue with online-only releases: digital decay. The internet is a wonderful tool to circulate rare music – I recently managed to play Kid Capri’s decades-old home-made mixtape Old School Vol 1 on SoundCloud. But its reputation as an archive – the idea that digitisation can be synonymous with preservation – is overstated. It’s not uncommon for artists who took a carefree approach to backing up their work to permanently lose songs because of a hosting issue.
In 2019 MySpace admitted that a server-migration error caused the loss of as many as 50 million tracks, many of which the creators had kept nowhere else. (A rescue attempt by the Internet Archive retrieved only about 10 per cent of the music.) It’s a misconception that once something is posted online it’s online forever.
As a teenager in the late 2000s and early 2010s, McAdam would volunteer to record music with nascent bands in a small youth centre studio in Ennis, in Co Clare. Much of that work is irretrievable.
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“We could record a lot of music and put it online, but a lot of those services are either just gone or, if you leave your account inactive for long enough, things just disappear. It was kind of a funny, unfortunate thing: there’s a lot of music recorded but not a lot of physical media actually made, so, unfortunately, a lot of it was just lost.
“This was the relatively early days of putting music on the internet ... I think we all probably thought, ‘Oh yeah, put our music on the internet, it’ll be there forever. Put it on MySpace, we’ll never have to worry about where we’ll find it again in 10 years’ time.’”
Physical media’s feeling of permanence is perhaps one of the things that makes it special. The vinyl craze is still with us; the rise in cassette tape sales suggests a yearning for the relationship between physical objects and music. Even Jehnova recently released a CD edition of his album IOU 3. He’s aware that many people who buy it probably don’t own a CD player but nonetheless like the idea of possessing a keepsake of an artist they like.
“Having something tangible – having something you can hold and open and touch – that’s an experience I would love to give someone with my stuff, because that’s the kind of experience I had first with music,” he says.
There’s always space for nostalgia, but streaming is likely to remain the dominant way we listen to music. Artists and their labels will therefore continue to test its possibilities, contorting the system to their will. As listeners, this brings the risk that the songs we love will change or disappear. As uncomfortable as that may be, deliberate music erasure was bound to happen, simply because it can happen.
