Want to try the latest streaming music service courtesy of Sub Pop’s Father John Misty? Then call yourself a SAP.
Subpop
On Tuesday, Josh Tillman, the lead singer and songwriter of the band Father John Misty, announced a fake, satirical music streaming service called Streamline Audio Protocol, or, more accurately, SAP. As of now, it’s only streaming Father John Misty’s second LP, which will hit stores on February 10th. However, the streaming version is a peculiar release of the album that sounds almost completely re-recorded compared to the source material – joke.
On the site, Tillman calls its music delivery system “a new signal-to-audio process where popular albums are ‘subverted’ of their performances, original vocals, atmosphere and other distracting affections so that consumers can quickly and efficiently decide whether they like a musical composition. , strictly based on its formal characteristics, enough to spend money on it.” As such SAP’s version of the album I love you honey bear has replaced all of Tillman’s vocal tracks with obnoxious MIDI, while still using a full band – albeit a different, smaller one than on the album – to play the rest of the parts. (The site jokes that this audio “contains just enough metadata to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software.”)
SAP’s launch site features a few cheap stock photos, along with sarcastic compliments about the likes of Pandora (“discovery algorithms guarantee we’ll never accidentally [music] we might not like it”) and Spotify (“some artists have discovered that it can be financially difficult to share their music for free”). widely documented as reactionary and self-centered, they do have a point, buried somewhere under the alarmist rhetoric and obtuse royalty breakdowns.
While the minimized version of the album sounds utterly laughable – and is a far more interesting protest against streaming music services than the usual complaints – it also sounds like it was crafted with surprising care. Honestly, it’s pretty catchy (although the full album, which we’ve already heard, is definitely better). The SAP site’s mix of sarcasm, humor and nonsense also fits neatly into Tillman’s weird Father John Misty persona, who emerged in 2012 with an album whose liner notes are a long, rambling, bonkers 31-part story about a “hypothetical video”. game.”