The truth is that no technological intervention was ever going to easily solve such a complicated and ever-changing question: not piracy, not downloads, not streaming. There are no one-click solutions, and perhaps what music could benefit from most would be a wholesale rejection of technological solutionism. The problems faced by musicians, like

At its most potent, music helps us give form to ideas and feelings that were previously inexpressible—fleeting moments where the ineffable becomes real, where loneliness dissipates, where the world briefly makes sense. And when music moves us in ways that we cannot fully fathom, it’s the words of music writers that can help pull us closer toward

But buying music directly from artists and independent record labels makes an actual difference; it is an important part of supporting the culture you’d like to see keep existing. That means tracking down where artists have their work on sale directly, whether online or at the local independent record shop. It also means keeping up, directly, with

Collective issues require collective solutions.

A statistic that librarians like to repeat is that there are more public libraries in America than there are McDonald’s locations. That is a testament to the widespread perseverance of libraries as institutions, but also to the wide array of realities that libraries exist within. Libraries are not a monolith—they have different histories,

Archiving is another reason he feels it’s important for the library to own its digital infrastructure. While private companies might be thinking about the next quarter or the next year, libraries often think about how their collections will be useful in “five hundred years…. There’s no one in the corporate world that has any incentive to think that

The “digital public space” framework for an online music offering can partially be traced back to the Edmonton Public Library (EPL), which hosted a 2013 unconference attended by over fifty Edmonton musicians, to help design its streaming program, Capital City Records. Among its many takeaways, musicians expressed the importance of a collection that

Dozens of public libraries have launched community-driven local music streaming collections over the past decade: Seattle, Austin, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Eau Claire, Chapel Hill, Edmonton, Salt Lake City, and Denver among them. Library streaming raises a particularly radical idea: What if people participating in a local music scene could also be

Part of the power of an artist-run platform, Stewart said, is encouraging listeners to dive in and learn about the records, the artists, and the communities—to invite people into the music in a deeper way. “I tell my students about the hip-hop method of digging in the crates and attuning your ear to samples, which is a way to exponentially raise