Author Talk: Damon Krukowski talks justice & equality, and his new book ‘Why Sound Matters’
360°Sound sat down with Damon Krukowski, author of Why Sound Matters. The 115-page book is a volume in Yale University Press’s Why X Matters series, in which authors make concise arguments for the continuing relevance of important ideas. Other entries include Why Acting Matters, Why Baseball Matters, and Why Poetry Matters.
In Why Sound Matters, Krukowski considers the material aspect of sound and how it fundamentally shapes our experience of the world. A musician, poet, and writer, Krukowski was the drummer in the indie rock band Galaxie 500, and he is one-half of the duo Damon & Naomi. He writes the newsletter Dada Drummer Almanach and is also the author of the books The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World and Ways of Hearing.
Krukowski is an advocate for social justice and equality as a founding member of United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), an advocacy group fighting for a more just music industry, and a better society.
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview on our YouTube channel @360degreesound.
360°Sound: Why did you decide to write Why Sound Matters?
Damon Krukowski: It was actually a commission. Yale University Press asked me if I’d write Why Music Matters, and I declined because I thought it was too presumptuous. Who am I to say why music matters? I just thought it was a little ridiculous. We settled on Why Sound Matters. The question in the title is still a little ridiculous, because sound does matter, you don’t have to explain why. But I took it as a challenge to talk about aspects of sound that we don’t always address and how we think of its value. I took it quite literally as a question of value.
You write in the book that sound is a material and has value. What do you mean by that?
I wanted to start off by positing that sound is very physical. If you have ever been in a very loud environment, you have had that sensation. But also, sound itself is a physical material. It’s not just about its effect on our bodies. I believe that sound is a part of the world, and it is an element that is there whether we use it or not as humans. Can we approach sound separately from its influence on our bodies or our lives? What does that then lead us to think about its qualities and its value?
I compare sound to other elements that we work with in the world, like the earth, the air, and the water. One of the ways I try and demonstrate that is through noise pollution. That’s an important demonstration of the fact that it is a material. If it’s a material that we work with our labor, or that we can despoil with our abuse, then it becomes an entirely different discussion than what you usually hear sound being talked about – like whether it’s good or bad.
You write about the economic realities for musicians today. You write that with the shift to online streaming platforms, the situation for musicians has gone from bad to worse.
One hundred percent, and it’s all about the consolidation of capital. I would bet that in whatever field you work in, you have seen a consolidation of capital. I was just at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin earlier this year, which is where we met, and I was there with my group United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) to lead a protest. You’ve got these giant corporations with immense amounts of money dominating almost every field of our lives, and musicians are no exception. In our world, it’s the streaming platforms. It’s really three audio-specific streaming platforms that dominate our lives: Spotify, Amazon, and Apple. And most people hear music on YouTube. When you look at those, you’re talking about three of the biggest corporations in the world with Apple, Amazon, and Google, which owns YouTube. And then there’s Spotify, which is the biggest of the audio-specific streaming players.
Spotify has double the market share of any of their competitors. Spotify runs the show in terms of policy making. They are worth a gabillion dollars and their executives are among the highest paid people in the music industry. So, it gives you an idea of the scale that we are dealing with. In the U.S., streaming accounts for 84% of all recorded music income. That means anything you make from your recordings outside streaming is in this 16% portion. It’s already marginal, so you’ve got to deal with streaming. But who do you deal with? These corporations are beyond human scale, and in fact, we have nobody to speak to there.
We never negotiate with the streaming platforms. They only talk to the biggest players of all, and even two of the three major labels feel marginalized. They basically only talk to Universal because they have the biggest account of the three remaining major labels. Deals are done in private negotiations between two corporations, Spotify and Universal, and everyone else falls in line. That’s a monopoly, and that should be ended by the government. But we’re living in a world where the government allows for this kind of consolidation and has encouraged it since the 1990s.
You are a member of United Musicians and Allied Workers. What is the top goal for UMAW in the coming years?
I would say it’s the fair treatment of labor in the music industry. We are an advocacy group, not a union, because we cannot legally form a union and have things like collective bargaining. But we can advocate and strategize, and we can build power as a collective voice in the industry. That’s what we’re doing.
We got SXSW to raise the pay for bands, which was amazing. We didn’t stop there; we had a set of demands. Our other demand was to get the military out of SXSW. Our members collaborated with local groups like Austin for Palestine, and we succeeded. We got the Austin City Council involved, and the coalition succeeded in getting SXSW to pledge that they would no longer have the military or military contractors as sponsors inside the festival. That was a huge victory. However, this year we were back because they broke their promise.
They’re still paying bands more, but they moved their military stuff offsite to the Capital Factory, which is one of those startup hothouses. Who’s behind that? Palantir, the most evil of the AI military-compromised corporations, and lo and behold, they were holding panels at Capital Factory with Israeli military contractors and AI military contractors. They weren’t mentioned in the SXSW program, but if you went over to Capital Factory, the events were branded as SXSW, and your badge got you in. So, they just had moved it a couple blocks away and pretended they were keeping their pledge.
It also gave us the opportunity to point out that one of the keynote speakers at SXSW was one of the two new CEOs of Spotify. What’s he speaking about? AI is the future of music. Well, down the street, Palantir is also saying AI is the future of the military. So, we’ve got a direct link, not only through the subject matter, but through the same technology and literally the same people and the same capital involved.
Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, has invested in a military contractor in Sweden, and he’s now the chairman of the board of that company, and they’re developing AI drones for the battlefield. In other words, the money that’s being drained out of music by Spotify is going down the street to Palantir and the military contractor. The AI being talked about at the hotels where SXSW has their conferences is the same as the AI being discussed at Palantir’s hothouse down the street. This is why UMAW exists, because we’re not just organizing around music, we are organizing around issues of justice and equality.
Purchase Damon Krukowski’s book ‘Why Sound Matters‘ direct from Yale University Press.
Watch the full interview with Damon Krukowsi on our YouTube channel @360degreesound:
