Jobs at Hipster Bait

We live in an age where physical location has begun to dissolve in favor of an isolated digital world. Gone are the days of rushing to the record store for a new album release, or stumbling across a mixtape full of new tunes. Our experience with music today has less and less to do with being alive in the here and now and connecting to a moment, and more to do with a constant stream that we expect to be running in the background. This is such a fundamental element of our lives that we don’t necessarily think of it, but the ‘placelessness’ of music deeply changes the way we relate to it. You don’t have to travel to it. It comes to you. You’ve made no real effort and your attention is only half-present. And as a result, your connection to the music and the artist is less meaningful. On the artist side, complex algorithms in streaming services are manipulated by money and make it difficult for indie artists to get discovered. A Canadian artist attempting to be discovered by half-listening audiences in an abundant sea of sound on streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud is nearly impossible. Streaming services also manipulate their algorithms to serve music that’s already popular and big record labels pay for unearned placements in high profile playlists, drowning out most of the independent artists. In protest of how impossible the discoverability of music is for artists, a website called Forgotify.com now allows millions of unheard songs on Spotify to get their very first play—a small step towards solving a problem that is only growing.