A few recent readers have wheedled for more editorial content in these posts. They somehow mistake our humble band page for the NYT, WSJ or even WWN. Flattery can get you everywhere though, so here goes nothing.

From a glance at my recent playlists, it would seem that I’ve developed a yen for “modern eunuch-like crooning” (oh, Pitchfork):

Shearwater, Rook

Radiohead, In Rainbows

Band of Horses, Cease to Begin

U2, Boy

Oscar Peterson, In a Mellow Mood

Jonsi, Go

To be honest, I’ve been struggling with some of these albums. Go, Rook and Cease to Begin are all solid sets, featuring gorgeous centerpieces. Also, as someone of ordinary vocal range I respect the sheer technique that goes behind the pyrotechnics that Jónsi Birgisson and Jonathan Meiburg pull off with their pipes. Band of Horses often sound like the Shins comping on early Coldplay, but I can get behind that too.

To my 90s alt rock-weaned sensibilities, what’s jarring is how chipper a lot of this music sounds. Jónsi comes off pretty consistently like the happiest cherub in the choir. Children, flowers, world peace; it all sounds delightful on paper, but I haven’t felt this alienated from a love-in since I first watched Eyes Wide Shut. My problem, not Birgisson’s; I’m just sharing.

By contrast, Thom Yorke’s singing gets about as stratospheric on In Rainbows as anyone’s (cf. “House of Cards”) but the whole package slinks along so deliciously that it’s easy to overlook the component parts. In other words, it doesn’t sound athletic, it just is.

Supposedly editorials require a central argument or theory so I’ll step off my soapbox with this: 1) Jónsi, Meiburg and Antony Hegarty should form a supergroup named something like “Elevation” or “Your Highnesses”, 2) the cover artwork of “Boy” is slightly creepy, especially on the LP version, and 3) never watch Kubrick with your parents, it rarely ends well.

Last week I came across a fascinating infographic retweeted by Colin Meloy. In it David McCandless breaks down how much a solo artist would need to distribute across various forms of traditional and new media in order to scrape together minimum wage. It’s fairly intuitive that a self-pressed CD would net an artist far more a pop than internet radio. What’s breathtaking is just how vast this difference is. The orders of magnitude separating CD revenues from Spotify’s remind me of nothing so much as a planetary size chart. Scroll down slowly for the full effect.

These numbers are especially bracing when you consider that 1) this chart assumes 100% net profit off each sale or impression (i.e. it cost nothing to make the music in the first place–ha!), 2) the scale assumes a “solo artist” making that minimum wage (sorry, Polyphonic Spree), and 3) common wisdom holds that unless you’re MC Hammer circa 1987, successful music marketing requires more than just selling CDs out of the trunk of your car.

So it’s hard to avoid the nagging suspicion offhand that maybe Lars Ulrich was tapping into something other than the green monster way back during NapsterGate. However I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy and am inclined to think that there’s a warm fuzzy buried somewhere deep in here. For starters, it’s encouraging to see just how many options there are for unsigned, DIY bands to make scratch without a label in the middle. I certainly don’t interpret this as an indictment of internet radio, which is really more of an exposure tool than a profit engine anyway (and hey, at least the money is trickling in the right direction vs. payola).

Mostly though, this info speaks to the fact that most music is not divined through the cloud but built from the ground up through hard work, great fans and a touch of good fortune. Parachute pants optional.