I personally have no problem discerning the delineation between the album proper and the extras tacked onto the end, but what about someone who is first learning about “Ghost” via Spotify? With streaming services growing exponentially in popularity each year, it’s very likely that the next generation of music lovers will mostly interact with the majority of their music on services like Spotify, and unless they’re vigilant about researching albums beyond the playlist presented to them, their experience will be quite different than those who grew up in the vinyl, tape, or CD decades. As if the album as an art form wasn’t already up against enough survival odds! If Spotify is the new universally available version of the older-sibling’s record collection, then it’s nowhere near as accurate (or alluring) as the version teenagers of earlier decades found in crates in Cory’s room underneath the Ozzy poster.This seems like such a piss-poor reason to accept a whole ocean of possibly fucked up music, and Spotify is not unaware of the problem. They have a system in place for reporting these kinds of errors and users have reported both success and failures getting these errors weeded out (the Tori Amos error was resolved when I checked back a few weeks later, FYI). If the error resides in Spotify’s database, they aim to correct it. But if the error arises from how the label uploaded or labeled the track, the onus is on the record label to make the correction. Apparently, in either scenario, change arrives slowly. One user on the Spotify community board exclaimed, “I’ve reported stuff since at least two years ago and not a single one has been fixed” while another remarked, “I think that main problem is that Spotify does not care.”That seems extreme, and outside the realm of proving by any party, but I do believe the truth resides somewhere in the zone between a) “the database is too large to effectively, accurately manage” and b) all available company energy being currently invested in growing the service and its profits, rather than cleaning up what’s already there.Profit is a hot button word for Spotify, especially when it comes to the artist payout for the usage of their music. There has been much dispute (more accurately described as a shit storm of protest, I’d argue) about the fairness of the payout model to artists for streaming services like Spotify. Radiohead pulled their content , David Byrne wrote an incendiary op-ed , Zoe Keating shared her exact accounting , and everyone from the Black Keys to Aimee Mann have expressed doubt in the sustainability of their job as a music creator/performer if streaming services are the future of music consumption (spoiler alert: it is).Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery has been the most vocal, writing open letters to NPR interns revealing an embarrassing Pandora payout for a million streams , and even testifying to congress . But recently, Lowery released what I consider to be the most incendiary of his protests yet, a soft accusation of outright fraud when it comes to streaming services reporting the true play counts for artists on their platform. In a post entitled “ Have Streaming Services Become an Illegal ClusterF***? Why Does My Statement Show Statistically Unlikely Plays? ” Lowery detailed that his first statement from new music streaming service Beats/MOG seemed curious, and he went on to make the case for how very unlikely the songs listed as Camper Van Beethoven’s only plays on the service were based simply on the historical precedent for the popular tracks in Camper’s output.It left Lowery wondering if these play counts were completely fabricated, an accusation that would definitely be easy to defend if it were untrue, leaving one to wonder why Beats doesn’t just do so (and why Lowery’s most inflammatory accusation yet has garnered the least amount of press). In a stunning footnote to the whole affair, Lowery ended the piece by mentioning, “As a songwriter the US Government bars me from auditing these streaming companies.” I have many questions about this last bombshell for both Lowery (who didn’t respond to my interview request) and an entertainment lawyer, so we’ll have to save exploring that topic for another article.Another recent trend, as an alternative to directly rebelling against streaming services’ payout models, is transforming the physical-object format of music into a rare, limited edition, fetish item, with an extremely high sticker price. Last week, Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan announced that he was releasing a set of experimental recordings called “AEGEA” with a price tag of $59.95. The fact that there will be no digital release of this music (or at least none that has been announced, but I suspect that could change once all 250 of these sell), directly suggests that Corgan is more interested in selling a fetish item than he is sharing new music with his legions of fans. On the one hand, this solves the artist’s problem of the low streaming-services payouts, and of musical piracy interrupting your sales (all of these will sell long before anyone uploads the work to The Pirate Bay).But this solution also leaves your biggest fans holding a sixty dollar price tag just to hear it, which you don’t need to be a member of Fugazi to believe that this is kind of a shitty way to deliver new music to your people (and if this video is any indication, it’s also kind of shitty music to deliver to anyone, period). If the solution to proper artist payouts involves soaking your fan base at every turn, this isn’t going to end well. Recall, the mildly cold behavior with which the recording industry treated their consumers over the past decades (“It cost me $18.99 for the new Pearl Jam CD at Straaaaaaaaaawberries, kid!”) was cited again and again as a defense of illegal downloading throughout the late nineties and oughts. So, imagine what kind of over-the-top response a decade of artist-approved extreme price-gouging would elicit from music fans? (I picture beheadings, but that’s just me.)Meanwhile, Wu-Tang Clan doesn’t give a fuck. They recently announced that they’d be selling exactly one copy of their unheard album “The Wu – Once Upon A Time In Shaolin” only, at auction, to the highest bidder. While this can be seen as a hilarious publicity stunt, Forbes went ahead and wrote this creepy screed about how this could be the future of music sales. “The more scarce the item, the more you can charge,” excitedly declares author Bobby Owsinksi. While we wish all of these money-hungry vampires the best, it should be noted that the idea that this is a new sustainable model for music sales ignores so many essential facts about music fandom that the entire piece instantly reads like something from The Onion.One of the only reasons music fans are willing to go to such great lengths to hear the music they love (whether that means paying $100 for a concert ticket, or driving 50 miles to see them perform, or shelling out whatever the asking price is for the new material) is that music is seen, heard, and felt by fans as a rebellion or an antithesis to the gray, cold world of business. Pop, rock and hip-hop music is what we blast the moment we escape the office, it’s what we put on when we want to go wild. Wanna treat your new single like it’s a NASDAQ stock? Go ahead, but you might run out of gas much earlier than you think. As the line between label and artist shrinks with each passing year, it will be increasingly difficult for a music creator to throw up their hands and cry, “I’m sorry! It’s not my decision, it was the label’s!” with a straight face. Corgan and Wu-Tang Clan’s recent acts are great examples. It’s blazingly clear that they thought of this idea themselves. Isn’t that…kind of…pathetic?Here’s the major take-away. We don’t want our rock stars making creepy, transparent financial maneuvers. We don’t even want them to spend their time rebelling against the fairness of emerging platforms’ payout rates (though, for the time being, that’s entirely more understandable than spending time cooking up ways to hose your followers). What we want from our musical heroes is to create and perform music. This was possible in the past, will it ever be possible again? Or will that just be a side-project as everyone screams about the rules of distribution leaving the fans standing by in the pouring rain? What happens when there’s a fundamental problem facing an art form, and it absolutely needs to be resolved, but continually working on the problem starts to lessen the power of the art form itself?Welcome to the Clusterfuck.