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RUSSIAN DENVER
Colorado Russian Newspaper published in English 720-436-7613 www.gorizont.com/rd
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ents’ last residence address to
register.»
In other words, if you are a
citizen, you can register to vote
even if your return to the U.S.
is uncertain, or even if you have
never lived in the U.S. You can
take care of overseas registration
online here.
Bottom line: Living outside
of the U.S., either temporarily or
permanently, does not affect your
eligibility to vote.
«I’m attending college in a
state that’s not where I grew
up, and if I register to vote here
then I’ll lose my financial aid.»
The Brennan Center for Justice
says, «Where you register to
vote will not affect any of your
federal financial aid, including
Pell Grants, Perkins and Stafford
Loans, Academic Competitive
Grants, SMART Grants, and
other federal loans. It will also
not affect whether you are considered
your parents’ dependent
for FAFSA (Free Application for
Federal Student Aid) purposes.»
There are a select number of
private scholarships and grants
that are designed exclusively for
students with residence in a particular
state. For the most part,
they define «residence» as where
your parents live, and/or where
you attended high school—
meaning that registering to vote
outside the state won’t affect your
scholarship eligibility. (For example,
the Banato Family Filipino
Education Fund requires that
you reside in specific California
counties while applying for the
scholarship, but if you get the
scholarship, you can use it at an
out-of-state college and register
to vote there without any problem.)
If you have a private, geographically-specific
scholarship
and you’re not sure whether registering
to vote in your college
town will impact your eligibility,
check with the your scholarship’s
administrator and/or your
school’s financial aid office.
The website BestColleges.
com offers more straightforward
FAQs for student voting, including
whether you should register
at home or at school, how to vote
while studying abroad, and so on.
Bottom line: Updating your
voter registration as a student
will not affect your financial
«If I register to vote, people
will know where I live; anyone
can access the voter registration
rolls and show up at my door.»
By default, voter registration
lists are publicly accessible. That’s
how political campaigns are able
to call you up to ask who you’re
voting for, or to ring your doorbell
to give you a piece of literature
on their candidate.
If you don’t want the intrusion,
leave your phone number
off your voter registration form.
(It’s optional.) And if you do get
a call or a canvasser, I’d advise
against ignoring them (they’ll
just keep coming back until they
can record an official response
from you)—instead, answer the
door or the phone, request that
they take you off their list, and
they will.
Having strangers try to talk
to you about politics can be, at
worst, an annoying interruption
of your day. But for victims of domestic
violence or stalking, having
a publicly accessible address
can be dangerous. Many states
have enacted Address Confidentiality
Programs for this exact
purpose. The National Network
to End Domestic Violence provides
a guide to which confidentiality
programs each state offers.
Bottom line: Registering to
vote will add you to a publicly accessible
database unless you take
extra steps to register through
your state’s Address Confidentiality
Program.
«It’s too late for me to register
to vote this year.»
Not if you act now. The earliest
states’ registration deadlines
Has 10 years of Spotify ruined music?
are October 7 (that’s for Alaska
and Rhode Island). Other states
may give you even more time.
See your state’s voter registration
deadline on this easy-to-read
chart.
Bottom line: There’s still time.
Don’t wait.
**
Here’s the real truth: most of
the reasons that people cite for
why they can’t or won’t register
to vote are just myths. And then
of course, once they’re registered,
people offer up a whole slew of
reasons why they can’t actually
cast a ballot. It probably won’t
surprise you to hear that most of
those reasons are false, as well. If
you think you don’t have a way
to get the polls, you can get a free
ride there. If you think you can’t
get time off work to vote, you
probably can. If you can’t find
postage to mail your absentee
ballot, just stick it in the mailbox
anyway.
Get registered. Go vote.
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
and Laura Snapes
The case for Spotify
The year is 2008. Now You’re
Gone by Basshunter has spent
its fifth week at No 1 and you
can’t get enough of it. Your options
are as follows: head to the
shops and buy the single on CD,
which doesn’t feel very on-demand;
buy it as a download, the
quality of which is as flimsy as
Basshunter’s subsequent career;
navigate through a labyrinth of
occasionally pornographic popups
to download it illegally; or
sit through Scouting for Girls
five times until it comes on the
radio.
Ten years on, Spotify has
erased these costly or frustrating
scenarios. You can instantly access
not just Now You’re Gone,
but deep cuts from Basshunter’s
oeuvre such as From Lawnmower
to Music or his oft-overlooked
Christmas single Jingle
Bells (Bass). And, indeed, the
majority of popular music made
by anyone ever.
The result is music’s most
radically democratic era. While
adverts between songs jarringly
juxtapose the beauty of art
with the brutality of capital, it
is at least free to listen to them.
Thanks to Spotify and YouTube,
no one with internet access –
90% of the UK – needs to pay
for music, an important and
seismic shift from the vinyl, CD
and download eras when, for
many people, music ownership
was a luxury or treat. For ?9.99 –
the going price of one newly released
CD album in 2008 – you
can have uninterrupted access
for a month.
The Spotify logo on the facade
of the New York Stock Exchange,
as it celebrated its stock
exchange listing in April 2018.
Photograph: Reuters
You can already hear the effects
of this democracy on music
itself. The global profile of non-
Anglophone pop has risen, from
K-pop band BTS to Puerto Rican
star Daddy Yankee, in part
thanks to this levelled playing
field; the multicultural hybrid
music of stars such as Stefflon
Don feels like the natural result
of a culture that can access
anything, anytime. Critics point
out that you don’t own the music
you pay Spotify for, but effectively
rent it, although the
«ownership» of digital files was
always pretty illusory and underwhelming
anyway – and, as
anyone who has tried to copy a
library of iTunes files from one
device to another, a teeth-gnashing
faff. As the parallel demise of
Blockbuster Video and, er, print
media shows, most people value
convenience over physicality
when it comes to film, news
and music. It can also be argued
that Spotify’s quality is lower
than that of a CD, which is true,
and the muso in me trembles
to think how many people are
listening to Spotify on its low,
data-preserving quality, which
sounds as if the songs have been
irradiated. But its 320kbps «high
quality» setting will satisfy all
but the most sensitive listener.
Spotify speaks to this silent
majority of music fans. Audiophiles,
object fetishists, anticapitalists,
musicians – these
groups noisily protest Spotify,
but are marginal compared with
the number of ordinary listeners,
who never read the liner
notes in the first place. For many
people, music is just for mood,
something to work, exercise or
have sex to – situations that Spotify
usefully caters to with playlists
such as Productive Morning,
Extreme Metal Workout and 90s
Baby Makers.
It is a badge of pride for
musos to say that Spotify’s
machine-learning algorithms –
when you listen to a track and it
recommends things you might
also like – don’t cover their
cosmopolitan taste. But there
are plenty more people who
have relatively narrow taste, for
whom – in a world where not
everyone has the time or inclination
to read up on new music
– this kind of recommendation
is really cherished. And if you
do happen to have catholic taste,
or fannish obsession, there are
some very deep back catalogues
to go down (even, should you so
desire, Basshunter’s). There are
debates to be had over revenue
sharing and the acts it chooses
to promote, but Spotify’s free,
total access makes it essentially
utopian. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
The case against Spotify
If I compiled the off-record
remarks from my interviews
over the past decade, the majority
would concern Spotify –
namely how much artists hate it.
«Please don’t put that in,» they
panic after slagging it off. «I really
need it to support my new
album.» And they do: Spotify is
a kingmaker.
After the early 2000s doldrums,
the recent music industry
revenue boom is thanks to
the rise in streaming. It is well
known that artists don’t see
much of this. Spotify’s royalty
rate is notoriously low. The top
10% of artists dominate 99% of
streams – as Ed Sheeran getting
16 tracks in the Top 20 after the
release of ? showed. Still, Spotify’s
patronage – putting artists
in its powerful playlists, which
drive streams – is crucial. Musicians
can’t afford to complain.
At a relatively affordable
?9.99 a month for an ad-free
subscription, Spotify benefits
the consumer more than the artist
– superficially. Its exploitative
relationship with musicians has
trickle-down effects. The most
basic is that any artist who can’t
afford to make music is not going
to be making much more of
it – or they will have to tour for
longer (costing their health and
creativity) and find alternative
revenue streams to survive. But
just as musicians realised they
couldn’t afford to be sniffy about
«selling out», after the puritanical
90s, Spotify undermined that
undesirable alternative, too. As
critic Liz Pelly writes in an essay
for the Baffler, brands don’t have
to pay to use songs on adverts if
they want to piggyback an act’s
cred – they can put them on
branded playlists without asking
permission or paying a penny.
Setting aside the issue of
money, these playlists have fundamentally
changed the listening
experience. Spotify prides
itself on its personalised recommendations,
which work
by connecting dots between
«data points» assigned to songs
(from rap, indie, and so on, to
infinite micro-genre permutations)
to determine new music
you might like. Its model doesn’t
code for surprise, but perpetuates
«lean-back» passivity. There
is no context on the platform,
merely entreaties to enjoy more
of the same: «You like bread? Try
toast!»
It limits music discovery and
the sound of music itself. Singles
are tailored to beat the skip-rate
that hinders a song’s chances of
making it on to a popular playlist:
hooks and choruses hit more
quickly. Homogenous mid-tempo
pop drawing from rap and
EDM has become dominant:
New York Times pop critic Jon
Caramanica regularly disparages
this sound as «Spotifycore».
The algorithm pushes musicians
to create monotonous
music in vast quantities for peak
chart success: hence this year’s
tedious 106-minute Migos album,
Culture II, and Drake’s
dominance. Add in Spotify’s
hugely popular artists with no
profile outside the platform,
widely assumed to be fake artists
commissioned by Spotify
to bulk out playlists and save on
royalties, and music appears in
danger of becoming a kind of
grey goo.
Spotify looks like a neutral
platform but behaves like a gatekeeper.
It faced a backlash this
year after censoring R Kelly and
XXXTentacion for their alleged
acts of violence against women
(only to grossly promote XXX
after his murder). Why were
only black men censored when
many white male rockstars have
violated women?
It continually perpetuates
such inequality: a report by Pelly
found that despite the «woke
optics of playlists like Feminist
Friday», women are underrepresented
on its most popular
playlists. (Meanwhile, Drake
benefited from Spotify’s first
«global artist takeover», his face
and music appearing on every
editorialised playlist when he
released this year’s Scorpion.)
These function as echo chambers,
popularity begetting more
support, the antithesis of musical
democracy.
Look: I pay my ?9.99 a month.
I use Spotify to make playlists
for friends’ weddings and to
compile 80s curios I discover
on TOTP reruns. The genie isn’t
going back in the bottle. But we
can be responsible listeners (I
buy albums I listen to more than
five times) and hold Spotify to
account because the people it
is meant to benefit can’t. Any
platform that intimidates the
creators that underwrite its business
is truly dystopian.