Yes, Damon. And...

Sound, Subsidy, and the Ground We're Actually On

Damon Krukowski's Why Sound Matters insists on what platforms would rather we forget: sound is material, labor is real, and the way we treat both reveals what we value. Noise pollution, streaming's devaluation of recorded music, the saturation of shared soundscapes—these are not abstract problems. They land in bodies, in ecosystems, in lives. The book's great strength is treating sound as substance where contemporary systems see only frictionless flow.

Yes.
And.

There is another material reality running alongside the book's arguments—one that doesn't negate them, but complicates them in ways that matter if we're being honest about how music, community, and survival actually work in 2025.

That reality is subsidy.

The Quiet Subsidy Beneath Music Community

Much of what we call "music community" today is not sustained by music itself. It is sustained by wages earned elsewhere. Salaries from tech, education, healthcare, civil service, and other platform-adjacent or institutional jobs quietly underwrite rehearsal spaces, regional tours, unpaid sound work, small labels, and decades-long artistic persistence.

This is not a scandal. It is an accounting.

The indie ecosystem that Krukowski celebrates—local venues, long-running labels, musicians still showing up thirty years on—exists because some participants can afford to lose money, time, or both. Platform economy wages, paradoxically, subsidize resistance to platform logic. PTO becomes tour support. Health insurance becomes artistic continuity. A steady paycheck becomes the difference between "I can do this" and "I can't."

None of this makes the music less meaningful. It makes it possible.

This creates a peculiar economy invisible to both market analysis and labor organizing. When someone runs sound for a friend's tour using PTO from their tech job, is that exploitation? Solidarity? Hobby? All three? The categories we inherit—professional/amateur, worker/volunteer, viable/failing—cannot account for what is actually happening. Most music labor exists in this unmapped territory: skilled, committed, meaningful, and economically marginal by design, not dysfunction.

The Visible and Invisible Subsidies

The subsidy that sustains music communities operates on two levels, and only one gets acknowledged.

The visible subsidy is straightforward: people with day jobs use that income to participate in music. They take PTO to tour. They use employer health insurance. They leverage household stability to absorb losses. Their tech salaries, teaching income, or civil service wages make it possible to spend evenings at rehearsals, weekends running sound, and vacation time on regional tours that might net two hundred dollars after gas.

This is how most sustained music participation actually works. Not through music income, but through other income that permits music to continue.

But there is another subsidy that remains unnamed in the book: the global supply chain that makes "local" music possible. The vinyl revival depends on petroleum extraction. Regional tours depend on fossil fuels. WiFi mixers depend on rare earth mining. The devices we critique platforms on were assembled in factories whose conditions we'd condemn if we looked.

This isn't whataboutism. It's material accounting. If sound is material—and it is—then we must trace the full material chain: from cobalt mines in Congo to server farms cooled with water from contested aquifers, to the e-waste that ends up in Ghana's landfills when the gear breaks. Music communities in the northern hemisphere mourning lost bookstores without acknowledging the global extraction enabling those communities risk universalizing what is actually a situated, privileged concern.

Krukowski is right that noise pollution in oceans disproportionately harms marine life. He's right that shipping generates that noise. He's less explicit about admitting that much of that shipping exists to supply Northern consumption—including the consumption that makes music infrastructure possible. The 32-fold increase in ocean noise over fifty years isn't separable from the material conditions that allow residents of Cambridge, Mass, to debate which fishmonger to patronize.

The ability to worry about soundscapes, streaming payouts, and the loss of neighborhood shops is itself built on invisible extraction elsewhere. Acknowledging this doesn't negate the concern. It completes the accounting.

The Living Wage Problem

This is where many readers, musicians included, feel their eyes drift sideways when they hear the phrase "all musicians deserve a living wage."

As a moral claim about dignity and security, it is unimpeachable. No one should live in precarity because they make art. But as an economic claim about music itself, it collapses under even gentle scrutiny.

The Simple Machines era of the early 1990s when a humble fanzine ignited a Cambrian Explosion of indie bands and labels proved that anyone could make a record. It also proved that most records would not find an audience large enough to support their creators. That wasn't platform failure; it was arithmetic.

That Simple Machines moment demonstrated both the promise and the limit of democratized production. Yes, anyone could make a record—but no mechanism existed (or exists) to ensure that every record finds sufficient audience to support its creator. That would require not just fair distribution, but managed scarcity or guaranteed consumption. Neither is desirable, and both are impossible.

The tragedy is not that most musicians can't make a living from music. The tragedy is that most people can't afford to make music seriously unless they already have other means of support. That's the actual gatekeeping: not talent or dedication, but economic security.

The brown vinyl (if you have any of the singles that Rainbow Records pressed, hold it up to a light and you'll see...) in landfills isn't evidence of exploitation alone—it's evidence of abundance exceeding demand. Most music, even good music, does not generate extractable economic value at living-wage scale. It never has. Platforms didn't invent that reality; they merely removed the illusions that once softened it—cheap rent, slower churn, fewer alternatives, physical scarcity.

To insist that music itself should provide living wages to all who participate is to mistake a broader social failure (lack of basic security) for a sector-specific one. The more honest demand is not "music should pay," but "people should be secure enough to make music without being destroyed by survival pressure."

That's a political project far larger than Spotify.

The Privilege to Resist

There is an irony worth naming directly: the ability to resist platform logic often depends on platform-economy wages. The person running sound on a regional tour using PTO from a cloud engineering job is not outside the system. They are using the system's surplus to create pockets of meaning the system cannot recognize.

This doesn't make the resistance fake. It makes it possible.

But it also means most people cannot participate this way. The barriers to serious music participation are not primarily about talent, dedication, or even audience—they are about economic security. Who can afford to spend a week running unpaid sound? Who can absorb tour losses? Who has health insurance that travels? Who has housing secure enough to leave?

The answer: people with cushions. The DIY ethos promises "anyone can do this," but in practice, sustaining participation over decades requires advantages that aren't evenly distributed.

None of this invalidates the work. But it does require honesty about conditions of possibility. When we celebrate musicians who "made it work" over thirty years, we should ask: what subsidized that persistence? Often the answer is: other income, family wealth, geographic luck, partner support, or some combination.

That's not moral failing. It's structural reality. And acknowledging it matters if we're trying to understand who gets to participate in "community" and on what terms.

The Ones Who Actually Do It

Not everyone in music communities is subsidizing participation with outside income. A small but real minority of musicians actually make music work as a livelihood. They tour constantly. They cultivate streaming numbers high enough to generate modest income. They teach, do session work, take side gigs, hustle. They live the precarity that others only brush against.

These musicians need the Holy Fools™.

The term comes from wisdom traditions—Alan Watts's holy fool who sees life as cosmic play (Lila) rather than serious struggle, the Blues Brothers on their mission from God, the Finnish death metal band in Heavy Trip leaving reindeer-gutting jobs to play Norway. Figures who reveal truth through seemingly absurd commitment, taking the work seriously while refusing to take the seriousness seriously.

A regional tour assembled from friends who can absorb losses, who bring their own gear, who run sound for free, who show up for love of music rather than professional compensation—this is often how working musicians make the math work in 2025. When the professional cannot afford to hire professionals, they need talented amateurs who can afford to be amateur.

The Holy Fools are technically supposed to be paid something—but the amount often goes unspoken, not from deceit, but because naming it would reveal how little the structure can bear. In an actual case of such a band, one of them maintains spreadsheets where numbers are tabulated to ensure things actually work financially: a hypothetical Vancouver, BC gig didn't make the grade. Break-even has its limits.

This creates a strange but functional symbiosis. The Holy Fools get meaningful participation in a music experience they could not otherwise access—the chance to headline venues, to play five cities up the West Coast, to be part of something life-affirming and meaningful. The working musician gets a band they can actually afford to tour with. Everyone benefits—but the structure depends on unevenly distributed economic security.

The working musician chooses friends over optimization, community over efficiency. That choice is admirable. It is also constrained. If everyone in the band needed music to pay rent, the tour would not happen. The economics do not scale that way.

This is not exploitation. It is collaboration built on honest acknowledgment of different positions. The Holy Fools know they are subsidizing. The working musician knows they are depending on it. That mutual clarity—rare in cultural labor—is itself a form of ethics.

But it does mean that even musicians who appear to "make it work" without day jobs remain embedded in an economy of subsidy. The professional musician without outside income is still sustained by a community largely composed of people who do have it.

And perhaps most telling: the working musician who has achieved what most never will—a sustainable music career spanning decades—still chose to ask friends rather than hire strangers. Not because friends are cheaper (though they are), but because three decades in music teaches you that the Holy Fools who show up for the right reasons are rarer and more valuable than hired guns with impeccable chops.

The Ship of Theseus sails on not through original components, but through people who care enough to keep replacing the missing pieces.

Survivor Bias and Gentle Resistance

Krukowski writes from the position of a survivor—and that matters. Galaxie 500 happened. Damon & Naomi sustained. Their Exact Change Press survived. These are not universal outcomes; they are improbable ones. For every such thread, there are thousands that snapped quietly.

This doesn't invalidate the analysis. It locates it.

The fishmonger story is the book's most honest moment: a beloved business with loyal clientele closes because the family chose not to continue. No villain. No market failure. Just completion. Yet this honesty doesn't extend fully to music. Krukowski mourns venue closures and label collapses while celebrating his own decades-long career—without quite acknowledging that both trajectories (closure and continuation) are normal, and that his own survival required specific advantages most don't have.

The book sometimes reads as if persistence were a replicable model rather than a contingent miracle supported by luck, class position, geography, health, and timing. The fishmonger story gestures at this honesty—the shop closed not because it failed, but because no one wanted to inherit the labor. That ending is not tragedy. It is completion.

The same may be true of many musical lives. Not everything that matters needs to scale, persist forever, or become a profession.

Commons, Scale, and the Math We Don't Escape

Why Sound Matters treats the commons with care, but stops short of confronting a harder truth: commons don't scale cleanly. They work when participants can see one another, enforce norms informally, and absorb small losses. Once anonymity enters, extraction follows.

Music commons are no exception. Community radio, Bandcamp, local venues, and regional tours function beautifully—at certain sizes. Beyond that, governance demands hierarchy, enforcement, and power structures that resemble the very systems being resisted.

The ocean is a commons. So is the internet. Both are being destroyed not because commons "failed," but because they succeeded—at attracting users who have no mechanism for collective governance at that scale. Krukowski is right that we need to defend commons. He's less clear about admitting that most commons we can actually defend are necessarily small, local, and incapable of challenging platform dominance.

This isn't pessimism. It's precision. Small commons matter—Club Passim matters, Exact Change matters, regional touring circuits matter. They just can't replace Spotify. And pretending they might risks obscuring what they can do: create pockets of different logic, spaces where attention isn't mined and labor isn't alienated. That's not nothing. It's just not everything.

This doesn't mean commons are futile. It means they are bounded. Their value lies in what they make possible locally and temporarily, not in their ability to replace global platforms.

What We Are Actually Doing

So what remains, once the illusions are stripped away?

Not solutions. Not purity. Not reform that scales. Not transcendence available on demand.

What remains is what some of us are already doing:

We work jobs that pay. We take PTO. We run sound for friends. We tour regionally at a loss (while aiming for break even). We headline a venue once and call it success. We read platform critiques on devices those platforms enable. Our shoulders hurt. The WiFi holds. The songs get played.

This is not a model. It is a practice available to those with sufficient cushion to absorb its costs. It converts surplus from scalable systems into unscalable meaning—and it works for some people, sometimes, temporarily.

That doesn't save music.
It sustains this music.
For these people.
Right now.

And maybe that's the honest place to stand.

Yes, And

Yes, sound matters.
Yes, labor matters.
Yes, platforms extract.
Yes, community creates value markets can't see.

And:

Most music communities are subsidized by non-music income.
Most music cannot generate living wages at scale.
Survival is unevenly distributed.
Commons are precious because they are limited.
Privilege doesn't invalidate care—but it does locate it.

The most ethical move available may not be fixing everything, but being honest about what enables what. To choose our wars carefully. To keep showing up where we can—without mistaking contingency for principle, or survival for virtue.

And more importantly to question why and how things are the way they are.

Krukowski is right: sound matters. It matters as material, as labor, as commons, as care.

And it matters differently depending on who is listening, who is paying, and who is being ground down so others can worry about the right fishmonger.

That's not resignation.
That's the ground we actually stand on, even or especially, when it is a position of privilege.

And standing there clearly—neither pretending purity nor surrendering to cynicism, neither claiming transcendence we haven't earned nor dismissing the transcendence others have achieved—might be the only honest position left.