The Future of Music Is Offline Part - 1
Spotify and AI are replacing our living music with a dead one
Reposted from Medium.
Back in 2018, I built a remote drum recording studio. To promote my services, I posted short videos on Instagram showing myself mic’ing and recording drums to various tracks. I quickly noticed that the currency of Instagram, especially Instagram Reels, in the music performance space was driven by epic feats of technical mastery and often unintentionally comic acrobatic performances compressed into 30—to 60-second snippets.
Around this time, an old friend from my University of Miami music school days shared an interesting story on Facebook. As the bassist in a household-name band, he had just completed a round of auditions to find a drummer for their next world tour. While they’d invited their usual roster of in-demand session drummers, they’d also decided to change it up and reach out to several Instagram drum stars.
What struck him — and he was diplomatic about not naming names — was how these social media virtuosos couldn’t actually play a song. The band could tell within the first measure something wasn’t right. They ultimately hired one of the in-demand session drummers (virtually unknown on Instagram) while the Instagram stars returned to posting their 30-second clips of superhuman technical displays, racking up hundreds of thousands of views and likes.
I wonder which path in life I would have taken if Instagram or TikTok had been available to me in the 1990s, when I was a teenager and then a young adult, practicing 8 hours a day on top of an 18-credit course load at the University of Miami, learning some really complex technical chops.
During this time, when I was spending long hours in the practice room, my mindset aligned perfectly with those Instagram stars. Back then, I didn’t understand the appeal of a drummer like Steve Ferrone, who played on this track:
But something important happened to me during this period that altered the course of my life trajectory.
The Night I Learned About The Living Middle
I was 20 years old and playing in one of the many bands I was part of in the Miami music scene in the ’90s. One of these bands was a straight-up cover band. We played tiki bars, restaurants along the coast, and unremarkable strip mall joints where no one cared who we were. It paid the bills, and more importantly, it forced me to learn hundreds of songs across genres and decades.
One night, we were playing one of these forgettable gigs, but the bandleader happened to be related to Elliot Randall — the guitarist who played the infamous solo on Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years.” Jimmy Page called it his favorite guitar solo in a 1999 interview, and in 2016, during a conversation with YouTuber Oliver Patrick Loughnan, Page rated it a 12 out of 10. Randall was in town for a night and sat in with the band. No one in that bar knew who he was. But I did.
And I wanted to impress him.
So, I played what I thought was an incredible set. It was technically precise and, as far as I could tell, full of passion. At the end of the gig, we went to the bar, and I sat next to Elliot. I leaned over and casually remarked, ‘So, that was fun.’
He smiled and said, ‘Oh, I had a lot of fun.’
Then he looked at me and said, ‘I have a question for you. When was the last time you got laid?’
I laughed, caught off guard, glancing down at my calloused hands. ‘I don’t know, to be honest.’
He nodded. ‘Alright, maybe that wasn’t fair. When was the last time you went on a hike?’
I thought about it. ‘I don’t remember, actually.’
“When was the last time you went camping?”
‘Middle school, maybe?’
He nodded again. ‘Yeah. I can kind of tell.’
Then he said, ‘Look man, tomorrow I’m flying to Jamaica to do a session with Bernard Purdie on drums.’
Bernard Purdie — the legendary drummer. The man who created the Purdie Shuffle.
Then Elliot looked at me and said, ‘You’ve got more chops than Bernard. You’ve got more chops than most anyone I’ve ever played with. You execute impeccably. But you don’t have anything to say.’
That hit me pretty hard.
He kept going, ‘I think what you need to do is stop spending so much time in a practice room and spend a little more time outside and hanging with some other people, you know experiencing life. Then come back and play some music.’
That exchange changed me forever.
The Roots of the Hollowing
I took his advice and went on to a 25-year career as a touring and session drummer. In midlife, after a post-COVID career shift, I stepped back from music as a profession and began to think more critically about its role in our lives. During those years on the road, I also worked with the Music Genome Project at Pandora Radio. From that vantage point, I saw firsthand the rise of music streaming and its growing dominance.
As the title of this piece suggests, if music is to persist as music rather than as mere content, its future is offline. That conclusion has emerged from a long process since I retired from music. Over the last five years, I have read well over 300 books, starting with fiction and turning toward philosophy, economics, and cultural criticism. What began as a personal shift: walking instead of drinking, reading instead of scrolling, became a deliberate practice of rethinking what it means to live and to create outside the logic of efficiency, scalability, and convenience. In that process, I began to see music differently, too.
One of the writers who shaped my understanding during this time and who will serve as our interlocutor in this discussion of music versus content and online versus offline is Paul Valéry. Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, Valéry diagnosed a hollowing out of culture that has only intensified today. He observed, for example, how education, once centered on cultivating the mind and spirit, became fixated on producing diplomas. And once the diploma became the goal, it reshaped the entire system. What could not be measured in terms of its utility toward that goal was pushed aside.
Valéry intuited that once knowledge was subordinated to the logic of certification through the diploma, education reoriented itself around that goal. The process fundamentally altered its relational and ethical substance. He was clear that this was not just a problem within education, but part of a broader movement in Modernity where human practices, once relational and embodied, became instrumentalized in service of measurable outcomes.
This is precisely why I have come to believe that music’s only future is offline. But before I explain what I mean by that, I want to show exactly how Valéry and others have led me to this conclusion.
Dead Languages and Dead Music
‘Let us confess,’ Valéry wrote, ‘the real object of education is the diploma.’
For Valéry, this fixation on credentials was catastrophic for genuine culture. ‘I never hesitate to declare that the diploma is the deadly enemy of culture,’ he insisted. That statement might seem extreme to many of us today, nearly one hundred years later. Our entire lives have been structured around pursuing degrees that confer credentialed professionalism. We are told from childhood that getting a college education, and maybe even a PhD, is the guaranteed path to a better life.
I went to music school for this very reason. I was told a college degree would increase my chances in life. And in many ways, it did. I could not have gotten the job at Pandora without it. Every music analyst at the Music Genome Project was required to hold a music degree just to be considered for the job. However, I doubt that same degree had much to do with me recording on a Sheryl Crow record or landing the audition and getting the gig with Chuck Prophet after his previous drummer left suddenly to go on tour with Bob Dylan.
In his 1935 essay The Outlook for Intelligence, Valéry uses the teaching of Latin and Greek to illustrate his critique. These ancient languages were no longer taught to foster understanding and engagement or to reveal enduring truths. Instead, they were taken out of their living context and reduced to mere requirements for obtaining a diploma. These languages, which were once alive in thought and culture, had already become dead languages.
But through the modern educational system, Valéry argued, they became something even more tragic and sinister: they were now twice-dead languages.
When we see the use to which those unhappy, twice-dead languages are put, we have the impression of some strange fraud. They are no longer dealt with as real languages or literatures; these tongues seem never to have been spoken but by ghosts.
Valéry saw how the diploma, structured as the object through which people gained access to material success, transformed Latin and Greek from living languages embedded within cultural and historical contexts into random decontextualized bits of grammar and vocabulary. These fragments were processed solely to pass exams and earn credentials. As Valéry described it, this was an ‘adulterated form of culture’ in which ‘the reading of authors has been replaced by the use of summaries, manuals, absurd digests of knowledge, ready-made collections of questions and answers, extracts, and other abominations.’
Valéry’s insight about fragments detached from their contexts foreshadowed a process that defines our digital age. Extracting cultural elements from their social and temporal contexts — placing them into containers for later instrumental use — prefigures exactly what happens with generative AI, Spotify algorithms, mood playlists, and those viral 30-second Instagram videos of drummers performing technical feats without musical substance. Each operates as a system of twice-dead cultural fragments. First killed by removal from their original context, then reanimated as hollow technical displays optimized for circulation rather than meaning.
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education, identified something similar through his concept of archetypal forces. Steiner named these forces Ahriman and Lucifer. They distort human development in opposing but equally damaging ways. Ahriman represents the cold, mechanistic logic that pulls humanity toward efficiency, utility, and control. Theirs is the voice that whispers that everything must be measurable, systematic, optimized. Lucifer, by contrast, seduces through abstraction, fantasy, and disconnection from material reality. Ahriman freezes; Lucifer volatilizes.
For Steiner, modern education increasingly fell under Ahriman’s grip. Living knowledge is reduced to systems of calculation. Learning becomes processing. Wisdom is replaced with technically accurate but spiritually hollow information. Steiner called these Ahrimanic containers ‘preserving jars’ — receptacles where cultural elements were maintained in appearance but killed in essence. Valéry’s twice-dead languages fit easily within Steiner’s metaphor.
These preserving jars help us understand how generative AI came to be seen as not only desirable but useful. In Steiner’s terms, we are reaching into these jars, extracting fragments of what was once living culture, and recombining them in the illusion of creativity. But what is produced has no living relation to its origin. Dead information is reassembled and presented as if it were alive by dead machines.
Though Valéry never used the term ‘preserving jars,’ he diagnosed the same condition. ‘As for books, never have so many been published. Never has so much been read, or rather, skimmed over!’ he wrote with alarm. ‘What will be the result of this great debauch?’ His answer was clear: ‘Our verbal sensibility is being brutalized, dulled, degraded. Our inner language is wearing out.’
Valéry saw how this education configuration replaced ‘the reading of authors with the use of summaries, manuals, absurd digests of knowledge, ready-made collections of questions and answers, extracts, and other abominations.’ These are precisely Steiner’s preserving jars by another name, the repositories of decontextualized knowledge fragments that maintain the appearance of culture while killing its essence.
As this proliferation continues, the inflation of publicness devalues everything it touches. ‘Adjectives are devaluated,’ Valéry observed. ‘The inflation of publicity has depleted the power of the strongest epithets.’ The result is ‘a gray matter in which nothing stands out, nothing can last, and we have an odd sense of the monotony of novelty; we are bored with wonders and extremes.’
When Elliot Randall asked me when I had last gone hiking, camping, or gotten laid, he was diagnosing the same condition Valéry and Steiner warned about. He saw in me a preserving jar walking around in human form. I had mastered the technical language of drumming but had nothing authentic to communicate through it. My playing was what Valéry would recognize as a twice-dead language: first killed by its reduction to technical patterns, then killed again by my performance of it without lived experience to animate it.
Like the Instagram drummers who dazzle in 30-second videos but cannot play a song with a band, I had become a purveyor of fragments optimized for technical display. I could execute with precision what Randall described as ‘more chops than Bernard Purdie,’ but I was speaking with the voice of ghosts.
Reclaiming the Living Middle
Elliot Randall told me I had nothing to say. Today, we have built entire systems that say nothing endlessly, with perfect technical precision. Spotify streams this nothingness all day. AI generates it in seconds. But behind the technical achievement lies an absence of resonance. What remains is merely content optimized for circulation within capital’s endless carousel.
‘Surely,’ you might protest, ‘when I stream Led Zeppelin or The Beatles on Spotify, I’m experiencing something real, not nothingness.’
You are — along with thousands upon thousands of other remarkable expressions of human creativity and lived experience. But these islands of meaning are being submerged by the daily flood of content. Approximately 100,000 new tracks arrive on Spotify every day. This isn’t musical democratization, it is what Valéry called the ‘inflation of publicity’ — a dissolution through abundance where nothing can stand out and nothing can last.
The wave metaphor helps us understand this process. A wave forms with distinct character, travels across the ocean, and crashes upon the shore. As it recedes, the next wave carries fragments back to sea and deposits some of it back on shore. Through countless cycles, the original expression is completely replaced, though the pattern of waves continues.
Similarly, streaming platforms maintain the appearance of musical continuity while systematically replacing music with content engineered for metrics. Articles detailing how the recording process and song construction have been radically altered over the last 5 years reveal a single purpose: to catch a ride on Spotify algorithms. Songs now come designed for publicness, not as expressions of inner embodied experience that reveal something real. True art seeks and reveals what is real by showing what is possible. You can not do that when you are chasing what an algorithm demands.
The platforms serve their financial masters by optimizing not for resonance but for passive engagement: minutes listened, advertisements served, data harvested. What began as a library of music that engages and hopefully disrupts transforms into a system for extracting value from attention while avoiding at all costs any shock that might take you out of the consumption flow and into reflection. The goal is frictionless consumption, not meaningful encounter.
‘So what do we do?’ you might ask. This brings me back to the title of this piece: The future of music is offline.
Music and art, more broadly, cannot survive within this digital architecture of preserving jars.
If we try to play the game, we will be completely subsumed. We cannot match this flood of content, nor should we try. This endless stream serves the ultimate Ahrimanic master of efficiency and utility.
What’s fading away is what we might call the living middle ground of music: the space where embodiment, struggle, time, and ritual create meaning. This middle ground still exists on the margins in live performances, independent scenes, and communities that prioritize musical relationships over metrics.
However, the dominant systems push music toward two extremes: either toward technical optimization for algorithmic distribution (what Steiner would recognize as Ahrimanic precision) or toward disconnected abstraction that loses touch with lived experience (Steiner’s Luciferian tendency). The result is music produced and consumed but rarely deeply known or truly lived.
Elliot Randall’s advice to me — to leave the practice room and live life — was precisely about reclaiming this middle ground. He understood that technical execution without lived experience creates hollow virtuosity with nothing to say. I feel fortunate Instagram did not exist at this stage of my life as I believe the pull of view counts and likes, the seduction of hollow virality, would have made me dismiss the sage advice that changed my life’s trajectory.
Randall’s wisdom points us toward what we need today: not more content but a deliberate rebalancing that reclaims this living middle. I see now that he was intuiting what Steiner formally recognized — that the path forward isn’t surrendering to either Ahriman’s cold precision or Lucifer’s disconnected fantasy but finding equilibrium between them, this resonant middle. We must create spaces where music can exist as a relational practice, one that embraces embodiment, time, ritual, and even the necessary struggle that gives art its depth.
The need for this rebalancing exists not just in how we engage with music publicly but in how we produce it. That remote drum recording studio I built years ago? I created it because most people now write and record music in isolation, and I saw an opportunity to offer live drums to these disconnected creators. My studio was hugely successful until Covid hit and closed my young son’s daycare. Yet, this disruption ultimately served a deeper purpose: it forced me to step out of the flow of optimization for metrics and utility. It compelled me to reconsider what I was doing and question who I was ultimately serving as a remote session musician. I saw that I was merely filling Steiner’s preserving jars, adding more decontextualized fragments to an already fragmented musical landscape.
Coming to terms with all of this has been a slow, arduous process. I now see that landing on Medium roughly a year and a half ago has been instrumental in this journey. Writing here has helped me transform loose threads of thought and unrefined anxious resonances into articulated ideas. This platform has also provided the necessary space for personal clarity and meaningful engagement with readers who have joined me in this public exploration.
I have come to the end of one phase. Years spent questioning, reading, and trying to understand how we arrived at this point are giving way to something else. Now, I am working to build an alternative—not to resist and critique the future but to create a different one. This is the response to the question that has haunted me: What do we do now?
The answer is clear. The future of music is offline. It lives in reclaiming the middle ground where meaning is made — embodied, relational, and alive.
Epilogue
As I’ve been writing this piece, another memory has surfaced. I guess it’s been sitting quietly in the background, waiting for the right time to express itself. Looking back now, it might explain how I ended up here, saying what I’m saying right here.
In 2003, I was on tour with a songwriter, playing a series of festival dates across the Southwest. We had an off night between gigs and stopped in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The bandleader’s family lived there, and they’d arranged a show at a restaurant: not a venue, just a place with some tables and chairs and a small corner for live music.
There were maybe ten people in the room, including the staff. I remember being annoyed. I had just finished helping set up the PA, which I didn’t usually do, and the whole thing felt pointless. So, I closed my eyes and played the set for myself—to work something out, not for anyone else.
A few weeks later, I got a call from a Seattle area code. I let it go to voicemail. I was broke at that time and figured it was a bill collector. But the message was strange. “If this is the Commander, call this number.” That was what the band had started calling me on that tour — Jeff ‘the Commander’ Anthony — but that’s a longer story. I called back.
It turned out Paul Allen had been at that show. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, one of the wealthiest men in the world at the time. He had a private recording studio outside Seattle and wanted to fly me up to record. A few weeks later, I was in his studio. At the time, Pearl Jam’s drum tech, Gregg Keplinger, had been hired to set up and tune kits for me, but Paul was not there. I asked where he was, and apparently, he was in Germany at the Steinway factory picking out a new piano, and besides, I wasn’t brought in to play with him. He just wanted to record me playing grooves. No songs, no structure. Just playing.
At the end of the third day, I noticed they were transferring everything from the hard drive to tape. Not the other way around, which is how it’s usually done if you want that natural tape compression. I asked why. The engineer told me the recordings were being archived. Paul Allen had a vault in the mountains where he stored what he considered cultural treasures. Things he thought were worth saving if the world ended, or something like that. My playing, for whatever reason, was now part of that.
That got me thinking that when I first walked into the studio, Gregg introduced himself and asked how I liked my drums tuned. After a few minutes, he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ I told him, ‘Honestly, I don’t know what’s happening right now.’ He smiled and said, ‘Paul called me and said he had discovered the greatest drummer he’s ever heard, and I needed to come here and set things up so he could record you. That’s all I know.’
It didn’t hit me until much later. What I had done in that studio over those three days wasn’t just playing drums. I was creating something stripped of its context, temporality, and, ultimately, life. My performances were being preserved not to make music but as artifacts—something to be stored and archived. I had become a contributor to what Rudolf Steiner called the preserving jars, and I guess I am not sure exactly how I have felt about that.
About 4 or 5 years later, I was doing a recording session in San Rafael, CA, and the producer asked if I had a tambourine. I said I did not because every studio I visit has a crate full of tambourines and shakers they know how to record well. So I found myself running down to the local music store, and I grabbed two tambourines, went to the counter, and handed over my credit card. The guy behind the counter says ‘wait are you Jeff ‘the commander’ Anthony who is a drummer on the Drumcore sampling software?’
I said, ‘Well, yes, that nickname is used for me in certain bands, but what the heck is Drumcore?’ He walked over to a shelf behind the register and pulled down a box with pictures of a bunch of famous drummers and me. It was a collection of grooves and samples from each player. So this is what became of the grooves I spent three days recording and ending up on a 24-inch reel-to-reel tape in a vault.
It wasn’t until I started thinking through Paul Valéry’s warning about the diploma that I understood what happened in that studio. Just as the diploma became the goal rather than knowledge itself, my drumming had become valuable not as music but as archived fragments. Knowledge is broken into summaries, digests, and manuals; drumming is broken into grooves, samples, and patterns. Valéry warned that the inflation of publicity devalues everything it touches.
Valéry saw this happening in 1935. Steiner saw it too, in a different register. In Paul Allen’s mountain vault and in that Drumcore software package, my playing had become twice-dead: first removed from its living context, then preserved in a way that prevents it from ever truly coming alive again. These preserving jars aren’t wrong in themselves. Steiner understood that we need memory, preservation, technique. But without the living middle, they are hollow. Without the embodied practice of life, they are ghosts speaking with borrowed voices.
For years, my playing was part of that system. A perfect fragment, stored away for a future that may never come. This is what Elliot Randall was warning me about all those years ago: technical perfection without life experience creates music that is flawless in execution but empty in meaning.
That’s why I believe the future of music is offline. Because that’s where life is. That’s where the middle ground exists between technical precision and meaningful expression. That’s where music remains a relational practice rather than content to be consumed.
That’s where I’m headed now.
Citations
Valéry, P. (1962). The outlook for intelligence (D. Folliot & J. Mathews, Trans.; F. Valéry, Pref.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1935)
Steiner, R. (1993). The influences of Lucifer and Ahriman: Human responsibility for the Earth (D. S. Osmond, Trans.). Anthroposophic Press. (Original lectures given 1919)
Anthony, J. (2024, November 20). Reading 333 books in five years: A guide to creating time, space, and habits for serious reading. Counter Arts.
Reading 333 Books in Five Years
A guide to creating time, space, and habits for serious readingmedium.com
I’m left speechless by your long, but to the point post that is authentic as it gets! Most ppl these days are so out of touch mostly because of the “programming”. I no longer am deeply connected to most of my family members because they will never be willing to see things through a different set of eyes. It’s all about instant gratification to quench their thirst for something that’s not even real! Only other thing that could be said is that it’s crucial that we retune to the original sounds of the Universe - solfeggio frequencies. I SO appreciate your thought and time in producing this post!