The Mission

Why I'm on a one man crusade to change our listening habits

My new book Ways of Listening hits stores tomorrow (!), so I thought I might take a moment to discuss my thinking behind writing it. The subtitle of the book is Building a Deeper Relationship with Music in the Streaming Era. As the days have marched on since I first started writing this collection of essays, the subtitle has only grown more salient.

I’ve experienced firsthand how allowing algorithmic recommendations to make my listening decisions for me impacted my taste profile at one point. When I was a heavy Spotify user (I no longer pay for the service or use it to listen to music), I noticed myself easily slipping into passivity. I become complacent, perfectly fine with autoplay recommendations that were close enough to something I would like, instead of putting in the legwork for myself.

It’s wild that something like that could happen to someone like me, a professional musician and lifelong archivist of sound, but it’s also in line with how technology has impacted every corner of our lives in ways that prioritize convenience. Just as Uber Eats makes us less thoughtful about what we put into our bodies and relying on AI makes us increasingly disinterested in thinking for ourselves, the music streaming apps profit by making us feel like choosing our own music is just another chore.

I wrote this book to remind myself and others of our own agency. Ways of Listening is coming at a critical, existential moment, as the encroaching wave of generative AI slop may soon become insurmountable. Deezer claims that 75,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to their platform everyday. It’s flooding Spotify to the point that they just slapped a “verified by Spotify” badge on my artist page to remind their users who the human musicians are.

I’ll be having conversations about the book in the coming days, starting tonight:

May 25 - Burlington - Burlington Central Library - 7 pm - REGISTER HERE
May 26 - Toronto - Type Books Junction with Elamin Abdelmahmoud - 7 pm
May 28 - Hamilton - Epic Books with Stuart Berman - 7 pm
June 2 - Montreal - Librairie Drawn & Quarterly with Hua Li 化力 - 7 pm

I’ll also have Forager vinyl on hand in both variants, so holla at me after the talks.

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I’ll be playing a rare show with the full eight piece band that I recorded Forager with on June 23 at the legendary Cameron House in Toronto. This will likely be the only show I do with this band during this album run. As explained in the video above, rather than working with a promoter, I’ve decided to put the show on myself. I’m even using my own ticket provider!

The show is 50% sold out already, so if you want to be part of what will no doubt be a special night, grab your tickets below ASAP:

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You can find me updating my playlists or hanging on TikTok, Instagram and Bluesky. You can listen to my music on Apple Music, Bandcamp and Spotify. You can get Cadence Weapon merchandise here. Pick up your copy of Bedroom Rapper here and please rate it on Goodreads.