“It’s all about discoverness, freedoming and sharehood.” These are the words of Father John Misty, the American folk wizard behind Streamline Audio Protocol, or SAP.
The self-made format for music streaming launched earlier this week, and it saps the listening experience of everything good and pure – and it’s all for free.
“Is there a way to prevent anyone from spending money ever?” asks Misty frontman J Tillman (right). Traditionally, money (or “value tokens”) can be exchanged for music (or “air noise”), but the new platform does away with this archaic trade-off by cleverly devaluing all stages of the system.
“SAP is a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are ‘sapped’ of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations.” The result is a low-resolution sound lump that vaguely echoes the original track.
To preview the format, Misty's forthcoming album is available to stream from his site now. Title track I Love You, Honeybear ultimately sounds like an autoharp breaking up with a kazoo, where Bored in the USA is aurally similar to a family of keytars experiencing a violent car crash.
Tillman’s platform has all the hallmarks of a proper format; its legitimacy confirmed by a spattering of vapid mantras on the SAP website such as “Free to be Free”.
All of this undoes the work of Neil Young, who recently developed his own high-quality music player, Pono. It uses a Free Lossless Audio Code (FLAC) format to create the warm, dynamic sound of analogue, making even the most dilapidated jalopy soundsystem feel like a control room. Allegedly.
Undoubtedly it’s infinitely better than Tillman’s efforts, but it costs more than free, which is where it falls down for most people. Ol’ Young will never beat those crazy low prices.
In Misty’s new game there’s a new loser, not the artist or the fan – but the song. So everybody wins. Emily Longworth
