Requiem for a Doomed Speaker

Do you remember the pandemic? People did some pretty odd things during those years. For instance, bands were doing live streams, and people were apparently watching them? I remember think pieces going “Is this the future of music?” and kinda expecting the answer to be “yes”, for once. All that came to a grinding halt even before the pandemic was over, and the conclusion was “no, we wanna get out and get drunk while listening to music”. One of the more innovative initiatives during those years was the Oda speaker. The pitch was unique: Buy these really nice-looking speakers, and you’ll get access to exclusive music. But there’s a twist! You won’t get to choose when to listen to it! Everything is live streamed, and the only thing you control is whether to turn the speakers on or not. I though that that sounded like an absolutely doomed idea. But I like fun but doomed ideas and I wanted to support them. (And people like Julia Holter, Laraaji and Arooj Aftab were on board as performers.)…