Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed.

Father John Misty launches shitty new streaming service

Father John Misty is streaming an extremely lo-fi version of his new record, I Love You, Honeybear, on SAP, a new (and fake) streaming service he invented. According to Josh Tillman, the man behind Father John Misty, SAP is a “signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are ‘sapped’ of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere, and other distracting affections.” That means the streaming version of Honeybear has no vocals, tweaks, or any other aspects that could make the record interesting to listeners. Tillman also says that, “SAP file sounds incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone” and “contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software.” In other words, SAP’s version of I Love You, Honeybear won’t sound great—or even good—but it is online for free a week before its release, so that’s something.