8 ms·

If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. There's a

If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. There's a ton of interesting music being made outside their domain but most people will never hear any of it.

rplnt 11y ago
One would think services like Spotify would help, but they only make the music more accessible, they don't help you find it. I don't have pro and only ads I hear (besides the spotify ones that are trying to annoy you into paying) are ones from Universal Music.
- wyclif 11y ago
  I don't agree—I use Spotify a lot and it's helped tremendously in my finding new music. The "Discover Weekly" and social playlists features always point me to sources of new music.
  - cageface 11y ago
    Spotify and other streaming services are amazing for discovering new music if you're willing to put in the effort but most people just listen to what they have pushed on them. I doubt most people even realize that top 40 music isn't written by the people that perform it.
    - kedean 11y ago
      Those people wouldn't have been willing to put forth the effort in any of the old systems either. Why does that mean Spotify made things worse?
- arnvald 11y ago
  I actually use Spotify to discover new music. I take some artist I know, and then I go to some related one, and then to artist related to that one, etc. Spotify actually made discovering music way easier to me. BTW there was one website that I used very often. It was called "We are Hunted"[1] and unfortunately it was acquired by Twitter, and as we all know Twitter Music is dead. That website had a playlist of emerging new tracks and I found a lot of good music there (and I heard some artists just 1-2 years before they became very famous) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted
- bufordsharkley 11y ago
  The internet continues to make human-curated content (college/community radio, in my opinion unmatched for discovery) more accessible. But very few people listen, and with changes to fee structure, very few stations can afford to continue online broadcasting. [0] [0] http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-independent-internet-radio-may-go-extinct-in-2016/ http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-indepen...
- dluan 11y ago
  Really? What about the anti-Spotify's like HypeMachine? Fiercely independent, trendspotting/trendsetting, and sustainable. It's a very valuable service to lots of folks. IMO Spotify/Rdio/Pandora could only ever hope to go the advertising route over subscription because they couldn't crack the much harder distribution problem (e.g. the HypeM's, SoundCloud's, Drip's, etc).
  - blfr 11y ago
    Spotify stopped working on Ubuntu a while back so I can't check but I'm pretty sure there is a HypeMachine app for Spotify. So you can get recommendations from them within the Spotify client. EDIT: it stopped working after 15.04. Something with an old version libgcrypt. I didn't care enough to debug it.
    - Nullabillity 11y ago
      Spotify works fine for me, under both Ubuntu and Arch, but they removed support for apps a while ago (on all platforms, IIRC Linux was actually the last holdout).
      - jorgearturo 11y ago
        It is buggy for sure; But many of the Spotify apps I use work fine on Linux even without support though.
    - s0l1dsnak3123 11y ago
      I don't know about whether the spotify app doesn't work for you anymore, but I use mopidy-spotify on arch which gives me full spotify access in the terminal.
    - rplnt 11y ago
      There are alternative clients (pro-only).
- lectrick 11y ago
  > they don't help you find it Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)
bootload 11y ago
"If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford." That's what record companies would like you to think. Counter-example, Milk Records, Melbourne. It's might be a record company but it looks so much like a startup. - http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 - http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turning-my-brain-inside-out-and-showing-it-to-everyone http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turni...
- cageface 11y ago
  I've been traveling all over the world and all I hear everywhere I go is crap American top 40 pop music. Like I said there's a ton of interesting stuff going on outside their purview but they control the conversation right now.
  - brandnewlow 11y ago
    That's unfortunately what most people want to hear.
    - pmontra 11y ago
      Most people want to hear what most people hear, to be able to talk about it and don't be cut off from their group of friends. Same thing about TV, movies, cloths, phones, books, games etc.
      - will_pseudonym 11y ago
        I'm a non-sports person, but I had a dawning realization earlier this week. We crave shared, tribal experiences, and that's why we seek out those shared events. On the same topic, sports is a religion. If you disagree, or don't yet understand, please compare and contrast the two for me.
        philh 11y ago
kbart 11y ago
My music style is far from trendy, but I can't remember the last time I listened (even more so bought something) from the major label. I'd say is much harder to become millionaire rock star now, but for indie bands, that play as a hobby, situation is very favorable as you can contact you audience directly and you don't need to frame yourself into "format" dictated by the labels.
- cageface 11y ago
  It's an amazing time to be a hobby musician. You can record and produce your own music very cheaply and publish it to the world at the touch of a button. The problem is what happens next, which in most cases is nothing, unless you've got somebody spending money marketing your music or you're willing to work very very very hard to promote it yourself. The difference between now and the 60s through early 90s was that labels were willing to put their weight behind more oddball artists like Bowie. He wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of achieving the same fame if he were starting now. We're in a weird time where mainstream music is the most timid and cynically commercial it's ever been but the fringes are exceptionally vital.
  - tjl 11y ago
    Bowie's first albums didn't catch on at all. It wasn't until he decided to change his presentation and style that he became successful. I recommend seeing "David Bowie & The Story of Ziggy Stardust" which talks about it. It wasn't until Hunky Dory in 1971 that he really got traction. He was dropped by his label (Mercury) after his third album. He signed with RCA for his 4th, Hunky Dory (Ziggy was his 5th). After that, he basically hit single digits for his peak chart position in the UK for in to the 90s for his studio albums. So, you can look at it as Mercury took a chance, didn't succeed and dropped him. RCA tried again and succeeded. But, he changed his approach and style around this time in an attempt to market himself better. Then, EMI would reap the rewards again in the 80s for Let's Dance which hit number 1 in a half-dozen countries and close to it in a few others.
    - leoc 11y ago
davidgerard 11y ago
Not really. They are important to the ever-shrinking mainstream pop industry ... but here in the Great Cultural Fragmentation, that's a smaller and smaller slice of a larger and larger pie.
ebbv 11y ago
> If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. That's just not true. While the very few artists that do sell albums nowadays (Taylor Swift, Adele, Kanye West, etc.) are on major labels and do have promotion from major labels, these artists are also already successful enough to have done their own promotion if they wanted to. On top of that, these successful artists by todays standards are selling what would have been considered disappointing numbers for artists at their levels 20 years ago. In the 90s Hootie and the Blowfish (an act with no staying power) sold 16 million albums in the US. By comparison Adele's 25 which is a huge hit by today's standards has only sold 3 million copies in the US (though 16 million worldwide.) In the 90s many albums sold tens of millions of copies, nobody does that any more. Bowie was 100% right.
- maldusiecle 11y ago
  Where are your numbers coming from? Wikipedia says 25 has sold 7.6 million in the US, and it's only been out a few months. 21 sold 11 million. In comparison, Thriller, one of the bestselling records of all time, sold 30 million. (All these numbers are US sales only.) The data says exactly the opposite of what you're saying.
hammock 11y ago
Music sales /= music (although there's an interesting debate to be had on that)

rplnt 11y ago

One would think services like Spotify would help, but they only make the music more accessible, they don't help you find it. I don't have pro and only ads I hear (besides the spotify ones that are trying to annoy you into paying) are ones from Universal Music.

wyclif 11y ago
I don't agree—I use Spotify a lot and it's helped tremendously in my finding new music. The "Discover Weekly" and social playlists features always point me to sources of new music.
- cageface 11y ago
  Spotify and other streaming services are amazing for discovering new music if you're willing to put in the effort but most people just listen to what they have pushed on them. I doubt most people even realize that top 40 music isn't written by the people that perform it.
  - kedean 11y ago
    Those people wouldn't have been willing to put forth the effort in any of the old systems either. Why does that mean Spotify made things worse?
arnvald 11y ago
I actually use Spotify to discover new music. I take some artist I know, and then I go to some related one, and then to artist related to that one, etc. Spotify actually made discovering music way easier to me. BTW there was one website that I used very often. It was called "We are Hunted"[1] and unfortunately it was acquired by Twitter, and as we all know Twitter Music is dead. That website had a playlist of emerging new tracks and I found a lot of good music there (and I heard some artists just 1-2 years before they became very famous) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted
bufordsharkley 11y ago
The internet continues to make human-curated content (college/community radio, in my opinion unmatched for discovery) more accessible. But very few people listen, and with changes to fee structure, very few stations can afford to continue online broadcasting. [0] [0] http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-independent-internet-radio-may-go-extinct-in-2016/ http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-indepen...
dluan 11y ago
Really? What about the anti-Spotify's like HypeMachine? Fiercely independent, trendspotting/trendsetting, and sustainable. It's a very valuable service to lots of folks. IMO Spotify/Rdio/Pandora could only ever hope to go the advertising route over subscription because they couldn't crack the much harder distribution problem (e.g. the HypeM's, SoundCloud's, Drip's, etc).
- blfr 11y ago
  Spotify stopped working on Ubuntu a while back so I can't check but I'm pretty sure there is a HypeMachine app for Spotify. So you can get recommendations from them within the Spotify client. EDIT: it stopped working after 15.04. Something with an old version libgcrypt. I didn't care enough to debug it.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    Spotify works fine for me, under both Ubuntu and Arch, but they removed support for apps a while ago (on all platforms, IIRC Linux was actually the last holdout).
    - jorgearturo 11y ago
      It is buggy for sure; But many of the Spotify apps I use work fine on Linux even without support though.
  - s0l1dsnak3123 11y ago
    I don't know about whether the spotify app doesn't work for you anymore, but I use mopidy-spotify on arch which gives me full spotify access in the terminal.
  - rplnt 11y ago
    There are alternative clients (pro-only).
lectrick 11y ago
> they don't help you find it Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)

bootload 11y ago

"If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford." That's what record companies would like you to think. Counter-example, Milk Records, Melbourne. It's might be a record company but it looks so much like a startup. - http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 - http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turning-my-brain-inside-out-and-showing-it-to-everyone http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turni...

cageface 11y ago
I've been traveling all over the world and all I hear everywhere I go is crap American top 40 pop music. Like I said there's a ton of interesting stuff going on outside their purview but they control the conversation right now.
- brandnewlow 11y ago
  That's unfortunately what most people want to hear.
  - pmontra 11y ago
    Most people want to hear what most people hear, to be able to talk about it and don't be cut off from their group of friends. Same thing about TV, movies, cloths, phones, books, games etc.
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      I'm a non-sports person, but I had a dawning realization earlier this week. We crave shared, tribal experiences, and that's why we seek out those shared events. On the same topic, sports is a religion. If you disagree, or don't yet understand, please compare and contrast the two for me.
      - philh 11y ago

kbart 11y ago

My music style is far from trendy, but I can't remember the last time I listened (even more so bought something) from the major label. I'd say is much harder to become millionaire rock star now, but for indie bands, that play as a hobby, situation is very favorable as you can contact you audience directly and you don't need to frame yourself into "format" dictated by the labels.

cageface 11y ago
It's an amazing time to be a hobby musician. You can record and produce your own music very cheaply and publish it to the world at the touch of a button. The problem is what happens next, which in most cases is nothing, unless you've got somebody spending money marketing your music or you're willing to work very very very hard to promote it yourself. The difference between now and the 60s through early 90s was that labels were willing to put their weight behind more oddball artists like Bowie. He wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of achieving the same fame if he were starting now. We're in a weird time where mainstream music is the most timid and cynically commercial it's ever been but the fringes are exceptionally vital.
- tjl 11y ago
  Bowie's first albums didn't catch on at all. It wasn't until he decided to change his presentation and style that he became successful. I recommend seeing "David Bowie & The Story of Ziggy Stardust" which talks about it. It wasn't until Hunky Dory in 1971 that he really got traction. He was dropped by his label (Mercury) after his third album. He signed with RCA for his 4th, Hunky Dory (Ziggy was his 5th). After that, he basically hit single digits for his peak chart position in the UK for in to the 90s for his studio albums. So, you can look at it as Mercury took a chance, didn't succeed and dropped him. RCA tried again and succeeded. But, he changed his approach and style around this time in an attempt to market himself better. Then, EMI would reap the rewards again in the 80s for Let's Dance which hit number 1 in a half-dozen countries and close to it in a few others.
  - leoc 11y ago

davidgerard 11y ago

Not really. They are important to the ever-shrinking mainstream pop industry ... but here in the Great Cultural Fragmentation, that's a smaller and smaller slice of a larger and larger pie.

ebbv 11y ago

> If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. That's just not true. While the very few artists that do sell albums nowadays (Taylor Swift, Adele, Kanye West, etc.) are on major labels and do have promotion from major labels, these artists are also already successful enough to have done their own promotion if they wanted to. On top of that, these successful artists by todays standards are selling what would have been considered disappointing numbers for artists at their levels 20 years ago. In the 90s Hootie and the Blowfish (an act with no staying power) sold 16 million albums in the US. By comparison Adele's 25 which is a huge hit by today's standards has only sold 3 million copies in the US (though 16 million worldwide.) In the 90s many albums sold tens of millions of copies, nobody does that any more. Bowie was 100% right.

maldusiecle 11y ago
Where are your numbers coming from? Wikipedia says 25 has sold 7.6 million in the US, and it's only been out a few months. 21 sold 11 million. In comparison, Thriller, one of the bestselling records of all time, sold 30 million. (All these numbers are US sales only.) The data says exactly the opposite of what you're saying.

hammock 11y ago

Music sales /= music (although there's an interesting debate to be had on that)