7 ms·

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Rocker

98 points by kawera 9y ago

jimbokun 9y ago
Any advice for the parent of a teenage who absolutely loves making music?
- TrueTom 9y ago
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13648043-platform https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13648043-platform
  - jimbokun 9y ago
    That looks really interesting, thanks!
- adamsea 9y ago
  Encouragement plus realism, without crushing their dreams. Supporting them but making sure they stay in school, etc. lessons if you can, go see a variety of concerts of all kinds with them if you can. And David Byrnes (of the Talking Heads) book “How Music Works” (unless they only like classical music, though perhpaps even then).
- haywirez 9y ago
  Make them understand that the medium and context of music will be different going forward. They don't need to make a living creating and selling recordings; there are many unexplored avenues and they should pursue those instead. As an example, I'm imagining my music more and more as an interactive app compared to a standard album. Christopher Small's Musicking[0] has influenced my thinking on this topic. The gist of the book is to understand music more as a verb ([communal] activity) than a noun (product, object). [0] https://www.amazon.com/musicking-meanings-performing-listening-culture/dp/0819522570 https://www.amazon.com/musicking-meanings-performing-listeni...
- analog31 9y ago
  My kids love playing classical music, and are in a youth orchestra. I know it sounds square, but it does have some selling points. It's supported by money. It's not a boys club. The kids aren't 100% supervised, so there's still a social hang that they can enjoy. For some kids, the fact that it spans multiple age groups is a plus. When I was a teenager, I enjoyed mixing with my own peers but also adults who had a lot better stories and jokes, and who had really experienced life in the trenches. I've noticed that among the people I know who played music as kids and actually kept with it into adulthood, virtually none of them play rock music.
sgt101 9y ago
The end of culture -> a culture needs a community to generate it, the current set of social structure being mediated by internet technology isn't sufficient.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
What's interesting is that Bandcamp is relegated to a passing note at the end of the article, but the service that Bandcamp offers is better than almost any record label contract in the "good old days". You get a much higher cut of your profits, and you almost certainly keep the rights to your own music. The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that. In terms of human connection, there's still plenty to be had in the act of performing music. When it comes to starting to learn an instrument, I agree that there are fewer role models around than when I was young. However, popular music moves in fads. Where I'm from, guitar-based music was last "in" in the late 00's, I'm sure it'll come around again.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that. The real downside is that with no gatekeepers there and so many acts (orders of magnitudes more) you can make and release albums that nobody hears at all. Whereas in the past, if you made it to have an album out, you had a small following almost guaranteed. At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company, you could blame your failure to those A&R guys that failed to appreciate you, or get your lack of contract as a sign that you're not good enough to begin with. Now that you can easily make an album, everybody both feels more entitled to success, but also gets to see firsthand how the audience just doesn't care.
  - mikestew 9y ago
    At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company Though I get what you’re driving at, there have been companies that will press your basement demo onto a vinyl LP almost as long as vinyl records have been made (and later cassettes and CDs, of course). They’d do the artwork, too, from “we’ll have an in-house artist do it for lots of money” to “we’ll put your camera-ready art on it for a little extra”. But pre-internet, that meant selling the hard copies at shows and maybe the local indie record store. What one is missing, of course, is the promotion from a label. But the production of hard copies of music hasn’t been a barrier for a long time.
1337biz 9y ago
Not that long ago it was far assumed that record labels would loose their power and the easy path to production and promotion would lead to a lot more independent structures. What happned that we still have a similar superstar culture as we had 20 years ago?
- Nav_Panel 9y ago
  > What happned that we still have a similar duperstar culture than 20 years ago? Perhaps idols have network effects. Do most people actually want independent structures? They're available to use if you do (see: bandcamp). I assert most people would prefer a musical common knowledge (even if banal) over more interesting yet isolating music. In a sense, musical isolation outside the mainstream has gotten worse over time, as the internet has made it easier to follow your aesthetic judgments into deeper and more disparate rabbit holes. The idea of a subculture seemed a happy medium, but these have mostly become "atomized" out of existence. There does still exist an "indie" alternate-mainstream, along with a few others, but for the more engaged music fan it's somewhat of a lonely world. Hopefully the pendulum will soon begin to swing back toward shared experience and music creation as a means toward community-building (see: prayer), rather than as an end in itself.
- goldmouth 9y ago
  Check out hip hop. Many of the current stars started out posting videos to YouTube or tracks to SoundCloud. The diy hustle of making mix tapes and homemade videos is how the current stars of rap, Migos, blew up. SoundCloud rappers are a thing. It's a drug influenced, dreary subgenra that's launched dozens of stars, lil uzi vert or for example.
  - 1337biz 9y ago
    But why do they almost all still end up at one of the big 3 labels? Or are there many soundclouders actually able to make a decent living from it?
- JohnnyConatus 9y ago
  The more competition that enters the market the more essential marketing and branding become to differentiate the product. Everyone who told us musicians that flattening the barriers to entry would lead to more income were either ignorant of economics or willfully ignoring it further their interests. Few bands make more money off of Bandcamp then they did flogging their CDs.
Mizza 9y ago
The artwork is done by Brian Chippendale, the drummer from Lightning Bolt, who are the greatest band in the world.
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  The best show I ever saw was Lightning Bolt in an abandoned warehouse with a couple of drone/dark ambient acts opening up. It was surreal, amazing experience. They are crazy live. This piece was written by Rhett Miller of the Old 97's, who are a similarly great live band who are absolutely worth seeing if you can.
  - AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
    I had a similar Lightning Bolt experience in college in Indiana. Did the audience surround the band in a circle?
    - deadmetheny 9y ago
      Yup, even when I've seen them play at clubs with proper stages they set up their kit in the middle of the floor.
      - AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
        I always loved that about them, it's such a friendly gesture and shows a real level of trust they've been able to establish among their fan base. Nice username by the way, but I hope Metheny does not die for some time. :)
  - arstin 9y ago
    Aye, Lightning Bolt was one of my favorite shows ever too. Had just finished college. Saw them play on the floor of a dive bar with just a few other local patrons. I stood right in front of the band---could have kicked the drumkit---with my body convulsing from the intensity. The whole experience was cathartic.
- 9y ago
davidw 9y ago
It's kind of hard to disambiguate the time in my life and the music that I grew up liking with everything else, so it's really difficult to judge for me. I recognize that sort of 'scene': one of the redeeming things about growing up in Eugene was seeing the Daddies play at the local place. Still an amazing band in terms of being good at being eclectic. Maybe technology is letting people connect with the sort of music they like these days in other ways though?
JohnnyConatus 9y ago
The nice thing about the old world of music was that when you played for an audience there was nothing going on but what you were doing. Now the band has to compete with everyone's phones.
- vondur 9y ago
  The two Misfit reunion shows have a no cell phone policy. They even have secure lockers set up to store them.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    The problem is that the band still has to compete for the instant gratification that those (now locked) cell phones offered their fans all day around.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      That doesn't seem like it should be that hard. You are at the concert experiencing the concert, which should be pretty instant and gratifying. Either you like it enough that you don't miss your phone, or you decide that the concert experience isn't what you're looking for. Being at the concert but doing something else seems like they are doing it to say they were there, and there are are always other ways to signal status people can fall back on.
- Joeboy 9y ago
  Another thing - you could sell music (ie. records / CDs) at gigs. You can still just about do that but probably not for long, at least with most markets. A small independent band will likely make more profit on a single CD sale than they'll ever make in downloads.
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    Records nowadays have an mp3 download code with them. The physical media of the record is almost just a placeholder, now, but people still like that even if they don't have a record player (!). Same thing could apply to some other object. I've seen it done with USB sticks and business cards. Some sort of physical media is still useful for that purpose.
javajosh 9y ago
First, I was curious to know if Google ripped this guy off. I could only find his song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU) not the Google ad. But, as a (amateur) musician myself, I don't think there is much to the chord progression. It sounds like a thousand other songs - the lyrics and delivery are what make this song unique and good. Second, incredibly well-written. Very persuasive. Third, it's been clear for a long time music was going to only get harder to succeed in, for the sole reason that as time goes on you are competing with the entirety of music history. Your recorded music is competing with everything ever recorded, Beatles, 80's glam rock, Mozart, and rain forest nature sounds. (Live music has magic, yes, but people are getting immune to it.) Fourth, the 60's-00's was a golden era where technology made it just barely possible to record and distribute music, in a way that required a lot of labor. That labor made it more collaborative, and served as a kind of distributed gate-keeper to the market. Now, technology is too good, and unless an EMP pulse from a solar flare or nuke destroys all digital recordings of everything, it's not going to turn back. Fifth, I think the solution is to embrace and extend the modern trends. Get people to collaborate with you on stage using their cell phones. As a performer, connect your phone to the PA, then run a webserver that people in the audience can access over the local subnet. They can then affect the sound in arbitrary ways (perhaps most simply by making beats).
coldtea 9y ago
>It’s all different now. My own observation of the current music industry is colored by my history with the extinct model. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to come up in this world of SoundCloud rappers and Swedish hit factories churning out auto-tuned EDM or whatever. Believe me, I’m keenly aware that even these two meager examples must make me sound impossibly old. My point is that if I was a fourteen-year-old depressive nowadays, I’m not sure what would even draw me into the world of music to begin with. Not much. And indeed, kids todays are much less invested in music than kids where in the 60s till the 80s or so. For one thing, there are now tons of competing outlets that weren't around then: tons of movies of all eras available (and most current top-tier movies made for teenage sensibilities, less All ), great TV series with huge production values, Netflix and co, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, the web at large, texting, computers, mobile apps, and games. Besides, there's less mystery in music acts (total transparency and 24/7 social media exposure for any fan who cares who check), less exclusivity (all music available on online services), and less ubiquity (each act gets a much smaller of the attention pie, and can even have a top-10 hit nationwide that half the nation haven't even heard or knows -- something impossible when there was huge radio and only a few TV stations and outlets and hits were hammered constantly without other recourse to everybody).
empath75 9y ago
Edm is still extremely social and face to face. Keep in mind that dance music is fundamentally music for a club and designed to be experienced on a loud system in a dance floor full of people. The process of making and distributing the music may be digital and remote, but the intended way to experience it is as social as it gets. If you want your music to get attention one of the best ways to do it is to go to a lot of clubs, and meet promoters and DJ’d face to face and to DJ yourself.
cousin_it 9y ago
Yes, the rock music scene is dying, but some other music scenes are very alive and social (like edm). So we probably shouldn't blame YouTube. It's just rock music that's dying.
- analog31 9y ago
  Sixty years is a pretty good run. I think that's longer than the jazz era.
smelendez 9y ago
> For every one of these fledgling anarcho-syndicalist collectives, there are a thousand or a million kids alone in their bedrooms staring at Protools screens wondering what they have to do to get the Swedish cabal to write a hit song for them. There's always been pop music. More people were listening to Ace of Base and Hanson in the '90s than to Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I get it's a personal essay, but I wish he had spent some time talking to young people who are making music about their actual practices. To bring it back to HN, nobody's typing Basic code out of Creative Computing or swapping homebrew code on the local BBS anymore, but there are more people making video games than ever.
TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
Anybody have favorite sites for music discovery? Soundcloud any good? Reddit? Blogs? NPR Tiny Desk? Years ago, I used to use the "similar" feature in Rhapsody and found some music that way, not sure what people use today.
- b1daly 9y ago
  Spotify for music discovery, hands down. It offers multiple ways to discover new music (or music new to you). It’s really beyond anything else, ever!
- icebraining 9y ago
  In my case, YouTube (related videos, not their recommendations), Wikipedia and search engines. But that's with active search, not passive suggestions.
b1daly 9y ago
One thing the articles references, which I don’t think people grasp yet,is that young people are inclined to create the music in the vein that they listen to. Nowadays, that means music that is entirely synthetic in its sound sources, and production methods. This music is not “performed” it is “programmed.” The expressiveness of music is no longer tied to some kind of real-time activity, generated by human muscle. The music that dominates the charts simply cannot be performed. A concert of this music is more akin to a pantomimed multimedia presentation. Because the care and feeding of an actual musician is quite high, I think we are undergoing the end of musicians, as a category. This is the end of an ancient practice. It’s a kind of singularity, of unknown outcomes. This is not to say there won’t be some musicians, but the cultural weight of this activity is being drastically marginalized. Performing music with others is a wonderful activity, that provides rewarding connections with others unlike anything else I know. Soon, people won’t know what they are missing.
- icebraining 9y ago
  This music is not “performed” it is “programmed.” I think this is a false dichotomy - it's often both. Even people using completely digital sources (like electronic musicians) still perform live, and not all just press play. I'm also reminded of Bret Victor's demos in Stop Drawing Dead Fish; programming and performing can be intertwined into new art forms.

98 points by kawera 9y ago

jimbokun 9y ago

Any advice for the parent of a teenage who absolutely loves making music?

TrueTom 9y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13648043-platform https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13648043-platform
- jimbokun 9y ago
  That looks really interesting, thanks!
adamsea 9y ago
Encouragement plus realism, without crushing their dreams. Supporting them but making sure they stay in school, etc. lessons if you can, go see a variety of concerts of all kinds with them if you can. And David Byrnes (of the Talking Heads) book “How Music Works” (unless they only like classical music, though perhpaps even then).
haywirez 9y ago
Make them understand that the medium and context of music will be different going forward. They don't need to make a living creating and selling recordings; there are many unexplored avenues and they should pursue those instead. As an example, I'm imagining my music more and more as an interactive app compared to a standard album. Christopher Small's Musicking[0] has influenced my thinking on this topic. The gist of the book is to understand music more as a verb ([communal] activity) than a noun (product, object). [0] https://www.amazon.com/musicking-meanings-performing-listening-culture/dp/0819522570 https://www.amazon.com/musicking-meanings-performing-listeni...
analog31 9y ago
My kids love playing classical music, and are in a youth orchestra. I know it sounds square, but it does have some selling points. It's supported by money. It's not a boys club. The kids aren't 100% supervised, so there's still a social hang that they can enjoy. For some kids, the fact that it spans multiple age groups is a plus. When I was a teenager, I enjoyed mixing with my own peers but also adults who had a lot better stories and jokes, and who had really experienced life in the trenches. I've noticed that among the people I know who played music as kids and actually kept with it into adulthood, virtually none of them play rock music.

sgt101 9y ago

The end of culture -> a culture needs a community to generate it, the current set of social structure being mediated by internet technology isn't sufficient.

ZenoArrow 9y ago

What's interesting is that Bandcamp is relegated to a passing note at the end of the article, but the service that Bandcamp offers is better than almost any record label contract in the "good old days". You get a much higher cut of your profits, and you almost certainly keep the rights to your own music. The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that. In terms of human connection, there's still plenty to be had in the act of performing music. When it comes to starting to learn an instrument, I agree that there are fewer role models around than when I was young. However, popular music moves in fads. Where I'm from, guitar-based music was last "in" in the late 00's, I'm sure it'll come around again.

coldtea 9y ago
>The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that. The real downside is that with no gatekeepers there and so many acts (orders of magnitudes more) you can make and release albums that nobody hears at all. Whereas in the past, if you made it to have an album out, you had a small following almost guaranteed. At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company, you could blame your failure to those A&R guys that failed to appreciate you, or get your lack of contract as a sign that you're not good enough to begin with. Now that you can easily make an album, everybody both feels more entitled to success, but also gets to see firsthand how the audience just doesn't care.
- mikestew 9y ago
  At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company Though I get what you’re driving at, there have been companies that will press your basement demo onto a vinyl LP almost as long as vinyl records have been made (and later cassettes and CDs, of course). They’d do the artwork, too, from “we’ll have an in-house artist do it for lots of money” to “we’ll put your camera-ready art on it for a little extra”. But pre-internet, that meant selling the hard copies at shows and maybe the local indie record store. What one is missing, of course, is the promotion from a label. But the production of hard copies of music hasn’t been a barrier for a long time.

1337biz 9y ago

Not that long ago it was far assumed that record labels would loose their power and the easy path to production and promotion would lead to a lot more independent structures. What happned that we still have a similar superstar culture as we had 20 years ago?

Nav_Panel 9y ago
> What happned that we still have a similar duperstar culture than 20 years ago? Perhaps idols have network effects. Do most people actually want independent structures? They're available to use if you do (see: bandcamp). I assert most people would prefer a musical common knowledge (even if banal) over more interesting yet isolating music. In a sense, musical isolation outside the mainstream has gotten worse over time, as the internet has made it easier to follow your aesthetic judgments into deeper and more disparate rabbit holes. The idea of a subculture seemed a happy medium, but these have mostly become "atomized" out of existence. There does still exist an "indie" alternate-mainstream, along with a few others, but for the more engaged music fan it's somewhat of a lonely world. Hopefully the pendulum will soon begin to swing back toward shared experience and music creation as a means toward community-building (see: prayer), rather than as an end in itself.
goldmouth 9y ago
Check out hip hop. Many of the current stars started out posting videos to YouTube or tracks to SoundCloud. The diy hustle of making mix tapes and homemade videos is how the current stars of rap, Migos, blew up. SoundCloud rappers are a thing. It's a drug influenced, dreary subgenra that's launched dozens of stars, lil uzi vert or for example.
- 1337biz 9y ago
  But why do they almost all still end up at one of the big 3 labels? Or are there many soundclouders actually able to make a decent living from it?
JohnnyConatus 9y ago
The more competition that enters the market the more essential marketing and branding become to differentiate the product. Everyone who told us musicians that flattening the barriers to entry would lead to more income were either ignorant of economics or willfully ignoring it further their interests. Few bands make more money off of Bandcamp then they did flogging their CDs.

Mizza 9y ago

The artwork is done by Brian Chippendale, the drummer from Lightning Bolt, who are the greatest band in the world.

deadmetheny 9y ago
The best show I ever saw was Lightning Bolt in an abandoned warehouse with a couple of drone/dark ambient acts opening up. It was surreal, amazing experience. They are crazy live. This piece was written by Rhett Miller of the Old 97's, who are a similarly great live band who are absolutely worth seeing if you can.
- AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
  I had a similar Lightning Bolt experience in college in Indiana. Did the audience surround the band in a circle?
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    Yup, even when I've seen them play at clubs with proper stages they set up their kit in the middle of the floor.
    - AndrewUnmuted 9y ago
      I always loved that about them, it's such a friendly gesture and shows a real level of trust they've been able to establish among their fan base. Nice username by the way, but I hope Metheny does not die for some time. :)
- arstin 9y ago
  Aye, Lightning Bolt was one of my favorite shows ever too. Had just finished college. Saw them play on the floor of a dive bar with just a few other local patrons. I stood right in front of the band---could have kicked the drumkit---with my body convulsing from the intensity. The whole experience was cathartic.
9y ago

davidw 9y ago

It's kind of hard to disambiguate the time in my life and the music that I grew up liking with everything else, so it's really difficult to judge for me. I recognize that sort of 'scene': one of the redeeming things about growing up in Eugene was seeing the Daddies play at the local place. Still an amazing band in terms of being good at being eclectic. Maybe technology is letting people connect with the sort of music they like these days in other ways though?

JohnnyConatus 9y ago

The nice thing about the old world of music was that when you played for an audience there was nothing going on but what you were doing. Now the band has to compete with everyone's phones.

vondur 9y ago
The two Misfit reunion shows have a no cell phone policy. They even have secure lockers set up to store them.
- coldtea 9y ago
  The problem is that the band still has to compete for the instant gratification that those (now locked) cell phones offered their fans all day around.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    That doesn't seem like it should be that hard. You are at the concert experiencing the concert, which should be pretty instant and gratifying. Either you like it enough that you don't miss your phone, or you decide that the concert experience isn't what you're looking for. Being at the concert but doing something else seems like they are doing it to say they were there, and there are are always other ways to signal status people can fall back on.
Joeboy 9y ago
Another thing - you could sell music (ie. records / CDs) at gigs. You can still just about do that but probably not for long, at least with most markets. A small independent band will likely make more profit on a single CD sale than they'll ever make in downloads.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  Records nowadays have an mp3 download code with them. The physical media of the record is almost just a placeholder, now, but people still like that even if they don't have a record player (!). Same thing could apply to some other object. I've seen it done with USB sticks and business cards. Some sort of physical media is still useful for that purpose.

javajosh 9y ago

First, I was curious to know if Google ripped this guy off. I could only find his song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdM4zNN-PxU) not the Google ad. But, as a (amateur) musician myself, I don't think there is much to the chord progression. It sounds like a thousand other songs - the lyrics and delivery are what make this song unique and good. Second, incredibly well-written. Very persuasive. Third, it's been clear for a long time music was going to only get harder to succeed in, for the sole reason that as time goes on you are competing with the entirety of music history. Your recorded music is competing with everything ever recorded, Beatles, 80's glam rock, Mozart, and rain forest nature sounds. (Live music has magic, yes, but people are getting immune to it.) Fourth, the 60's-00's was a golden era where technology made it just barely possible to record and distribute music, in a way that required a lot of labor. That labor made it more collaborative, and served as a kind of distributed gate-keeper to the market. Now, technology is too good, and unless an EMP pulse from a solar flare or nuke destroys all digital recordings of everything, it's not going to turn back. Fifth, I think the solution is to embrace and extend the modern trends. Get people to collaborate with you on stage using their cell phones. As a performer, connect your phone to the PA, then run a webserver that people in the audience can access over the local subnet. They can then affect the sound in arbitrary ways (perhaps most simply by making beats).

coldtea 9y ago

>It’s all different now. My own observation of the current music industry is colored by my history with the extinct model. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to come up in this world of SoundCloud rappers and Swedish hit factories churning out auto-tuned EDM or whatever. Believe me, I’m keenly aware that even these two meager examples must make me sound impossibly old. My point is that if I was a fourteen-year-old depressive nowadays, I’m not sure what would even draw me into the world of music to begin with. Not much. And indeed, kids todays are much less invested in music than kids where in the 60s till the 80s or so. For one thing, there are now tons of competing outlets that weren't around then: tons of movies of all eras available (and most current top-tier movies made for teenage sensibilities, less All ), great TV series with huge production values, Netflix and co, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, the web at large, texting, computers, mobile apps, and games. Besides, there's less mystery in music acts (total transparency and 24/7 social media exposure for any fan who cares who check), less exclusivity (all music available on online services), and less ubiquity (each act gets a much smaller of the attention pie, and can even have a top-10 hit nationwide that half the nation haven't even heard or knows -- something impossible when there was huge radio and only a few TV stations and outlets and hits were hammered constantly without other recourse to everybody).

empath75 9y ago

Edm is still extremely social and face to face. Keep in mind that dance music is fundamentally music for a club and designed to be experienced on a loud system in a dance floor full of people. The process of making and distributing the music may be digital and remote, but the intended way to experience it is as social as it gets. If you want your music to get attention one of the best ways to do it is to go to a lot of clubs, and meet promoters and DJ’d face to face and to DJ yourself.

cousin_it 9y ago

Yes, the rock music scene is dying, but some other music scenes are very alive and social (like edm). So we probably shouldn't blame YouTube. It's just rock music that's dying.

analog31 9y ago
Sixty years is a pretty good run. I think that's longer than the jazz era.

smelendez 9y ago

> For every one of these fledgling anarcho-syndicalist collectives, there are a thousand or a million kids alone in their bedrooms staring at Protools screens wondering what they have to do to get the Swedish cabal to write a hit song for them. There's always been pop music. More people were listening to Ace of Base and Hanson in the '90s than to Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I get it's a personal essay, but I wish he had spent some time talking to young people who are making music about their actual practices. To bring it back to HN, nobody's typing Basic code out of Creative Computing or swapping homebrew code on the local BBS anymore, but there are more people making video games than ever.

TYPE_FASTER 9y ago

Anybody have favorite sites for music discovery? Soundcloud any good? Reddit? Blogs? NPR Tiny Desk? Years ago, I used to use the "similar" feature in Rhapsody and found some music that way, not sure what people use today.

b1daly 9y ago
Spotify for music discovery, hands down. It offers multiple ways to discover new music (or music new to you). It’s really beyond anything else, ever!
icebraining 9y ago
In my case, YouTube (related videos, not their recommendations), Wikipedia and search engines. But that's with active search, not passive suggestions.

b1daly 9y ago

One thing the articles references, which I don’t think people grasp yet,is that young people are inclined to create the music in the vein that they listen to. Nowadays, that means music that is entirely synthetic in its sound sources, and production methods. This music is not “performed” it is “programmed.” The expressiveness of music is no longer tied to some kind of real-time activity, generated by human muscle. The music that dominates the charts simply cannot be performed. A concert of this music is more akin to a pantomimed multimedia presentation. Because the care and feeding of an actual musician is quite high, I think we are undergoing the end of musicians, as a category. This is the end of an ancient practice. It’s a kind of singularity, of unknown outcomes. This is not to say there won’t be some musicians, but the cultural weight of this activity is being drastically marginalized. Performing music with others is a wonderful activity, that provides rewarding connections with others unlike anything else I know. Soon, people won’t know what they are missing.

icebraining 9y ago
This music is not “performed” it is “programmed.” I think this is a false dichotomy - it's often both. Even people using completely digital sources (like electronic musicians) still perform live, and not all just press play. I'm also reminded of Bret Victor's demos in Stop Drawing Dead Fish; programming and performing can be intertwined into new art forms.