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Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art. It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you d
by pier25 6y ago
Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art.
It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you don't get in and out of whatever it is you're doing.
Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
- mkl 6y agoIt's about releasing, not creating. If you write 12 good songs a year on average, you can release 1/month. It doesn't matter if you actually write one song per month, or write and record them all in one frantic week, and then spend 51 weeks growing as a person and cultivating new ideas.
- NamTaf 6y agoI'm almost sure he knows all of that about creativity and art, and simply does not care. He has instead decided that he is going to try to commodify music, and this is the result. Factory-farmed music benefits the distributors over the artists, after all, because it's reliable.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoWhat’s especially funny about your example is Hemingway wrote for periodicals as a day job for a long time, and so he kept that kind of schedule. Except some of his books came about because he didn’t keep to that schedule, and we don’t usually talk about Hemingway for his articles in the Toronto Star.
- pier25 6y agoOk, the metaphor doesn't really work for writers because the effort you put into an article or blog post is not comparable to a song. But anyway my point was more about producing significant and valuable work.
- yxhuvud 6y agoThe trend in self published novels is also towards putting out series of cheap and relatively bite sized books coming out in a tight schedule. Many of these are.. not so good. A few are great.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoOh! I didn’t mean for my comment to come across as a disagreement of any kind. I was just making a side comment. I thought it was funny and that your analogy was even more true because we don’t talk so much about Hemingway’s frequent articles in a newspaper but we study at length and hold in high regard his long form works.
- the_af 6y ago"What's he going to record a song about?" "Nothing." "Spotify'll kill him." "I guess they will." "He must have got mixed up in something with the music industry." "I guess so," said Nick. "It's a hell of a thing." "It's an awful thing," Nick said. They did not say anything. George reached down for his mobile phone and wiped the screen. "I wonder what he did?" Nick said. "Failed to write enough songs fast enough to generate user engagement. That's what Spotify will kill them for." "I'm going to cancel my Spotify subscription," Nick said. "Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do." "I can't stand to think about him waiting in the recording room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful." "Well," said George, "you better not think about it." (with apologies to Hemingway!)
- kevmo 6y agoHa! I recently picked up a old gift someone made to me of a book of Hemingway short stories -- this is quite a good approximation.
- mpalmer 6y agoGod help me, I can't tell if this is GPT-3 or not. If you told me it was I'd believe you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- doyoulikeworms 6y ago"This writing looks computer-generated" as a compliment is kind of blowing my mind
- chesterarthur 6y agoIsn't that how Dickens wrote at least one classic novel? The history of creative endeavors if rife with short deadlines.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoAnd that’s also how you hear about how much writers hate writing and are only happy when handing in a manuscript for publication. (See: Vonnegut)
- spookybones 6y agoCan you provide a link or source for Vonnegut on the subject? I'm interested.
- 52-6F-62 6y agohttp://www.jamespreller.com/2016/02/18/kurt-vonnegut-via-circe-berman-in-bluebeard-on-a-writers-happiest-moment/ http://www.jamespreller.com/2016/02/18/kurt-vonnegut-via-cir...
- tyre 6y agoYes. A Tale of Two Cities was written and published in dozens of serial parts
- pier25 6y ago> The history of creative endeavors if rife with short deadlines. Yes totally, but my point was not so much about the time spent doing the thing as the pauses in between.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI think he just sees the norms of traditional songwriting as not his job. If I'm the CEO of Chipotle, I'm going to focus on getting my customers good food at reasonable prices, and I'm not gonna take it tremendously seriously if chefs complain they can't express creativity well in my kitchens.
- rubidium 6y agoMany many great novels were written with a pay-per-page on a weekly basis.
- aglavine 6y agoBoth aren't exclusive you know.
- kbenson 6y agoSpotify is not for putting out art, it's for generating buzz about your art so you can get paid for it later. If your goal is the best art you can produce, then perhaps Spotify and that roller coaster isn't what you should care about. If you want to good art while also also getting a lot of buzz so you can make money or be popular, then you need to deal with market forces, just like everyone always has. Different artists will value to varying degrees generating good art, exposing many people to that art, and getting paid well. All those goals are related, but I doubt any one of them can be maximized without concessions from others. > Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years. Authors release at their own schedule if they don't rely on the money from the books, they have other income, or they've already made enough to be secure. Hemingway is not really different. Neither is any other already famous artist.
- pier25 6y agoRight, but my point is that if you're absorbed dealing with market forces you won't be able to produce significant work. The more cookie cutter stuff you release, the more you will adopt that mindset and it will consume your creativity. I guess in the past musicians toured and performed to satisfy that need, and relegated the "important" work to long term writing/composing. With Spotify (and specially now with COVID) it seems this has changed since the only way to generate income is by releasing music.
- kbenson 6y agoMy guess is that things have only changed for the mega-stars. Household names that are in the public consciousness need to work to stay at that level, and keep people hyped about their work. I think those people are likely already making significant concessions in their work for this, so it's not like it affects them that much. Does it really matter for artists that aren't being played multiple times a day on iHeartMedia/Clear Channel radio stations already if they follow this model? I doubt it, unless their goal is more about fame than art, in which case the question answers itself.
- rewgs 6y ago
- falcor84 6y agoI don't know if this was intended sarcastically, but novels written in a weekly serialized form were a huge thing [0] and Hemingway wrote at least one novel this way [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_%28literature%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_%28literature%29 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_River_and_into_the_Trees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Across_the_River_and_into_the_...
- pier25 6y agoMy point was not that artists need a long or short time to produce something, but rather that they need to pause and reflect on things between projects.
- voldacar 6y agoPop music and everything surrounding it makes much more sense once you realize that it isn't art, and the people making it aren't artists
- pier25 6y agoI agree, it's entertainment. But do Pop artists generally spend years to publish an album? I honestly don't know, I don't follow that world anymore.
- Johnny555 6y agoObviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art. He's not telling bands how to be successful artistically, he's telling them how to be successful financially in the modern music world. If the band is only interested in promoting their art, they can do anything they want. If they want to earn a living too, they need to provide the market what it wants.
- pier25 6y agoYou think Spotify cares about artists being financially successful?
- Johnny555 6y agoNot in general, but they do have incentive to help them to become more successful on their own platform.
- boomlinde 6y agoGenerally, the financially successful artist will be touring and playing live shows and between that spend a lot of time in a studio recording many songs at once, not recording a song every month for Spotify pittance.
- objektif 6y agoNo he is telling artists how to make his platform more profitable. He does not give a shoot about artists or their financial wellbeing.
- paxys 6y agoHe is talking about making money, not art.
- nemo44x 6y ago> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years. It's much easier when there are literally thousands of song writers trying to get a label or famous singer to use their song. The Nashville model is pretty much everywhere now. It also helps that we've been able to computationally determine which parameters and heuristics are most likely to end up as a hit. There's a reason popular music across genres all more or less sounds the same today (loud, compressed with little dynamic range, auto-tuned, 4 chords, etc), with the difference between them being the style they are in.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years. In his prime writing period he was closer to the former than the latter; between 1923 and 1933 he published, it looks like, at least 49 short stories, 10 poems, 3 novels, and two nonfiction books. At least one of the novels was initially released in serialized form over 6 months of magazine issues.
- webmaven 6y ago> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years. Hemingway's fiction in particular aside, it is worth noting that many of the novel-length works now considered classics were actually created and released as a series of shorter works, often to fairly strict deadlines: https://booksonthewall.com/blog/serial-novel-a-brief-history/ https://booksonthewall.com/blog/serial-novel-a-brief-history...