5 ms·
Not if you’re coerced into having to produce a piece of music every month/couple of months to keep the machine running. That’s just producing a commodity. Som
by 52-6F-62 6y ago
Not if you’re coerced into having to produce a piece of music every month/couple of months to keep the machine running.
That’s just producing a commodity.
Some groups have got it together and are able to fund years of quiet work before releases, but no matter how much I enjoy creating I would hate to be so bound as outlined above.
- chesterarthur 6y agoA lot of creative endeavors run on this timeline. It's just a shorter cycle and it's not new.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoYou’re right. It’s not new. Not for pop music anyway. I’d argue that it’s worse, though. Shorter cycles are even less healthy. And just because it’s been done before(-ish) and other endeavours run in this timeline doesn’t make it good or beneficial to anything but those who aspire to only make money off of it. The fact is, good music doesn’t require business to be good music. And the business doesn’t necessarily require the music to be good—it just requires that it directly or indirectly generates revenue. From the perspective of commerce the rest is incidental. Encouraging the commercial perspective over something more balanced is a net negative for culture and society. At least I think so.
- guyzero 6y agoI am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work. https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramics-class-and-quantity-before-quality/ https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic... It turns out that the students who were just churning out pots ended up making the pots that were ultimately better. I think there's probably something to be said for constantly creating.
- e1g 6y agoJust FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions https://jamesclear.com/repetitions In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.
- JAlexoid 6y agoIt definitely works for the "writing a song" bit. A lot of things can be said and some expressions of the same thing are just better...
- guyzero 6y agoI am not a musician but my guess is that they don't sit down and say "I'm going to record an album with 9 bad songs and one good one." They do their best on every song and that's just how it turns out.
- wwweston 6y agoAfter hearing this story for years and finally trying to source it, as far as I can tell it's not entirely clear this experiment was ever actually run -- and in fact is sourced in the link behind your link as a "parable." I can imagine it's true that churning out quantity is its own education but I can also imagine there's a plateau past which deliberate practice and polish matter quite a bit.
- guyzero 6y agoWell t's a better parable than the one about boiling a frog, so I guess it got that at least.
- 1123581321 6y agoIt’s still possible to batch composition and production with this release model. The lead time saved from releasing digital only can be used to polish the earlier tracks in the schedule.