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There’s some evidence that current streaming habits are actually affecting how music is produced. For example, it seems most listeners will spend a few seconds

There’s some evidence that current streaming habits are actually affecting how music is produced. For example, it seems most listeners will spend a few seconds listening to a second before deciding whether to skip it, so intro sections in pop music are disappearing. If your money was split between what you listened to, wouldn’t it make sense to split by time listened or length of the tracks? That might start incentivizing musicians to create inordinately longer songs to try to get a bigger slice of your money... hmm...

piva00 6y ago
Listening habits has always shaped how music is made. David Byrne explains that quite well in "How Music Works", his take on the history of how music is made and how it sounds being correlated how it was usually played is quite interesting. Tribal music could be more beat/drum focused as those are played in open air, where the bass sounds can propagate without room interference. Going from there to the point where he talks about concert halls and how different architectures (from cathedrals to halls designed for orchestras) shaped how music was made to sound in that kind of room. And later on how recordings have changed all of that. So music has been shaped and will continuously be shaped by how people listen to it. Nowadays music is a very personal experience, listening at home, on our headphones, we experience it outside of the context it's existed for millenia before good recordings were possible. Where the experience of listening live music was always attached to the place it was played. Now we listen to it completely devoid of space, this shapes the kind of music made, how it sounds and so on.