7 ms·
The Economics of 24/7 Lo-Fi Hip-Hop YouTube Livestreams
- meetups323 5y ago> all run by white European men in their twenties, I should say Why should they say?
- King-Aaron 5y agoI also found this to be sort of an out-of-place comment in the article.
- enw 5y agoThat successfully irritated me enough to stop reading. Why is race and gender so cheaply brought into everything, regardless if it has any relevancy?
- CyanBird 5y agoBecause US people are incredibly racially polarized and almost any topic is prime for it to be used as a leverage point to imbue their racial polarization on
- phroobster 5y agoSomehow in an attempt to “fix” racial disparities, America is making race relations worse than they’ve been in decades.
- tomrod 5y agoBand aid peeling?
- atat7024 5y agoHow else do you hope to successfully continue to divide a populace that's so fed up that they're simultaneously ready to elect Donald Trump AND Bernie Sanders AND Ron Paul in the same generation, just to see who has a shot at stopping the carousel?
- tjs8rj 5y agoI always wonder with this point: who is doing the dividing? Do rich people coordinate on some scale like this? Is this done by powerful groups like “The Clinton’s” or well connected financiers? You could make an argument that all these groups could benefit from a distracted populace, but is there any reason to believe they actually actively seek to do so? It looks more to me like a lot of rich people doing their own thing seeking profits, and the result for the rest of us just ends up crappy as a by product. Traditional media makes a ton of money from outrage, so they forment and spin outrage, not to divide Americans (except as a by product), but because it makes them so much money.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arminiusreturns 5y agoCheck out the Tavistok institute history sometime for a small glimpse.
- abraae 5y agoLook no further than Rupert Murdoch. His empire is built on monetizing outrage.
- tjs8rj 5y agoThat’s exactly my point. He and others aren’t trying to divide Americans as some coordinated scheme to prevent revolution or something, they just make a lot of money from clickbait and outrage. It’s independent profit seeking division only as a byproduct
- ardit33 5y agoThe conservatives have Fox News / Newsmax / OAN scaremongering, and profiting out of it, and the liberals have CNN, MSNBC, Teen Vogue and more, inducing moral panic about everything, race baiting and profiting out of it. They are two sides of the same coin. There is no single entity creating this atmosphere, just a bunch of outlets amplifying the most radical voices, as normal news and balanced debate is boring and not that profitable.
- rorykoehler 5y agoThis was the biggest culture shock I had when I visited. It instantly made me realise when my American mother left ASAP when she was old enough. Exhausting to live like that. What an unbelievable waste of brain cycles.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoFor perspective I'm curious where you live or lived when you visited. It's also quite a foreign idea for me living in New Zealand.
- rorykoehler 5y agoIreland
- justatdotin 5y ago> regardless if it has any relevancy to me? hip hop has a racial bias. I think that makes this somewhat relevant to note.
- 55555 5y agoThe author -- an asian female, I shouldn't say -- may herself believe the detail relevant because she believes the 70/30 deals struck by these white male micro-label owners are "exploitative."
- sebmellen 5y agoBut is any of it actually racially charged? It’s so strange to use race like this – it cheapens the egregious instances where racism is truly at play.
- jcims 5y agoIt's not new but there's clearly a linguistic analogue of the music 'loudness wars' at play, in which we are losing all dynamic range in our language. Where terms previously used to describe people willing to unceremoniously lynch black folks or beat them to death and throw them off a bridge is now, for example, casually applied to millions of people working in an industry that has unbalanced hiring outcomes.
- ericjang 5y agoI think in the last decade, cultural norms in progressive circles have conditioned people to notice and point out when a community lacks racial / gender diversity. For instance, people will pay lip service to the cryptocurrency, AI, cybersecurity, FOSS communities (just to name a few) as being very "white and male" . Just explaining why, I'm not making a normative claim here.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y agoIt's something that members of the "coastal urban elite" progressive circles like to say to affirm their allegiance to the group, without actually having to put in any effort in fixing the alleged issues beyond Twitter activism. It's a way to belong, without sacrificing much and making the purity spiral worse than it already is. It's considered especially enlightened and tasteful when regularly repeated by a white male. Costs you nothing, makes you look good.
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoGood gracious, your attitude irritates me to no end. What on earth kind of omniscient insights do you have about these people that you can proclaim that their activism starts and ends with Twitter? And why do you seem to think it's impossible for a white male to genuinely believe that their position of privilege can and should be challenged?
- neartheplain 5y agoBecause the author, Cherie Hu, is softly bigoted against white men. Per her Twitter, she views concentrations of white men in the music industry as "alarming" and "egregious." She encourages artists to boycott lineups where white men happen to comprise the majority of the artists. Her twitter replies, likes, and selective capitalization of white/Black indicate a strong ideological alignment. https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267836435756978179 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1327347401368211456 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1327347401368211456 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267874338298003457 https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1267874338298003457
- phroobster 5y agoSoftly bigoted? She is blatantly racist and sexist against white men. If she made those same tweets but “white male” was replaced with “black female” it would be enough to get fired from most jobs.
- DC1350 5y agoIt’s easier to replace the word “white” with “Jewish” since the arguments about disproportionate wealth and representation will still hold. Everyone knows that’s wrong, so I don’t know why they think white is any better.
- parsimoniousplb 5y agoYes, but the British Empire was a thing, which is why "white" can be mocked and ridiculed in ways unimaginable to any other ethnicity. Science tells us so...
- plugger 5y ago*is a thing. It's called the Commonwealth now. And I'd rather be mocked when compared to being oppressed and treated as second class citizens or slaves as other ethnic groups have by the British Empire.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads straight into flamewar right off the bat. Cherry-picking the detail you find most provocative and rushing to the comments to copy and complain about it is a recipe for poor-quality discussion. We're trying for better than that on HN. Especially in this case, where the provocation could not be more off topic. You should leave such things where you find them, not drag them in here and set them on fire. I'm sure that wasn't your intent—and really the upvoters do the greater part of the damage—but it is the effect nevertheless. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoEven though this is obviously a touchy subject, I don't think this is going "straight into flamewar". I also thought that comment felt very out of place in the article.
- dang 5y agoOf course it is. The topic is hip-hop livestreams, not race war. The article contained a phrase that some people found provocative—does that mean we should change the topic to the provocation and have a big argument about it? On HN, the answer is no. If you've read the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), that should be obvious. When I happened on this thread, it had been upvoted to the top and was choking out all discussion on the smaller, more obscure topic. That's a failure mode for HN. When an article contains a provocation, flamewars don't start themselves. Someone has to import the provocation into the thread and start reacting to it here. From an HN perspective, that's the original sin - not the provocation itself. If we just left it in its original habitat and ignored it, nothing bad would happen. Online discussion tends to gravitate to the few hottest, angriest, and most repetitive themes. Something about the mind gets stuck on those and wants to repeat them over and over. This is exciting in one way but it's not interesting in HN's sense of the word. Therefore it's off topic here. Threads like this one should be like a spaceship traveling to a little-known planet that hasn't been visited much. For that, we need to steer clear of black holes. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20ideolog%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- ecliptik 5y agoI haven’t listened to Lo-Fi Hip-Hop or Chillhop and some of the other ones in the article, but how is it different than Trip Hop that’s been around for decades?
- Ceezy 5y agoIt's more jazzy and relax in general. It's usually slow. It's quite good to work.
- tomrod 5y agoReminds me a great deal of soma.fm.
- unixhero 5y agoLofi is great, and sits in the triphop universe. Check out some early Bonobo for instance
- robotastronaut 5y agoI’ve noticed a much heavier use of minor keys in trip hop than lofi or chill. Tempo might match, some of the techniques might match, but that minor key changes the feel entirely. Takes you right into that dark trippy place that I love so much.
- samplatt 5y agoThough they definitely share production methods and tone and meter, TripHop is traditionally used when the artist is being experimental with form and and tone, often within the confines of a single track. There might even be a structure resembling verses and choruses. LoFi/Chillhop is more along the lines of Ambient, with much less overall variation of tone/structures during the track or between tracks.
- atat7024 5y agoBPM. Massive Attack has fast undertones, etc.
- barredo 5y ago> all run by white European men in their twenties, I should say what kind of perspective adds this? there's no such thing as "white European" in Europe. This is an Americanism
- m00x 5y agoAmerican race baiting
- xrd 5y agoI'm confused by your comment. Isn't the article stating that the musicians that created the genre (madlib, jaylib) are black American men, which is in direct contrast to the white Europeans running these channels? There are non white Europeans in Europe of course, so it seems interesting to me to hear that they are non black and non American. What are you adding to that fact that makes you upset? Edit: not sure why autocorrect turned jaylib into kaylin..
- peytn 5y agoNujabes kinda popularized the genre as well. It would be weird and unnecessarily racially charged if the author referred to him as a “yellow Japanese man.”
- brendoelfrendo 5y agoI mean, yes, but only because "yellow" has pejorative connotations that "white" and "black" don't have. I don't see how saying "white European" is controversial. There are Black Europeans, Asian Europeans, etc., and the author is pointing out that these channels are not run by someone from those groups. Now to be fair, if I find any part problematic it's the "European" bit; I assumed they meant "white Europeans from western Europe," which is what that phrase connotes to me, but the vagaries of referring to an entire continent are usually best avoided, I think.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 5y agoIt would blow an American blogger's mind to learn that you can live your whole life in certain parts of Eastern Europe and not see a single black person.
- vector_spaces 5y ago> Facing paltry YouTube revenue, many lo-fi hip-hop channels have ventured beyond just curation and founded their own record labels, in order to build up a catalog that can be monetized elsewhere (e.g. on Spotify and Apple Music) in a more lucrative manner. Most of these labels sign non-exclusive deals with individual singles, rather than albums — meaning that artists can choose to release said singles with other labels as well, which can be useful for getting featured on several lo-fi compilations and mixes at once. Pardon my ignorance, but what is the incentive driving artists to work with these record labels rather than self-publishing? Is it not possible to "self-publish" to Spotify and Apple Music without a record label? Is it strictly to increase exposure in the way mentioned in this paragraph, i.e. to have their music included in various mixes/albums from different labels? Finally, what is the barrier to starting a record label that anyone would want anything to do with? I would (in my ignorance) think that an artist would have more leverage here, since they already belong to the community
- atat7024 5y agoClout. Discovery. Making great shit with like minded people without caring about the equity. Tech community here could take a lesson.
- DC1350 5y agoThere’s nothing noble about giving your money away for free to middle men.
- albertsondev 5y agoWhile rent-collecting is a major problem in the music industry, this is a rather reductive statement. Especially when it comes to more niche genres, such as lofi, a label can be a major help to increase name recognition for smaller artists just starting out, especially when said label allows such non-exclusive publishing deals and still offers the artists fair compensation. In this regard, they often serve as, essentially, incubators. This is also a common way for much larger, more well-recognized artists within a niche to give back to the community, by providing their own name recognition to (or even starting) a relatively small label that launches other artists in similar genres, in spite of the fact that said label is less likely to give that artist in particular more value-add than another, larger one.
- ch33zer 5y agoIn my opinion lo-fi is a different kind of music than traditional artist/album structure. It's not that I'm interested in a particular artist or album, I want to listen to a mood. Lofi provides that. I don't think that this is a unique phenomenon: look at the popularity of the Spotify artist, album, and song radio: those do the same thing, let me listen to more music that matches my current mood. I think that the difference for lofi is that by definition it's basically unoffensive background music (not a bad thing) so it gets called out a lot more as being unique from other types of music.
- whatsmyusername 5y agoLofi is huge because it’s not in the RIAA. So you can actually do stuff with it (like stream) and not get sued.