5 ms·

I'd go one little step further: Recorded music has killed new music. Thanks for the fact that the sieve of time has basically left us with only the best of the

I'd go one little step further: Recorded music has killed new music. Thanks for the fact that the sieve of time has basically left us with only the best of the best of the past we have become so pretentious regarding new artists. Also the fact that music can be injected 24/7 into our brains everywhere we are with a simple internet connection has totally separated us from the reality of music making. Why go outside and listen to some guy in the street or go at a concert in an abandoned factory if you can just lazily put on a pair of headphones and have hundreds of years worth of genius compositions impeccably recorded ready at your fingertips? Some of you may say that taking inspiration from other artists is a big part of making new music, so the fact that any young lad can access such a catalog must mean he can get creative right away, right? Nope, because before recorded sounds if you took inspiration (and maybe lessons) from a matured and acclaimed musician you would then go back to your town and do your own thing. Few people would have known the original artist and after his death maybe a few sheets of music would be all that remained of him. Having learned from him you would have killed it after his death and your creative endeavor wouldn't get buried just because people have a better record playing at home

nkingsy 5y ago
Commented down thread I agree recorded music is the problem, but it’s more direct. Recorded music is one of the very first automations, and it has slowly automated 99% of professional musicians out of a job.
- yetanotherloser 5y ago
  My 1910 player piano nods smugly. This trend has taken a long time to, as it were, play out. Many of the things that are a mess about music reproduction copyright today are actually artefacts of that era too...
Apocryphon 5y ago
That is contradicted by how this phenomenon isn't happening to any other mediums- books, movies, shows. Why should music be any different?
- bambax 5y ago
  The big difference is you read a book once or maybe twice; same for a movie (maybe three times if it's "cult"); but you listen to a song hundreds of times.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Maybe dozens of times. The novelty of songs wears off after twenty or so replays- heard about this from a pop psychology podcast somewhere. Certainly good feelings towards a song with a personal emotional connection might linger for longer, but there’s still a neurological limit to the novelty.
- Crastlon 5y ago
  Comparing the arts is something I've never understood. Literature, music, cinema, etc. are all different things.\n Music is different because it can exist without it being recorded, literature, cinema, etc. can't. Non-recorded cinema is live theatre, non-recorded literature is live storytelling. Recorded and live music should be considered as two different things
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Literature preexists media in the form of oral tradition. Your arguments about the exceptionalism of music would invalidate the Odyssey. Your argument of recorded music vs. live music also doesn't make sense- why is a record more recorded than sheets music? If a piece of music is literally written down and can be replicated, it's no less recorded than the most pristine lossless sound file.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > Recorded and live music should be considered as two different things There is ample evidence you are simply wrong. Recorded music is replacing live music in every possible way. People play recorded music at their weddings and parties - once a staple of live musicians. People play recorded music while working - one of the main places where people used to hum and sing themselves. Where once one might pull out a guitar, today they are more likely to pull out a phone. Sure, live concerts still exist - but this is more like the difference between going to cinema vs watching a movie at home, or eating out at a restaurant vs cooking at home.
analog31 5y ago
An interesting aside is that I was looking through a music history textbook belonging to one of my kids. The book chose the invention of movable type for printing sheet music, as the beginning of music as an "industry." I've also read that as early as the 19th century, sheet music was a huge industry, and had many of the characteristics that we associate with recorded music, such as "stars," musicians getting ripped off by publishers, and so forth. It was reasonably common for people to have a piano in the parlor (if you were affluent enough to have a parlor), or some other instrument, and to entertain yourself by playing the latest "hits" from sheet music.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Yup, and you can still find quite a bit of that "popular" sheet music on IMSLP if you search around for it. The nice thing about sheet music compared to recordings alone is that it makes music into a truly literate artform; it becomes quite easy to read what the composer expected to be played, and to recreationally engage with the music on that level - perhaps even by performing it yourself! (It's of course a far more intellectually and audiatorily meaningful engagement than just passively listening to a recording.) There's also a flip side in that when comparing what we read with a heard performance, we become far more intuitively aware of the additional improvisation-based elements that a good, 'inspired' performance can bring to the music. The sheet music itself is a bit like a structural sketch, a blueprint that ought to be suitably "ornamented" in a good performance.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Indeed, IMSLP is such a phenomenal resource. Both of my kids are classical musicians, and they enjoy getting together with friends to play chamber music. Besides being able to get so much material, they both have Apple tablets and page turning pedals, so they're largely paperless.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      (I suppose I should point out that IMSLP is a crowd-sourced resource that could always benefit from new contributions. Even if you don't have scans or transcriptions of old music to upload, there's a lot that can be contributed by just curating information about the existing content. For example, lots of large collections of pieces have been uploaded that have no detailed listings of their contents, and are not cross-referenced from the wiki pages for their individual pieces. Fixing this will make things easier for users who are looking for stuff to play.)
bambax 5y ago
Maybe, but recorded music became widespread 50 years ago, and what you're describing has been true for the last 20 years at least. Yet something feels different now.
wink 5y ago
I don't know, I don't think I'm listening to a lot of "genius music" and the things I like most are usually not played by some guy on the street. (Metal and EBM, or electronic). Also in my experience the correlation between "likes music" and "likes to go to concerts" for people is not direct. One more point, I'm one of those people who are not heavily into improv, so if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. I'm not proud of that and of course they're free to do what they wnat with their music, but I like "a live version of the song" and not "a live reinterpretation with everything different", maybe that's also why I dislike jazz.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. Why go to a live concert at all, then?
  - masklinn 5y ago
    Ambience? Group identity? There are vocaloid concerts, and I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording, so people don’t attend for different takes on the song they know.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      > I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording EDM was quite possibly the biggest genre for live music this past decade, and it came with many memes of Skrillex "performing" by pushing a single button on a MacBook at concerts.

nkingsy 5y ago

Commented down thread I agree recorded music is the problem, but it’s more direct. Recorded music is one of the very first automations, and it has slowly automated 99% of professional musicians out of a job.

yetanotherloser 5y ago
My 1910 player piano nods smugly. This trend has taken a long time to, as it were, play out. Many of the things that are a mess about music reproduction copyright today are actually artefacts of that era too...

Apocryphon 5y ago

That is contradicted by how this phenomenon isn't happening to any other mediums- books, movies, shows. Why should music be any different?

bambax 5y ago
The big difference is you read a book once or maybe twice; same for a movie (maybe three times if it's "cult"); but you listen to a song hundreds of times.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Maybe dozens of times. The novelty of songs wears off after twenty or so replays- heard about this from a pop psychology podcast somewhere. Certainly good feelings towards a song with a personal emotional connection might linger for longer, but there’s still a neurological limit to the novelty.
Crastlon 5y ago
Comparing the arts is something I've never understood. Literature, music, cinema, etc. are all different things.\n Music is different because it can exist without it being recorded, literature, cinema, etc. can't. Non-recorded cinema is live theatre, non-recorded literature is live storytelling. Recorded and live music should be considered as two different things
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Literature preexists media in the form of oral tradition. Your arguments about the exceptionalism of music would invalidate the Odyssey. Your argument of recorded music vs. live music also doesn't make sense- why is a record more recorded than sheets music? If a piece of music is literally written down and can be replicated, it's no less recorded than the most pristine lossless sound file.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > Recorded and live music should be considered as two different things There is ample evidence you are simply wrong. Recorded music is replacing live music in every possible way. People play recorded music at their weddings and parties - once a staple of live musicians. People play recorded music while working - one of the main places where people used to hum and sing themselves. Where once one might pull out a guitar, today they are more likely to pull out a phone. Sure, live concerts still exist - but this is more like the difference between going to cinema vs watching a movie at home, or eating out at a restaurant vs cooking at home.

analog31 5y ago

An interesting aside is that I was looking through a music history textbook belonging to one of my kids. The book chose the invention of movable type for printing sheet music, as the beginning of music as an "industry." I've also read that as early as the 19th century, sheet music was a huge industry, and had many of the characteristics that we associate with recorded music, such as "stars," musicians getting ripped off by publishers, and so forth. It was reasonably common for people to have a piano in the parlor (if you were affluent enough to have a parlor), or some other instrument, and to entertain yourself by playing the latest "hits" from sheet music.

zozbot234 5y ago
Yup, and you can still find quite a bit of that "popular" sheet music on IMSLP if you search around for it. The nice thing about sheet music compared to recordings alone is that it makes music into a truly literate artform; it becomes quite easy to read what the composer expected to be played, and to recreationally engage with the music on that level - perhaps even by performing it yourself! (It's of course a far more intellectually and audiatorily meaningful engagement than just passively listening to a recording.) There's also a flip side in that when comparing what we read with a heard performance, we become far more intuitively aware of the additional improvisation-based elements that a good, 'inspired' performance can bring to the music. The sheet music itself is a bit like a structural sketch, a blueprint that ought to be suitably "ornamented" in a good performance.
- analog31 5y ago
  Indeed, IMSLP is such a phenomenal resource. Both of my kids are classical musicians, and they enjoy getting together with friends to play chamber music. Besides being able to get so much material, they both have Apple tablets and page turning pedals, so they're largely paperless.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    (I suppose I should point out that IMSLP is a crowd-sourced resource that could always benefit from new contributions. Even if you don't have scans or transcriptions of old music to upload, there's a lot that can be contributed by just curating information about the existing content. For example, lots of large collections of pieces have been uploaded that have no detailed listings of their contents, and are not cross-referenced from the wiki pages for their individual pieces. Fixing this will make things easier for users who are looking for stuff to play.)

bambax 5y ago

Maybe, but recorded music became widespread 50 years ago, and what you're describing has been true for the last 20 years at least. Yet something feels different now.

wink 5y ago

I don't know, I don't think I'm listening to a lot of "genius music" and the things I like most are usually not played by some guy on the street. (Metal and EBM, or electronic). Also in my experience the correlation between "likes music" and "likes to go to concerts" for people is not direct. One more point, I'm one of those people who are not heavily into improv, so if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. I'm not proud of that and of course they're free to do what they wnat with their music, but I like "a live version of the song" and not "a live reinterpretation with everything different", maybe that's also why I dislike jazz.

TomSwirly 5y ago
> if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. Why go to a live concert at all, then?
- masklinn 5y ago
  Ambience? Group identity? There are vocaloid concerts, and I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording, so people don’t attend for different takes on the song they know.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    > I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording EDM was quite possibly the biggest genre for live music this past decade, and it came with many memes of Skrillex "performing" by pushing a single button on a MacBook at concerts.