10 ms·

Streaming is changing the sound of music

72 points by lxm 3y ago

piker 3y ago
Fascinated / saddened by the effect of modern economic trends on music, but it is what it is. However, > Before the Temptations sing a word, an instrumental introduction featuring organ, guitar, bass, and a hi-hat cymbal ebbs and flows for more than four minutes. Seems like this should refer to about 2 minutes of instrumental intro based (ironically?) on my listening to the ca. 7 minute version on Spotify. Am I missing something?
- spatley 3y ago
  This article is pretty sloppy. There are 2 different versions. The 7 minute release has vocals coming in just under 2 minutes. The 12 minute version has vocals kicking in just under 4 minutes. So the characterization that the intro "ebbs and flows for more than four minutes" is incorrect in all possible counts. And in aggregate pop music has always been objectively terrible.
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJV2pWFyfn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJV2pWFyfn4 has the vocals come in at 4:02 which I guess very technically is over 4 minutes, but it's a vinyl recording that starts ~5 seconds before the beginning of the song.
- rchaud 3y ago
  An oldies band from the 1940s, The Ink Spots, would play a 3-second bass guitar melody before every song. Back then, if the DJ did not announce the name of the band or song, the melody would act as an identifier.
  - carrozo 3y ago
    Oh wow! Found here: https://youtu.be/rzTFKTi_cZ4?si=R514OgVC-I0vXTFf https://youtu.be/rzTFKTi_cZ4?si=R514OgVC-I0vXTFf
crooked-v 3y ago
This seems like a repeat of everything I've seen about the effects of radio on mass music.
- gdulli 3y ago
  If technology through streaming, AI, and other enshittifying forces are scaling up pre-existing bullshit from annoying trends into absolute omnipresence, that's worth recognizing and talking about as its own phenomenon.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    This take doesn't resonate with me at all. The music is scene is fantastic right now and the insane amount of collaborations will be remembered in 20 years as a musical era. Literally everyone's preferred era of music is someone's "todays music is bad rabble rabble." Even classical was considered inferior and simplistic by people who preferred music from the baroque period. Like its original critics literally said that classical was too repetitive.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      > classical was too repetitive Ravel's "Bolero", anyone? I hate that composition. Even Emerson Lake Palmer couldn't fix it.
      - bradrn 3y ago
        In the periodisation GP is referring to, I believe Boléro would be Modernist, not Classical. The latter [0] refers to works by e.g. Mozart and Haydn, and followed the Baroque period of e.g. J.S. Bach. (Incidentally, I do find Classical music quite repetitive — although on the other hand I’ve long enjoyed Boléro. Curious!) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_period_(music) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_period_(music)
      - eredengrin 3y ago
        At least you can avoid bolero pretty easily. The real disaster is canon in d...
rhabarba 3y ago
I will _not_ listen to music made for people with a short attention span.
- xav_authentique 3y ago
  Who says you’ll have that choice?
  - dmonitor 3y ago
    soundcloud
  - rhabarba 3y ago
    My vinyl player.
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    There's already more recorded music in existence than you could listen to in a lifetime. There is also a vast amount of music being created today which is not pop music and is not following current pop trends.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Thank you, thank you, thank you!
kouru225 3y ago
Why is it that a “play” is defined by a discrete threshold line 30 seconds? Isn’t it way more logical to define some continuous relationship between amount of time played and amount of money generated like it’s done on YouTube?
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Should a 6 minute song pay 50% more than a 4 minute song? Most people would think not. So you should pay by play, rather than per minute. YouTube is different because number of ads shown is roughly proportional to video length. Variance in video durations is much, much higher than variance in song durations. And 30 seconds is much longer than most people skipping through songs, and much shorter than most songs, and a nice round number.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    ... why not? It's occupying 50% more listening time, isn't it?
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long... But more importantly, for popular music, song length doesn't correlate to work or effort, generally speaking. A 6 minute song doesn't take 50% more effort than a 4 minute one. (Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.)
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        It does not seem especially obvious that the price of a product should depend on the cost of its input and not on the value of its output? We can quibble about whether "time that a user spends listening" is correctly what a streaming service wants to buy from an artist, but it doesn't seem like the reasonable metric.
JKCalhoun 3y ago
Famously "She Loves You" (The Beatles) was unusual in kicking the song off with the chorus. Way ahead of their time, as usual. Seriously though, it does suggest that having a "hook" early in a song was always a good idea, commercially speaking.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, probably the best intro evar.
  - musicale 3y ago
    The hook comes before the chorus, and it's very good. But I think the Kinks' You Really Got Me from the previous year (1964) hits harder out of the gate. Many rock songs start with great hooks/riffs though. I am particularly fond of 20 foot tall guitar riff hooks/intros as practiced by classic hard rock and metal bands, often by doubling the riff/hook on lead guitar and bass. Rock bands seem to excel at intros, and even the lengthy ones can be riveting. And some song intros are so great that they overshadow the rest of the song.
    - JKCalhoun 3y ago
      Some other oddities that come to mind: Squeeze's "Up the Junction" [1] has no chorus and lyrics ends with the title. Hem's "Not California" [2] closes with the bridge. [1] https://youtu.be/RQciegmLPAo?si=sXcMm0MgIUUOc5-q https://youtu.be/RQciegmLPAo?si=sXcMm0MgIUUOc5-q [2] https://youtu.be/DQNknNX7HoA?si=AIQwfPzmjdAfr83g https://youtu.be/DQNknNX7HoA?si=AIQwfPzmjdAfr83g
      - musicale 3y ago
        Interesting - I don't think I'd heard Not California before. An oddity that has become increasingly popular over nearly 20 years (breaking records for stream counts and singles chart tenure) is the Killers' Mr. Brightside, which only has one (repeated) verse. Which probably makes it a good singalong anthem. It also starts with a nice (if short) guitar riff/hook.
HPsquared 3y ago
I think it's less than the effect of people listening to music on small phone speakers. There's a definite shift to mixes that are listenable on a phone speaker.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Do many people listen on phone speakers? I would figure most people use headphones.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Tiktok/Shorts/Reels is a big source of music discovery, and those are frequently listened to via phone speakers.
  - callalex 3y ago
    It sure seems like it based on my experience riding the bus/train.
- bsder 3y ago
  As far back as the Rolling Stones, they used to have an old 4 ohm AM car stereo speaker on the console to check the mixes.
  - moritzwarhier 3y ago
    Still better than phone speakers :D I once read something about a famous music producer and/or mastering engineer who said his mixing and mastering goes through two first passes: first on his studio monitors, then - before testing the final master on real-world speakers for final polishing - he would adjust everything in the mix again to sound good one his cheapest Mackie studio monitors. Can't seem to find the original article, so maybe I mixed up some details. Instead I found this 2011 forum thread: https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/720856-mix-engineers-who-insist-using-cheap-monitors.html https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/720856-mix-engin... Also, I agree with OP, I hate how mainstream productions nowadays target the lowest common denominator of speakers. Of course they have to, but in this current age of phone speakers it really starts to show annoying effects. Small BT speakers and even in-ears have become surprisingly OK though, also for music which doesn't participate in the loudness wars as much. Also seems like these might be what most music is consumed on.
zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
Recorded music has always been written for the limitations of the format it was being released on.
- rhabarba 3y ago
  The newest album by NǽnøcÿbbŒrg VbërrHolökäävsT is 44 hours long. I guess that the format is not the limit anymore.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
    A 44 hour album wouldn't be practical without modern data storage
    - rhabarba 3y ago
      I wouldn't say it was practical anyway.
cortesoft 3y ago
Recorded music changed music, as did radio.
- rchaud 3y ago
  The parallels aren't that similar. "Radio" played an infinitesimally small amount of the music that was being produced. If you wanted to discover new music, the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio. Spotify is both 'radio' and a music discovery service, and global in nature, so its impact is much greater. And unlike radio stations that tend to specialize in a certain sound (pop, classical, rock, jazz, hiphop), Spotify mixes everything together. A lot of contemporary music is 'genre-less' as a result. That was never the case with radio.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    You're claiming radio didn't really affect discovery, when radio music discovery was being regulated by federal law and driving congressional hearings by the 1950s. Radio changed music as much as streaming did, and before streaming, MTV did too.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      I'm saying that radio isn't good for discovery, precisely because its selection is so narrow compared to an on-demand catalog of algorithmically selected music that Spotify provides.
  - InCityDreams 3y ago
    > the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio. The BBC's John Peel: Peel was one of the first broadcasters to play psychedelic rock and progressive rock records on British radio. He is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of many genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop. Fellow DJ Paul Gambaccini described Peel as "the most important single person in popular music from approximately 1967 through 1978. He broke more important artists than any individual." [wikipedia] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geI2TbD3ihM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geI2TbD3ihM
a_bonobo 3y ago
Streaming definitely destroyed sampling as a musical method: every sampled recording house wants their slice of the pie, and if the income is low as it is with streaming records, you minimise your sampling to keep more pie to yourself. Many early great hip hop albums that rely heavily on sampling are not on streaming services because the sampled record companies can't come to an agreement, and I'm sure today's artists see the hassle and minimise their sampling. Examples are Frank Ocean's 'Nostalgia, Ultra' and De La Soul's '3 Feet High and Rising'
- Jonnston 3y ago
  De La Soul's discography came to streaming this year. Including 3 Feet High and Rising.
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    Yes and it took a long time! >De La Soul’s sampling artistry made digitizing the catalog they built over their career a monumental task, as samples previously cleared for use on vinyl, cassettes and CDs had to be redone for streaming. https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2023/03/03/de-la-souls-music-catalog-makes-streaming-debut/ https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2023/03/03/de-la-souls-music-cata... My argument is that people would rather avoid doing this kind of thing
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  This is an interesting take. A lot of the big artists these days (Doja Cat, Megan thee Stallion, Charli XCX, to name a few) all heavily sample. In some cases the new hits have multiple levels of sampling; Latto’s Big Energy has a remix with Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, and both sample Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love. Charli XCX interpolates both Hey Mickey and Robyn for her new song from the Barbie movie.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    They have the money to pay the bills. They're all either plants or giants. The barbie soundtrack has a massive budget so you can just pay for the samples.
WalterBright 3y ago
Don't forget the 12" disco versions of songs in the 70's and 80's! The disco version was lengthened and mixed with a much heavier bass line. The grooves on a 12" single were spaced further apart to accommodate this.
- odiroot 3y ago
  It wasn't even just disco, that was a general fashion back then. I remember Trevor Horn writing in his book, labels asked him for 12" mixes of singles he produced in the 80's. And it was mostly new wave and pop stuff. I guess the purpose was the same though, to produce a more danceable version.
w-ll 3y ago
I think streaming killed the "album", sure there were always singles, but they would be used to promote an upcoming album, now musicians and labels keep it at that. I miss the days of getting a new cd and moving the last one from my cars cd player to the visor cd sleeve.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  The album was an artifact of the limitations of the LP format. I prefer to think of it as that streaming liberated music from those restrictions. That said, some files on a Spotify server do feel a bit empty compared to a physical LP with an artful cover.
sashahilton 3y ago
Behind the scenes there is a lot more going on than just songs getting shorter. I'll focus on Spotify as it's the firm I'm most familiar with. The article briefly touches on the hook being moved to the beginning, so I'll skip that part - much the same thing is happening on streaming platforms for movies/tv shows, where analytics are used to determine the ordering and features of a piece of content to maximise engagement/minimise churn - at the expense of directorial freedom. There are 2 other significant factors at play. The first is that not all streams are created equal. It is relatively well known that the large studios have cut deals on payouts per stream, eg. $0.0029 vs $0.002, depending on the artist's following, age of the album, etc. But, a lesser known fact is that not all streams are created equal in a number of countries. Songs played is sequence on an album, or as part of a playlist, may attract a lesser premium than individual plays, and radio broadcast format pays less still. How it works depends on the jurisdiction/contract. With this in mind, consider how you listen to songs on Spotify. You may search for songs and albums, but a large proportion of the music you hear probably comes from autoplay, where Spotify matches what it 'thinks' you might like to hear. With the above in mind, Spotify has been acquiring podcast companies and building them into their client for several years. There is undoubtedly an audience for podcasts, but the business case is that they do not have any of the licensing legacy issues that music has, where Spotify gets to keep a bigger piece of the pie. The point in the article - that 'songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and artists are collaborating across genres' is mostly a result of artists producing to satisfy a recommendation algorithm that balances retaining listeners, whilst minimising licensing costs. The collaborating across genres is also explainable; several years ago, Spotify bought a company called Echonest (amongst others), which was essentially a large graph database mapping songs and their musical attributes (genres), onto which a recommendation engine was built - it's worth looking up their whitepapers on matrix factorisation at scale if they still exist. The corrolary though, is that similar listening habits could be used to cross-recommend songs with a good degree of accuracy. There are also a smattering of other considerations to take into account - a lot of the large playlists not operated by Spotify are pay to play - if you're a new artist, you can pay to feature on playlists for a given genre. There is no official channel for doing this, but the practice is widespread. These playlists make more money if they have 50 x 3 minute songs, than 30 x 5 minute songs. I'm sure you can see where this is going - a cost/engagement optimisation engine, along with a recommendation engine where artist remuneration is more or less directly proportional to the number of people that are happy to listen to it if it is played for them. The artist is rewarded if they produce a larger number of songs, suitably homogenised to appeal to the mass market and sound familiar to what they already listen to, and to hit as many of the genres possible to maximise inclusion in recommendations. Unless you are one of the few exceptional artists, you are going to be punished for creativity vs. playing it safe. There's no easy fix for this, assuming it needs fixing. All media streaming platforms in the long run chase the marginal user, who by and large wants average content almost by definition. Tweaking the remuneration model would be a good starting point, where instead of Spotify taking eg. 30% of the subscription, and paying $0.0018-0.0032 per stream depending on artist, if instead the model worked as Spotify taking 30%, and each artist payout for a user's streams was calculated as ($10 * 0.7) * (number of plays by user of artist songs / total plays in given period), one would likely see artists serving niches or esoteric music to be better remunerated, albeit at the expense of the studios managing household name artists.
jsnell 3y ago
The thesis of the article is that the payment structure is incentivizing artists to record shorter songs. But this also means that the platforms should have an equal incentive to make listeners listen to longer ones. Spotify seems to pay out about $7 billion / year in music licensing. If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%. That's saving like $35 million / year for each second! Move the average up by 10 seconds, and it's enough to actually make Spotify profitable. Considering how much of the modern music listening is driven by algorithms either directly or through recommendations, it seems like it'd be incredibly easy for a streaming platform to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the longer songs being what gets listened to. That in turn should make the artists record longer songs. Why isn't that happening? Or is it happening, and the current state is just the equilibrium we've arrived at when those competing incentives were resolved?
- rm999 3y ago
  > If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%. This isn't how music royalties work - rather, Spotify (and most other on demand streaming services) pay out a % of their net revenue to rights holders. This % does not change based on how many streams there are in total, but it IS distributed proportionally based on the number of streams, so it's more profitable for a music rightsholder to have more streams (the topic of the article). Some high level information: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
  - morkalork 3y ago
    Seems like they should measure proportions using seconds streamed vs units streamed?
    - foota 3y ago
      White noise and other background sounds cause issues here.
d--b 3y ago
Haha reminds me of Lorenzo, a French rapper who split his album into 68 30-second tracks just to mess with Spotify. The album got withdrawn within minutes but the buzz worked well!
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  So much for “art”, eh? I consider what he did art. I think it’s cool he played with the system, that is art to me, shame “the central committee” deemed it as unorthodox.
benrutter 3y ago
I listen to a lot of more left field music styles, and it seems like the trend is almost in the complete other direction. Styles and genres like ambient music or field recordings, that aggressively don't try to capture your attention immediately are definitely having a bit of a heyday. I'd be interested whether this is to some level a reaction to mainstream music's getting shorter.
verisimi 3y ago
Hasn't corporatisation/marketing of music always 'changed the sound'? I can't even think what non-commercial music would sound like, unless it's classic folk tunes, and even then...
- defrost 3y ago
  Every part of the world has it's own local sound, although perhaps less and less and less these days. There's always been "music people play to be social" with a line from that to "music people play to make some extra cash at the local shindig" which is the essetial core of commercial music - if you want the money you have to appeal to the crowd. Anyhow, for what it's worth - back in the day we'd drift into the nearest big town once a month or so and typically have an all night get together | jam session with these people (and others) .. it's classic folk but particular to a specific bit of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgBgQQXoUw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgBgQQXoUw8
spondyl 3y ago
While not directly related, fellow readers might also find the memo titled "Dave Goldberg on music"[1] to be an interesting prediction around the future of music as it comes to streaming. As a bit more background, it was a memo sent to then-CEO of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton by Dave Goldberg[2] who was most recently known as CEO of SurveyMonkey but had been the Director of Marketing Strategy at Capital Records in the early 90s. I'm not entirely sure when it was sent but according to my notes, it was originally sent in the form of an email, and was released as part of the Sony Pictures hack from 2014. Anyway, the gist of the memo recommends that back-catalogue becomes the core of the business, as that's where the most streams occur with the new release business being greatly scaled down with a focus on music that will have longevity. > Music is becoming a purely digital product. A digital-only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs. > Catalog needs to be defined much more broadly to include all music that hasn¹t been created in the last 2 years > With catalog providing the base profits, new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money (justified by the long term catalog income stream of those songs) > This will bias new releases to genres like rock and country that typically have had strong catalog. These also happen to be the genres that don’t have expensive producers so more music can be created for the same A&R dollars > Artist contracts that have large fixed marketing costs will need to be restructured or sold off as there will no longer be headcount to do the work. New releases will be tested on consumers before added money is spent to ensure that it isn’t wasted. > Internationally, most local repertoire will probably have to be eliminated. The record company will want to sell off the local repertoire or spin out the local labels and focus on English language repertoire globally, unless there is some country that has managed to be profitable on its local repertoire (i.e.Japan) Not all of this necessarily came to pass, and some of it sounds a little miserable, but it's an interesting peek at some thinking at the time, at least from a consultant. [1]: https://sriramk.com/memos/goldberg-music.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/goldberg-music.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Goldberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Goldberg
PedroBatista 3y ago
The sound/structure was changed many times before to make an album sellable, for the radio, to make venues sell more beer, to help the graphical aspect when shown on MTV and the list goes on.
archo 3y ago
https://archive.is/uTnYi https://archive.is/uTnYi
- thunderbong 3y ago
  For some reason that link didn't work for me. https://archive.ph/uTnYi https://archive.ph/uTnYi

72 points by lxm 3y ago

Fascinated / saddened by the effect of modern economic trends on music, but it is what it is. However, > Before the Temptations sing a word, an instrumental introduction featuring organ, guitar, bass, and a hi-hat cymbal ebbs and flows for more than four minutes. Seems like this should refer to about 2 minutes of instrumental intro based (ironically?) on my listening to the ca. 7 minute version on Spotify. Am I missing something?

spatley 3y ago
This article is pretty sloppy. There are 2 different versions. The 7 minute release has vocals coming in just under 2 minutes. The 12 minute version has vocals kicking in just under 4 minutes. So the characterization that the intro "ebbs and flows for more than four minutes" is incorrect in all possible counts. And in aggregate pop music has always been objectively terrible.
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJV2pWFyfn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJV2pWFyfn4 has the vocals come in at 4:02 which I guess very technically is over 4 minutes, but it's a vinyl recording that starts ~5 seconds before the beginning of the song.
rchaud 3y ago
An oldies band from the 1940s, The Ink Spots, would play a 3-second bass guitar melody before every song. Back then, if the DJ did not announce the name of the band or song, the melody would act as an identifier.
- carrozo 3y ago
  Oh wow! Found here: https://youtu.be/rzTFKTi_cZ4?si=R514OgVC-I0vXTFf https://youtu.be/rzTFKTi_cZ4?si=R514OgVC-I0vXTFf

crooked-v 3y ago

This seems like a repeat of everything I've seen about the effects of radio on mass music.

gdulli 3y ago
If technology through streaming, AI, and other enshittifying forces are scaling up pre-existing bullshit from annoying trends into absolute omnipresence, that's worth recognizing and talking about as its own phenomenon.
- Spivak 3y ago
  This take doesn't resonate with me at all. The music is scene is fantastic right now and the insane amount of collaborations will be remembered in 20 years as a musical era. Literally everyone's preferred era of music is someone's "todays music is bad rabble rabble." Even classical was considered inferior and simplistic by people who preferred music from the baroque period. Like its original critics literally said that classical was too repetitive.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    > classical was too repetitive Ravel's "Bolero", anyone? I hate that composition. Even Emerson Lake Palmer couldn't fix it.
    - bradrn 3y ago
      In the periodisation GP is referring to, I believe Boléro would be Modernist, not Classical. The latter [0] refers to works by e.g. Mozart and Haydn, and followed the Baroque period of e.g. J.S. Bach. (Incidentally, I do find Classical music quite repetitive — although on the other hand I’ve long enjoyed Boléro. Curious!) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_period_(music) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_period_(music)
    - eredengrin 3y ago
      At least you can avoid bolero pretty easily. The real disaster is canon in d...

rhabarba 3y ago

I will _not_ listen to music made for people with a short attention span.

xav_authentique 3y ago
Who says you’ll have that choice?
- dmonitor 3y ago
  soundcloud
- rhabarba 3y ago
  My vinyl player.
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  There's already more recorded music in existence than you could listen to in a lifetime. There is also a vast amount of music being created today which is not pop music and is not following current pop trends.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

kouru225 3y ago

Why is it that a “play” is defined by a discrete threshold line 30 seconds? Isn’t it way more logical to define some continuous relationship between amount of time played and amount of money generated like it’s done on YouTube?

crazygringo 3y ago
Should a 6 minute song pay 50% more than a 4 minute song? Most people would think not. So you should pay by play, rather than per minute. YouTube is different because number of ads shown is roughly proportional to video length. Variance in video durations is much, much higher than variance in song durations. And 30 seconds is much longer than most people skipping through songs, and much shorter than most songs, and a nice round number.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  ... why not? It's occupying 50% more listening time, isn't it?
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I definitely wouldn't want the economic incentive to be for artists to make all their songs 10-20 minutes long... But more importantly, for popular music, song length doesn't correlate to work or effort, generally speaking. A 6 minute song doesn't take 50% more effort than a 4 minute one. (Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.)
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      It does not seem especially obvious that the price of a product should depend on the cost of its input and not on the value of its output? We can quibble about whether "time that a user spends listening" is correctly what a streaming service wants to buy from an artist, but it doesn't seem like the reasonable metric.

JKCalhoun 3y ago

Famously "She Loves You" (The Beatles) was unusual in kicking the song off with the chorus. Way ahead of their time, as usual. Seriously though, it does suggest that having a "hook" early in a song was always a good idea, commercially speaking.

WalterBright 3y ago
"Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, probably the best intro evar.
- musicale 3y ago
  The hook comes before the chorus, and it's very good. But I think the Kinks' You Really Got Me from the previous year (1964) hits harder out of the gate. Many rock songs start with great hooks/riffs though. I am particularly fond of 20 foot tall guitar riff hooks/intros as practiced by classic hard rock and metal bands, often by doubling the riff/hook on lead guitar and bass. Rock bands seem to excel at intros, and even the lengthy ones can be riveting. And some song intros are so great that they overshadow the rest of the song.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Some other oddities that come to mind: Squeeze's "Up the Junction" [1] has no chorus and lyrics ends with the title. Hem's "Not California" [2] closes with the bridge. [1] https://youtu.be/RQciegmLPAo?si=sXcMm0MgIUUOc5-q https://youtu.be/RQciegmLPAo?si=sXcMm0MgIUUOc5-q [2] https://youtu.be/DQNknNX7HoA?si=AIQwfPzmjdAfr83g https://youtu.be/DQNknNX7HoA?si=AIQwfPzmjdAfr83g
    - musicale 3y ago
      Interesting - I don't think I'd heard Not California before. An oddity that has become increasingly popular over nearly 20 years (breaking records for stream counts and singles chart tenure) is the Killers' Mr. Brightside, which only has one (repeated) verse. Which probably makes it a good singalong anthem. It also starts with a nice (if short) guitar riff/hook.

HPsquared 3y ago

I think it's less than the effect of people listening to music on small phone speakers. There's a definite shift to mixes that are listenable on a phone speaker.

cortesoft 3y ago
Do many people listen on phone speakers? I would figure most people use headphones.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Tiktok/Shorts/Reels is a big source of music discovery, and those are frequently listened to via phone speakers.
- callalex 3y ago
  It sure seems like it based on my experience riding the bus/train.
bsder 3y ago
As far back as the Rolling Stones, they used to have an old 4 ohm AM car stereo speaker on the console to check the mixes.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago
  Still better than phone speakers :D I once read something about a famous music producer and/or mastering engineer who said his mixing and mastering goes through two first passes: first on his studio monitors, then - before testing the final master on real-world speakers for final polishing - he would adjust everything in the mix again to sound good one his cheapest Mackie studio monitors. Can't seem to find the original article, so maybe I mixed up some details. Instead I found this 2011 forum thread: https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/720856-mix-engineers-who-insist-using-cheap-monitors.html https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/720856-mix-engin... Also, I agree with OP, I hate how mainstream productions nowadays target the lowest common denominator of speakers. Of course they have to, but in this current age of phone speakers it really starts to show annoying effects. Small BT speakers and even in-ears have become surprisingly OK though, also for music which doesn't participate in the loudness wars as much. Also seems like these might be what most music is consumed on.

zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago

Recorded music has always been written for the limitations of the format it was being released on.

rhabarba 3y ago
The newest album by NǽnøcÿbbŒrg VbërrHolökäävsT is 44 hours long. I guess that the format is not the limit anymore.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
  A 44 hour album wouldn't be practical without modern data storage
  - rhabarba 3y ago
    I wouldn't say it was practical anyway.

cortesoft 3y ago

Recorded music changed music, as did radio.

rchaud 3y ago
The parallels aren't that similar. "Radio" played an infinitesimally small amount of the music that was being produced. If you wanted to discover new music, the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio. Spotify is both 'radio' and a music discovery service, and global in nature, so its impact is much greater. And unlike radio stations that tend to specialize in a certain sound (pop, classical, rock, jazz, hiphop), Spotify mixes everything together. A lot of contemporary music is 'genre-less' as a result. That was never the case with radio.
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  You're claiming radio didn't really affect discovery, when radio music discovery was being regulated by federal law and driving congressional hearings by the 1950s. Radio changed music as much as streaming did, and before streaming, MTV did too.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    I'm saying that radio isn't good for discovery, precisely because its selection is so narrow compared to an on-demand catalog of algorithmically selected music that Spotify provides.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  > the last thing you'd do is turn to the radio. The BBC's John Peel: Peel was one of the first broadcasters to play psychedelic rock and progressive rock records on British radio. He is widely acknowledged for promoting artists of many genres, including pop, dub reggae, punk rock and post-punk, electronic music and dance music, indie rock, extreme metal and British hip hop. Fellow DJ Paul Gambaccini described Peel as "the most important single person in popular music from approximately 1967 through 1978. He broke more important artists than any individual." [wikipedia] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geI2TbD3ihM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geI2TbD3ihM

a_bonobo 3y ago

Streaming definitely destroyed sampling as a musical method: every sampled recording house wants their slice of the pie, and if the income is low as it is with streaming records, you minimise your sampling to keep more pie to yourself. Many early great hip hop albums that rely heavily on sampling are not on streaming services because the sampled record companies can't come to an agreement, and I'm sure today's artists see the hassle and minimise their sampling. Examples are Frank Ocean's 'Nostalgia, Ultra' and De La Soul's '3 Feet High and Rising'

Jonnston 3y ago
De La Soul's discography came to streaming this year. Including 3 Feet High and Rising.
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  Yes and it took a long time! >De La Soul’s sampling artistry made digitizing the catalog they built over their career a monumental task, as samples previously cleared for use on vinyl, cassettes and CDs had to be redone for streaming. https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2023/03/03/de-la-souls-music-catalog-makes-streaming-debut/ https://nbcpalmsprings.com/2023/03/03/de-la-souls-music-cata... My argument is that people would rather avoid doing this kind of thing
bobthepanda 3y ago
This is an interesting take. A lot of the big artists these days (Doja Cat, Megan thee Stallion, Charli XCX, to name a few) all heavily sample. In some cases the new hits have multiple levels of sampling; Latto’s Big Energy has a remix with Mariah Carey’s Fantasy, and both sample Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love. Charli XCX interpolates both Hey Mickey and Robyn for her new song from the Barbie movie.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  They have the money to pay the bills. They're all either plants or giants. The barbie soundtrack has a massive budget so you can just pay for the samples.

WalterBright 3y ago

Don't forget the 12" disco versions of songs in the 70's and 80's! The disco version was lengthened and mixed with a much heavier bass line. The grooves on a 12" single were spaced further apart to accommodate this.

odiroot 3y ago
It wasn't even just disco, that was a general fashion back then. I remember Trevor Horn writing in his book, labels asked him for 12" mixes of singles he produced in the 80's. And it was mostly new wave and pop stuff. I guess the purpose was the same though, to produce a more danceable version.

w-ll 3y ago

I think streaming killed the "album", sure there were always singles, but they would be used to promote an upcoming album, now musicians and labels keep it at that. I miss the days of getting a new cd and moving the last one from my cars cd player to the visor cd sleeve.

BurningFrog 3y ago
The album was an artifact of the limitations of the LP format. I prefer to think of it as that streaming liberated music from those restrictions. That said, some files on a Spotify server do feel a bit empty compared to a physical LP with an artful cover.

sashahilton 3y ago

Behind the scenes there is a lot more going on than just songs getting shorter. I'll focus on Spotify as it's the firm I'm most familiar with. The article briefly touches on the hook being moved to the beginning, so I'll skip that part - much the same thing is happening on streaming platforms for movies/tv shows, where analytics are used to determine the ordering and features of a piece of content to maximise engagement/minimise churn - at the expense of directorial freedom. There are 2 other significant factors at play. The first is that not all streams are created equal. It is relatively well known that the large studios have cut deals on payouts per stream, eg. $0.0029 vs $0.002, depending on the artist's following, age of the album, etc. But, a lesser known fact is that not all streams are created equal in a number of countries. Songs played is sequence on an album, or as part of a playlist, may attract a lesser premium than individual plays, and radio broadcast format pays less still. How it works depends on the jurisdiction/contract. With this in mind, consider how you listen to songs on Spotify. You may search for songs and albums, but a large proportion of the music you hear probably comes from autoplay, where Spotify matches what it 'thinks' you might like to hear. With the above in mind, Spotify has been acquiring podcast companies and building them into their client for several years. There is undoubtedly an audience for podcasts, but the business case is that they do not have any of the licensing legacy issues that music has, where Spotify gets to keep a bigger piece of the pie. The point in the article - that 'songs are getting shorter, albums are getting longer, and artists are collaborating across genres' is mostly a result of artists producing to satisfy a recommendation algorithm that balances retaining listeners, whilst minimising licensing costs. The collaborating across genres is also explainable; several years ago, Spotify bought a company called Echonest (amongst others), which was essentially a large graph database mapping songs and their musical attributes (genres), onto which a recommendation engine was built - it's worth looking up their whitepapers on matrix factorisation at scale if they still exist. The corrolary though, is that similar listening habits could be used to cross-recommend songs with a good degree of accuracy. There are also a smattering of other considerations to take into account - a lot of the large playlists not operated by Spotify are pay to play - if you're a new artist, you can pay to feature on playlists for a given genre. There is no official channel for doing this, but the practice is widespread. These playlists make more money if they have 50 x 3 minute songs, than 30 x 5 minute songs. I'm sure you can see where this is going - a cost/engagement optimisation engine, along with a recommendation engine where artist remuneration is more or less directly proportional to the number of people that are happy to listen to it if it is played for them. The artist is rewarded if they produce a larger number of songs, suitably homogenised to appeal to the mass market and sound familiar to what they already listen to, and to hit as many of the genres possible to maximise inclusion in recommendations. Unless you are one of the few exceptional artists, you are going to be punished for creativity vs. playing it safe. There's no easy fix for this, assuming it needs fixing. All media streaming platforms in the long run chase the marginal user, who by and large wants average content almost by definition. Tweaking the remuneration model would be a good starting point, where instead of Spotify taking eg. 30% of the subscription, and paying $0.0018-0.0032 per stream depending on artist, if instead the model worked as Spotify taking 30%, and each artist payout for a user's streams was calculated as ($10 * 0.7) * (number of plays by user of artist songs / total plays in given period), one would likely see artists serving niches or esoteric music to be better remunerated, albeit at the expense of the studios managing household name artists.

jsnell 3y ago

The thesis of the article is that the payment structure is incentivizing artists to record shorter songs. But this also means that the platforms should have an equal incentive to make listeners listen to longer ones. Spotify seems to pay out about $7 billion / year in music licensing. If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%. That's saving like $35 million / year for each second! Move the average up by 10 seconds, and it's enough to actually make Spotify profitable. Considering how much of the modern music listening is driven by algorithms either directly or through recommendations, it seems like it'd be incredibly easy for a streaming platform to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the longer songs being what gets listened to. That in turn should make the artists record longer songs. Why isn't that happening? Or is it happening, and the current state is just the equilibrium we've arrived at when those competing incentives were resolved?

rm999 3y ago
> If they can make the average song listened to by a user just 1 second longer, they reduce that by about 0.5%. This isn't how music royalties work - rather, Spotify (and most other on demand streaming services) pay out a % of their net revenue to rights holders. This % does not change based on how many streams there are in total, but it IS distributed proportionally based on the number of streams, so it's more profitable for a music rightsholder to have more streams (the topic of the article). Some high level information: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
- morkalork 3y ago
  Seems like they should measure proportions using seconds streamed vs units streamed?
  - foota 3y ago
    White noise and other background sounds cause issues here.

d--b 3y ago

Haha reminds me of Lorenzo, a French rapper who split his album into 68 30-second tracks just to mess with Spotify. The album got withdrawn within minutes but the buzz worked well!

ChatGTP 3y ago
So much for “art”, eh? I consider what he did art. I think it’s cool he played with the system, that is art to me, shame “the central committee” deemed it as unorthodox.

benrutter 3y ago

I listen to a lot of more left field music styles, and it seems like the trend is almost in the complete other direction. Styles and genres like ambient music or field recordings, that aggressively don't try to capture your attention immediately are definitely having a bit of a heyday. I'd be interested whether this is to some level a reaction to mainstream music's getting shorter.

verisimi 3y ago

Hasn't corporatisation/marketing of music always 'changed the sound'? I can't even think what non-commercial music would sound like, unless it's classic folk tunes, and even then...

defrost 3y ago
Every part of the world has it's own local sound, although perhaps less and less and less these days. There's always been "music people play to be social" with a line from that to "music people play to make some extra cash at the local shindig" which is the essetial core of commercial music - if you want the money you have to appeal to the crowd. Anyhow, for what it's worth - back in the day we'd drift into the nearest big town once a month or so and typically have an all night get together | jam session with these people (and others) .. it's classic folk but particular to a specific bit of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgBgQQXoUw8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgBgQQXoUw8

spondyl 3y ago

While not directly related, fellow readers might also find the memo titled "Dave Goldberg on music"[1] to be an interesting prediction around the future of music as it comes to streaming. As a bit more background, it was a memo sent to then-CEO of Sony Entertainment Michael Lynton by Dave Goldberg[2] who was most recently known as CEO of SurveyMonkey but had been the Director of Marketing Strategy at Capital Records in the early 90s. I'm not entirely sure when it was sent but according to my notes, it was originally sent in the form of an email, and was released as part of the Sony Pictures hack from 2014. Anyway, the gist of the memo recommends that back-catalogue becomes the core of the business, as that's where the most streams occur with the new release business being greatly scaled down with a focus on music that will have longevity. > Music is becoming a purely digital product. A digital-only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs. > Catalog needs to be defined much more broadly to include all music that hasn¹t been created in the last 2 years > With catalog providing the base profits, new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money (justified by the long term catalog income stream of those songs) > This will bias new releases to genres like rock and country that typically have had strong catalog. These also happen to be the genres that don’t have expensive producers so more music can be created for the same A&R dollars > Artist contracts that have large fixed marketing costs will need to be restructured or sold off as there will no longer be headcount to do the work. New releases will be tested on consumers before added money is spent to ensure that it isn’t wasted. > Internationally, most local repertoire will probably have to be eliminated. The record company will want to sell off the local repertoire or spin out the local labels and focus on English language repertoire globally, unless there is some country that has managed to be profitable on its local repertoire (i.e.Japan) Not all of this necessarily came to pass, and some of it sounds a little miserable, but it's an interesting peek at some thinking at the time, at least from a consultant. [1]: https://sriramk.com/memos/goldberg-music.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/goldberg-music.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Goldberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Goldberg

PedroBatista 3y ago

The sound/structure was changed many times before to make an album sellable, for the radio, to make venues sell more beer, to help the graphical aspect when shown on MTV and the list goes on.

archo 3y ago

https://archive.is/uTnYi https://archive.is/uTnYi

thunderbong 3y ago
For some reason that link didn't work for me. https://archive.ph/uTnYi https://archive.ph/uTnYi