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I finally watched this whole video. There are a bunch of misstatements in your post: > linear programming sucks and people don't like it Pretty wild & unsuppo

I finally watched this whole video. There are a bunch of misstatements in your post: > linear programming sucks and people don't like it Pretty wild & unsupported statement. "Linear programming" could also be called "curation" which is something usually boasted about, not apologized for. What is a long Spotify playlist except linear programming? > There wasn't meaningful competition even before consolidation. In most markets, a single AOR station and a single Alternative station was all you had before Clear Channel came around. In the Bay Area, you had KFOG, which was more or less "alternative" and one or two other rock-ish stations whose callsigns escape me now. That was more than we have now. Those DJ's had personalities. In LA you had KMET. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KMET_(FM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KMET_(FM) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNBR-FM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KNBR-FM > Beato has a very Albini-esque take on the points and cuts taken from recording budgets and contracts. I guess this is meant as an insult? The rental fees for equipment, drums, and tuning the drums are a smoking gun for corruption. You haven't even touched that, except to smear it as Beato-esque. > you made your money touring and on merch, if at all. Wrong; you made your money on songwriting royalties. You can watch any of the biopics on 60's and 70's musicians (I've written on most of them on Substack), and it's always the musicians who did NOT write the songs who are bitter that the guys who did are rich. Now the songwriters say "change a word, get a third" about the singers who've wised up on that deak,

tptacek 3y ago
I'm glad somebody disagrees with me; I thought I'd written all that for nothing. I appreciate the rebuttal. I think my arguments are going to hold up, though. One of the biggest stories in the entire overarching media industry, from talk radio to television, is the shift away from linear programming and towards on-demand. To call linear Modern Rock radio "curation" and suggest that listeners moved away from it en masse and abruptly because the curation got worse is an extraordinary claim. You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it. In every medium where people have the opportunity to switch from linear to on-demand, they do so. Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time. I'm in Chicago and grew up here (like I said in my comment, I'm actually a little obsessive about 90s Modern Rock ["Alternative"] radio programming, since it was the soundtrack to my first startup). We had by my count 1.5 AOR stations (WCKG and WLUP, depending on the year) and 2 Modern Rock stations (WKQX and WXRT). I am aware that the largest markets in the country had a small measure of competition (bear in mind that AOR and Modern Rock in the 1990s had wildly different programming and didn't compete with each other). But it was ATT vs. Comcast levels of competition. Albini-esque is not an insult, at least not coming from me. According to Steve Albini, nobody was making money on royalties long before radio consolidation. David Lowery, who appears to disagree with him about almost everything, agrees with him at least on that one point (his argument would be that nobody recoups on advances, but that the advance itself funded a middle class lifestyle for recording artists, so that something was indeed lost when the record industry collapsed). You can also just look at the numbers --- even Beato's status quo ante numbers --- and see that they don't add up for a typical rock band. They had to be making their living on day jobs, touring, and merch; it could not have been the contract. Remember that when we're talking about the health of the rock industry, we're implicitly talking about the marginal signed rock act. Think Letters to Cleo, not U2. Yes: U2 makes a crapload on royalties.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  you obviously meant a lot more by "linear programming" than the mere words' definitions. > Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time. Not "obviously." How many listeners are tuned into Spotify's most popular playlists at the same time, and not interacting with them at all? Versus the number of listeners of a local radio station? I would bet the first >> the second. As for whether royalties were enough to sustain a rock act then or now: I really don't know. They said that a modern recording budget is comically small compared to what it would have been in the 90's, so clearly the money has changed. However, I didn't get from that video any claim that royalties used to be enough. What I got was that the artists are getting screwed by a lot of BS charges. And, of course, that corporate ownership of radio is bad, which I would hope very few HN'ers would argue with. As for "You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it": I actually spent a lot of time at YouTube in my time at Google. "The lean-back experience" was something they really lusted after, and that wa the term they used for it. In fact, if I play one music video on YT, it usually seems to segue into another. So I don't think the broad mass of music listeners is quite as on-demand in their actual behavior as you think.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    The point of the video is that structural factors in the music industry destroyed ("killed", such that it was "dead" by 2012) rock music. So that's what we're resolving: is the video's argument credible? And it is not. I'm the one who introduced the term "linear radio" to this conversation; Beato doesn't use it. So, what matters isn't the precise definition of the word, but the concept. You'd like to call a Spotify playlist "linear". Ok, fine. That doesn't change my argument! The shared, scheduled, broadcast delivery system for music died because people drastically prefer the option of listening to whatever they'd like; for instance, they'd rather avail themselves of one of the 18.7 million Apple Music and Spotify playlists they now have access to than turn an FM knob to one of 3-4 corporate radio stations that play 4 songs in a row before running 45 seconds of commercials. That latter delivery system is what Beato laments, and whose loss he credits with ending rock music. Note that part of my argument is that I don't grant his premise that rock music ended, or that the shift in attention from rock to hip-hop had anything to do with this stuff. I have no doubt that corporate rock screwed people over in all sorts of ways (Lowery doesn't so much, though! Go track his article down, it's interesting, he makes a case for the corporate rock structure subsidizing a lot of work that couldn't have happened otherwise, and unit sales numbers just don't work out to numbers that can support the marginal rock band). The problem is: Beato isn't making his central case, that producers renting amps and drum kits out to signed bands due to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is why we didn't get 3 more Verve albums.

tptacek 3y ago

I'm glad somebody disagrees with me; I thought I'd written all that for nothing. I appreciate the rebuttal. I think my arguments are going to hold up, though. One of the biggest stories in the entire overarching media industry, from talk radio to television, is the shift away from linear programming and towards on-demand. To call linear Modern Rock radio "curation" and suggest that listeners moved away from it en masse and abruptly because the curation got worse is an extraordinary claim. You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it. In every medium where people have the opportunity to switch from linear to on-demand, they do so. Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time. I'm in Chicago and grew up here (like I said in my comment, I'm actually a little obsessive about 90s Modern Rock ["Alternative"] radio programming, since it was the soundtrack to my first startup). We had by my count 1.5 AOR stations (WCKG and WLUP, depending on the year) and 2 Modern Rock stations (WKQX and WXRT). I am aware that the largest markets in the country had a small measure of competition (bear in mind that AOR and Modern Rock in the 1990s had wildly different programming and didn't compete with each other). But it was ATT vs. Comcast levels of competition. Albini-esque is not an insult, at least not coming from me. According to Steve Albini, nobody was making money on royalties long before radio consolidation. David Lowery, who appears to disagree with him about almost everything, agrees with him at least on that one point (his argument would be that nobody recoups on advances, but that the advance itself funded a middle class lifestyle for recording artists, so that something was indeed lost when the record industry collapsed). You can also just look at the numbers --- even Beato's status quo ante numbers --- and see that they don't add up for a typical rock band. They had to be making their living on day jobs, touring, and merch; it could not have been the contract. Remember that when we're talking about the health of the rock industry, we're implicitly talking about the marginal signed rock act. Think Letters to Cleo, not U2. Yes: U2 makes a crapload on royalties.

AlbertCory 3y ago
you obviously meant a lot more by "linear programming" than the mere words' definitions. > Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time. Not "obviously." How many listeners are tuned into Spotify's most popular playlists at the same time, and not interacting with them at all? Versus the number of listeners of a local radio station? I would bet the first >> the second. As for whether royalties were enough to sustain a rock act then or now: I really don't know. They said that a modern recording budget is comically small compared to what it would have been in the 90's, so clearly the money has changed. However, I didn't get from that video any claim that royalties used to be enough. What I got was that the artists are getting screwed by a lot of BS charges. And, of course, that corporate ownership of radio is bad, which I would hope very few HN'ers would argue with. As for "You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it": I actually spent a lot of time at YouTube in my time at Google. "The lean-back experience" was something they really lusted after, and that wa the term they used for it. In fact, if I play one music video on YT, it usually seems to segue into another. So I don't think the broad mass of music listeners is quite as on-demand in their actual behavior as you think.
- tptacek 3y ago
  The point of the video is that structural factors in the music industry destroyed ("killed", such that it was "dead" by 2012) rock music. So that's what we're resolving: is the video's argument credible? And it is not. I'm the one who introduced the term "linear radio" to this conversation; Beato doesn't use it. So, what matters isn't the precise definition of the word, but the concept. You'd like to call a Spotify playlist "linear". Ok, fine. That doesn't change my argument! The shared, scheduled, broadcast delivery system for music died because people drastically prefer the option of listening to whatever they'd like; for instance, they'd rather avail themselves of one of the 18.7 million Apple Music and Spotify playlists they now have access to than turn an FM knob to one of 3-4 corporate radio stations that play 4 songs in a row before running 45 seconds of commercials. That latter delivery system is what Beato laments, and whose loss he credits with ending rock music. Note that part of my argument is that I don't grant his premise that rock music ended, or that the shift in attention from rock to hip-hop had anything to do with this stuff. I have no doubt that corporate rock screwed people over in all sorts of ways (Lowery doesn't so much, though! Go track his article down, it's interesting, he makes a case for the corporate rock structure subsidizing a lot of work that couldn't have happened otherwise, and unit sales numbers just don't work out to numbers that can support the marginal rock band). The problem is: Beato isn't making his central case, that producers renting amps and drum kits out to signed bands due to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is why we didn't get 3 more Verve albums.