6 ms·

Nelson's faming here pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole ball of wax myself, a musician, and someone who started their career working for a major nat

Nelson's faming here pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole ball of wax myself, a musician, and someone who started their career working for a major national concert promotor, worked for two streaming music services and who participates in a local music scene as performer, supporter and occasional promotor: """ The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. """

johnny22 2y ago
> There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. What is your reference time frame here? That's exactly how it was in the 90s and before. Feels like there was a tiny bright spot from the early 2000s to say 2010 or so, but then it was over.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat. If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't really have any other choice unless you fooled around with expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that kinda get what they deserve. [1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?
- phone8675309 2y ago
  > If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?
  - RiverCrochet 2y ago
    A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself; B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.' Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's birthday time, so let's sing it. A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist has often poured intense personal energy into it, yet there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens consistently over decades or centuries, it's awesome and that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not necessarily the artist). Business models around particular arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon, other than possibly giving more people the ability to pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which they will have an innate need to do because it is a personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any surrounding business model or economic/religious/political system. "Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.
- QuercusMax 2y ago
  It was always true that anyone could make music, since the earliest days of modern humans. By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.
  - jerf 2y ago
    I think the point is the recording industry was a very different beast. Now it's not. What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording can record it with only a modest percentage increase in time and money. The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we expect anything but an explosion in supply? Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a lot of new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still quite a bit of new great music. [1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it rather than other things, but it's well within an individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where the successful companies were larger than that.

johnny22 2y ago

> There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. What is your reference time frame here? That's exactly how it was in the 90s and before. Feels like there was a tiny bright spot from the early 2000s to say 2010 or so, but then it was over.

RiverCrochet 2y ago

It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat. If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't really have any other choice unless you fooled around with expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that kinda get what they deserve. [1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?

phone8675309 2y ago
> If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself; B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.' Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's birthday time, so let's sing it. A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist has often poured intense personal energy into it, yet there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens consistently over decades or centuries, it's awesome and that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not necessarily the artist). Business models around particular arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon, other than possibly giving more people the ability to pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which they will have an innate need to do because it is a personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any surrounding business model or economic/religious/political system. "Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.
QuercusMax 2y ago
It was always true that anyone could make music, since the earliest days of modern humans. By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.
- jerf 2y ago
  I think the point is the recording industry was a very different beast. Now it's not. What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording can record it with only a modest percentage increase in time and money. The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we expect anything but an explosion in supply? Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a lot of new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still quite a bit of new great music. [1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it rather than other things, but it's well within an individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where the successful companies were larger than that.