7 ms·

I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspec

by nluken 2y ago

I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these platforms are neither neutral nor meritocracies and don't care about the content that they host. Sounds obvious, yes, but reading about the concrete consequences of this fact, namely the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively, definitely got me to reexamine how I was using Spotify and consuming music in general. It really drove home the fact that some people treat art as a fungible object, and that these folks are the people deciding what music we're hearing unless we really make an effort to seek it out on our own. Is the model profitable? For some. Good for society? Perhaps not. EDIT: also want to concur with others here that the problem here isn't necessarily AI but how we're selecting what music we're listening to. In the book, Pelly specifically identifies channels like Chilled Cow as being part of the watering down of this genre, since they have a similar incentive to play music at as low a cost to the channel as possible versus playing the best music available to them.

bane 2y ago
The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Sure songs would get overplayed, but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes. As much as I love the fact that teens these days are growing up with the same songs I grew up with as a teen, I also view it as a problem. The shared cultural experience that radio generated was powerful. We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste. An algorithm might find similar songs based on musical features, but the same sounding song over and over is boring. AI just makes more boring songs because it's largely looking to replicate popular song features as well. This can be passable for purely background music meant to fill space with non-distracting sound, but is terrible for active listening. Radio was good at mixing in variety within the confines of the genre and audience expectations. Heck, many channels use to program to support the mood during the commute and work hours, and outside of those main audience times would allow the DJs to get a little wild sometimes. Growing up the only place you could catch early EDM was on weekend late-night broadcasts on the local alt-rock station. It's not like radio of a sort does still exist - just download the GNOME Shortwave client and you can drown in channels there. It's just not powered by the marketing that supports Spotify. edit - I think it's interesting that the comments I'm seeing below this so far are talking about recent radio. I should have been more clear. In the U.S. markets at least Radio "died" during a great consolidation wave in the earl 2000s when Clearchannel and a few other media companies slurped up all the local channels, switched their formats and started playing consolidated playlists. It really did used to be the case that your local station DJs were local brands, each with their own curation of songs. Some stations would even have local music festivals and were big promoters of local talent. I spent many evenings calling up the local station to request songs to be slipped into the playlist, sometimes to promote somebody I knew and get them some airtime.
- Gud 2y ago
  I couldn't disagree more. Most radio stations only played the most blandest junk music, even from great artists. Seems they would rotate the top 3 songs even from the absolute most popular musicians. I must have heard Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden >500 times on the rock stations in Stockholm. The Prowler? 0. Maybe some 3am DJ could play some cool songs on occasion, like you said. There was always very little variety.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    yeah it's a hilarious complaint seeing as most radio stations have been a playlist on shuffle with algorithmically determined tracks and no real DJ for over twenty years. It's not different at all from most terrestrial radio. (shout-out to KEXP and KUTX for bucking the trend)
    - svnt 2y ago
      GP is talking about more than 20 years ago, I think. You could time-travel into the future by moving your radii from somewhere else to a musical cultural center like New York or Seattle. People would pay for subscription services to listen to radio stations from those areas.
    - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
      Some of us on HN are old enough to have grown up on radio more than 20 years ago. It's not ancient history, it's within our lifetime. We experienced the consolidation and genericization you are complaining about personally as we saw our favorite local stations get ruined.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Always extends before you were born and things used to be different. Even fairly recently the exceptions were awesome. Over 25 years ago a friend setup a fairly expensive satellite dish system specifically to be able to listen to WFMU. It’s a NYC station he loved that was being rebroadcast for people who left the area. The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.
goosejuice 2y ago
I will read that but... I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million. If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this. Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.
- Gud 2y ago
  Agreed. it's not like we have to choose. I find Spotify to be pretty good if you want to listen to the rock classics and adjacent music(b-sides). If you want to discover new music, YouTube Music and SoundCloud seem superior.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- dkarl 2y ago
  It's an evergreen moral panic. Historically, we retrospectively recognize the seminal importance of scenes that had virtually zero participants, and rather than regretting that those scenes were so tiny and demonizing the distribution networks that served less-seminal music to the vast majority of listeners, we romanticize the marginality of those scenes. But when we see the same thing playing out contemporaneously, with creative niche music reaching tiny numbers of listeners and not getting traction via the distribution networks that serve the vast mainstream, we treat it as a crisis.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
izacus 2y ago
I'd still like to hear how is that exactly different or worse than the old "publisher" model, where everything is gatekept by publishing megacorporations and they decided what the taste of the decade was. And by "they", it was a few executives in those corporations - it was never a meritocracy and those people never cared about music they peddled either. So what exactly did it change here except the fact that now we're not at a mercy of a megapublisher to actually ship tapes/CDs across the world to hear a smaller artist?
- dhosek 2y ago
  Umm, gonna hard disagree. At least before the consolidation of media (whether publishers or record labels), the people who ran publishing houses and record labels did it because they loved books or music as appropriate. Publishing was never a big money maker and book and record stores fall into a weird part of capitalism where they don’t make a lot of money and they have a much larger number of distinct products than most other businesses do. I would guess that the local Target has fewer SKUs on the shelves than a modest-sized bookstore. Note that Barnes & Noble has been successful since its last change of ownership because the CEO cares about books, not because he’s trying to squeeze every penny possible out of it.
  - izacus 2y ago
    There isn't a single story of a successful band that wouldn't hinge on having a big publisher exec approve them and work with them to change their music for acceptance. I think you're heavily rewriting history here.
    - dhosek 2y ago
      Off the top of my head, how about the Beatles?
      - izacus 2y ago
        What about them? One of their biggest early issues was EMI as a publisher not doing enough to promote their songs. Sounds familiar?
MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
> the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively I disagree with this assertion and find it cynical. The golden age of radio was a far more 'aesthetic flattening' experience. And yet we wax nostalgic about it all the time. I think there are good things that come about from less than ideal situations. Back then there were next to zero ways for your art to get noticed, but on the flip side the shared experience of having only a handful of 'hit' songs still had its merits. These days distribution costs have all but disappeared, so the barriers to being heard are far lower than ever before. Yes greasy corps like Spotify will continue trying to take their cut from every angle possible even if it dilutes the pool, but that's nothing new. So instead of making no money and being heard by no one, bands continue making no money but people actually have a chance of discovering their music. SoundCloud, YouTube, streaming services... it has never been easier to find and listen to music. Consequently have we ever had a time of more diverse musical tastes? I don't think so.
bazmattaz 2y ago
I understand it’s trendy these days to shit on Spotify but when I read about this practice it kind of seems like a non-story. Spotify are adding low cost tracks to their curated playlists (which are usually quite boring) to save themselves some money. If you don’t like this practice just don’t listen to their curated playlists. There are so many better user generated playlists out there.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Something I've mulled over in the past is what a market-driven pricing model for streams would look like. Newer songs are generally worth more than older songs, and lean-in listening costs more because the user actually wants to hear a specific song, while in lean-back listening, anything with a similar vibe works. It's probably a good thing it's hard to pull off because you'd see Taylor Swift streams going for 10 cents and aspiring artists paying you $0.0001 to listen to their work in the background.
  - bazmattaz 2y ago
    Sure that would be nice but how do you know what music is lean in/back music?
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      Active song selection and playlist engagement.
- currymj 2y ago
  the curated playlists used to be incredibly good. the initial release of Discover Weekly 10 years ago gave everyone such uncanny recommendations that it was a cultural event, people were talking about it, it was written up in major newspapers. Apple Music had just released a few months before and was a serious threat to Spotify, so Discover Weekly changed the trajectory of the company. It was also technologically interesting because it was one of the first times that a recommender system incorporated deep learning (on the actual song audio) in addition to collaborative filtering. It was really amazing! Now instead, they are shoveling whatever garbage costs them the least. Depressing.
DiscourseFan 2y ago
I have gotten to the point where I only listen to music now at live performances. Expensive, yes, but streaming music has made it dull and meaningless. I went to so many great underground shows in college and music was something I could feel. Now its just noise.

by nluken 2y ago

bane 2y ago

The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Sure songs would get overplayed, but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes. As much as I love the fact that teens these days are growing up with the same songs I grew up with as a teen, I also view it as a problem. The shared cultural experience that radio generated was powerful. We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste. An algorithm might find similar songs based on musical features, but the same sounding song over and over is boring. AI just makes more boring songs because it's largely looking to replicate popular song features as well. This can be passable for purely background music meant to fill space with non-distracting sound, but is terrible for active listening. Radio was good at mixing in variety within the confines of the genre and audience expectations. Heck, many channels use to program to support the mood during the commute and work hours, and outside of those main audience times would allow the DJs to get a little wild sometimes. Growing up the only place you could catch early EDM was on weekend late-night broadcasts on the local alt-rock station. It's not like radio of a sort does still exist - just download the GNOME Shortwave client and you can drown in channels there. It's just not powered by the marketing that supports Spotify. edit - I think it's interesting that the comments I'm seeing below this so far are talking about recent radio. I should have been more clear. In the U.S. markets at least Radio "died" during a great consolidation wave in the earl 2000s when Clearchannel and a few other media companies slurped up all the local channels, switched their formats and started playing consolidated playlists. It really did used to be the case that your local station DJs were local brands, each with their own curation of songs. Some stations would even have local music festivals and were big promoters of local talent. I spent many evenings calling up the local station to request songs to be slipped into the playlist, sometimes to promote somebody I knew and get them some airtime.

Gud 2y ago
I couldn't disagree more. Most radio stations only played the most blandest junk music, even from great artists. Seems they would rotate the top 3 songs even from the absolute most popular musicians. I must have heard Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden >500 times on the rock stations in Stockholm. The Prowler? 0. Maybe some 3am DJ could play some cool songs on occasion, like you said. There was always very little variety.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  yeah it's a hilarious complaint seeing as most radio stations have been a playlist on shuffle with algorithmically determined tracks and no real DJ for over twenty years. It's not different at all from most terrestrial radio. (shout-out to KEXP and KUTX for bucking the trend)
  - svnt 2y ago
    GP is talking about more than 20 years ago, I think. You could time-travel into the future by moving your radii from somewhere else to a musical cultural center like New York or Seattle. People would pay for subscription services to listen to radio stations from those areas.
  - mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
    Some of us on HN are old enough to have grown up on radio more than 20 years ago. It's not ancient history, it's within our lifetime. We experienced the consolidation and genericization you are complaining about personally as we saw our favorite local stations get ruined.
- Retric 2y ago
  Always extends before you were born and things used to be different. Even fairly recently the exceptions were awesome. Over 25 years ago a friend setup a fairly expensive satellite dish system specifically to be able to listen to WFMU. It’s a NYC station he loved that was being rebroadcast for people who left the area. The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.

goosejuice 2y ago

I will read that but... I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million. If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this. Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.

Gud 2y ago
Agreed. it's not like we have to choose. I find Spotify to be pretty good if you want to listen to the rock classics and adjacent music(b-sides). If you want to discover new music, YouTube Music and SoundCloud seem superior.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dkarl 2y ago
It's an evergreen moral panic. Historically, we retrospectively recognize the seminal importance of scenes that had virtually zero participants, and rather than regretting that those scenes were so tiny and demonizing the distribution networks that served less-seminal music to the vast majority of listeners, we romanticize the marginality of those scenes. But when we see the same thing playing out contemporaneously, with creative niche music reaching tiny numbers of listeners and not getting traction via the distribution networks that serve the vast mainstream, we treat it as a crisis.
insane_dreamer 2y ago

izacus 2y ago

I'd still like to hear how is that exactly different or worse than the old "publisher" model, where everything is gatekept by publishing megacorporations and they decided what the taste of the decade was. And by "they", it was a few executives in those corporations - it was never a meritocracy and those people never cared about music they peddled either. So what exactly did it change here except the fact that now we're not at a mercy of a megapublisher to actually ship tapes/CDs across the world to hear a smaller artist?

dhosek 2y ago
Umm, gonna hard disagree. At least before the consolidation of media (whether publishers or record labels), the people who ran publishing houses and record labels did it because they loved books or music as appropriate. Publishing was never a big money maker and book and record stores fall into a weird part of capitalism where they don’t make a lot of money and they have a much larger number of distinct products than most other businesses do. I would guess that the local Target has fewer SKUs on the shelves than a modest-sized bookstore. Note that Barnes & Noble has been successful since its last change of ownership because the CEO cares about books, not because he’s trying to squeeze every penny possible out of it.
- izacus 2y ago
  There isn't a single story of a successful band that wouldn't hinge on having a big publisher exec approve them and work with them to change their music for acceptance. I think you're heavily rewriting history here.
  - dhosek 2y ago
    Off the top of my head, how about the Beatles?
    - izacus 2y ago
      What about them? One of their biggest early issues was EMI as a publisher not doing enough to promote their songs. Sounds familiar?

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago

> the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively I disagree with this assertion and find it cynical. The golden age of radio was a far more 'aesthetic flattening' experience. And yet we wax nostalgic about it all the time. I think there are good things that come about from less than ideal situations. Back then there were next to zero ways for your art to get noticed, but on the flip side the shared experience of having only a handful of 'hit' songs still had its merits. These days distribution costs have all but disappeared, so the barriers to being heard are far lower than ever before. Yes greasy corps like Spotify will continue trying to take their cut from every angle possible even if it dilutes the pool, but that's nothing new. So instead of making no money and being heard by no one, bands continue making no money but people actually have a chance of discovering their music. SoundCloud, YouTube, streaming services... it has never been easier to find and listen to music. Consequently have we ever had a time of more diverse musical tastes? I don't think so.

bazmattaz 2y ago

I understand it’s trendy these days to shit on Spotify but when I read about this practice it kind of seems like a non-story. Spotify are adding low cost tracks to their curated playlists (which are usually quite boring) to save themselves some money. If you don’t like this practice just don’t listen to their curated playlists. There are so many better user generated playlists out there.

dehrmann 2y ago
Something I've mulled over in the past is what a market-driven pricing model for streams would look like. Newer songs are generally worth more than older songs, and lean-in listening costs more because the user actually wants to hear a specific song, while in lean-back listening, anything with a similar vibe works. It's probably a good thing it's hard to pull off because you'd see Taylor Swift streams going for 10 cents and aspiring artists paying you $0.0001 to listen to their work in the background.
- bazmattaz 2y ago
  Sure that would be nice but how do you know what music is lean in/back music?
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    Active song selection and playlist engagement.
currymj 2y ago
the curated playlists used to be incredibly good. the initial release of Discover Weekly 10 years ago gave everyone such uncanny recommendations that it was a cultural event, people were talking about it, it was written up in major newspapers. Apple Music had just released a few months before and was a serious threat to Spotify, so Discover Weekly changed the trajectory of the company. It was also technologically interesting because it was one of the first times that a recommender system incorporated deep learning (on the actual song audio) in addition to collaborative filtering. It was really amazing! Now instead, they are shoveling whatever garbage costs them the least. Depressing.

DiscourseFan 2y ago

I have gotten to the point where I only listen to music now at live performances. Expensive, yes, but streaming music has made it dull and meaningless. I went to so many great underground shows in college and music was something I could feel. Now its just noise.