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Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Like Carthage, it is my opinion that Spotify and the music /industry/ founded on copy-theft m

by antocv 13y ago

Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Like Carthage, it is my opinion that Spotify and the music /industry/ founded on copy-theft must be burned down.

untog 13y ago
Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Care to expand on what you mean by that? I'll agree with you that the music industry is deeply messed up, but it has been for a very long time. If anything services like Spotify will allow artists to abandon parasitic record labels and release material by themselves.
- saaaaaam 13y ago
  People halo around the most visible artists. The various services promote the most popular artists, because that's what their audience wants. As the model shifts from a lean forward (I buy music that I like, so that I can listen to it) to a lean back (curated, data/discovery) model the top line hook for fairly un-engaged music consumers means that they discover less new music and hear more of what they expect to hear. Which is exactly what happened to radio, for exactly the same commercial reasons, over the past couple of decades.
  - andyhmltn 13y ago
    Really? Because I have used Spotify for 2+ years and I discover a lot of new music through it. Not the kind of stuff that I find on the radio either. Being able to start a 'radio' with a specific song brings out some great stuff you wouldn't of found before
- antocv 13y ago
  saaaaam and others under the top parent comment have provided really good answers. Spotify is the parasitic record label, they're owned and in their command. Ill never miss a chance to point out the hypocrisy of spotify, which was founded on piracy, its initial load of mp3s came from dc++ and thepiratebay.
JonnieCache 13y ago
>Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Why do you think this? Because of the insultingly tiny fees they pay out?
diydsp 13y ago
It's too bad you were downvoted to oblivion, but a more reasoned response might have nurtured more conversation. Anyway, having read lots of social theory on music, I'll bite. Go ahead and tell more. Specifically, death relative to what culture? It's my opinion music as a practice before the sedentary age of agriculture will probably never be recovered. It is currently just as subject to capitalistic practice as health care and everything else. I don't see Big Data's leveraging of music for profit as being significantly worse or better than previous generations' exploitations of music. In fact, I blame music for leading to its own demise. I believe music helped transmit the patterns and information which helped us become sedentary. I believe today's music rarely, if ever, soothes or nurtures us. There is another, truer form of music which attains that, but we have either lost it entirely or it is a well-kept secret.
- kpennell 13y ago
  "never soothes or nurtures us"... I feel like I'm drowning in good music now thanks to the net. Soothed, nurtured, confused, educated, lifted...there's no limit to the number of verbs that the plethora of music I have access to now does to me.
tunesmith 13y ago
I've felt the same but the syllogism path is hard to explain. Basically, many of these services are founded the same way Amazon was founded - completely unsustainable and then hoping something magic happens to make it sustainable later. Amazon wouldn't have survived without the dotcom scene going crazy and they barely got through to the other side. The music services exist by seeking to convince end users that they are entitled to "mostly free" music, and they only reason they can supply that service is with debt funding. Their hopes is that the appetite they instill in the end user will give the business enough support to argue favorable licensing terms from labels and the government. So when that happens, the party that hurts is the songwriter. You already have way too many people believing the canard that an indie songwriter should only expect to make money through touring and merchandise, and never from their recording efforts. That opinion is self-serving and pushed by those services "use your songs as a marketing expense!" when it is actually supposed to be the musician's livelihood. So what happens when a musician gets less and less likelihood of getting any kind of financial remuneration from their actual songwriting? It's a disincentive to focusing on original craftsmanship, and an incentive to focus on churning out greater volumes of homogenous crap in an effort to capture a very tiny piece of a very large homogenous pie. The end result from the perspective of the listener is that they never experience the counterfactual; they never know what they're missing. Sure, you might be enjoying that latest "indie" piece that is really just a max martin form with a decemberists diphthong singing tone combined with a couple of dubstep beats, but is that really original?
- diydsp 13y ago
  You've got some good points, but I actually believe it's a bit bleaker :) I believe the role of the musician is too important to be simply cast as a typical capitalist job- e.g. do it 40 hours and get a salary. Although I'll accept this until the rest of sedentary culture reforms (not likely in this life). The problem is our celebrity culture. We turn our efforts away from the 1000s of less famous musicians around us to the handful of celebrity musicians. Classical music culture, with its reverence and deification of a handful of sponsored artists, provides the template for rock music. Hip hop culture successfully followed the template. Jazz mainly dodged it. Recorded media (sheet music and the record) catalyzed it. Any technological aid to music culture can be judged by whether it leads to the (imo benevolent) fractioning of music - the re-directing of attention toward our immediate musicians - or whether it leverages and bolsters the celebrity culture. Any capitalistic enterprise is blind - or farcical - to these ends and will randomly support whatever ends lead to its own survival. However, this randomness must be biased toward existing resources, e.g. if not doing well, support the thread of celebrity culture to survive. This pattern continues for the individual musician, too, as you point out. So, from this perspective, I appreciate services which connect individuals with musicians of their choosing, but it's not like connecting people to Primary Care Physicians, a geographically-constrained problem. Instead, it facilitates people following their own flawed decision-making processes, following the crowds. So it becomes an issue of individual freedom, which I adore, even though so many people will not use it optimally for themselves.
al2o3cr 13y ago
Given that "the death of music" has been variously predicted to be caused by sheet music, player pianos, radio, home cassette tapes, MTV, MP3s, Napster, CD-Rs, Bittorrent etc I think Spotify may need to get in line...
kpennell 13y ago
Please answer: http://www.quora.com/Spotify/Is-Spotify-good-for-artists-and-musicians http://www.quora.com/Spotify/Is-Spotify-good-for-artists-and...

by antocv 13y ago

Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Like Carthage, it is my opinion that Spotify and the music /industry/ founded on copy-theft must be burned down.

untog 13y ago

Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Care to expand on what you mean by that? I'll agree with you that the music industry is deeply messed up, but it has been for a very long time. If anything services like Spotify will allow artists to abandon parasitic record labels and release material by themselves.

saaaaaam 13y ago
People halo around the most visible artists. The various services promote the most popular artists, because that's what their audience wants. As the model shifts from a lean forward (I buy music that I like, so that I can listen to it) to a lean back (curated, data/discovery) model the top line hook for fairly un-engaged music consumers means that they discover less new music and hear more of what they expect to hear. Which is exactly what happened to radio, for exactly the same commercial reasons, over the past couple of decades.
- andyhmltn 13y ago
  Really? Because I have used Spotify for 2+ years and I discover a lot of new music through it. Not the kind of stuff that I find on the radio either. Being able to start a 'radio' with a specific song brings out some great stuff you wouldn't of found before
antocv 13y ago
saaaaam and others under the top parent comment have provided really good answers. Spotify is the parasitic record label, they're owned and in their command. Ill never miss a chance to point out the hypocrisy of spotify, which was founded on piracy, its initial load of mp3s came from dc++ and thepiratebay.

JonnieCache 13y ago

>Spotify and similar disservices mean death to a culture of music. Why do you think this? Because of the insultingly tiny fees they pay out?

diydsp 13y ago

It's too bad you were downvoted to oblivion, but a more reasoned response might have nurtured more conversation. Anyway, having read lots of social theory on music, I'll bite. Go ahead and tell more. Specifically, death relative to what culture? It's my opinion music as a practice before the sedentary age of agriculture will probably never be recovered. It is currently just as subject to capitalistic practice as health care and everything else. I don't see Big Data's leveraging of music for profit as being significantly worse or better than previous generations' exploitations of music. In fact, I blame music for leading to its own demise. I believe music helped transmit the patterns and information which helped us become sedentary. I believe today's music rarely, if ever, soothes or nurtures us. There is another, truer form of music which attains that, but we have either lost it entirely or it is a well-kept secret.

kpennell 13y ago
"never soothes or nurtures us"... I feel like I'm drowning in good music now thanks to the net. Soothed, nurtured, confused, educated, lifted...there's no limit to the number of verbs that the plethora of music I have access to now does to me.

tunesmith 13y ago

I've felt the same but the syllogism path is hard to explain. Basically, many of these services are founded the same way Amazon was founded - completely unsustainable and then hoping something magic happens to make it sustainable later. Amazon wouldn't have survived without the dotcom scene going crazy and they barely got through to the other side. The music services exist by seeking to convince end users that they are entitled to "mostly free" music, and they only reason they can supply that service is with debt funding. Their hopes is that the appetite they instill in the end user will give the business enough support to argue favorable licensing terms from labels and the government. So when that happens, the party that hurts is the songwriter. You already have way too many people believing the canard that an indie songwriter should only expect to make money through touring and merchandise, and never from their recording efforts. That opinion is self-serving and pushed by those services "use your songs as a marketing expense!" when it is actually supposed to be the musician's livelihood. So what happens when a musician gets less and less likelihood of getting any kind of financial remuneration from their actual songwriting? It's a disincentive to focusing on original craftsmanship, and an incentive to focus on churning out greater volumes of homogenous crap in an effort to capture a very tiny piece of a very large homogenous pie. The end result from the perspective of the listener is that they never experience the counterfactual; they never know what they're missing. Sure, you might be enjoying that latest "indie" piece that is really just a max martin form with a decemberists diphthong singing tone combined with a couple of dubstep beats, but is that really original?

diydsp 13y ago
You've got some good points, but I actually believe it's a bit bleaker :) I believe the role of the musician is too important to be simply cast as a typical capitalist job- e.g. do it 40 hours and get a salary. Although I'll accept this until the rest of sedentary culture reforms (not likely in this life). The problem is our celebrity culture. We turn our efforts away from the 1000s of less famous musicians around us to the handful of celebrity musicians. Classical music culture, with its reverence and deification of a handful of sponsored artists, provides the template for rock music. Hip hop culture successfully followed the template. Jazz mainly dodged it. Recorded media (sheet music and the record) catalyzed it. Any technological aid to music culture can be judged by whether it leads to the (imo benevolent) fractioning of music - the re-directing of attention toward our immediate musicians - or whether it leverages and bolsters the celebrity culture. Any capitalistic enterprise is blind - or farcical - to these ends and will randomly support whatever ends lead to its own survival. However, this randomness must be biased toward existing resources, e.g. if not doing well, support the thread of celebrity culture to survive. This pattern continues for the individual musician, too, as you point out. So, from this perspective, I appreciate services which connect individuals with musicians of their choosing, but it's not like connecting people to Primary Care Physicians, a geographically-constrained problem. Instead, it facilitates people following their own flawed decision-making processes, following the crowds. So it becomes an issue of individual freedom, which I adore, even though so many people will not use it optimally for themselves.

al2o3cr 13y ago

Given that "the death of music" has been variously predicted to be caused by sheet music, player pianos, radio, home cassette tapes, MTV, MP3s, Napster, CD-Rs, Bittorrent etc I think Spotify may need to get in line...

kpennell 13y ago

Please answer: http://www.quora.com/Spotify/Is-Spotify-good-for-artists-and-musicians http://www.quora.com/Spotify/Is-Spotify-good-for-artists-and...