101–110 of 861 posts
Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art. It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you don't get in and out of whatever it is you're doing. Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
Artists to Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer afford to make $0.00174927 per stream.
Let's be honest. The amount Spotify/Pandora/et al pay the majority of musicians per stream is far more than they'd make selling CD's. The overwhelming majority of music is unknown, has few fans, and will never "go platinum" nor sell out stadiums - ie, most musicians are not Taylor Swift. For all those artists... access to millions of potential listeners from around the world is an amazing advancement. The number of a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. Man, that's depressing.
>> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. > Man, that's depressing. If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?
Artists to Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer afford to make $0.00174927 per stream.
Let's be honest. The amount Spotify/Pandora/et al pay the majority of musicians per stream is far more than they'd make selling CD's. The overwhelming majority of music is unknown, has few fans, and will never "go platinum" nor sell out stadiums - ie, most musicians are not Taylor Swift. For all those artists... access to millions of potential listeners from around the world is an amazing advancement. The number of a…
"Access to millions of potential listeners from around the world" was an advance that had arrived with internet itself and monetized with a number of retailed-recording models like iTunes or Amazon.
Or Pandora, if you like, but it's important to note it is a big mistake to think of Spotify and Pandora as the same thing. They're no more in the same category than FM radio is in the same category as a cabinet full of records. Pandora is radio evolved,and it's a discovery and promotional boon, I happily enjoy it and pay for it. Spotify is something else entirely -- it isn't primarily a radio station, it is a cloud replacement for record collections or the practice of owning recordings at all. Even calling it "streaming" almost kneecaps attempts to think about it productively because of how much that term is associated with broadcast.
Spotify's value-ad isn't audience reach. It isn't even algorithmic or social recommendation, both of which were done before it began to gnaw away at the industry. Spotify's contribution to both is marginal.
The big first-order benefit for the consumer is that it replaces retailed-recording revenue with very fractional per-stream revenue, and so it turns out you pay a lot less and the artist gets paid a lot less.
Trying to justify that with "yes, but their potential audience is so much bigger" ignores that artists have to do a LOT of increased volume to make up. 100 plays for every single or album they might have sold is a floor; in a retailed-recording model, someone who nets $.50 a song is already doing better than someone who gets 100 plays on Spotify (also, that's average and there are some rank-takes-all issues with how payments are distributed). And you still have the classic problem artists have always had -- how do you capture fickle and scarce attention?
And if you're relying on attention-volume, then that means niche music isn't going to be as much, so you need to pick a form that has the broadest possible appeal. And like the article says, you need to also focus on volume of material rather than polishing less frequent releases for a long time. And of course, marketing & promotion matters more than ever when a broad audience makes the economics work.
Do we like these incentives? Or do we just like paying less up front and not having to think about them?
As you say, let's be honest and clear-eyed about our answers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
people enjoy music for various reasons but there are a few deep ones: beauty and live no system can replace a good live concert, it's a high grade experience (sometimes religious even) if the music industry goes toward absurdism, the "customers" will just find the real drug elsewhere
Gorillaz used to do their shows almost entirely hidden from the audience and the characters would be projected onto screens. If we get to the point where we can generate actual good music we can do it in a live setting with avatars.
Recommendations from friends for movies and TV shows are usually very good, but not with music. My opinion of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music recommendations is much worse. I find that I am better off randomly picking music tracks.
I prefer the Kanye West model in which every 8 months or so you promise to release an album on a specific date. Then that date comes and you go completely MIA, and pretend you never even announced the album. Then a few weeks later once all the hype has turned to dismay you quietly release the album and the dismay turns back into hype. Maybe that model only works if you're Kanye though.