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Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

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Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#131

Don’t people write and listen to entire albums anymore? When I listen to music, I almost always listen to entire albums, not individual songs.

Not really. Most people hated getting and paying for whole albums, out of which most stuff was garbage.

Few artists have whole albums worth listening to.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#133
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This might be true if Spotify's monetization was distributed fairly, but instead it's basically redistributive to the biggest players. In short, instead of splitting a person's premium payment equally among all the artists they listened to, it's split among all artists on the platform. E.g. if Lady Gaga is 2% of all Spotify plays in a month, they get 2% of the money, even if you personally didn't listen to Lady Gaga…

Does this really work out differently?

It probably gets complicated w/ ads vs premium subs, but if I was 1 subscriber and there were 100 total subs, and I listened exclusively to 1 artist, but 99 other people listened to a different artist... the artist I listened to gets the same amount if they get 100% of my fee or 1% of the total fees, right?

I guess users with idle subscriptions is another edge case here.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#134
post #81

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. If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?

Music is different from software in my mind. Software, with rare exceptions, is solving a problem—music is not.

I would disagree. I would instead phrase it as "addressing a need", and with that phrasing, I don't see a clear distinction between software and music.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#135
post #44

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.

What’s especially funny about your example is Hemingway wrote for periodicals as a day job for a long time, and so he kept that kind of schedule. Except some of his books came about because he didn’t keep to that schedule, and we don’t usually talk about Hemingway for his articles in the Toronto Star.

Ok, the metaphor doesn't really work for writers because the effort you put into an article or blog post is not comparable to a song.

But anyway my point was more about producing significant and valuable work.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#137
I think the main issue is that people don't buy albums anymore. They only buy/listen to singles. So it doesn't make sense to work on a full album and release it a the same time. Because of the new channels, it makes more sense to release individual songs at regular intervals.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#138
post #97

So many bands lose their creative spark after the first album or two, and it's exactly because of this mentality. I'd rather have one album of music carefully curated over 4 years than four albums than have 4 albums rushed out over a year. The creative process takes time. If you just rush out the next album you're probably just adding onto the already massive heap of formulaic uninspired music. I'm not saying you can…

Some famous musician (can’t remember their name) said something along the lines “you take 10 years to write your first album and they expect you to write the second in 6 months”.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#139
I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech companies have abused musicians to get rich is one of the most shameful things to ever happen. Furthermore, I'm sick of these guru edicts about how everyone will need to work that much harder in the "new normal". I got into software to pay the bills, but the way geeks talk about the industry and people I love drives me right up the wall. Have some appreciation--even awe--for the art you enjoy. It requires more effort than you could ever imagine.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#140

I used to work in the music industry professionally, on the ground level doing booking and management. This trend has been happening slowly for nearly a decade but it’s finally here. Rap and Hip Hop figured out a long time before most other genres that rapid small releases was a far better way to keep hype and sales up. Before Spotify was a thing, the shift was happening with YouTube but it wasn’t as predominant. Now…

Also, didn't the hip hop crowd just give away their music for free and make all their money touring? Until signed anyway. And mix tapes were more than a single. So to that end, music definitely was their marketing. To put it another way, they let the music market itself. That's all they needed, and was all they got. I would put influence under marketing though, unless we can settle that music and influence are both both.
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