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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”

#201
post #121
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work. https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic... It turns out that the students who were just churning out pots ended up making the pots that were ultimately better. I think there's probably something to be said for constantly creating.

Just FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate…

I am not a musician but my guess is that they don't sit down and say "I'm going to record an album with 9 bad songs and one good one."

They do their best on every song and that's just how it turns out.

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

#202

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 com…

It's market valuing things based on scarcity. Music is in abundance right now due to lower barrier to entry for distributing and producing it than ever before. You have to provide more value than someone producing music as a hobby for free on youtube.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kanye West is a singular being. He is a human work of art, this generation’s Warhol. Perhaps even more fascinating than Warhol, if less self-aware. I’m a huge fan of his brilliant public trajectory, yet I despise his music.

Interesting. I feel the exact opposite. I think he is a great artist, but I think his persona outside of the actual songs is just noise.

His early career is really inspiring but yea everything recently is just noise and being married to Kardashians.

His shoes are doing really well, almost catching Jordan in yearly revenue.

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

#204
post #151

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 com…

Would you be more open and accepting to commentary if there was more kindness, more love, more empathy and compassion in discussions of how the old normal is gone? Expressions of admiration and awe coupled with opining that the old multi-year release cycle doesn't work anymore, and legions of hard-working humans making sacrifices for what they love may need to change? Thank you for sharing. The world is always a bett…

The message itself is wrong.

We live in a world of plenty. We should be working less, not more. We have created more music in this century than all of the last combined. We have the ability to listen to thousands of years of music at the touch of a button. A concert that would have taken hours of work for 50 people to entertain 200 now takes nothing - a million people put on their headphones and listen to a recording made 20 years ago.

And that is just music - the same plenitude is available in almost all aspects of our lives. And yet, people insist on ever more growth, on ever more work.

Hopefully in the next decades, as the reality of global warming and worker empowerment gain traction, we'll realize that in fact the work week can be drastically reduced without affecting our material needs, as long we let go of this level of consumption.

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

#205
post #82
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why they haven't improved the platform. Anyone working on a better alternative? If you're into electronic music you can also check Bleep (by Warp records). No DRM, you download your files and play them however you want. https://bleep.com/

What do you think Bandcamp should be improving? What would a better alternative look like? Genuinely curious as an artist pretty satisfied with Bandcamp.

The UI design is just awful for this day and age. It looks like MySpace from 15 years ago.

For example you get to an album page and there's just so much crap. The album and the player should be the main focus but the player is this tiny thing relegated into a corner.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not comparable - music is art.

The implication in your comment is that code isn't art, when code absolutely can be art. Functional things can be artistically beautiful too.

This is a stretch.

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

#209

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 com…

> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. I think the same could be said of any (good) art. Art and engineering are fundamentally very different things that just can't be compared, even if there may be some mutual overlapping. (Audio/mixing/mastering engineering definitely crosses the streams more, but for the sake of argument let's just consider the entire end-to-end…

Art isn't the kind of thing that can be solved with a clever hill-climbing algorithm, is it.

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

#210
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?

It's not comparable - music is art.

Musician and software developer here, and I'm calling BS on that. Here's a transcript of a talk I gave last year on "code as art" (apologies if this sounds like self-promo). You can skip the first half and scroll down to where it says "Which leads me back to code as an artform". There are a lot of ways to demonstrate that code IS art, and this was just a quick 5-minute overview of the subject. Cheers! https://www.johnluxford.com/blog/code-as-art
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