431–440 of 861 posts
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.
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.
Kanye West was the first big artist I know to really utilize The new release model to break out of the old formula of releasing an album and then it’s done. It was fascinating when Life of Pablo was released on Spotify and over the next few months was given continuous updates and patches, like it had been software. Really proves the old proverb that great art never is finished, it’s abandoned...
For me personally, it has been a negative, because I really loved Tame Impala's Borderline, which was switcheroo'd with a song I don't feel for when the album came out. They even took out the single version from Spotify and YouTube (the official channel), so we're stuck with the album version. A comment from unofficial YouTube version sums it up:
"I understand him wanting to make a version with the vision he originally intended for the song but the fact that he removed the other version when it already was presented and existed to other is what is infuriating and upsetting. The single version clearly held a special place in people's hearts and to lose that is hard to swallow."
The single version, one of my favorite songs of 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXkZ-eeGs6A
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I think it could be depressing if we think of "your product" as "the most important part of what you do". But we could also think of it as "the thing that you need to make money from". If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!
> If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing! It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.
Think of it like a software roadmap: Is it better to wait 6 months and release a bucket of features twice a year, or to release features gradually throughout the year and measure their effectiveness? Some might say that releasing features gradually is "rushing things out", while others might say that it's the only way to ship non-broken software that people actually want to use.
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As a musician and programmer I find the bar to make money on apps way way lower than on music. Being a good programmer brings you much closer to making money on an app than being a good musician does to get a record out. For one you don't need luck, money and the right contacts to release an app. It isn't even in the same ballpark IMHO. Pro musician is closer to "race driver" than "viral app creator".
In the same way you can just put your music on YouTube if want to 'release' it. You can ofc release apps, that doesn't mean people will ever use it. The cost to acquire a user isn't anywhere cheaper than a finding an listener.
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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.
Good music - electrifying, change-your-life music - is still extremely scarce. But Spotify has made it even harder to find by swamping it in mediocre burger+fries music.
Compared to what?
I grew up with music heavily filtered by radio promoters. That was rarely "change-your-life music".
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Can you elaborate on what you're referring to or talking about? Of course there are loads of software that people use in art. But in the end, those are still solving a problem and are not art. Examples are TouchDesigner, Processing, Logic, Studio One, Pure Data, vvvv, and much more. These software products are not art themselves but are rather solutions to problems to allow artists to create art easier. They are not…
A tremendously important example is videogames which as well as being a multi-billion dollar industry akin to music are also a major medium of individual self expression. In the broader set you have interactive fiction and a whole slew of art that shares a lot in common with time-based art. Demoscene is a good example of the latter.
My favorite game designer is Fumito Ueda. His games of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian are prime examples of games can be art.
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I don't think this subthread is any use when you're just speaking of "musicians" at large being able to pay their rent. You can't put Rammstein in the same league as my friend who would like to make a living in music but realizes that it's unlikely he'll ever make pay-the-rent kind of money from that, simply due to the sheer volume of competition and luck involved (while their music is as good as any song I've heard…
I'd just like to take a second to appreciate that your example of a band with money is Rammstein. Rock on!
I'm not even that big a fan of Rammstein, just a few of their songs I like :)
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…
Yeah the CEO’s take reminds me of Jobs’s “you’re holding it wrong”. So it’s not that Spotify is not paying artists enough, it’s that artists aren’t working hard enough. And even though artists have been complaining about the money they make from streaming for years, “in private” some of them are happy. Sure.
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Good music - electrifying, change-your-life music - is still extremely scarce. But Spotify has made it even harder to find by swamping it in mediocre burger+fries music.
Music ain't changing my life. Help me have a good cry? Sure. Make chores less boring, absolutely. But for me life changes are life-changing; music's ultimately just what was on, the soundtrack.
Functional music, like what you describe, is easy to listen to. It serves a purpose: reduce boredom, be a companion in sadness, lift the awkwardness of sitting next to strangers in silence. It fits in the genres you are used to listening.
This is, of course, just my experience. But it's clear that for many people, music becomes their life.