441–450 of 861 posts
I think singles and smaller albums (5 tracks or less) are the sweet spot these days - for consumers and for artists.
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. That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs). But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I do…
Sure, you could strum a guitar and sing and have a decent song wrapped up in an afternoon.
But if you're creating anything more complex, you will spend hours finding the right sound, more hours creating the right arrangement, and even more hours fine-tuning the vocals, sounds, and final mix.
Something as simple as getting a snare drum right can take a ton of time. You don't hear it because you don't know what the bad snare sounds like.
Be more iterative, experimental, and user driven by releasing an album's worth of content over the course of a few years. Seems like this reduces the risk for musicians publishing music that doesn't have an audience.
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> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs). But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I do…
It sounds to me like you're making his point. You offered no insight into the process of creating music whatsoever.
With or without insight, it's obviously apples-to-oranges to compare "working software" to a "hit record".
Most "working software" is rarely used and makes no money, look at the long tail of apps in the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, etc that didn't become hits.
I don't see the lie here. :) Many of us in the music industry have been doing more single-based releases than album-based, because there really is no point to albums anymore. If you have a couple of tracks that all fit together, by all means, release them at once. But music isn't album-driven anymore, it's track-driven, and has been for a very long time.
This is exactly the problem: the technological advances changed the music consumption and music, unfortunately, follows. So instead of empowering the artists with more creative freedom it forced everyone to follow the same route. It's appalling.
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Over 80% of my music listening is full albums, even though I haven’t played a record or CD since 2015. I really hope the medium of the album survives, because I much prefer listening to a coherent and deliberate group of songs than any other method.
I don’t understand how an album wouldn’t survive if singles survive. An album is a collection of single songs.
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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.
Jobs never said that, so maybe avoid putting it in quotes.
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> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs). But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I do…
As a part-time musician, even a single track can take tens of hours of effort - depending on the genre and the track. Sure, you could strum a guitar and sing and have a decent song wrapped up in an afternoon. But if you're creating anything more complex, you will spend hours finding the right sound, more hours creating the right arrangement, and even more hours fine-tuning the vocals, sounds, and final mix. Something…
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Ah yes, the "new music sucks" argument. I've definitely never heard this one before. Please tell me how Metallica is relevant right now.
People still listen to Metallica's music, and their music still ends up in movies. I don't really think all new music is bad, just most of it. The same could be said for back in the day though. Metallica is a bad example for you to use cause they are still widespread because they are really good. There are other bands you haven't heard of from the 70s and 80s.
This "all new music is dross" argument is repeated every generation as new music out-ages the outgoing generation.
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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".
20 years ago you needed all of the same stuff in software engineering, as you described in music. Things change... It costs as much to "release an app" as to "get a record out" today.