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

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

#571

Post by matwood » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #442

crazygringo wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Artistic endeavors always take me a long time, but then I read about people like Kanye who puts down a hit track in 20 minutes (he’s apparently known for working this way). You may not line rap or him, but he has a knack for hit beats.

https://www.okayplayer.com/news/heres-the-story-behind-kanye...

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

#572

Post by matchagaucho » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

alchemyromcom wrote: post #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 com…

Creating a "hit" in the software space would be more of an apples to apples comparison.

Both music and software are crafts that take years to perfect. But adoption by an audience is never guaranteed.

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

#573

Post by lotsofpulp » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

boomlinde wrote: post #561

lotsofpulp wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how an album wouldn’t survive if singles survive. An album is a collection of single songs.

That's a bit like saying that a movie is a collection of single pictures.

An album is a playlist of songs selected by the musician. They can be consumed as a playlist, or individually.

A frame of a movie won’t make sense without the whole movie.

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

#574

Post by Kalium » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

adamsea wrote: post #430

JAlexoid wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. It's their freedom to be on Spotify. They can go back to the olden model of no streaming as well.

This is a pretty narrow take IMHO. We all have the freedom to do whatever; the issue is the consequences. The question I think is more about if as a society we think it’s important for musicians to be able to make a decent living at their work and if so do we want to use our collective tools of law or government (or if someone gets lucky and innovates a better business model) to help that happen? And if Spotify’s cur…

> it’s important for musicians to be able to make a decent living at their work

I think this depends on a great many factors. Do you mean possible for some musicians, everyone who wants to do music in some capacity, or somewhere in between? How do you define a decent living?

I'm reminded of the "No farms, no food" bumper-stickers I would sometimes see. While obviously true as written, it's subtlety different in practice and politics. Food comes from farms. Farms are needed. Yet this may not the same as all farms being needed, important, or significant to keep functioning. The person with that bumper sticker may not agree with the distinction I've drawn.

Music is absolutely critical to our ongoing cultural life. No musicians, no music. Yet... to what extent should a society with limited resources devote them to the promotion and enablement of musicians, bearing in mind that there are other uses for those resources? Even with an abundance mindset and in today's world of plenty, this key question does not go away.

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

#575

Post by boomlinde » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

Johnny555 wrote: post #160

pier25 wrote: 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.

Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art. He's not telling bands how to be successful artistically, he's telling them how to be successful financially in the modern music world. If the band is only interested in promoting their art, they can do anything they want. If they want to earn a living too, they need to provide the market what it wants.

Generally, the financially successful artist will be touring and playing live shows and between that spend a lot of time in a studio recording many songs at once, not recording a song every month for Spotify pittance.

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

#576

Post by ZephyrBlu » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

quacked wrote: post #12

shakezula wrote: post #4

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…

> 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.

It's amazing, not depressing. Music is an incredibly effective marketing channel.

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

#577

Post by boomlinde » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #122

Larrikin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of an album being bad as a stereotype I believe was just from actual bad artists when basically anyone could get a deal and possibly go platinum from a single song. Good artists typically had good albums

Possibly, but I think albums are only significant due to the historical medium of music requiring grouping songs together on various disks. Once it’s digital, I don’t see the importance of grouping certain songs together, outside of certain categories like movie soundtracks. I guess some albums could tell some story about what the musician was feeling at some time, but that probably doesn’t apply for a lot of music i…

Long suites of thematically consistent music of course predates recorded music, so I don't think you can chalk it up entirely to the recording medium.

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

#578

Post by jessaustin » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

toohotatopic wrote: post #376

adamsmith wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are orders of magnitude of scale in both fields. In software it can cost $10k to build an app but Google Search costs $10^10: a six orders of magnitude difference. In music there’s got to be a big dynamic range in effort involved as well. (I doubt it’s 10^6 though!) But comparing the best music to the lowest end app is apples to oranges.

If you have an orchestra with 100 musicians who receive something like $10^5 per year, you pay $10^7 per year. You need several years to practice and to form the orchestra into a team with a repertoire. If it takes 10 years, then that is $10^8.

Presumably a well-paid professional orchestra could record more than one decent song a year, or at least one "every 3-4 years"?

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

#579

Post by eslaught » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

dijksterhuis wrote: post #536

eslaught wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably took me about 10 years to get good at programming. Sure, I could create programs pretty quickly---but making something like [1] is another matter altogether. [1]: http://regent-lang.org/

But I'm guessing you were paid for programming during those 10 years.

I guess it depends on how you count, but not really, at least not for the first 6 years or so. The first two-ish were high school, the next four were college, and the next six were in graduate school (so on a grad student's salary). After that I got a "real" job.

For what it's worth, I do other artistic pursuits as well. I did music for about 15 years though I wouldn't say I was ever good. I've been writing for about 10 years. I would say I'm just now barely at the point where I think I can write half-way decently.

To be clear, I am very aware, and very grateful that one of the things I happen to like doing also pays well. I was responding more to the "you can't imagine the level of effort required to do this work" aspect of the ancestors' comments. Yes, I can imagine, thank you very much. While I don't like where we're going with funding models for art, that doesn't mean that understanding the effort is the limiting factor.

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

#580

Post by brandonmenc » Fri, Jul 31, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #374

shakezula wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your friend was absolutely right. I never cared if people pirated my bands music (or later the bands that I was managing) because the real thing I wanted was them showing up at shows, buying merch, posting us on facebook, asking events to bring us on, etc... At a certain point, Taylor Swift and larger artists _do_ make a good chunk of change from their actual music sales, but it isn't a feasible strategy to rely on t…

> Your friend was absolutely right. I never cared if people pirated my bands music (or later the bands that I was managing) because the real thing I wanted was them showing up at shows, buying merch, posting us on facebook, asking events to bring us on, etc... This model breaks down for people like me who are neither interested in merch nor in going to concerts. I just like the music.

You can always send money to your favorite musicians.