Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thefader.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

701–710 of 861 posts

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

#701

Post by bryanrasmussen »

weeksie wrote: post #384
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 medium is the message. This is the equivalent to amazon kindle self-pubbers needing to crank out 3-5 books per year to make a living.

Do you have links on articles on how many books are needed to make living and how much of a living it might be expected at median and high ends? I'm interested in the subject and your offhand comment makes me hope you have more insight into it than I do.

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

#702

Post by solarized »

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…

freemium business model

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

#704

Post by [deleted] »

hedora wrote: post #656
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…

I prefer to listen to bands that produce an excellent album every few years, vs a pile of sameness every three months. Examples: “Boy Meets Robot”, “Unwoman”, “The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets”, “Goldfrapp”, much of what is featured on “Dark Compass”. Where do people go for music like this? Bandcamp? Other places?

[deleted]

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

#705

Post by loa_in_ »

hedora wrote: post #656
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…

I prefer to listen to bands that produce an excellent album every few years, vs a pile of sameness every three months. Examples: “Boy Meets Robot”, “Unwoman”, “The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets”, “Goldfrapp”, much of what is featured on “Dark Compass”. Where do people go for music like this? Bandcamp? Other places?

YouTube/some kind of streaming service for music, Facebook/Twitter to get information about tours and get pointers to official stores and sites

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

#706

Post by [deleted] »

bmitc wrote: post #436
meheleventyone wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Games certainly can be art! But I don't see how that conflicts with what I said or serves as a counterexample. Games are not just software products. They are the culmination of work by artists, designers, writers, and engineers. The end product is often an artistic piece, and a rather interesting one. Games being art doesn't suddenly mean software products are art. The software itself helps drive the art but is not t…

[deleted]

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

#707

Post by bobthepanda »

bmitc wrote: post #193
bobthepanda wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean pop music has been doing this for a while too. This group has pretty rapid releases, 5 singles a year, and 10 EPs and 3 albums since 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_discography

While I enjoy Kpop, I don't feel it's necessarily a great model for artistic expression. It's an industry where fake is the status quo. Kpop is not selling people music per se. It's selling people this idea that you could be an idol or be friends with an idol or be a partner of an idol. It's an emotional hack like a carrot being dragged in front of you. I personally like a lot of Kpop for the strange music production…

To be quite clear I'm not endorsing it. It just seems to be a natural evolution of music industry in the digital age. South Korea was, if not is, one of the countries farthest on the digital curve.

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

#708

Post by mopierotti »

bmitc wrote: post #152
oarsinsync wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 really silly argument. There is an art to building software, no doubt, in terms of it being a craft. But I think you've misspoken about functional things being artistically beautiful. What you really should mean is that functional things can be aesthetically beautiful, which is true and different. Art is primarily defined by expression and exploration, particularly revolving around human emotions. Software…

I might be late to the party, but:

Software can be art in itself. Consider quines [1]. (Programs that, when run, produce themselves) They serve no real world purpose, and I consider them beautiful. Kind of like the restrictive format of a haiku. (Edit: Or perhaps tesselations, e.g. Escher's work [3])

I particularly enjoy what this artist(?) has done with their 128 language uroborus quine. [2]

Edit 2: I expect the objection will be that this is not functional, or a "product", however the uroboros quine does have practical uses. E.g. as a system stress test. If it were marketed as a stress test, its artistic value would still be apparent to a programmer examining its structure.

[1] https://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

[2] https://github.com/mame/quine-relay

[3] http://www.tessellations.org/eschergallery2.shtml

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

#709

Post by tsimionescu »

Nasrudith wrote: post #546
tsimionescu wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you think the world of plenty came about in the first place? A hell of a lot of growth and work to provide for the demands of broad consumer bases instead of the whims of some head honcho who wanted pointless setpiece folly castles or grand monuments.

The world of plenty mostly came about from technological advancement.

In my opinion, we're way past the point where we should have stopped trying to grow, in most fields. In particular in music, we're at least 2 decades past the point where the music production industry is being helpful.

Also in art in general, it's interesting to think about what this world of plenty has cost us. Even if we have incomprehensibly more music available to us than any generation before say 1920, most people have actually lost the pleasure of producing their own music.

In the times before recording and playing back music were common, a much larger proportion of the population would be learning how to sing and play themselves. Many more people would be composing and sharing their own stories - the almost dead world of folklore.

This can also apply to a lot of crafts - we're more and more becoming dependent on industry for simple things that we would have done ourselves in centuries past.

If all of this had been a way to help free us pursue other passions, it would have been good. But it seems to me that it's mostly a way to free us to do more work for other people, and that, for the average person who is not working in a job capable of using their creativity, it has started stunting a lot their creative potential, which would have found an outlet in some of these domestic pursuits in the past.

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

#710

Post by mosselman »

wyattpeak wrote: post #689
loudtieblahblah wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this very model has prevented hip hop from evolving and instead we ended up with mumble rap which feels like a step backwards in multiple ways. Music has become all gimmick, fueled by celebrity gossip and social media bullshit. It's samey as hell and stagnant and lacks innovation.

> we ended up with mumble rap > It's samey as hell and stagnant I don't follow rap, but these two claims seem contradictory. Is the first not evidence of evolution in the genre, if in a direction you don't like?

If anything mumble rap is a devolution. Add auto-tune to this and you are left with a worthless corpus of shitty rap, hip-hop and also pop music.

It is samey, because everybody does the same thing. You can’t really differentiate music by different performers anymore. Each song is the same.

There used to be a cost to producing music; you needed a studio, producer, physical copies of the samples you wanted to use (in case of most rap), etc. Now you can just boot your computer and use one of the many digital studios.

It is a blessing in some ways, but a curse in most I think. Quality is by no means the element by which (popular) music is judged. It is all about presentation, which somehow means the most deplorable people get the most praise.

Note: I am talking about what is mainstream and played on still high quality radio. I don’t listen to rap stations and luckily there are stations that have a good selection of older music and only play some of the new stuff. The new stuff there is already worse than music from the past though.

If you look at the rap and hip-hop scene however, the quality has plummeted even more. It is just one homogeneous soup of crappy, lazy music. In no way like the music of 2Pac, Notorious B.I.G and Outkast but still all the same as the other new crap.

Post reply on HN