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

thefader.com

811–820 of 861 posts

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

#811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Yorkers said the same thing about all southern rappers decades ago and now many of those artists and songs they panned are considered classics. Rap doesn't have to fit some narrowly defined category where all artists are doing the same style during a given period. You can also like conscious rappers calling for social change and still enjoy a club banger asking women to shake their butts. They aren't diametricall…

>Rap doesn't have to fit some narrowly defined category where all artists are doing the same style during a given period. And yet thats where it's at right now, with some exception. Hiphop used to have diversity of sound. Now, as far as popular rap goes, it's all homogenized. Same beats. Same cadence. Same flow. Voices indistinguishableffrom each other.

>Same beats. Same cadence. Same flow. Voices indistinguishableffrom each other.

This is how people used to talk about Hip Hop in the 90s. People familiar with Trap can easily distinguish between the different rappers and producers - just like people familiar with 90's Hip Hop could distinguish between Nas and Ghostface or DJ Premier and Pete Rock.

And, that's only Trap. There are still popular MC's and producers who operate outside of Trap.

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

#812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Andre 3000 is a big fan of Future fwiw.

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

#813
post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer good lyrics over mumble rap, but music is entirely subjective. You think it's a step backwards, but young people think it's a step forwards. Mumble rap is essentially just natural selection. Some random rapper started doing it, people liked it, and so it propagated. If people didn't like it, it would have died out quickly. You just aren't one of those people. > It's samey as hell and stagnant and lacks innov…

I don’t know what mumble rap is, so I’m not commenting on that in particular. But, something being selected for doesn’t imply that it isn’t a bad thing. Even if we assume that “how much the typical person likes it” or “how many people like to listen to it” or something along those lines is a good measure of goodness, those are not the only things involved in the selection pressure. Things like cost to produce, discov…

The point of my comment wasn't that mumble rap is good, it's that music is subjective. There is no good or bad music. There is only music that is good to some, and bad to others. Mumble rap is good to enough people that it propagated.

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

#814
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.

> Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.

Hemingway's fiction in particular aside, it is worth noting that many of the novel-length works now considered classics were actually created and released as a series of shorter works, often to fairly strict deadlines:

https://booksonthewall.com/blog/serial-novel-a-brief-history...

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

#815
post #780
post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re just saying the same things older people have been saying about new music since time immemorial.

How about from other established rappers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0OdmRtuQew Admittedly they are now "older" :)

Established older musicians hated The Beatles.

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

#816
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s especially funny about your example is Hemingway wrote for periodicals as a day job for a long time, and so he kept that kind of schedule. Except some of his books came about because he didn’t keep to that schedule, and we don’t usually talk about Hemingway for his articles in the Toronto Star.

Ok, the metaphor doesn't really work for writers because the effort you put into an article or blog post is not comparable to a song. But anyway my point was more about producing significant and valuable work.

Oh! I didn’t mean for my comment to come across as a disagreement of any kind.

I was just making a side comment. I thought it was funny and that your analogy was even more true because we don’t talk so much about Hemingway’s frequent articles in a newspaper but we study at length and hold in high regard his long form works.

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

#817
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spotify is not for putting out art, it's for generating buzz about your art so you can get paid for it later. If your goal is the best art you can produce, then perhaps Spotify and that roller coaster isn't what you should care about. And how exactly will people get paid, when Spotify (and other streaming services) have effectively replaced album sales? This is just the same tired old "exposure" argument.

> And how exactly will people get paid, when Spotify (and other streaming services) have effectively replaced album sales? Touring and merch sales, which is why the aggressive release schedule on Spotify to keep buzz up is supposed to be good in the first place. > This is just the same tired old "exposure" argument. The whole argument about needing to release more often is predicated by that exposure argument. If you…

sigh

You're dead wrong. I don't have the energy to go into it anymore, but see my other comments on the matter if you care.

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

#818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is probably similar to the apocryphal story about Picasso: A woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.” “But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied. “No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

Yeah. Many don’t realize he was making beats for well known rappers before the general public knew who Kanye was. I still think his best talent is as a beat creator/producer.

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

#819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1970s golden age of making a concept album in a French villa doing drugs for two years on the record label's dime are long gone.

The only album that comes to mind is Exile on Main Street, but I'm not particularly into back stories. Were a lot of people doing this in the 70s? I'm D'Angelo is as good as it gets. Voodoo and Black Messiah are two of my absolute favorite albums, and they're the only two albums he's put out in the last 20 years. Other than it being a long process, I don't know a lot about the Black Messiah recording process, but Voo…

Fleetwood Mac was definitely fueled by cocaine.

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

#820
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So set up an organised way for me to do that, e.g. Patreon. Some artists already do.

This is crazy but we used to have this scheme where you actually just paid them for access to the recording. Weird, right? Then we Spotifyd and that was the end of that and people got a new hobby coming up with justifications for why it's good that we replaced a revenue source for musicians with ... maybe giving them money? Or maybe having them run a T-shirt business?

Yeah, it was weird. I don't want to have to keep track of a particular object, whether it's a physical recording or a downloaded file.

Make sure the music is available when I want it. Send a bit of money to artists I want to support. But don't couple them together with a bunch of transactions I've got to manage individually.

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