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Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

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Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#231

Post by rsynnott »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #173
svantana wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, music has historically been a very social thing that have brought people together. The decline into a sollipsist "service" has been gradual since the dawn of recorded music, but Spotify et al are definitely making it worse than ever. My 11-year old daughter loves music but she and her friends all listen to different things, there is no music that they all know. I may have hated top40 stuff in my da…

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

In a way, that would just be a return to before the second industrial revolution, when popular music and consumer products were more more regionalised. "Everyone in the world, or even the country listens to the same thing and drinks the same cola" is a recent phenomenon, and arguably not that valuable a phenomenon.

In practice, though, I'm sure there's quite a bit of sharing musical tastes between friend and interest groups; it wouldn't be literally everyone listening to different things.

I would wonder does increasing consumer choice ultimately erode generational identity a bit, though. So much of the "what is a boomer/gen X/millenial" is founded in what popular culture everyone was consuming in a given decade.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#232

Post by CincinnatiMan »

CydeWeys wrote: post #200
CincinnatiMan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

If you don't have anything in common with others then you're both mutually doing a really bad job of sharing your favorites with each other. I love getting musical recommendations from friends, and most of my very favorite music ever comes by way of friends, rather than me having "discovered" it "independently" (whatever that even means).

Interesting point. What helped you become friends with those people in the first place? For myself it's usually a common background or shared interest in something, which for example enables us to jokingly rank the best video games, which we are all familiar with from our childhood.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#233

Post by bby »

laurent92 wrote: post #65
ehnto wrote: post #53

I hope so. Top 40 lists are constructed not observed. They seem to have no relationship to what music is favored by listeners, just what is being pushed on pop radio. A self satisfying loop.

It is astonishing when you realize it. Since the MCM times, we’ve transferred music bands from sound to image, and we noticed the commercial drums (and repetition on radios in particular) produced linear return in investment, and music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it. To the point that today, any music will do. It’s much easier for the labels, since they can pimp anyone among the 1-10% of the population who…

MCM?

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#234

Post by CydeWeys »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #232
CydeWeys wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have anything in common with others then you're both mutually doing a really bad job of sharing your favorites with each other. I love getting musical recommendations from friends, and most of my very favorite music ever comes by way of friends, rather than me having "discovered" it "independently" (whatever that even means).

Interesting point. What helped you become friends with those people in the first place? For myself it's usually a common background or shared interest in something, which for example enables us to jokingly rank the best video games, which we are all familiar with from our childhood.

Honestly it's mostly about collocation, which studies have shown to be the most powerful factor in friendship formation. My best long-running friends that I'm still in regular contact with are all people that I met freshman/sophomore year of college because we lived on the same floor in the dorms. Now obviously most of the people on my floor I didn't make friends with, but I did make friends with the ones that I got along with. And yes there's some shared interests involved as part of that, but proximity was more important. I was in the CS major and I actually didn't make a lot of friends in the major at all; we didn't gel well for whatever reason and the classroom environment wasn't suitable for getting to know people. So my college friends ended up being a diversity of majors plus a lot of landscape architecture majors, because my most outgoing friend was in that major and he made a lot of friends in the major because of the nature of it (lots of time spent together in close quarters in the studio doing project work).

So I wouldn't say I've explicitly made many if any friends over shared interests in music, but then once I had friends for whatever other reasons, we shared a lot of music with each other. Hardly any of them weren't "in" to music, and indeed some of them quite the opposite; they ended up in a band together (and I would occasionally incompetently noodle along with them on vocals/bass/guitar, but I wasn't remotely good enough to play out like they were).

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#235

Post by goto11 »

fiblye wrote: post #72
bawolff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is music supposed to challenge you? To each their own, but if i wanted to be challenged i read a book, learn something new, etc. I think i listen to music because it has an effect of transfering emotional state/causes me to feel. Being intellectually challenging is not a good thing in that context. (Although i still want it to be unpredictable and not neccesarily safe)

> Is music supposed to challenge you? Music can be whatever it wants. But music having complex melodies, varied lyrics, telling stories, and having social or political commentary has very much always been a thing. Plenty of that music still exists and is still being made, but it's not really found on modern pop stations (although older pop stations have slightly more complex work). Just walking by a radio today bothe…

> lyrics that are all just some variation of "yeah yeah club dance club club club club party party club club love you dance dance drunk drunk club club don't love you now".

Maybe you just don't like dance music? "Rock around the clock" or "Twist and Shout" had the same style of lyrics - simple, repetitive, rhythmic, accentuating the music rather than telling a story.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#236

Post by chrisco255 »

goto11 wrote: post #211
chrisco255 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no trouble listening to pop music from the 80s, 90s and early 00s. I don't know if that's old age and nostalgia or if music was just better then. I think in many cases, music was just better in prior decades, pop music in particular.

And in the 80s, 90s and early 00s people were complaining that music was just better in prior decades.

Yeah but you know I think because we listen to less and less music on the radio and more on streaming, I think it's harder for break out hits to happen today. New music has to compete on equal footing with old music that is more accessible than it has ever been and also has to compete with podcasts and other forms of audio entertainment that are available in much higher quantities today.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#237

Post by skciva »

austhrow743 wrote: post #162
sjwright wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn’t killed the album, it’s just changed the rules of the game for marketing “popular” music by reducing the power of radio and increasing interest in the long tail.

Streaming didn't kill the album, but something did. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/ Looks like piracy did it in.

I don't think focusing on album sales paints the full picture on how modern artists find success.

I've heard artists mention how albums don't really make them much money. Things like touring and merch sales account for the bulk of their income. I'd guess with streaming, podcasts, social networks, etc. artists have found ways outside of releasing a traditional album to stay relevant to the listener.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#238

Post by mywittyname »

stareatgoats wrote: post #201
rsynnott wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many? Virtually _all_, either for a rich individual or the church. An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it, is a pretty new invention. Probably a big part of why post-19th century art is so much more interesting and diverse; Western art pre-19th century was largely about technical competence in whatever the current fashionable style was.

> An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains.

You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films.

Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#239

Post by rsynnott »

mywittyname wrote: post #238
stareatgoats wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains. You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead s…

> You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability.

I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#240

Post by ryandrake »

CydeWeys wrote: post #203
fiblye wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell Nicki Minaj from them, but I can't tell Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, or Ariana Grande apart and they've been looping on the radio for years. I can point out a specific song that I've heard before and looked up who it was, but whenever a new song pops up, I can't tell them apart. They've completely merged into the same media personality with the same music.

To be fair, if I hear a new rock song with a lead male vocalist I'll also struggle mightily to identify them immediately. There are very few bands/singers with such unique styles that they can be told immediately apart. Same with any other genre really.

I think you need to be familiar with the songs' content in order to tell all these vocalists apart. If instead each of the top 5 male and female pop singers of today were to sing each others' songs, I challenge anyone to tell them apart.

And I don't think it's an artifact of being old. It's more about how much pop production homogenizes these voices into one "ISO Standard Voice." Back in the nineties, I couldn't tell all the various grunge singers apart without having pre-knowledge of the songs. If you had Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Alice In Chains sing random songs, I wouldn't have been able to easily tell them apart either.

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