Spotify acquires The Echo Nest to build a better music discovery engine

I had just started to dabble with python and echo nest (the remix API if I remember correctly) and now I wonder if their system will still be available or if now it is going to be proprietary/closed.

It's too bad you were downvoted to oblivion, but a more reasoned response might have nurtured more conversation.

Anyway, having read lots of social theory on music, I'll bite. Go ahead and tell more. Specifically, death relative to what culture?

It's my opinion music as a practice before the sedentary age of agriculture will probably never be recovered. It is currently just as subject to capitalistic practice as health care and everything else. I don't see Big Data's leveraging of music for profit as being significantly worse or better than previous generations' exploitations of music.

In fact, I blame music for leading to its own demise. I believe music helped transmit the patterns and information which helped us become sedentary. I believe today's music rarely, if ever, soothes or nurtures us. There is another, truer form of music which attains that, but we have either lost it entirely or it is a well-kept secret.

I've felt the same but the syllogism path is hard to explain. Basically, many of these services are founded the same way Amazon was founded - completely unsustainable and then hoping something magic happens to make it sustainable later. Amazon wouldn't have survived without the dotcom scene going crazy and they barely got through to the other side. The music services exist by seeking to convince end users that they are entitled to "mostly free" music, and they only reason they can supply that service is with debt funding. Their hopes is that the appetite they instill in the end user will give the business enough support to argue favorable licensing terms from labels and the government.

So when that happens, the party that hurts is the songwriter. You already have way too many people believing the canard that an indie songwriter should only expect to make money through touring and merchandise, and never from their recording efforts. That opinion is self-serving and pushed by those services "use your songs as a marketing expense!" when it is actually supposed to be the musician's livelihood.

So what happens when a musician gets less and less likelihood of getting any kind of financial remuneration from their actual songwriting? It's a disincentive to focusing on original craftsmanship, and an incentive to focus on churning out greater volumes of homogenous crap in an effort to capture a very tiny piece of a very large homogenous pie.

The end result from the perspective of the listener is that they never experience the counterfactual; they never know what they're missing. Sure, you might be enjoying that latest "indie" piece that is really just a max martin form with a decemberists diphthong singing tone combined with a couple of dubstep beats, but is that really original?

I hope Spotify acquire last.fm at some point.

You've got some good points, but I actually believe it's a bit bleaker :)

I believe the role of the musician is too important to be simply cast as a typical capitalist job- e.g. do it 40 hours and get a salary. Although I'll accept this until the rest of sedentary culture reforms (not likely in this life).

The problem is our celebrity culture. We turn our efforts away from the 1000s of less famous musicians around us to the handful of celebrity musicians.

Classical music culture, with its reverence and deification of a handful of sponsored artists, provides the template for rock music. Hip hop culture successfully followed the template. Jazz mainly dodged it. Recorded media (sheet music and the record) catalyzed it.

Any technological aid to music culture can be judged by whether it leads to the (imo benevolent) fractioning of music - the re-directing of attention toward our immediate musicians - or whether it leverages and bolsters the celebrity culture. Any capitalistic enterprise is blind - or farcical - to these ends and will randomly support whatever ends lead to its own survival. However, this randomness must be biased toward existing resources, e.g. if not doing well, support the thread of celebrity culture to survive. This pattern continues for the individual musician, too, as you point out.

So, from this perspective, I appreciate services which connect individuals with musicians of their choosing, but it's not like connecting people to Primary Care Physicians, a geographically-constrained problem. Instead, it facilitates people following their own flawed decision-making processes, following the crowds. So it becomes an issue of individual freedom, which I adore, even though so many people will not use it optimally for themselves.