I think it say something about the relatively low-effort nature of this genre that it could be so easily codified and displaced by AI. The human-produced examples in the article follow simple and predictable rules and already sounded pretty artificial before the robots got involved.
How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
131–140 of 237 posts
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who gets the money?
Spotify the split is 70% rights holders and 30% for Spotify
and crucially, it's not taking 70% of your $12/month and parceling it out to the artists you listen to, it's taking everyone's money and putting it in a big bucket and parceling out it proportionally by stream numbers, so you can't direct $8.40 to an artist by only streaming them.
If you want to direct a few dollars to an artist you really do need to buy their music (or mech), or somehow give them a couple thousand streams.
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You kind of can with Bandcamp's "pay this much or more " model, though obviously there's a substantial percentage taken.
Bandcamp docks 15% for revenue share and charges a payment processor fee. Someone recently paid $4.00 for an album I published and Bandcamp gave me $3.15 of it
and if the online calculators are right, I think it would then take several thousand streams to earn close to $3.15 from Spotify
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#134> We can support musicians we like by adding them to our personal playlists and playing their music every day. We can also just buy their albums like ye olden times. Buy tracks for $1.29 like ye slightly less olden times! If you have disposable income, buy albums! It's easy and also fun.
A growing number of artists don't make albums anymore, either physical or something that can be purchased. I don't understand, but their choice.
However, I only buy albums (preferably physically, will accept flac download), so they won't be getting money from me.
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without Spotify and the rest of the streaming services most of the people would just pirate music. I would probably spend less on music than I do now on Spotify per year.
They also wouldn't know about many of the artists in the first place.
That's the point. YOu listen to shit.
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#136There seems to be a lot of anger around Spotify these days, often misplaced I reckon. One of the biggest impediments to new artists making a living from recorded music is not the existence of Spotify and other streaming platforms, rather it's the massive and growing library of existing music, some of which is excellent. But it's not impossible. My neighbor manages his music career himself. In 2024 he went from having…
> you have to put in the time to 'train' your personal algorithms first, mainly by liking tracks, saving albums and playlists, and making playlists. Also: by paying attention to DJs/curators and researching dark corners of the music blogosphere, SoundCloud and Mixcloud. If you're going to do all of this, what's the point of the algorithm?
How can the algo know what you like if you don't tell it?
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Sure songs would get overplayed, but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes. As much as I love the fact that…
Do you have any proof that radio DJs are less prevalent now than in the past? I'm having trouble finding evidence of that.
There are 33k broadcast stations in the USA [0], and
11k people employed as disc jockeys [1]
There were 12k broadcast stations in the 1980s [2]
Given we can assume little to no automation, or at least a DJ human making sure the equipment didn’t break, and 8 hour shifts, that suggests 36k people were employed as radio DJs in the 1980s if we only count their time on air, assuming a 24 hour broadcast. If we include their other duties, probably the total DJ time resource required would increase, and so would the number of employed DJs.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1034A1.pdf
https://www.zippia.com/disc-jockey-jobs/demographics/
https://usinfo.org/enus/media/overview/press11.html?utm_sour...
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#138I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine , which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these pl…
I'd still like to hear how is that exactly different or worse than the old "publisher" model, where everything is gatekept by publishing megacorporations and they decided what the taste of the decade was. And by "they", it was a few executives in those corporations - it was never a meritocracy and those people never cared about music they peddled either. So what exactly did it change here except the fact that now we'…
Umm, gonna hard disagree. At least before the consolidation of media (whether publishers or record labels), the people who ran publishing houses and record labels did it because they loved books or music as appropriate. Publishing was never a big money maker and book and record stores fall into a weird part of capitalism where they don’t make a lot of money and they have a much larger number of distinct products than most other businesses do. I would guess that the local Target has fewer SKUs on the shelves than a modest-sized bookstore.
Note that Barnes & Noble has been successful since its last change of ownership because the CEO cares about books, not because he’s trying to squeeze every penny possible out of it.
Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#139Does anyone ever comply with these "As listeners we must band together" things? I couldn't care less. I like the lo-fi sound myself and put on some Nujabes while in the kitchen. It's a good time. But whether any specific artist gets to play or not doesn't concern me that much. I've found that single artists rarely preserve the feel so much as ones in a genre.
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Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop
#140Does anyone ever comply with these "As listeners we must band together" things? I couldn't care less. I like the lo-fi sound myself and put on some Nujabes while in the kitchen. It's a good time. But whether any specific artist gets to play or not doesn't concern me that much. I've found that single artists rarely preserve the feel so much as ones in a genre.
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