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How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

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Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#191

Post by goosejuice »

myaccountonhn wrote: post #179
goosejuice wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will read that but... I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artist…

I’ve moved away from Spotify, and it’s actually quite hard to buy music. Bandcamp has a lot of indie music but not so much for the genres I like. There’s Apple Music but I don’t have Apple devices and Amazon music doesn’t work in my country.

What genres? A lot of labels bundle digital with physical copies. Most/all new vinyl I've bought recently did this. Some like ninja tune have digital only options.

I'm willing to bet if you email the artist they will be happy to point you where to purchase their music digitally.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#192

Post by goosejuice »

bane wrote: post #183
svnt wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

Nice analysis, but maybe still missing some things. e.g. it's not clear that "DJ" here is professional radio-DJs vs dancehall/wedding etc. which tend to be small single-person businesses in an entirely different function. A good radio-DJ might be hired to fill a key block of time in a major metro. They may select to play a local band's new song during evening rush hour and suddenly 3 million new people know about it…

> Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.

Man, I read stuff like this and it's just so far out of touch it blows my mind. Let me introduce you to the internet. You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#193

Post by Retric »

goosejuice wrote: post #190
Retric wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m expecting something to add to this sort of list: Rap, Country, Electronic, Funk, Hip hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Punk, Reggae, Rock, Heavy Metal, Soul music and R&B I’d even take Polka. My argument is we’re missing the kind of regional cross pollination that gives rise to such things.

All of those genres can be linked to one another and you can continue on down to extreme levels. Rock, punk, metal, funk, country, soul, and reggae alone barely touches on the diversity of string instrument based music. Is this a naming problem for you? Every noise at once attempts to show the extremes to which music can be classified if you haven't seen it. I don't see any signs that this evolution has ever stopped…

There’s definitely relationships and cross pollination between genres, but that’s why the lack is concerning to me. It doesn’t directly matter to me if little new shows up, but indirectly I’ll be worse off.

> I don’t see any signs that this evaluation has ever stopped or will stop.

It wouldn’t be difficult to name something as new if there was a lot of meaningfully different new things to name.

Now I’m not saying things will be static, obviously we people will create. But I think it’s clear things have slowed down noticeably, and that means something really has been lost.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#194

Post by bane »

goosejuice wrote: post #192
bane wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice analysis, but maybe still missing some things. e.g. it's not clear that "DJ" here is professional radio-DJs vs dancehall/wedding etc. which tend to be small single-person businesses in an entirely different function. A good radio-DJ might be hired to fill a key block of time in a major metro. They may select to play a local band's new song during evening rush hour and suddenly 3 million new people know about it…

> Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through. Man, I read stuff like this and it's just so far out of touch it blows my mind. Let me introduce you to the internet. You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.

Right, but you aren't really acknowledging four realities:

1 - 90% of everything is crap.

2 - > if you actually make an effort so now I have to be the curator! But I don't have time to sift through the 90% of crap. That's the point somebody else used to get paid to separate the creme from the top. You may have and unlimited amount of low value time to dedicate to listening to thousands of artists and tens of thousands of songs, but I certainly don't.

3 - even among curators, 90% of them aren't any good at it either, which is why, even if you shared your personal playlist of your very carefully curated list of songs that you spent 2000 hours last year carefully putting together, I'm more than likely to not like it myself. Being able to find good music, and then find an audience for your curation that is able to connect millions of people to those previous unknown is also a skill.

> You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort. 4 - then where are your multiple times a year new breakthrough artists that show up out of nowhere, dominate the charts for two weeks then are subsumed by newer geniuses? The charts are slammed full of artists who've been top of their game for 10-20 even 30 years now. It's the same old artists over and over, but that pales in comparison to the before times when you'd get something new and big and hit big every week.

I'm looking right now at the U.S. top-40 pop charts and there is on it this week -- no shit get this: Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Charli XCX, Akon, Alphaville, Kendrick Lamar, Ariana Grande, and a few more that, let's face it have careers that are nearing drinking age in the U.S. Great artists all, but that used to be the age music shifted up-frequency to the oldies channel in the past.

If you disappeared from the planet in 2005 and showed back up today, you'd feel that the list was familiar. Where are your endless parade of geniuses on the top-40? We could have tight-beamed these old artists' entire discographies to Alpha Centauri and Back and they'd still be relevant and dominating the charts.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#195

Post by scrumper »

yapyap wrote: post #147
itsoktocry wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I trying to figure out where the author got this from? I laughed at this too. Oh yeah, back in 2005 there was no way to get good sound from that dusty old equipment. I mean, some of the best sounding albums of all time are 50+ years old.

> I mean, some of the best sounding albums of all time are 50+ years old That is.. arguable

Some Steely Dan albums are 50 and over. Say what you want about the music but their albums are sonically incredible.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#196

Post by dvngnt_ »

mtalantikite wrote: post #86
qoez wrote: post #7

AI seems like a scapegoat here when I think the real answer is simply that it was a tired genre that died out like many music fads over the years. (Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.)

I think like anything, the lineage evolves. If we're to call Madlib and Dilla 'lofi', as the wikipedia does, then we can follow that lineage to someone like Knxwledge, who just this week won a grammy for 'Why Lawd?'. Meanwhile, you have all these people on YouTube that distill something out of that lineage and just make tons and tons of boring versions of it. As more people encounter it, divorced from it's history, t…

knxwledge famously hates spotify and has posted how little they pay which is why most of his catalog is on bandcamp

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#197

Post by dvngnt_ »

midiguy wrote: post #80
Synaesthesia wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dilla is still the greatest to ever do it.

Lofi peaked long before the term lofi even came about

The people behind the california beat scene https://pitchfork.com/features/pitchfork-essentials/9716-the... made the blueprint then 'lofi' came after

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#198

Post by jrm4 »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #89
jrm4 wrote: post #53

As a long time (actual) hip-hop fan, I do find it quite hard to muster sympathy for this weirdly isolated, and perhaps disposable, genre? Kind of like, okay, how much did you try to build with the origins of the thing you're using to make new music? Reminds me a bit of "nerdcore" hip-hop; which also made little sense because e.g. Del the Funkee Homosapien and RZA were also nerds making VERY nerdy music, but for "some…

I mean, I don't disagree with you, but nobody should have to compete with AI on the biggest market out there. If the genre was dying because it isn't cool anymore, whatever. If more people are listening than ever, but they're just getting AI lofi to avoid paying artists, then it's bad news.

This presumes AI makes competitively good music. I'm not saying it's not possible or even maybe it's happening somewhere -- but I've yet to hear really good AI hip-hop competitive with humans -- while on the other hand, the "lo-fi" I've heard already sounds like AI-level effort. Not bad, but entirely forgettable.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#199

Post by myaccountonhn »

goosejuice wrote: post #191
myaccountonhn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve moved away from Spotify, and it’s actually quite hard to buy music. Bandcamp has a lot of indie music but not so much for the genres I like. There’s Apple Music but I don’t have Apple devices and Amazon music doesn’t work in my country.

What genres? A lot of labels bundle digital with physical copies. Most/all new vinyl I've bought recently did this. Some like ninja tune have digital only options. I'm willing to bet if you email the artist they will be happy to point you where to purchase their music digitally.

I could try emailing them or the labels, but the genres I listen to are mostly Latin American

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#200

Post by lewispollard »

itsoktocry wrote: post #105
calibas wrote: post #56

> For Japanese soundtrack producer Nujabes, the “lofi” sound wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was an artifact of creating such forward thinking music with the dusty equipment from 20 years ago. I trying to figure out where the author got this from? Audio hardware/software hasn't changed that much in 20 years, and Nujabes' lofi aesthetic seems intentional. According to Wikipedia, it originated from an effect button on R…

> I trying to figure out where the author got this from? I laughed at this too. Oh yeah, back in 2005 there was no way to get good sound from that dusty old equipment. I mean, some of the best sounding albums of all time are 50+ years old.

Those 50+ year old albums weren't using samplers.
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