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Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

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Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#201

Post by stareatgoats »

rsynnott wrote: post #188
simias wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial art in general has been that way for centuries. Doesn't mean that it's intrinsically devoid of quality. Many of the classical masterpieces were made to order to cater to the fancy of some rich patron.

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.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#202

Post by humantorso »

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.

Ha thats a sweeping statement mate.....No one has anything in common?

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#203

Post by CydeWeys »

fiblye wrote: post #144
hilbertseries wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you listen to Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, Chun-Li by Nicki Minaj and thank u, next by Arianna Grande. You would say all of these women sound the same and have the same instrumentals?

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.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#204

Post by l4r5 »

This is a little bit off topic, but I read this interesting article how it's possible to do money laundering through Spotify with the help of streaming farms: https://ppcprotect.com/spotify-streaming-farms/

This seems to be a bigger issue than I thought - this article quotes up to $300 million as damage: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/how-to-fight-spoti...

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#205

Post by CydeWeys »

chrisseaton wrote: post #106
mNovak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree. I anticipate some amount of people still discover music on the radio (even pop mega hits you have to hear the first time somewhere), then go seek it out on spotify. I haven't much been in a car, thus haven't heard the radio, in 7 months. I have no idea what's on the top 40 right now.

> I haven't much been in a car, thus haven't heard the radio, in 7 months. What's the connection between being in a car and listening to the radio? Do people not generally have radios in their homes where you live? And you must have a phone or laptop to be typing this where you could listen to the radio!

I'm in the US, and no, younger people do not generally have standalone radios anymore. Music listening happens on digital devices these days, primarily via streaming (whether it be YouTube or Spotify).

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#206

Post by maxmamis »

ehnto wrote: post #166
tobr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say “music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it” but then you list a number of specific characteristics that make music more likely to work on radio. That suggests the opposite of “any music will do”. Only music with very specific qualities will do. Or maybe you just meant to say you don’t like pop?

I think they mean pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship. Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song. Every now and then a great musician makes it into the pop scene, and you get interesting chord progressions, melodies and rythms. So it's not the pop style that's bad…

> Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song.

Ok, why don’t you prove it by writing a hit pop song? Come back to this thread when you have your gold record, I’ll wait

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#207

Post by CydeWeys »

chrisseaton wrote: post #145
theshrike79 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Radio just works. Someone else is choosing the playlist and you kinda hear the music in between the ads and annoying hosts. At home, I can select what I want to hear. I don't need to keep my attention on the road.

Do you not have radio stations where you value how the host selects, curates, and gives the background to the music for you? What about the current affairs, plays, comedy, history? I can’t imagine going without the radio!

They started dying out heavily over a decade ago. The best remaining stations are the local NPR stations, then there's the cesspool of talk radio stations, and there are some local gems like WFMU here in NYC which I stream online.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#208

Post by rsynnott »

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.

I think the difference today is that the normal path is that an artist does a lot of stuff, potentially quite innovative, and is _then_ discovered (or not; see Van Gogh for instance). And at that point, maybe discovered by the market, not a single patron; I believe an artist having a single patron has been rather unusual for at least the last century.

A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#209

Post by bad_user »

newen wrote: post #165
bad_user wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conspiracy of some kind could be an explanation, who knows Actually we do know. It’s safe to say that conspiracies involving a lot of actors are mathematically impossible. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Snowden’s leaks were about a conspiracy that involved many more than a 1000 people and it lasted for years. You get reports about one government program or another that’s been kept secret for decades. These are conspiracies. Statistically improbable is different from mathematically impossible. It’s also much less improbable when the people involved have to join through rituals like government classification designati…

Not sure of what conspiracies you’re thinking of, but if actual evidence was leaked, then we are talking about a clear failure of those involved, therefore this is evidence for the claim that large scale conspiracies are indeed impossible ;-)

You can believe what you want of course, but from my POV when the discussion ends up in non-falsifiability land, you might as well talk about the existence of God or Santa Claus, an interesting discussion for sure, but not one that can yield any useful insight.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#210

Post by ukyrgf »

gandutraveler wrote: post #151
wfme wrote: post #5

Personally, I used to be able to listen to a large portion of the top 50 on Spotify without skipping too many. As of late last year, though, I've found that the top 10 are almost exclusively songs made popular on TikTok. I can't stand to listen to these songs, not because I necessarily dislike the songs (or TikTok for that matter), but because there are 15-30s sections of the song that I have heard dozens of times, p…

Wonder how tiktok is changing the way pop music is produced nowadays. I'm sure music producers are focusing more on that unique 10-15s catchy tune that is easy to market. This is definitely not good for the future of music.

This has been going on for years in commercials. Have you ever heard the full version of a song used in a Target or one of those drug commercials? Outside of the hook it's basically just a beat from a Casio keyboard.
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