451–460 of 861 posts
Don’t people write and listen to entire albums anymore? When I listen to music, I almost always listen to entire albums, not individual songs.
Not really. Most people hated getting and paying for whole albums, out of which most stuff was garbage. Few artists have whole albums worth listening to.
Obviously the guy knows nothing about creativity and art. It takes time to grow as a person and cultivate new ideas. It may not be possible to do that if you don't get in and out of whatever it is you're doing. Imagine telling Hemingway he has to release a new blog post every week instead of a book every couple of years.
It's much easier when there are literally thousands of song writers trying to get a label or famous singer to use their song. The Nashville model is pretty much everywhere now.
It also helps that we've been able to computationally determine which parameters and heuristics are most likely to end up as a hit. There's a reason popular music across genres all more or less sounds the same today (loud, compressed with little dynamic range, auto-tuned, 4 chords, etc), with the difference between them being the style they are in.
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> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs). But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I do…
I find that in software, it's much easier to anticipate change. Companies are more open about their future plans and long-term goals. For example, GitHub just publicized their roadmap. This entire website is predicated on the fact that people like to share their latest ideas, inventions, and solutions to problems that everyone faces. I've never seen Universal Music post their "roadmap" of how they plan to sign new ar…
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As a part-time musician, even a single track can take tens of hours of effort - depending on the genre and the track. Sure, you could strum a guitar and sing and have a decent song wrapped up in an afternoon. But if you're creating anything more complex, you will spend hours finding the right sound, more hours creating the right arrangement, and even more hours fine-tuning the vocals, sounds, and final mix. Something…
I agree, but 10s of hours of effort isn't anywhere near "more than I can imagine" as the OP said. I don't think anyone here is claiming it's easy
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I am curious what you think the optimal solution for music in today’s world with massive storage and high bandwidth. Spotify is paying 70% of revenue to artists. You have factor in piracy if the price is to high or the solution is inconvenient. The public has rejected DRM and songs are easily give away to their friends. Lastly, No one wants physical media.
The way that 70% is counted is a huge scam
So after you've pumped out 6 singles a year, spent £100 a pop promoting those said singles, £50 mastering each single.. how much do these people think 98% of artists are making these days and can be sure of what they may take home every 2 months from these singles. At least with an LP you have a fixed cost and a revenue projection that can be worked out by price per copy.
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Ugh I wish that anyone would understand that "just work more" is a HORRIBLE outlook on things.
Demanding a "deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past" from people whose profession you've already made more difficult is pretty galling. It may be the case that their careers were going to get more difficult anyway; nevertheless, Ek is in fact one of the main drivers and beneficiaries.
30 Seconds to Mars made a documentary about the album they recorded in 2008 and the lawsuit they had to deal with at their record label (which had been recently purchased by a larger company that had zero music / talent experience). Their contracts seem to put them almost $1 million in debt to the record label for each album, despite the fact that they sell (err sold?) multi millions and they do worldwide tours.
Sure, Spotify's CEO is a strange vessel to make more demands on musical talent, but he's also in a position to know how his customers want to consume their music and what gets them engaged in his product. I would take it for what it is and no more.
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It's market valuing things based on scarcity. Music is in abundance right now due to lower barrier to entry for distributing and producing it than ever before. You have to provide more value than someone producing music as a hobby for free on youtube.
Good music - electrifying, change-your-life music - is still extremely scarce. But Spotify has made it even harder to find by swamping it in mediocre burger+fries music.
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As a part-time musician, even a single track can take tens of hours of effort - depending on the genre and the track. Sure, you could strum a guitar and sing and have a decent song wrapped up in an afternoon. But if you're creating anything more complex, you will spend hours finding the right sound, more hours creating the right arrangement, and even more hours fine-tuning the vocals, sounds, and final mix. Something…
I agree, but 10s of hours of effort isn't anywhere near "more than I can imagine" as the OP said. I don't think anyone here is claiming it's easy
But if you're creating your own sound? That takes effort and experimentation.
Creating a song - easy. Creating music that's distinctively your own - tons and tons of effort.
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What defines "good"? Marketability to the lowest common denominator?
For software, actual usefulness. A word processor that's trending on Twitter but which makes it hard to actually edit documents is not useful. A graphics driver that actually renders my screen is useful even if nobody's ever heard of it (although I grant that below a certain size maintenance issues might come up). For music... I'm far less qualified to say, but there's still a notion of (subjective) quality, which is…
However, use-value makes for a very poor metric for evaluating music (I am ignoring arguments about the "usefulness" of music when it's played on a factory floor, making workers slightly more productive). So what must we use to evaluate its "good"-ness? Anything you propose here will have certain people agree, and others disagree, e.g. one set of people say good music must make you dance, and another set will say good music must make you feel relaxed (the opposite of dance).
When aggregated, these individual differences will cancel out. So the average most marketable music must, therefore, be as bland as water.