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How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

gamechops.substack.com

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Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#51

Post by ta8645 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #35
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re arguing against continued development of AI? (Apologies if I’ve misunderstood) I won’t use the word “Luddite”, but your argument could be applied word-for-word to automatic looms: “[The automatic loom] is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth… how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams…

Truthfully, I don't give a shit about AI. It's a tool to generate mediocre garbage, be that writing, be that images, be that music, whatever, and in those tasks, it can largely succeed. If you want a lifetime of generated Lo-Fi to listen to, it will do that. If you want a lifetime of generated hentai to fap to, it will do that too, and the outputs meet your standards, congrats, you are an average consumer of mediocre…

Money flows to the things people want. The real housewives, the view, twilight, etc. Hell people make millions simply playing video games on twitch. But nobody is owed an income for doing something they love.

The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.

> For. Doing. Nothing.

That's obviously not true. I've tried doing nothing for a long time, and am not anywhere close to a billionaire.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#52

Post by tengbretson »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #28
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.)

> Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market That is a strange way to view music to me. Just because people can make music doesn't mean others will enjoy it. It isn't really obvious to me that overwhelming the supply would decrease demand. I mean, look at any extreme pop genre. One would assume that there are more complicated economics at play.

If people's ability to produce slop outpaces the ability for content delivery and discovery platforms to separate the wheat from the chaff, the category as a whole will diminish.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#53

Post by jrm4 »

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 reason" weren't seen as the same thing.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#54

Post by [deleted] »

serf wrote: post #42
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.)

>Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI 'ease of creation' has never been the metric by which popular media has been judged.

[deleted]

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#56

Post by calibas »

> 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 Roland samplers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofi_hip-hop

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#57

Post by quintes »

ixtli wrote: post #18
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #4

AI is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth. I've been called a Luddite so many times on this website asking basic questions of how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living, and nobody has an answer.

Thats because there is no answer. Marx and all of the people who developed his theories after him have exhaustively and scientifically proved this. That's really whats happening: its not that people dont have an answer is that they're not admitting to the exploitative nature of private capital accumulation. The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equ…

So communism it’s the answer cuz Marx?

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#58

Post by adrr »

eppp wrote: post #16
roywiggins wrote: post #13

> 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.

Who gets the money?

Spotify the split is 70% rights holders and 30% for Spotify

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#59

Post by ZeroCooly »

briantakita wrote: post #27

Lofi Girl still has an active audience. >100k for each video. GameChops has a channel as well with >5k & The Musician's story adds to the vibe. If someone can relate to the creator, it helps to create more connection with the audience than a pure algorithm. The human curated/generated animations seem more coherent...even if it's on a loop. I like some of the new AI animations for being novel...mostly futuristic. Thou…

You should check out the artist "Home Alone." Their stuff has a very neatly crafted vibe. It's lofi esc maybe a bit more jazzy than you'd expect. But their album covers are great and albums are coherent.

Just another example of an artist doing well for themselves still.

Re: How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

#60

Post by nluken »

I 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 platforms are neither neutral nor meritocracies and don't care about the content that they host. Sounds obvious, yes, but reading about the concrete consequences of this fact, namely the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively, definitely got me to reexamine how I was using Spotify and consuming music in general. It really drove home the fact that some people treat art as a fungible object, and that these folks are the people deciding what music we're hearing unless we really make an effort to seek it out on our own.

Is the model profitable? For some. Good for society? Perhaps not.

EDIT: also want to concur with others here that the problem here isn't necessarily AI but how we're selecting what music we're listening to. In the book, Pelly specifically identifies channels like Chilled Cow as being part of the watering down of this genre, since they have a similar incentive to play music at as low a cost to the channel as possible versus playing the best music available to them.

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