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Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

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Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#541

Post by caseyohara »

grawprog wrote: post #390
zjaffee wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what the CEO is saying, and it has been an increasing trend in music for a long time now, is moving even further away from large LP releases every few years. The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music. The way to keep fans engaged involves releasing EPs and Single on a regular basis, releasing a whole album only really makes…

LP's or long form collections by artists capture a moment in that artist's creative point. Typically, the cycle was release a record, tour a bunch, write new music, and repeat. This meant by the time that next LP came along, the collection of songs on there could sound fairly different as the artist changed, got better, heard new songs and got inspired etc. Then there's the recording and engineering challenges around…

I agree with what you said about albums as a cohesive piece of art, I will miss that for sure.

> Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs

But who is forcing the artists? The market? It's clear people don't want to listen to LPs released every 3-4 years, they want singles and EPs released frequently. If it is indeed a market effect, then artists need to evolve or perish. If you want to make money selling art, you need to make it in a way that people want to buy it. It's that simple.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#542

Post by salty_biscuits »

tossthere wrote: post #524
alchemyromcom wrote: post #139

I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech com…

This is controversial for some reason, but I don’t think there’s ever been a significant demand or market for music production. The entire notion that musicians get paid to make music is a false premise. There was a market for records, not for music. What people were actually paying for was the technology to play music, and the distribution of music. When that became digitized, no significant market formed around mus…

Isn't it just the age old problem that most people like crap and people who like art aren't willing to pay for it?

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#544

Post by JAlexoid »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #505
JAlexoid wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that you'd make all of those sales, if you had no Spotify access at all? I mean... If you pointed me to your BandCamp store page and told me to buy an album, without first hearing it - I wouldn't buy it.

Hard to say! Spotify definitely isn’t a magic music marketing machine — you need a decent amount of organic traction before you’ll get any algorithmic promotion, and even more for editorial. It took us years of releasing music, playing shows, networking with other bands, pitching to blogs and buying ads before Spotify became an effective way for us to find fans. It might be that “listen on Spotify before you buy on B…

I don't claim that Spotify is end-all-be-all of music marketing. It's one of the tools, that is part of the arsenal. It feels that middle of the spectrum - above "we have a facebook page" and below "corporate label promotion material".

>is this slightly better for musicians than music piracy

They're a music streaming and recommendation service company, not a "we kill piracy" company. Maybe they should get into more promotional business... but they're not in that business.

I would argue that Spotify is "(insert more successful band in the genre here) is looking for a warm up act for their gig in your town".

If you're in a very middle of the pack mass appeal genre - you're definitely screwed on Spotify, or anywhere, without a breakout act(corporate contract/viral video)

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#545

Post by kmlx »

tossthere wrote: post #524
alchemyromcom wrote: post #139

I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech com…

This is controversial for some reason, but I don’t think there’s ever been a significant demand or market for music production. The entire notion that musicians get paid to make music is a false premise. There was a market for records, not for music. What people were actually paying for was the technology to play music, and the distribution of music. When that became digitized, no significant market formed around mus…

not too long ago you were considered a sell out musician if you actually made money out of licensing deals and the like.

to my memory, the mantra was that money corrupts the art.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#546

Post by Nasrudith »

tsimionescu wrote: post #204
Kalium wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be more open and accepting to commentary if there was more kindness, more love, more empathy and compassion in discussions of how the old normal is gone? Expressions of admiration and awe coupled with opining that the old multi-year release cycle doesn't work anymore, and legions of hard-working humans making sacrifices for what they love may need to change? Thank you for sharing. The world is always a bett…

The message itself is wrong. We live in a world of plenty. We should be working less, not more. We have created more music in this century than all of the last combined. We have the ability to listen to thousands of years of music at the touch of a button. A concert that would have taken hours of work for 50 people to entertain 200 now takes nothing - a million people put on their headphones and listen to a recording…

How do you think the world of plenty came about in the first place? A hell of a lot of growth and work to provide for the demands of broad consumer bases instead of the whims of some head honcho who wanted pointless setpiece folly castles or grand monuments.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#547

Post by d0gbread »

copperx wrote: post #414
zjaffee wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what the CEO is saying, and it has been an increasing trend in music for a long time now, is moving even further away from large LP releases every few years. The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music. The way to keep fans engaged involves releasing EPs and Single on a regular basis, releasing a whole album only really makes…

I absolutely agree, and that's what I think the CEO is referring to. Slowly dropping 6-12 singles over a two year period is more sensible nowadays than taking two years to write, record, and release an album or EP. In fact, leaving out the few niche bands that release albums as a cohesive whole, the concept of an album seems terribly anachronistic in this new world of streaming. It's now the era of the single song, w…

How much of that falls to user experience though? We're not constrained by physical media, but aren't we by Spotify design?

I almost exclusively browse my library by album, but Spotify generally pushes me towards tracks. The release radar, for example, offers no way to filter to full album releases.

I hope artists aren't pressured into releasing tracks one off purely due to design decisions vs artistic choice. Software can easily cater to both.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#548

Post by adrr »

singhrac wrote: post #90
gwd wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. > Man, that's depressing. If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?

It's not comparable - music is art.

Code can be describe with aesthetic qualities like clean, beautiful, shitty, complex, delicate, etc. Just like music. Art is just a representation of human creativeness and imagination which is what software is.

Re: Spotify CEO: musicians can no longer release music only “once every 3-4 years”

#549

Post by bazeblackwood »

tossthere wrote: post #524
alchemyromcom wrote: post #139

I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech com…

This is controversial for some reason, but I don’t think there’s ever been a significant demand or market for music production. The entire notion that musicians get paid to make music is a false premise. There was a market for records, not for music. What people were actually paying for was the technology to play music, and the distribution of music. When that became digitized, no significant market formed around mus…

This isn't "controversial", it's just a kneejerk contrarian position from an armchair expert. It's actually hard to understate the demand for music production. You walk through any major retail store, they're playing music that is generally designed (and proven) to make you purchase more. Advertising, movies, basically any form of audio-visual entertainment would be devoid of life without music. And people demand novelty. Just because you don't personally see the value because of your "automatic brain adjustment" problem doesn't mean it isn't there. These of course, are consumerist arguments, let alone the fact that say, personal expression has been a major feature of popular music for over 500 years, and that people from all walks of life have proven time and again that they are willing to pay for the experience of live entertainment, even to change their entire life to accommodate it (think festivalgoers, Deadheads, other diehards, etc.). I mean you may as well be arguing that the economy doesn't exist—like, yeah it sort of doesn't, because currency is all just an illusion we have to agree upon to grease the wheels, but acting like that invalidates the clear societal value of music... is some willful ignorance. The music industry has grown over the past decade. I implore you to do some reading on this, maybe start with Tin Pan Alley.
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