Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says working musicians can no longer release music only “once every three to four years.” Spotify's stock value hit all-time highs of $50 billion this summer.

[psn]

Hard work is a requisite for success, not a guarantee. It is very rarely enough in itself - luck, right time right place, gatekeeping, good looks, cynicism, opportunism, positioning, controversy, etc, needs to be in place in addition. 

[psn]

*or

[dingformung]

2 hours ago, Candiru said:

Then again, Ed Sheeran supposedly played 300 shows one year before he became a star, so... maybe there are no rules and no magic formula and reality makes no sense. 

Complex systems can't simply be understood. They consist of many known and unknown variables that interact with each other and with outside systems in unpredictable ways.

[marf]

I don't think people like Bowie, Steve Nicks, Jimmy Page, Neil Young, The Beatles, (did all that before they turned 29!), Gosh on and on. Ozzy. Voices that are totally unique, Song writing talent. These people don't come around often.  Maybe they are out there but have no interest. You have to have a driving passion. Like you have no choice.

It's not work if you love it, Maybe touring in a shitty van ,sleeping on strangers sofas, etc. That would be the work. 

The Beatles, kiddie band to White album in 3 years or so? The progression of the writing was astounding. Almost makes me believe in God. Like they were there to change the world. 

Yeah, in the middles ages, John Lennon might have had a hard time in a more formal art environment. 

[ghsotword]

23 hours ago, marf said:

Yeah, in the middles ages, John Lennon might have had a hard time in a more formal art environment. 

What makes you think John Lennon would have been in any kind of art environment in the middle ages? He'd probably be a peasant like 80% to 90% of the population at that time. He would have had about 50% chance of dying before reaching adulthood. He'd have very narrow knowledge of previously existing music (limited to what other peasants in his village and neighbouring villages knew). He'd be slaving in a field that's likely not owned by him. He'd probably get whipped for spending time playing an instrument instead of working for a feudal lord in the field.

[marf]

^ Not a real argument, as the most impressive art has been made in the ancient world. Plenty enough people lived long enough to make it.

One thing Im not sure of is how much palm greasing has either lessened or increased.

The access to the public is an access tunnel to a door. Over the centuries that tunnel to that door has gotten shorter and shorter. 

The easier it is to get to the public the less formal the art. The 50's to the 90's saw an explosion of technology. You still ad an access tunnel but it wasn't a government doing commissions. It was the public and companies. So you had people there to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Art was more formal in the past. Much more training. Or apprenticeship. Pure craft. Like any other approach to making a living

A mozart quote

""To win applause one must write stuff so simple that a coachman might sing it." "

He was a fucking prophet

[Limo]

3 hours ago, marf said:

Not a real argument, as the most impressive art has been made in the ancient world.

Survivorship bias.

3 hours ago, marf said:

Mozart

Easy for him to say. Guy is the f-ing epitome of European music, both high brow and lowbrow, both ancient and modern. Everything else, from Gregorian chant to  Elseq 4 is just froth around the edges of what he wrote.

[ignatius]

sort of related. basically a discussion how people get fucked

 

[auxien]

On 8/7/2020 at 12:07 PM, rhmilo said:

TBH it seems like jazz can only survive because it’s subsidized. The audience for it is stupidly small. It’s almost become a museum of sorts.

Classical music is subsidized, too, but at least there’s an audience for it. 

i think years ago i'd found the source for the talk sampled here but if so i've long since forgot

[dcom]

Quote

The key to success is to find a phony artist name that Spotify users are likely to type into search. Like Relaxing Music Therapy, some of these “artists” use names inspired by an adjective commonly used to describe music. Others name themselves after popular uses for certain kinds of music, well-known generic tunes like children’s rhymes, or entire music genres. Often, these creators optimize further by titling tracks and albums with related words and reuploading the same songs ad nauseum, which can look especially absurd when filtering to see just a single tune. Relaxing Music Therapy, for instance, has uploaded the track “Stream in the Forest With Rain” 616 times to date.

[...]

Gaming SEO is particularly effective if the goal is simply to monetize some preexisting catalog of music, without any aim to actually build a following, throw a concert, or push a genre forward. Even if a user ends up becoming a fan of the music after inadvertently discovering it, there’s often no way to find the musician outside of the Spotify platform, as the artists’ name itself and accompanying metadata are just SEO word salad.

[...]

Still, some music in this vein is downright deceptive, either of noticeably low quality or having little to no connection to the given artist title.

Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre, Generic Artists Like ‘White Noise Baby Sleep’ (OneZero/Medium)

[J3FF3R00]

On 8/9/2020 at 8:13 PM, marf said:

A mozart quote

""To win applause one must write stuff so simple that a coachman might sing it." "

He was a fucking prophet

I spent the better part of a day working with Marilyn Manson once and he told me something similar. “Never write a song that would confuse a stripper “.

[dcom]

Quote

The ostensibly frictionless nature of online listening has other hidden or overlooked costs. Exploitative regimes of labor enable the production of smartphone and computer components. Conditions at Foxconn factories in China have long been notorious; recent reports suggest that the brutally abused Uighur minority has been pressed into the production of Apple devices. Child laborers are involved in the mining of cobalt, which is used in iPhone batteries. Spotify, the dominant streaming service, needs huge quantities of energy to power its servers. No less problematic are the streaming services’ own exploitative practices, including their notoriously stingy royalty payments to working musicians. Not long ago, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s C.E.O., announced, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans.” In other words, to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.

[...]

In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless. In much the same way, it has convinced us not to think too hard about the regime of mass surveillance on which the economics of the industry rests. Spotify’s inability to become consistently profitable tends not to bother investors, who see vast potential in the company’s hoard of personal data. The musicologist Eric Drott fills in more of that chilling picture in a recent Journal of the Society for American Music article, titled “Music as a Technology of Surveillance.” According to Drott, Spotify’s head of programmatic solutions once boasted, “We not only know what our users are listening to, we also know their personal activities as well,” and gave showering as an example. The company registers “550,000 shower streams per day.”

The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music (The New Yorker) - a review of Kyle Devine's Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press).

Quote

Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of.

Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by dcom

[tailings]

On 9/22/2020 at 11:58 PM, dcom said:

Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre, Generic Artists Like ‘White Noise Baby Sleep’ (OneZero/Medium)

Reading that makes me want to take a very long, hot bath, as if I just crawled through the sewage of the music industry.

[tailings]

17 minutes ago, tailings said:

Reading that makes me want to take a very long, hot bath, as if I just crawled through the sewage of the music industry.

(quoting myself, how lame).

 

I washed with this:

https://stockhausenandwalkman.bandcamp.com/album/buffed-up

I feel clean again.

[tailings]

Addendum:

https://stockhausenandwalkman.bandcamp.com/track/sponge

>>>NOW<<< I feel clean.  Never was there a better song that defines, "That sucked, I need to purge".  I love Sponge in a way very few songs have ever been privy to.

 

Addendum addendum: How do I embed a specific song from bandcamp??

Edited September 24, 2020 by tailings

[Candiru]

 

Controversy ensues

[ignatius]

1 hour ago, Candiru said:

 

Controversy ensues

what a douche that guy is. so dismissive of the issues with spotify and the fact that spotify is making money that should be going to artists. also, i've discovered many many great releases on bandcamp. ugh. fuck this guy. 

i lol'd when he basically said "do it for the exposure".. like.. fuck off. 

Edited September 26, 2020 by ignatius

[vkxwz]

On 8/9/2020 at 3:11 AM, dingformung said:

If you underpay them it indeed isn't enough for them to live on.

Yes, what's wrong with this? Like any other field, if someone isn't good enough at making music that other people enjoy then they won't be able to make enough money to have it as their only source of income. Only difference is that with music there's a space between what being employed vs unemployed is in other industries, so there is a possibility that you could pour all your time into it and not make enough to live on if you really don't know what you're doing. You'd have to be pretty stupid to willingly do that though considering it's not particularly difficult to find an entry level job just to keep the lights on.

[Candiru]

7 hours ago, ignatius said:

what a douche that guy is. so dismissive of the issues with spotify and the fact that spotify is making money that should be going to artists. also, i've discovered many many great releases on bandcamp. ugh. fuck this guy. 

i lol'd when he basically said "do it for the exposure".. like.. fuck off. 

He’s a punk rock guy that designed t shirts for Hollister. 

[ignatius]

8 hours ago, Candiru said:

He’s a punk rock guy that designed t shirts for Hollister. 

i posted in the commetns of his video and he replied saying he knows people with 200k monthly listeners who make their living on spotify. i doubt that. unless he knows beyonce. if they do make their living from spotify then they are getting better than the typical royalty rate. you need more than 5 or 10 million plays to get more than minimum wage from spotify at the standard royalty rate.

[Silent Member]

If my monthly payment was split between the creators of the music I streamed that month Spotify would be a really good thing, unfortunately that's not how it works at all because capitalism fuck you Daniel

Edited September 26, 2020 by Silent Member

[ignatius]

there's people commenting at that video that 1 million plays in a month = $4000. but i haven't seen any new math that shows that spotify's royalty rates have gone up. i'm guessing there's different rates for different people which is also a problem, imo. 

[Silent Member]

Yeah, I think big bad labels get all the money for them to keep their music available on Spotify tbh. 

[Candiru]

1 hour ago, ignatius said:

i posted in the commetns of his video and he replied saying he knows people with 200k monthly listeners who make their living on spotify. i doubt that. unless he knows beyonce. if they do make their living from spotify then they are getting better than the typical royalty rate. you need more than 5 or 10 million plays to get more than minimum wage from spotify at the standard royalty rate.

I’m sure if he elaborated further, his advice would be to start a band that does screamo covers of Disney songs “because that’s how the game is played”. 
 

I mean at least you’d still be contributing to culture lolz

[ignatius]

i just spoke to someone who had 55 million plays on spotify and got $1700.