Posted by mcgin 17 hours ago
The music/movie industry is now way less diverse, because smaller actors cannot live out of it, so only the big players remain and produce stuff that only a very large audience would like but not love (you cannot please everyone whenyou have a 1B audience). Smaller categories in movies and music will just disappear: look at the 2000`s movies like the Ninth gate or some cool thriller, these could not make enough money just with the theater tickets but they could exist thanks to the DVD money. Now with streaming there is not enough revenue to capitalize on second tier movies (not block busters) that would be really loved by a smaller audience.
We have a less fragmented culture so by definition it just slowly looses its richness.
The fact that home video would provide a second boost of cash for a production was important, and I do mourn the slow death of physical media. But it is not directly connected to the discoverability problem we have. Even when people were buying CDs and DVDs, you still had to contend with a distribution system that largely had already decided what you could and could not buy. Midlisters still made shit money, because publishers do not actually care about their midlist and they don't want to sell you originality. They want to sell you IP they already own.
go down a couple of layers and various genres of music are experiencing renaissance’s like you would not believe.
pop music has always (mostly) sucked
[EDIT] Bring on the downvotes. You never bothered to explore. If you take what’s given to you by those who are selling, you’re in the seller’s market. Your downvotes are pride to me.
If you look at this year rock werchter festival in Belgium, it's ofcourse very good artists: Gorillaz, The XX, Franz Ferdinand,...
But almost only groups from the 90`s / 2000`s that could make their name when the industry was more tolerant with non-pop / blockbuster music.
I m over caricaturing ofcourse, but probably that if Gorillaz was created in 2026, Damon Albarn would post his work on a forgotten soundcloud, do some bartmitzvah during the weekend to roundup the end of the months while working as a ubereats delivery driver.
I also think the industry is pretty tolerant of more experimental/non-pop music, just that this isn't really true for the rock scene amymore. Hardcore punk, hardstyle, dubstep, hyperpop, shoegaze are all huge genres now, large enough to live off of and perform at festivals as big as coachella.
You may be right about Damon Albarn but that would just be a result of which genres have listeners who are willing to listen to smaller, non-mainstream artists. I think the biggest example of this is that mainstream rock music a la guns and roses has pretty much completely died out, while genres with smaller, more dedicated fanbases like post-rock and noise rock are still going strong as ever. I'm sure if you check your local shows (and you live in a place with reasonably large population) you will be able to find plenty of bands who completely live off their music.
I use it and have a subscription, but I dread opening their app and looking at the starting screen that shows the same artists I listened to twenty years ago in pointless blurbs like "presave this (you can't listen to it)", "jump back in (you literally already listened to it)", "your favorite artists (not according to you but according to us)". There is no joy of discovery of new music that you haven't heard. There is no connection to other humans through music. Audioscrobbler/Last.fm is miles ahead of this. Youtube is miles ahead of this.
Here's how I discover music these days: I swipe Youtube shorts until its algorithm decides to show me an artist, then I look that artist up on Spotify. Thats how bad Spotify is - it's an audio server with search and a hundred layers of irrelevant features bolted on top.
I got so frustrated with Tidal recently that I finally sat down and finally setup a media player on Linux to play my locally saved music (most of which is from What.cd).
Hard disagree here.
For new music, Discover Weekly is great, if you take some time to engage with it on a routine basis. Even better, if you have an artist/genre you already like, the Fans Also Like or Discovered On will link you to other artists and playlists. Super easy to go down rabbit holes of new artists and playlists.
As far as connecting with others, I do like the spotify DMs (in-app share), the friend activity tab, and particularly the share attribution. When you share a song via link (url with ?si=), you'll permanently be linked to it. For a number of my favorite songs, I see "From {friend}" at the bottom while listening. Makes me feel super connected to friends I've bonded with over music.
then they started blocking family members because i was not around.
then they wanted to charge in a different coin because i was not home, but EVEN if i would their login doesnt work because it redirects me to a different country if i am abroad.
they are vibe coding too hard that they add all bs they think is a good idea. it was a good push for me to cancel that.
I have my problems with Spotify, but this is not one of them. I discover new artists, or long forgotten artists, regularly - even some weird obscure shit like Tänzelcore.
But I have to agree, that the magic of discovering new music is not the same as, for example, digging records in a record store or via obscure boards and platforms (remember FF-Shrine?)
Years later it was uncovered that it was never System of a Down, but one Joe Pleiman
https://kotaku.com/no-system-of-a-down-did-not-make-a-zelda-...
Well, the song was a bit out of style for System of a Down, but the voices are similar enough.
I loved that place, being able to browse people's hard drives was ingenious.
Music piracy also changed the course of my life, thanks to a DVD full of music I discovered my passion for metal, picked up the electric guitar, met a lot of friends, partners and had a lot of fun (I could say it was the best time of my life, but that was just because I was younger and without worries ;)
I also had no money to spend on CDs, nowadays I'm often thinking about buying a blu-ray player to buy the albums and movies I love... but I don't want them to collect dust, so I'm waiting for an excuse...
I do have a Sony Walkman (the new one) with a nice collection of music, but with spotify (which I want to replace with Qobuz) it's not getting used. I'm also selfhosting NaviDrome.
Nobody can "own" a song that I've enjoyed and listened to in my own head.
That's my own experience.
And if I want to have that experience again at any point in the future, I sure as shit should not have to shell out money to some record producer (or band member, whoever has their hand out) to do so.
If you want to make music, make music.
If I want to listen, I'll listen.
If I see them in person and I feel like paying to see them, I will.
I published a sociology paper on this in college that may be of interest! (2000)
The social organization of audio piracy on the Internet (Media, Culture, and Society)
"In this article, we describe and analyze the emerging audio piracy (MP3) subculture on the Internet. As is evident to even the most naïve observer of the contemporary landscape, the explosion of Internet-based communication is radically redefining the nature of social relationships in modern societies, if not creating altogether novel forms of social interaction (Lyotard, 1991; Stone, 1996).
Yet sociologists have yet to take the Internet seriously as a site of ethnographic investigation. Where sociological observation concerning the Internet exists at all, it is through vague generalizations and unqualified assertions about what these new virtual forms of communication portend for “society” (Kellner, 1995), offering little in the way of concrete social research.
We attempt to advance the sociological study of “virtual communities” by embarking on an extremely focused study of one particular Internet subculture that is literally revolutionizing the production and consumption of popular music: audio pirates."
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/q3tcst00gjbwr5t02x38f/Social-...