How about getting rid of these ridiculously long copyright terms so that people can actually reinterpret and remix and reinvent the cultural artifacts of their youth?
Isn't it kinda obvious that these copyright terms - tailored to suit corporations almost exclusively - are like a straitjacket in terms of creativity? All human cultural work always built up on what came before. We are - as the saying goes - standing on the shoulders of giants. But since about one generations, the giants have started to refuse to let go and don't let us climb on top anymore.
So, yeah. When you prevent the old giants from dying and stop their corpses from becoming fertilizer for new ideas and approaches, that's just what you get; a stale 'creative' industry, ever regurgitating the same ideas without real innovation and experimentation.
I agree with you on copyrights in general, but I'm not sure that's the issue here.
1. Movies and their sequels/prequels: If anything, copyright should make it easier to make NEW stuff. But while there's lots of interesting movies being made (check Youtube and tiktok and vimeo etc, and even the mainstream streaming services which have tremendous long tail of weird content!), as far as cinemas specifically go - that's less and less where we watch our video entertainment, attention span is lower and lower, and people are choosing safe choices with their limited money and time, so cinema-oriented companies are making tremendously expensive visually impressive safe content. I can watch experimental interesting stuff at home. I go to cinema at cinema prices for a safe movie that has astonishing special effects that I cannot feasibly watch at home. It's an outdated medium, but that doesn't mean art itself is dead - it just moved to new forms.
2. Music may well be a discoverability problem. There's a RIDICULOUS amount of new stuff being made. Experimental and traditional, interesting and boring, in all shapes and formats and kinds. Go to reddit and see the amount of cool stuff people make at home. But it's also positively overwhelming... whereas I know I like Sultans of Swing and will always like Sultans of Swing :). And we have to consider who is the paying audience and how they pay - is the cool stuff teenagers and youngsters watch and listen to captured through traditional channels? Cool new stuff has always been shared and bootlegged.
So I think cool innovative art is being made all the time, more than ever in fact; but not necessarily much or all of it is being consumed and importantly tracked at mainstream level. And that may be OK and normal. The article is looking at outdated art format/consumption, and noting that they are showing outdated content. It may be more tautologically true than an enlightening/warning sign.
I don't think it is. Or at least not effectively. When I need a utility or have a requirement, I struggle mightily to find reliable software I can trust to fulfill that purpose. A lot of signals that would've worked 10 years ago don't anymore. Paying for software, which would be my preference, in no way guarantees that it will fit purpose, won't install Malware, Won't abuse my trust or won't be handicapped in some way. Search will lead me to slightly scammy software, and so increasingly will SEO-ed paid reviews on websites and even forums. I live the trustless Web and I hate it :-D
So for me at least, easy seamless software discovery is completely lacking.
Now, this is HN. I am sure there are number of people who will enjoy spending many hours Nd days on reddit and github sifting through opinions and source code, trying many things and then tweaking them until they get what they need. I used to be one. But that's not easy software discovery, that's hard physical labour for 99.99% of populace, including today myself :->
Whereas frankly, Spotify does ok job in building a radio station from a song or playlist. Unsolved problem is still finding a song that's alike to this song in some specific way that makes sense to me... But I expect that to be unsolved in my lifetime.
Music discovery/recommendation and really discovery/recommendation more broadly are just really hard problems. I know someone who gave a number of talks about the difficulty maybe 15 years ago (I think at SXSW among other places). [1] And it really hasn't gotten any better.
I use RateYourMusic and Last.fm mostly to find out about new music:
1. RateYourMusic has a wonderful feature of democratically tagging albums with genres. People suggest this or that genre, then if it gets more than 2 votes (or something like that) the album's page is updated to feature the genre. You can then browse the genre page and swift through other similarly-tagged albums. Here's an example[1].
2. I find Last.fm's "Similar Artists" section to favor niche artists more than, say, the Spotify equivalent.
Consumption and purchase of music are different things. The culture has not stopped. The kids just aren't paying. Thier parents are paying for easy access to Queen songs. The kids get thier music elsewhere.
No so young anymore, but I listen to SoundCloud at least 50 hours per week (after heavily curating who I follow and writing my own SoundCloud frontend to make the site usable, fwiw).
In fact most artists I follow do not publish anywhere else, except maybe Bandcamp (whose usability is even worse).
ps: to any SoundCloud pm listening, I would have gladly paid for a purely linear timeline of my follows that remembers its position across devices, but no I had to build it myself.
I had the payment problem the other day and it's because I wanted to pay with PayPal. It seems if you use a card they can roll together all the items, but PayPal can't.
My biggest frustration is not being able to download a zip file of all the tracks I just bought. Going one by one is tedious, especially because I tend to download both a FLAC for backup and 320 for everyday listening.
A massive chunk of my music collection recently came from random
strangers.
I found a waterlogged phone on the beach. No amount of dry rice could
resurrect it. But I located the owner and, via a micro SD card,
returned a 100GB of family photos by EXIF GPS data that led me to
their house. Happy repatriations. As a side effect I snarfed about
100GB of high quality MP3s. I'm still listening to bands I've never
heard of before. On reflection I rather liked that. It shows my
ego-driven so-called "tastes" are perhaps an over inflated sense of
identity and that whether I'll like random music or not is only a
little higher than chance.
Another time someone gave me a USB with a PDF to read, and the rest of
the drive was chock full of their whole music collection. Now that
thumb drives are so HUGE and I literally have boxes of them lying
around I wonder whether to just preload them with a shit-ton of cool
music and give them to people I like. Like old mix tapes... it's
nothing to do with the cost/purchase... it's a whole new formula for
discovery and restoring a social dimension to music.
Back when coffee shop wifi was a new thing, and AP Isolation hadn't been invented yet, I used to discover a lot of music on Network Neighborhood at my local Caribou Coffee.
A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind.
Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow.
Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.
I found a pretty good band while giving advice to a coworker on how to explain away inappropriate language at work if someone complained to HR.
The coworker was putting together a new workstation for someone, and said "I need a network card". The person at the next desk said that they had an extra and tried to hand it to the guy building the workstation.
He said "I don't want your sloppy seconds". Then he remembered the origins of the term "sloppy seconds" [1] and wondered if he's allowed to say that at work.
I overheard and told him, "Don't worry. If someone complains just say you were talking about the band. Every sexual term and phrase has a band named after it somewhere. Even if HR tries to check, you can just say it was a band you heard at a bar when you were in college".
Naturally I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and sure enough, there is a band by that name and the first Google hit is a Wikipedia article about them [2].
The first two paragraphs of that article say:
> Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up."
> The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk.
After that second paragraph I had to check if they were on Spotify and they were. I listened to a few of their albums the rest of the day and sure enough, there were songs on all those things mentioned in that second paragraph, some of them quite good.
I'm not quite young, but I listen to lo-fi hip hop streams, video game soundtracks (Guilty Gear Strive is my current recommendation), DJ streamers, live cover streamers, and space music on public radio (WXPN). I doubt any of these get reflected in the official numbers.
This can't be anywhere near all of it, but check out the chat on the Lofi Girl YouTube channel, one hundred percent kids studying algebra and worrying about testing. Just like a chatroom in the 90's.
Don't look at algorithm services, look and follow smaller record labels (on bandcamp maybe). Some of the labels i follow: unseen worlds, drag city, hausu mountain, hyperdub.
I am turning 33 next year, I have yet to have a year where my heart almost doesnt explode from joy and amazement at all the music people are make. Every year I feel luckier than last to be alive to hear the new things coming out. I really can't relate at all to most of this discussion.. It is very alien to me.
Spotify, youtube, indie discord servers, musician friends, SoundCloud, Instagram accounts of artists, live shows, just everywhere you turn there's a goldmine of indie music
Certainly the culture hasn't stopped, but how would you say that music has moved forward in the past decade or two? While I can name a lot of groups that make new music I enjoy, I can't say that there have been revolutionary genres created for awhile.
Ohhh it's out there... I'm not sure "when" dubstep was created, but it's starting to spawn new explorations. Take Clown Core, kind of a dubstep/metal/jazz/comedy fusion... thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT7x1NvGf5k Before you write it off entirely (I don't blame you), take a second to notice the synchronization around 0:55.
Have you heard of live coding? Writing code in front of a live audience that plays music? I doubt anything like that has been done before the last couple of decades. I don't know the history, maybe people dabbled with it way back when, but it's an actual thing now. I hope it really catches on!
Sure there have been totally new genres within the last few years: Russian hardbass, phonk, hyperpop, etc. Art is constantly evolving, even though not necessarily evolving in the mainstream.
Nils frahm, jon hopkins, pomme, go_a, all awesome and the last two are fairly recent. I think there's hundreds of new genres, but we're all finding what we love. I don't have to listen to college radio at 1 AM and hope for the best anymore.
Yet all the summer music festivals are packed, sold out within minutes. It's just that the kids value live experience more than they value mp3 or Spotify.
doesn't look like you have enough to show to get me interested, and everything you've put there is either opinion ("Write 10 songs in the same time as you used to write 1.") or things that daws or random ios apps already do.
It's also totally unrelated to the article at hand so this is shameless self promotion of something that isn't really available to promote.
At first I was interested by this. But as I have seen this comment pop up everywhere on HN for a very long time, and zero progress on said IDE, I think it's just spam. Please stop.
Good that you recognize you are spamming - then please stop spamming!
You've been posting about it being ready soon for 4 years now, and you keep posting it in just vaguely related threads despite having been asked multiple times to stop.
Yeah shit took way longer than it should have. Just FYI Bitwig also took a while. Figma too. Desktop apps are hard, and audio desktop apps are double hard.
I don't see teens mentioned in the article anywhere. If anything, teens are probably underrepresented in the data due to greater willingness to use non-traditional outlets.
Also "The media kids enjoy today is bad for their health." As true for TikTok seizures and speech impediments as it was for Judas Priest inspired suicides and D&D Satanism.
For me, the thing that seems to be missing from modern music is passion. Pop music isn't about art its about sales, it does not want to say anything it just wants to party. Where are the songs that say something and touch you? Where are the folks that can even sing without digital processing?
I think modern tools also have an effect on how we produce music - there is lots of software and anyone can use it but everyone plays in the same playground to do it. Maybe we rely on too much automation, too many reach for the same plugins.
You might like The Mountain Goats, or even the podcast "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats" where they talk about the story behind the lyrics, and how they used to record the vocals on a half-busted 80's boombox mic.
I think they're reasonably popular. One of the local newspapers recenlty ran a cover story about their new album. Anyway, they tick all your boxes.
For something amazing that ticks none of your boxes, you could check out Igorrr.
Lindsey Stirling, Diablo Swing Orchestra and Sumo Cyco are in between those extremes. Those bands are all very different from each other, and mostly from automatic recommendations.
This article is making a lot of assumptions that I'm not sure are correct. For example, it claims older music and older movie franchises are gaining in popularity for the same pervasive cultural reason. That's an assumption, especially because he only mentioned two categories of artistic endeavor. What about others? Old books vs new books? Old video games vs new video games? Painting, sculpture, architecture?
I can't point to numbers that say he's wrong, but for my whole life I have never felt like I had access to a smaller variety of media than I had before. It's just not on billboards. It's more individualistic. None of my friends read the same books or listen to the same bands as each other.
Yeah. We probably know some of the reasons action movie franchises (in particular) are big. Budgets have gotten huge and predictable effects-laden action franchises are very important for the international market and theater goers apparently flock to them in the US as well. The good news is there's lots of choice if that's not your thing.
The putative effect is not statistically distinguishable, as observed by the fat overlapping confidence intervals. And the word "old" growing in prominence in movie titles is a very weird, unreliable proxy for the effect at hand. The rest of the article is similar drivel.
This looked odd to me too - and suspiciously like a p-hack.
Besides - if the grey shaded area is where we are supposed to believe the 'actual' number should fall, we actually know the 'actual' numbers (the dots) and 60% of the datapoints fall outside of the shaded area, so this seems like total nonsense to me (presumably 95% of the points should sit inside this area?).
On top of that - if you added the actual numbers to this graph (which I expect are 1-4 films a year) only a handful of releases can completely skew the data.
And then even if you ignore the above, the whole premise titles such as 'old school', 'no country for old men' and 'the 40 year old virgin' are picked because of a trend towards 'old stuff' isn't in any way backed up by either data or common sense when thinking about the movie titles.
When you get a graph like this which has such basic failures in stats and common sense, it does make you question the data and rigor behind the rest of the article.
Ha yeah you've got to love a graph that looks like random noise until you throw a fancy looking R trend line on it. Most of the data points are outside the confidence interval!
Irrelevant. The confidence interval is for the uncertainty of a parameter, the overall mean/trend: if most of your points fell inside it, that would not be good but extremely bad (you have that much imprecision that your estimate of the overall mean could be anywhere inside the range of observations?). Ideally, your CI would be so narrow that ~0 data points fell within it. (An example: you take a population census of adult heights and find the mean height is 5'7 ± 0.001 inches, say. Very few people will fall within that CI. But that's because it's such a good precise CI due to so much data, not because it's a bad CI.)
Notice also that we are looking at a “minimum 1k” observations, and the y-axis is labeled in increments of one-one thousandth starting at zero, so really it’s “1”, “2”, “3”, etc. The observed fluctuation may be attributable to removing the components of the top-1k which were not movies (reducing the size of the denominator).
I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the rest of the article drivel, though. There are some pretty interesting points made elsewhere, especially the average age of actor plot.
The music industry execs are the ones hurting here. The music industry has done fuck all for music and culture for decades. Now they have painted themselves into a corner with their paint-by-numbers crap and can't even out-compete the pop/commercial stuff from just a few decades ago.
Culture is innovating just fine, all over the world. Anyone with talent and heart can gain a following large enough to support them. You just can't package culture up and sell it in a mass market anymore.
"AAA" gaming is also headed in a bad, but different, direction. Most money now comes from microtransactions, and the temptation to sell what amounts to an unregulated slot machine with a game attached will be hard to resist for most publishers.
In fact, the current CEO of Unity (One of the most popular game engine) said that anyone who's not baking monetization into their games right from the start is "f*king idiot".
Read the fine print on the bar chart. They're measuring catalog by trying to figure what the current top 100 streamed songs / albums are.
I can only name a song from one top forty band from the last 10 years. (The HU; I have no idea how mongolian throat metal charted in the US; check them out.)
However, I regularly stream dozens of albums that came out after 2020.
The article seems concerned that pop music is dying. Good riddance?
I'd be much more interested in a revenue-based breakdown (inclusive of concerts, merchandise, etc.), and the number of musicians grossing over $10K, 100K, 250K 500K, 1M, etc. per year over time.
If the population of musicians earning a middle class income is increasing, that'd be great news, and would be well-worth having fewer break $10M per year.
The HU likely charted because of their inclusion in the OST of a game by EA - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I was pleasantly surprised to see them start prominently in the opening of that game!
Doom Eternal, for the record, also had some Mongolian throat singing from the late vocalist of Tengger Cavalry.
She might like 89.3 KBCZ. They're based near silicon valley, and play good pop music from the 70's. However, it only comes in on route 9. They have an internet stream.
Everyone who is now the age that Ozzy, Slash, and Alanis were when they did the work that made the world pay attention, was born after 9/11. Meaning, in that climate. They were never conscious of a world without the web, Facebook, and YouTube. Rock, as Marilyn Manson noted, is deader than dead. That’s a formidable and fertile tradition going back to the blues that’s just over and done as far as the mainstream is concerned. Forget Metallica- we don’t even have Nickelback and 3 Doors Down anymore.
Instead of reaching for your logical fallacies and statistical poindexterism to pseudo-refute the article, maybe have a think about why it might actually be describing an actual phenomenon.
That’s an interesting point. How would you characterize growing up in the shadow of the Global War on Terror vs growing up in the shadow of the Cold War?
The shadow of the global war on terror has been more intimate. Surveillance, airport security etc. During the cold war the fear was that we would all be blown up by the same thermonuclear bombs in a nuclear holocaust. What you could do with a passenger airplane was not the main problem.
I think the "music is boring" sentiment could be about the lack of shared experiences due to hyper-fragmentation. It's easy to access all genres of music from one app at flat monthly rate. The mainstream, then, is the lowest common denominator much more so than before. Specifically it doesn't need to embrace any rising genres. And there are no longer pronounced subcultures either, if there's no friction e.g. queueing up in front of the record store - that facilitate socializing with like-tasted fans.
I think you'll also find a sentiment going back decades that "today's music sucks" or "today's popular music sucks." That said, there's certainly a lot of fragmentation even if there's still a big pop culture head too. In TV certainly an HBO or Netflix hit has nothing like the reach of a network hit a couple decades ago. And, of course, watching is less synchronous too.
Disco is certainly the genre from what would normally be my peak music taste acquisition time--college and the period thereafter--that I could never stand and which none of my peers were into either.
This is survivorship bias. There was a lot of mediocre dreck shoveled out in the late 70's that is largely unlistenable. Everything was rerecorded in disco style even if it wasn't a good idea.
Aww. Disco spawned house music[1] and, from there, all of house's subgenres and massive influence on popular music. Listening to old 80s house is full of samples of disco beats and string grooves. You can still hear it in popular records; disco influence is all over Daft Punk's discography[2]. I think it deserves some credit and fond appreciation :)
I think the end of musical subcultures may be significant. It used to feel like there were many isolated musical bubbles, separated by geography or language or social class or simply aesthetic choice, and each one would develop its own unique musical idiom. Every now and then some cultural explorer would bring one of these idioms back to the mass market, introducing a new flavor into the pop music melting pot, and a surge of innovation would occur.
Of course the flow of attention back into the previously-isolated musical subculture tended to be destructive, as far as its inhabitants were concerned; the musicians who rode the wave out to mainstream popularity were often scorned and labeled sell-outs, for making private profit at the expense of the community which had supported them.
When there is no more isolation, all music shared everywhere over the internet all the time, how can a unique new cultural strain develop? When any new ideas one musician comes up with just get dropped into the global soup, instead of taking time to ferment in a smaller, more focused environment, how can any distinct new genre emerge? It seems like we are seeing a different model of musical creativity, which is likely to be broader and smoother; more gradual global drift and fewer irruptions.
> When there is no more isolation, all music shared everywhere over the internet all the time, how can a unique new cultural strain develop? When any new ideas one musician comes up with just get dropped into the global soup, instead of taking time to ferment in a smaller, more focused environment, how can any distinct new genre emerge?
The bar of checking out a new genre has gotten lower than ever, yes. But I don't agree that it's one big global soup now. Recommendation systems of Soundcloud/Spotify/Youtube often give you stuff from the same genre/niche of music when you listen to a given niche, and conversely they don't recommend you stuff from unrelated niches. So small niches might not be discovered by average listeners unless they are going viral.
Furthermore, the gatekeepers of the mainstream are still in full power. Things like radio stations, shopping mall music, etc. all are still controlled by a small elite. Even social media platforms often perform curation of things featured on their front or even trending pages. So there's still often a "this isn't going to work with average listeners" kind of decision going on, done by a human.
I'm not so sure about the end of musical subcultures. The house/techno/dnb underground here is still strong, there are events focused around those genres every weekend and during the week here. I almost went to a warehouse party last night but was worn out from walking all day. And I just got back from a festival in another part of the state that was almost exclusively bass music.
And this is completely separate from the larger festival circuit, EDC/CRSSD and the like. I actually don't like going to bigger festivals, the vibe is all wrong and its way too bro-y.
The subcultures are still there, they're just not easily organized or present on Spotify. I judge a DJ by how easy it is to Shazam all the tracks he plays, the good ones aren't getting their shit off Spotify thats for sure
My sis has been diving headfirst into goth culture, and exploring their musical palette. She goes to events centered around the music they listen to. And on and on.
I think it's demographics. The 2 latest generations are such a minority and so dominated by older generations that they can't find each other, and their voices can't be heard or amplified
“The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”
Has anyone thought of this in relation with age demographics?
Declining birth rates in developed countries => shrinking share of younger people => most of the demand is created by older people with lower neuroplasticity => older music stars are more popular
> It seems impossible—after all, billions of dollars are spent every year by entertainment corporations in their quest for market dominance. Yet, despite this constant spending spree, almost every week brings a new sign of cultural stagnation.
The author fundamentally misunderstands how business works, I think. Lots of money up for grabs in a highly competitive market equals hardcore conservatism from investors (the labels in this case). They will heavily bet on artists following a "winning formula", and buy up the independents that invent new winning formulas. You see the same exact behavior in every creative industry, because the money is relying on past performance to predict success.
Exactly right. Everything is boring because reliable is boring. A lot of what we see output by major cultural businesses is basically algorithmic:
We need a well-known actor (so one of maybe 50), supported by some other known actors (several of a few hundred), in a story that's a continuation (so a dozen or so franchises), where he beats up a bad guy or two, doesn't die, and doesn't offend anyone. We'll add explosions, magical creatures, and physically impossible stunts, because people like that. We'll fill it up with either well known tropes or ironic spoofs of such for a bit of variety.
Songs are similar. Make sure the chorus is good, repeat it a few times, don't make people wait too long before the memorable bit, add a featuring artist who is going to get their own release soon.
What we saw in the past was people would try something new, and quite a lot of those things would crash and burn, but now and again you got a really great hit.
Part of why I don't consume much mass culture is I see this algo all the time. It's a bit like a foodie who's seen all the ingredients and all the ways to cook them: you stop thinking this new dish is new, and you just want to appreciate a well-made thing, which is also something that fits in this formula, but doesn't require constant innovation, and crucially doesn't require constant consumption.
Explore/exploit tends to exploit when there's a lot of money on the line. Same reason drugs are invented by little companies that get bought by the big ones.
It takes a different kind of vision to predict things which are orthogonal to past performance.
In so many areas where corporate control has been consolidated, there is more complete dominance of bureaucratic hierarchies that just happen to more systematically exclude those rare innovators and creatives who could occasionally punch through to earth-shaking effect. The allowance for true innovation is almost extinct. The difference is it's nearly universal now.
People like Thos. Edison and Nikola Tesla wouldn't have a chance today, they already had it difficult in their time where the downward pressure was already palpable, and each came very close to not having a worldwide imact, just like everyone else. Keep in mind their productivity was actually decimated by going against the current like this, so their known milestones & breakthroughs are only the tip of the iceberg compared to what "could have been" in a more supportive cultural environment.
And that was then.
Even in places which pride themselves in non-traditional corporate behavior, the same anti-creative characteristics have become generally acceptable by comparative example, all up and down the entire chain of command. Especially among the money people, increased greed is the antithesis of increased innovation.
If the only thing you want to do with money is make more of the same, that's legitimate especially if you're in debt or something, but that's not how you make more of new other things which could turn out to be more valuable than money.
People in general have gradually settled for so much less innovation, in exchange for the very little financial improvement that might result without such a distraction.
And creatives who would have had a (already slim) chance in previous decades are having none of it.
Woz dropped out when it started getting so bad you couldn't deny it.
Plus "star-making machinery" itself became so much more prominent and more like an insiders lottery. The establishment of a mechanism which can "make anyone a star" ended up being needed just to get recognition for the occasional jaw-dropping talent. But once that mechanism is in place, there's almost no talent needed after that.
Trump and Biden will be 81 and 78 respectively if they choose to run again in 2024 (and assuming they are alive to do so). The average age of congress is the oldest it has ever been. The wealth disparity between those over 54 compared to those under is the highest it has ever been.
While the methodology may be flawed, the point remains that we’re in an epidemic of artistic risk mitigation, where pre-sold franchises (sequels, reboots and remakes) combined with name brand artists are gobbling up an inordinate amount of attention that could be fueling new art and artists.
Maybe the big studios are, though I feel like I've been hearing this complaint for my entire life. But there is so, so, so (so) much creativity happening in spaces like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, etc. Don't write that off just because it's not coming to your local theatre.
Honestly, the crazy wacky internet stuff tours aggressively (how else can they get paid?), and regularly does make it to the local theater (or at least local bar).
The article would have us write off anything that has fewer than a 2-day stint at a local sports arena.
I don’t understand what is so surprising about this. The world has been producing high-quality music for decades. The catalog of old music will always grow in size relative to the catalog of new music. Were we expecting the dominance of old music to decline for no reason?
This is it. Music production technology made incredible strides from 1960-1990, as well as new ideas around production that the new equipment enabled. Thus, in that period, pop music sounded "old" very quickly. This all culminated with a computer-driven "we can do anything" style in the late 90's, where people like BT made awful hi-tech productions. Now, with hindsight, we see that 40-year old albums like Thriller still sound amazing, there simply is no new tech that can improve it.
While I personally don't much care for much new music I hear, I'm hesitant to chalk it up to music being worse rather than I'm somewhat set in my preferences. That said, pre-COVID I had definitely reached the point where I had never heard of the bands playing trade show parties and the like and, when I did hear them, my impression was somewhere between meh and it's noise.
Hold up, I certainly didn't mean to imply that music has gotten worse - only that it stopped getting better (from a purely sonic perspective). There's lots of great new music coming out, but a lot of it has a retro sound anyway.
People mostly play old and familiar content likely because it's totally exhausting now to find favorable new content.
Too many of my older favorite artists like Tracy Chapman don't even release music any more because of the lack of reward and respect involved in releasing music now, it's disheartening to post your hard work and not get any notable views, especially when they're a grammy winner. Even notable musicians from the past don't get views now, not because the music isn't good, they don't get views because often the music isn't "TikTok Clip Worthy".
If TikTok only had a tool to scroll through songs (music videos), with a much better method of preventing spam, playing everything uploaded fairly, and that was better at preventing repetitive plays, that's likely what would make new music discovery far far easier for everyone.
How much of this is due to some fundamental cultural decline, and how much is due to the fact that, starting relatively recently, old music stopped being something that you had to seek out and obtain, and instead became something that's provided almost effortlessly via vast archives and recommendation engines?
There is an enormous amount of old music out there, and while only a small percentage is really good, that still amounts to an enormous amount of non-new good music that competes with new music.
Not even sure it's decline so much as cultural fragmentation. The head pop culture creations (hollywood movies and the top streaming songs) are things with universal awareness (so things that came of age before the internet and mass media was created by a few brokers). The tail has been growing absurdly. Go ask a teenager what they like to watch or listen to, they'll probably mention some youtube/tiktok streamers you've never heard of, and have a tiny cultural footprint.
Vinyls are mastered differently. If that same master mix was stamped on a CD and played under the same speakers/dB/amp/conditions as a record player it'll sound the same. Some people do the whole pre-amp and EQ thing and you could do that to a CD player's output too.
But nothing beats the big jackets, and there's magic in mixing between turntables that isn't there with any other method.
I don't feel like 18 months and not currently on the Billboard charts is a particularly reasonable cutoff for "new vs old" music.
I listen to tons of new music - current, young artists, who've released all or nearly all of their music the past 5-10 years, that's most of my listening.
In spite of that, I expect that 70%+ of my listening is over this arbitrary cutoff and would count as "catalog" . Even if I find a new band opening at a show - probably they've been around a couple years and if I dive into them the majority of their music is >18 months.
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The other aspect is I'd like to see age demographic data for the music stats. Older people have largely only gotten into Spotify and the like more recently. Are young people listening to less new music, or is this just a reflection of now having a wider age range in streaming stats?
Yep, besides, by the definition on the graph their own examples of Kate Bush's "Running up that hill" and Metallica's "Master of Puppets" would not count as "catalog" and counts as 'new music' while The Weekend's "Blinding Lights" counts as 'catalogue' music (i.e. 'old' music in the context of this article).
Seems overly simplistic to me!
It's also worth accounting for how music is consumed and how this is accounted for - i.e. I assume the shift to streaming platforms would naturally cause reporting of old-listens to increase (i.e. if you buy a CD once in 2015 and listen to it every year, this would be recorded as a single 'non-catalogue' sale, while in the streaming world it would be classified as 'two non-catalogue listens and then five catalogue listens'), so I assume more people streaming would drive more 'recorded' catalogue listens unless this is carefully adjusted for.
The NYT ram an article a while back on Spotify listening by age; they found that people tend to latch on to what was popular when they were in their early teens.[1]
So yes, on the music side this is probably dominated by demographics. Old people listen to old music.
In order to find "new music" the listeners themselves have to put in some effort, be curious and open to the experience. It helps if there is a culture around it, not around "genres" but around discovering music (be it old or new) in general.
When I was a kid I always enjoyed walking into my uncle's living room being awestruck by the enormous hi-fi sound and his massive collections of LPs and later CDs. He, at times, offered me to play what I like. Because I had no real clue about music back then, I just picked the ones with "interesting" cover art.
I vividly remember picking Bauhaus' The Sky's Gone Out or King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, totally alien music for me but quite the listening experience.
This kind of ceremonial setting and the work and care around it, is missing in the days of immediate availability under our impulsive fingertips and with it the disposition to take a good listen with a clear intention, with a beginning and an end. It seems that we are more or less offered to be drowned in music streams making it hard to discern, unable to recover with fresh/curious ears without taking breaks and the possibility to listen more sparingly.
> In order to find "new music" the listeners themselves have to put in some effort
This is a very good point. I listen to a lot of great "new" music, but I do that by listening to oddball radio stations (like KCSM San Mateo), going to music festivals (just got back from the Sicily Jazz Festival in Italy), and "new music" events (like the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music https://cabrillomusic.org/ ), and I play the piano with amateur groups and in amateur recitals.
It takes a lot of work, but all I hear is new music, or fresh takes on old music. But sadly, the audience for this is either people like me (men 55+ and some women) and kids who are music majors. There's little in the middle.
I think the average kid who simply followed pop and rock back in the 70s knew more about "music" than the kid today to whom it's just a branding, or a backdrop for a TikTok. They don't listen and pay attention. Pop culture doesn't resolve around music anymore. There's too many other things (games, social media) to worry about.
No offense, but the "new music" you're talking about, that primarily appeals to men aged 55+, is new jazz and classical music? Kids these days don't pay enough attention to the hip new composers? Come on.
Nobody would call modern art music "classical music."
When I was high school/college age, I certainly paid attention to the composers who were writing for film, or synthesizers, etc. I just don't think enough kids today are positioned to be able to appreciate it.
The artists performing this aren't all old men, for the most part they're a diverse group of young people.
From my perspective, you really are stuck in a bubble of old music, whether or not those takes are "new". Modern art music is old music. Jazz, even the most forward-thinking of forms, is old music. I don't think you're able to draw the conclusion that young people aren't interested in music from the concerts you attend, because you are simply listening to old music.
If you want to see hordes of young people who are genuinely interested in music (new music), you'll find them within the sprawling umbrella of club music. Not your local top 40 pop club, but the underground places.
Young people who are interested in music are focused on novel atmospheres/noises coupled with danceable rhythms. They're not interested in harmony, chord progressions, or sounds created near-exclusively by acoustic or electroacoustic instruments. That's the purview of old music, and that's why you'll only find it in music schools (which are fantastically archaic) + old people.
On that note, I'm willing to accept the hypothesis that the "average" young person today is less interested in music than in the past. It's probably true. But your evidence is... well, I think in a bit of a bubble.
Counter to this, I know some teenagers who are obsessed with music in the way (time wise) mainly only teenagers can be. Currently enjoying a summer off doing 10+ hour days focused on that, collaborations with other people online, everything digital or digitized.
You know what they won’t be doing? Any of the venues and sources you describe. Not a value judgment, by the way, just an observation and a curiosity of what you are really seeing is a silo effect where you just don’t see what they are into and vice versa.
> You know what they won’t be doing? Any of the venues and sources you describe.
And I get to hear a lot of their music. It's very clear they haven't heard a wide range of music, and thus for the most part they make music within a tiny range of what is possible, and you get painfully conventional music.
Being ignorant of the past doesn't make you a better musician.
Not one song on the pop charts this year would have sounded particularly out of place in 1992.
In 1970, the music on the charts would have sounded like alien voices to people in 1940.
Actually why I don't see AI generated music a thing.
What I think we do as humans participating in culture is "select" music, I'm not sure music is every truly created or composed but stumbled upon and then selected. It's selected at a rate which we can manage. A large part of the fun comes from sharing music with others. When everything becomes personalized, we start to lose this.
If I had library of never ending new great AI generated music, what would happen? I guess I'd just keep browsing forever and never really know what I like. Arguably this is already happening. I've been a musician from a young age, and I now actually find it difficult to know what to listen to. Before I had steaming services, it was a lot easier a lot less option stress.
> This kind of ceremonial setting and the work and care around it, is missing in the days of immediate availability...
I'm riffing off of this, and saying it's about the same as trying to find a new opinion by reading Facebook.
If the main way you're trying to find new music is algorithmically, you're only going to find fairly similar kinds of music. This differs hugely from the music festival, or even being able to go into a music shop and ask a human for something interesting and new.
That's without talking about how garage bands and live music have mostly died a sad death.
As well, I'd say listening to complex music, or even a different genre of music, takes focus and patience. In gaining the algorithm-driven, attention-seeking internet, we've lost a lot of that focus and patience.
I'd guess like most people, my greatest period of music discovery was in my teens and 20's. Listening to music with friends, we'd share new discoveries, hoping to win over a new fan.
Music stores were great, too. Putting on the gross headphones at Tower Records and sampling the latest releases, let me find new bands without risking my limited teen cash supply.
Even better, I could go across the street from Tower and pick the brains of the people at the punk/metal shop, or convince them to play something that Tower would never stock. The people there always had a better understanding of your tastes, far better than a genre listing.
The most fruitful source of new music was going out to see shows. Going to a show to see one or two bands at any given show, there was a good chance I'd come away a fan of one of the openers.
It's seems like what you're describing would help you find music that's new to you, not necessarily music that has been produced recently like in the article.
I imagine this is especially true with today's data driven recommendation engines.
When I discover new music it often turns out to be made in 2010 rather than 2022, and tbh it doesn't matter to me since I haven't heard it before either way.
Something like this happened to me when I was at debate camp in high school.
I roomed with a super-chill guy who had an enormous (at the time) volume of CDs with him. I told him I was starting to listen to rock music more seriously (something I hid for a long time; I'm Black and Latino and got made fun of by people when I told them I listened to Blink and Taking Back Sunday). When I told him I was listening to KROQ, he said "No. Here's a Bob Dylan CD. Listen to this; give it back to me whenever."
Loved it.
He then gave me White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground, which is what basically _really_ started me on punk, which I still listen to a ton of today (less Blink; more SNFU, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, and the like) and has kind-of formed a part of my identity (or at least the part that is always ALWAYS seeking new music and doesn't fixate on the music of my college years).
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadIsn't it kinda obvious that these copyright terms - tailored to suit corporations almost exclusively - are like a straitjacket in terms of creativity? All human cultural work always built up on what came before. We are - as the saying goes - standing on the shoulders of giants. But since about one generations, the giants have started to refuse to let go and don't let us climb on top anymore.
So, yeah. When you prevent the old giants from dying and stop their corpses from becoming fertilizer for new ideas and approaches, that's just what you get; a stale 'creative' industry, ever regurgitating the same ideas without real innovation and experimentation.
1. Movies and their sequels/prequels: If anything, copyright should make it easier to make NEW stuff. But while there's lots of interesting movies being made (check Youtube and tiktok and vimeo etc, and even the mainstream streaming services which have tremendous long tail of weird content!), as far as cinemas specifically go - that's less and less where we watch our video entertainment, attention span is lower and lower, and people are choosing safe choices with their limited money and time, so cinema-oriented companies are making tremendously expensive visually impressive safe content. I can watch experimental interesting stuff at home. I go to cinema at cinema prices for a safe movie that has astonishing special effects that I cannot feasibly watch at home. It's an outdated medium, but that doesn't mean art itself is dead - it just moved to new forms.
2. Music may well be a discoverability problem. There's a RIDICULOUS amount of new stuff being made. Experimental and traditional, interesting and boring, in all shapes and formats and kinds. Go to reddit and see the amount of cool stuff people make at home. But it's also positively overwhelming... whereas I know I like Sultans of Swing and will always like Sultans of Swing :). And we have to consider who is the paying audience and how they pay - is the cool stuff teenagers and youngsters watch and listen to captured through traditional channels? Cool new stuff has always been shared and bootlegged.
So I think cool innovative art is being made all the time, more than ever in fact; but not necessarily much or all of it is being consumed and importantly tracked at mainstream level. And that may be OK and normal. The article is looking at outdated art format/consumption, and noting that they are showing outdated content. It may be more tautologically true than an enlightening/warning sign.
Lots of the discovery algorithms seem to be paywalled, which I don’t want to do, I want to find good music for free and CHOOSE to support artists.
Software discovery isn’t easy either.
I kind of miss Yahoo categories and lists.
So for me at least, easy seamless software discovery is completely lacking.
Now, this is HN. I am sure there are number of people who will enjoy spending many hours Nd days on reddit and github sifting through opinions and source code, trying many things and then tweaking them until they get what they need. I used to be one. But that's not easy software discovery, that's hard physical labour for 99.99% of populace, including today myself :->
Whereas frankly, Spotify does ok job in building a radio station from a song or playlist. Unsolved problem is still finding a song that's alike to this song in some specific way that makes sense to me... But I expect that to be unsolved in my lifetime.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2009/mar/17/sxswi-reco...
I want to support artists I like, but it’s hard to find them in an endless sea of crap.
1. RateYourMusic has a wonderful feature of democratically tagging albums with genres. People suggest this or that genre, then if it gets more than 2 votes (or something like that) the album's page is updated to feature the genre. You can then browse the genre page and swift through other similarly-tagged albums. Here's an example[1].
2. I find Last.fm's "Similar Artists" section to favor niche artists more than, say, the Spotify equivalent.
[1]: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/casper-mcfadden/medi...
People are making crappy music.
You can't really blame copyright for lack of talent, marketing, and lack of taste.
When I was young I used torrents and filesharing between friends or local networks.
ps: to any SoundCloud pm listening, I would have gladly paid for a purely linear timeline of my follows that remembers its position across devices, but no I had to build it myself.
I guess this is a matter of taste. Personally I find Bandcamp super usable. It's one of the gems of the internet if you ask me, up there with HN.
There's so much amazing independent music on BC and the revenue cut for artists is extremely fair. Money spent there is well spent.
> If I put 6 albums in my cart and check out, you make me enter my credit card info SIX TIMES. This is insane. You realize this is insane, don't you?
> You have used Amazon, right? Click once, receive candy. You need to be like that.
(Maybe they fixed it? Haven't bought multiple items at once in a while)
Also I would gladly pay for SoundCloud if most of the money actually went to the artists (if any SC pm is still listening).
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/shouting-into-the-void-this... (you will have to copy and paste the link manually because he loves to block HN referrals for self-amusement)
The only friction is waiting a few second per track for them to prepare my 12 flac downloads, clicking through payment only takes a second or so.
My biggest frustration is not being able to download a zip file of all the tracks I just bought. Going one by one is tedious, especially because I tend to download both a FLAC for backup and 320 for everyday listening.
I found a waterlogged phone on the beach. No amount of dry rice could resurrect it. But I located the owner and, via a micro SD card, returned a 100GB of family photos by EXIF GPS data that led me to their house. Happy repatriations. As a side effect I snarfed about 100GB of high quality MP3s. I'm still listening to bands I've never heard of before. On reflection I rather liked that. It shows my ego-driven so-called "tastes" are perhaps an over inflated sense of identity and that whether I'll like random music or not is only a little higher than chance.
Another time someone gave me a USB with a PDF to read, and the rest of the drive was chock full of their whole music collection. Now that thumb drives are so HUGE and I literally have boxes of them lying around I wonder whether to just preload them with a shit-ton of cool music and give them to people I like. Like old mix tapes... it's nothing to do with the cost/purchase... it's a whole new formula for discovery and restoring a social dimension to music.
A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind.
Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow.
Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.
I found a pretty good band while giving advice to a coworker on how to explain away inappropriate language at work if someone complained to HR.
The coworker was putting together a new workstation for someone, and said "I need a network card". The person at the next desk said that they had an extra and tried to hand it to the guy building the workstation.
He said "I don't want your sloppy seconds". Then he remembered the origins of the term "sloppy seconds" [1] and wondered if he's allowed to say that at work.
I overheard and told him, "Don't worry. If someone complains just say you were talking about the band. Every sexual term and phrase has a band named after it somewhere. Even if HR tries to check, you can just say it was a band you heard at a bar when you were in college".
Naturally I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and sure enough, there is a band by that name and the first Google hit is a Wikipedia article about them [2].
The first two paragraphs of that article say:
> Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up."
> The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk.
After that second paragraph I had to check if they were on Spotify and they were. I listened to a few of their albums the rest of the day and sure enough, there were songs on all those things mentioned in that second paragraph, some of them quite good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_seconds
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_Seconds
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/22/1080632810/tiktok-music-indus...
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiktok-music-i...
I am turning 33 next year, I have yet to have a year where my heart almost doesnt explode from joy and amazement at all the music people are make. Every year I feel luckier than last to be alive to hear the new things coming out. I really can't relate at all to most of this discussion.. It is very alien to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts
https://ngrid.io
Launching soon.
Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG
It's also totally unrelated to the article at hand so this is shameless self promotion of something that isn't really available to promote.
You've been posting about it being ready soon for 4 years now, and you keep posting it in just vaguely related threads despite having been asked multiple times to stop.
Yeah shit took way longer than it should have. Just FYI Bitwig also took a while. Figma too. Desktop apps are hard, and audio desktop apps are double hard.
Almost there though.
Does suggest you are spamming it.
I think modern tools also have an effect on how we produce music - there is lots of software and anyone can use it but everyone plays in the same playground to do it. Maybe we rely on too much automation, too many reach for the same plugins.
I think they're reasonably popular. One of the local newspapers recenlty ran a cover story about their new album. Anyway, they tick all your boxes.
For something amazing that ticks none of your boxes, you could check out Igorrr.
Lindsey Stirling, Diablo Swing Orchestra and Sumo Cyco are in between those extremes. Those bands are all very different from each other, and mostly from automatic recommendations.
I can't point to numbers that say he's wrong, but for my whole life I have never felt like I had access to a smaller variety of media than I had before. It's just not on billboards. It's more individualistic. None of my friends read the same books or listen to the same bands as each other.
The putative effect is not statistically distinguishable, as observed by the fat overlapping confidence intervals. And the word "old" growing in prominence in movie titles is a very weird, unreliable proxy for the effect at hand. The rest of the article is similar drivel.
Besides - if the grey shaded area is where we are supposed to believe the 'actual' number should fall, we actually know the 'actual' numbers (the dots) and 60% of the datapoints fall outside of the shaded area, so this seems like total nonsense to me (presumably 95% of the points should sit inside this area?).
On top of that - if you added the actual numbers to this graph (which I expect are 1-4 films a year) only a handful of releases can completely skew the data.
And then even if you ignore the above, the whole premise titles such as 'old school', 'no country for old men' and 'the 40 year old virgin' are picked because of a trend towards 'old stuff' isn't in any way backed up by either data or common sense when thinking about the movie titles.
When you get a graph like this which has such basic failures in stats and common sense, it does make you question the data and rigor behind the rest of the article.
You seem to be thinking of a predictive interval (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_interval), which, however, is not what is being plotted here.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the rest of the article drivel, though. There are some pretty interesting points made elsewhere, especially the average age of actor plot.
The music industry execs are the ones hurting here. The music industry has done fuck all for music and culture for decades. Now they have painted themselves into a corner with their paint-by-numbers crap and can't even out-compete the pop/commercial stuff from just a few decades ago.
Culture is innovating just fine, all over the world. Anyone with talent and heart can gain a following large enough to support them. You just can't package culture up and sell it in a mass market anymore.
I can only name a song from one top forty band from the last 10 years. (The HU; I have no idea how mongolian throat metal charted in the US; check them out.)
However, I regularly stream dozens of albums that came out after 2020.
The article seems concerned that pop music is dying. Good riddance?
I'd be much more interested in a revenue-based breakdown (inclusive of concerts, merchandise, etc.), and the number of musicians grossing over $10K, 100K, 250K 500K, 1M, etc. per year over time.
If the population of musicians earning a middle class income is increasing, that'd be great news, and would be well-worth having fewer break $10M per year.
Edit: misspelled "The HU"
Doom Eternal, for the record, also had some Mongolian throat singing from the late vocalist of Tengger Cavalry.
Just terrible, terrible pop music from the 70s.
Instead of reaching for your logical fallacies and statistical poindexterism to pseudo-refute the article, maybe have a think about why it might actually be describing an actual phenomenon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_music
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daft_Punk#Musical_style
Of course the flow of attention back into the previously-isolated musical subculture tended to be destructive, as far as its inhabitants were concerned; the musicians who rode the wave out to mainstream popularity were often scorned and labeled sell-outs, for making private profit at the expense of the community which had supported them.
When there is no more isolation, all music shared everywhere over the internet all the time, how can a unique new cultural strain develop? When any new ideas one musician comes up with just get dropped into the global soup, instead of taking time to ferment in a smaller, more focused environment, how can any distinct new genre emerge? It seems like we are seeing a different model of musical creativity, which is likely to be broader and smoother; more gradual global drift and fewer irruptions.
The bar of checking out a new genre has gotten lower than ever, yes. But I don't agree that it's one big global soup now. Recommendation systems of Soundcloud/Spotify/Youtube often give you stuff from the same genre/niche of music when you listen to a given niche, and conversely they don't recommend you stuff from unrelated niches. So small niches might not be discovered by average listeners unless they are going viral.
Furthermore, the gatekeepers of the mainstream are still in full power. Things like radio stations, shopping mall music, etc. all are still controlled by a small elite. Even social media platforms often perform curation of things featured on their front or even trending pages. So there's still often a "this isn't going to work with average listeners" kind of decision going on, done by a human.
And this is completely separate from the larger festival circuit, EDC/CRSSD and the like. I actually don't like going to bigger festivals, the vibe is all wrong and its way too bro-y.
The subcultures are still there, they're just not easily organized or present on Spotify. I judge a DJ by how easy it is to Shazam all the tracks he plays, the good ones aren't getting their shit off Spotify thats for sure
My sis has been diving headfirst into goth culture, and exploring their musical palette. She goes to events centered around the music they listen to. And on and on.
This article is an elaboration on an earlier post by the author about there being no countercultures in today's world:
"14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture"
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...
I firmly believe all the best new art (including music) is digital. Everytime I go looking for it I'm astounded at what I find.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/06/the-record-eff...
Declining birth rates in developed countries => shrinking share of younger people => most of the demand is created by older people with lower neuroplasticity => older music stars are more popular
The author fundamentally misunderstands how business works, I think. Lots of money up for grabs in a highly competitive market equals hardcore conservatism from investors (the labels in this case). They will heavily bet on artists following a "winning formula", and buy up the independents that invent new winning formulas. You see the same exact behavior in every creative industry, because the money is relying on past performance to predict success.
We need a well-known actor (so one of maybe 50), supported by some other known actors (several of a few hundred), in a story that's a continuation (so a dozen or so franchises), where he beats up a bad guy or two, doesn't die, and doesn't offend anyone. We'll add explosions, magical creatures, and physically impossible stunts, because people like that. We'll fill it up with either well known tropes or ironic spoofs of such for a bit of variety.
Songs are similar. Make sure the chorus is good, repeat it a few times, don't make people wait too long before the memorable bit, add a featuring artist who is going to get their own release soon.
What we saw in the past was people would try something new, and quite a lot of those things would crash and burn, but now and again you got a really great hit.
Part of why I don't consume much mass culture is I see this algo all the time. It's a bit like a foodie who's seen all the ingredients and all the ways to cook them: you stop thinking this new dish is new, and you just want to appreciate a well-made thing, which is also something that fits in this formula, but doesn't require constant innovation, and crucially doesn't require constant consumption.
Explore/exploit tends to exploit when there's a lot of money on the line. Same reason drugs are invented by little companies that get bought by the big ones.
It takes a different kind of vision to predict things which are orthogonal to past performance.
In so many areas where corporate control has been consolidated, there is more complete dominance of bureaucratic hierarchies that just happen to more systematically exclude those rare innovators and creatives who could occasionally punch through to earth-shaking effect. The allowance for true innovation is almost extinct. The difference is it's nearly universal now.
People like Thos. Edison and Nikola Tesla wouldn't have a chance today, they already had it difficult in their time where the downward pressure was already palpable, and each came very close to not having a worldwide imact, just like everyone else. Keep in mind their productivity was actually decimated by going against the current like this, so their known milestones & breakthroughs are only the tip of the iceberg compared to what "could have been" in a more supportive cultural environment.
And that was then.
Even in places which pride themselves in non-traditional corporate behavior, the same anti-creative characteristics have become generally acceptable by comparative example, all up and down the entire chain of command. Especially among the money people, increased greed is the antithesis of increased innovation.
If the only thing you want to do with money is make more of the same, that's legitimate especially if you're in debt or something, but that's not how you make more of new other things which could turn out to be more valuable than money.
People in general have gradually settled for so much less innovation, in exchange for the very little financial improvement that might result without such a distraction.
And creatives who would have had a (already slim) chance in previous decades are having none of it.
Woz dropped out when it started getting so bad you couldn't deny it.
Plus "star-making machinery" itself became so much more prominent and more like an insiders lottery. The establishment of a mechanism which can "make anyone a star" ended up being needed just to get recognition for the occasional jaw-dropping talent. But once that mechanism is in place, there's almost no talent needed after that.
This fact pattern is visible in many places.
Are the bourgeois over-54s paying plebs to watch Harrison Ford movies and listen to crappy music now?
Apparently, my misunderstanding of TikTok is much deeper than I previously imagined.
The article would have us write off anything that has fewer than a 2-day stint at a local sports arena.
Too many of my older favorite artists like Tracy Chapman don't even release music any more because of the lack of reward and respect involved in releasing music now, it's disheartening to post your hard work and not get any notable views, especially when they're a grammy winner. Even notable musicians from the past don't get views now, not because the music isn't good, they don't get views because often the music isn't "TikTok Clip Worthy".
If TikTok only had a tool to scroll through songs (music videos), with a much better method of preventing spam, playing everything uploaded fairly, and that was better at preventing repetitive plays, that's likely what would make new music discovery far far easier for everyone.
There is an enormous amount of old music out there, and while only a small percentage is really good, that still amounts to an enormous amount of non-new good music that competes with new music.
Anyone that claims they can't tell the difference is full of it.
But nothing beats the big jackets, and there's magic in mixing between turntables that isn't there with any other method.
I listen to tons of new music - current, young artists, who've released all or nearly all of their music the past 5-10 years, that's most of my listening.
In spite of that, I expect that 70%+ of my listening is over this arbitrary cutoff and would count as "catalog" . Even if I find a new band opening at a show - probably they've been around a couple years and if I dive into them the majority of their music is >18 months.
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The other aspect is I'd like to see age demographic data for the music stats. Older people have largely only gotten into Spotify and the like more recently. Are young people listening to less new music, or is this just a reflection of now having a wider age range in streaming stats?
Seems overly simplistic to me!
It's also worth accounting for how music is consumed and how this is accounted for - i.e. I assume the shift to streaming platforms would naturally cause reporting of old-listens to increase (i.e. if you buy a CD once in 2015 and listen to it every year, this would be recorded as a single 'non-catalogue' sale, while in the streaming world it would be classified as 'two non-catalogue listens and then five catalogue listens'), so I assume more people streaming would drive more 'recorded' catalogue listens unless this is carefully adjusted for.
18 months is not that old. Even mainstream pop radio stations are still going to be playing a stuff that’s 3 years old regularly.
Maybe it’s not brand new but it doesn’t fit their rhetoric later on.
So yes, on the music side this is probably dominated by demographics. Old people listen to old music.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-s...
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/people-stop-discoveri...
When I was a kid I always enjoyed walking into my uncle's living room being awestruck by the enormous hi-fi sound and his massive collections of LPs and later CDs. He, at times, offered me to play what I like. Because I had no real clue about music back then, I just picked the ones with "interesting" cover art. I vividly remember picking Bauhaus' The Sky's Gone Out or King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, totally alien music for me but quite the listening experience.
This kind of ceremonial setting and the work and care around it, is missing in the days of immediate availability under our impulsive fingertips and with it the disposition to take a good listen with a clear intention, with a beginning and an end. It seems that we are more or less offered to be drowned in music streams making it hard to discern, unable to recover with fresh/curious ears without taking breaks and the possibility to listen more sparingly.
This is a very good point. I listen to a lot of great "new" music, but I do that by listening to oddball radio stations (like KCSM San Mateo), going to music festivals (just got back from the Sicily Jazz Festival in Italy), and "new music" events (like the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music https://cabrillomusic.org/ ), and I play the piano with amateur groups and in amateur recitals.
It takes a lot of work, but all I hear is new music, or fresh takes on old music. But sadly, the audience for this is either people like me (men 55+ and some women) and kids who are music majors. There's little in the middle.
I think the average kid who simply followed pop and rock back in the 70s knew more about "music" than the kid today to whom it's just a branding, or a backdrop for a TikTok. They don't listen and pay attention. Pop culture doesn't resolve around music anymore. There's too many other things (games, social media) to worry about.
When I was high school/college age, I certainly paid attention to the composers who were writing for film, or synthesizers, etc. I just don't think enough kids today are positioned to be able to appreciate it.
The artists performing this aren't all old men, for the most part they're a diverse group of young people.
If you want to see hordes of young people who are genuinely interested in music (new music), you'll find them within the sprawling umbrella of club music. Not your local top 40 pop club, but the underground places.
Young people who are interested in music are focused on novel atmospheres/noises coupled with danceable rhythms. They're not interested in harmony, chord progressions, or sounds created near-exclusively by acoustic or electroacoustic instruments. That's the purview of old music, and that's why you'll only find it in music schools (which are fantastically archaic) + old people.
On that note, I'm willing to accept the hypothesis that the "average" young person today is less interested in music than in the past. It's probably true. But your evidence is... well, I think in a bit of a bubble.
You know what they won’t be doing? Any of the venues and sources you describe. Not a value judgment, by the way, just an observation and a curiosity of what you are really seeing is a silo effect where you just don’t see what they are into and vice versa.
And I get to hear a lot of their music. It's very clear they haven't heard a wide range of music, and thus for the most part they make music within a tiny range of what is possible, and you get painfully conventional music.
Being ignorant of the past doesn't make you a better musician.
Not one song on the pop charts this year would have sounded particularly out of place in 1992.
In 1970, the music on the charts would have sounded like alien voices to people in 1940.
What I think we do as humans participating in culture is "select" music, I'm not sure music is every truly created or composed but stumbled upon and then selected. It's selected at a rate which we can manage. A large part of the fun comes from sharing music with others. When everything becomes personalized, we start to lose this.
If I had library of never ending new great AI generated music, what would happen? I guess I'd just keep browsing forever and never really know what I like. Arguably this is already happening. I've been a musician from a young age, and I now actually find it difficult to know what to listen to. Before I had steaming services, it was a lot easier a lot less option stress.
I'm riffing off of this, and saying it's about the same as trying to find a new opinion by reading Facebook.
If the main way you're trying to find new music is algorithmically, you're only going to find fairly similar kinds of music. This differs hugely from the music festival, or even being able to go into a music shop and ask a human for something interesting and new.
That's without talking about how garage bands and live music have mostly died a sad death.
As well, I'd say listening to complex music, or even a different genre of music, takes focus and patience. In gaining the algorithm-driven, attention-seeking internet, we've lost a lot of that focus and patience.
Music stores were great, too. Putting on the gross headphones at Tower Records and sampling the latest releases, let me find new bands without risking my limited teen cash supply.
Even better, I could go across the street from Tower and pick the brains of the people at the punk/metal shop, or convince them to play something that Tower would never stock. The people there always had a better understanding of your tastes, far better than a genre listing.
The most fruitful source of new music was going out to see shows. Going to a show to see one or two bands at any given show, there was a good chance I'd come away a fan of one of the openers.
I imagine this is especially true with today's data driven recommendation engines.
When I discover new music it often turns out to be made in 2010 rather than 2022, and tbh it doesn't matter to me since I haven't heard it before either way.
I roomed with a super-chill guy who had an enormous (at the time) volume of CDs with him. I told him I was starting to listen to rock music more seriously (something I hid for a long time; I'm Black and Latino and got made fun of by people when I told them I listened to Blink and Taking Back Sunday). When I told him I was listening to KROQ, he said "No. Here's a Bob Dylan CD. Listen to this; give it back to me whenever."
Loved it.
He then gave me White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground, which is what basically _really_ started me on punk, which I still listen to a ton of today (less Blink; more SNFU, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, and the like) and has kind-of formed a part of my identity (or at least the part that is always ALWAYS seeking new music and doesn't fixate on the music of my college years).
Sharing music is a huge part of discovery.