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.

also https://www.nme.com/news/music/82-per-cent-of-musicians-earn-less-than-200-a-year-from-streaming-2833510

this thread title is to music what onlyfans is to bodies. second order simulacra. a copy of the copy. with past iterations of the social media model (ie instagram) there was still the illusion presented that this might be the sort of person you'd run into at the grocery store & take out on a coffee date - u are, after all, on social media, not reading some hollywood insider mag. obviously smoke & mirrors, of course - the most popular photos are heaviily staged, touched up, made up, algorhythmized, etc etc. But still, the illusion is presented. The real illusion is not the context presented by the photo, but the implicit suggestion that perhaps someone somewhere still might be able to believe in that illusion. with onlyfans even this is taken away. it becomes pure business, pure capital accumulation, pure transaction. success is measured in # of simps per capita

music becomes quantatative distributive model. all thoughts of the qualitative are gone. no time for anything to become nostalgic anymore. everything fluid. metrics, analytics. make sure you've got the right funny reaction face, font, and emojis on your yotuube thumbnail. gotta pump those numbers up kid. there is a flattening of the distance between creator & consumer. the roles are essentially the same now. quantity of music produced/consumed this week. all aesthetic distinction becomes amorphic as proliferation reaches infinity. every form imaginable, all at once. every song becomes white noise. every song becomes the brown note. every song feels like shitting but the shit never lands.

in the future all of culture will be a rube goldberg machine comprised wholly of bots & self-generating strings of code. hopelessly atomized, the individual meat-operator finally manages to disentangle himself from the remnents of western society become global simulation matrix, and re-enters the forest. all valuation signifiers have become iredeemably corroded. now there is only the world of your senses & the sound of my voice

  On 12/9/2020 at 12:15 AM, Cryptowen said:

this thread title is to music what onlyfans is to bodies. second order simulacra. a copy of the copy. with past iterations of the social media model (ie instagram) there was still the illusion presented that this might be the sort of person you'd run into at the grocery store & take out on a coffee date - u are, after all, on social media, not reading some hollywood insider mag. obviously smoke & mirrors, of course - the most popular photos are heaviily staged, touched up, made up, algorhythmized, etc etc. But still, the illusion is presented. The real illusion is not the context presented by the photo, but the implicit suggestion that perhaps someone somewhere still might be able to believe in that illusion. with onlyfans even this is taken away. it becomes pure business, pure capital accumulation, pure transaction. success is measured in # of simps per capita

music becomes quantatative distributive model. all thoughts of the qualitative are gone. no time for anything to become nostalgic anymore. everything fluid. metrics, analytics. make sure you've got the right funny reaction face, font, and emojis on your yotuube thumbnail. gotta pump those numbers up kid. there is a flattening of the distance between creator & consumer. the roles are essentially the same now. quantity of music produced/consumed this week. all aesthetic distinction becomes amorphic as proliferation reaches infinity. every form imaginable, all at once. every song becomes white noise. every song becomes the brown note. every song feels like shitting but the shit never lands.

in the future all of culture will be a rube goldberg machine comprised wholly of bots & self-generating strings of code. hopelessly atomized, the individual meat-operator finally manages to disentangle himself from the remnents of western society become global simulation matrix, and re-enters the forest. all valuation signifiers have become iredeemably corroded. now there is only the world of your senses & the sound of my voice

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dj spooky, is that you?

  On 12/9/2020 at 12:17 AM, nikisoko said:

dj spooky, is that you?

lol. not enough "flip the script" or talk of "the oldest profession" to pass as a paul d miller aka dj spooka aka dat subliminal kid PhD joint

One time they put DJ Spooky on at my last job & I clowned on it so hard that the guy who put it on came up to me after work to reprimand me

  On 12/9/2020 at 10:10 AM, Cryptowen said:

One time they put DJ Spooky on at my last job & I clowned on it so hard that the guy who put it on came up to me after work to reprimand me

lol

when I worked at a bookstore I used to keep a copy of his book under the register and randomly read it aloud and people usually thought I was making it up

i can't remember exactly what i said that got me in trouble but it mighta been something along the lines of "this guy sounds like he goes to parties to try to get girls to do k & listen to sufjan stevens with him"

dj spooky that subliminal kid subforum when?

I don't understand, are we hatin' on DJ Spooky in this thread now?

  On 12/8/2020 at 7:09 PM, ignatius said:

  On 12/8/2020 at 11:39 AM, dcom said:

Spotify could soon replace real artists with AI music (Input)

probably only a matter of time. the comments in the linked youtube clip =.. ugh. 

That linked clip is fucking god awful.

  On 12/11/2020 at 8:23 PM, chenGOD said:

I don't understand, are we hatin' on DJ Spooky in this thread now?

absolutely

  On 12/12/2020 at 2:32 AM, Alcofribas said:

absolutely

por qe?

  On 12/12/2020 at 5:58 AM, chenGOD said:

por qe?

bro he is cringe lol

(to be fair I’m just goofing on his writings, not his musique. I’ve actually only ever heard like 2 of his tracks)

Songs of a Dead Dreamer is a great album, but yeah, the guy writes like he's consistently tripping balls.

  On 12/12/2020 at 6:44 AM, Alcofribas said:

bro he is cringe lol

 

(to be fair I’m just goofing on his writings, not his musique. I’ve actually only ever heard like 2 of his tracks)

I’ve never read anything he’s written but DJ Spooky is great...

to me monsieur le spök kinda occupies a similar music space to josh wink. to me

My suspicion with AI generated music or AI generated content writ large is that it'll be kinda like CGI in movies, ie always feeling like it's on the verge of making it across the uncanny valley, but never quite succeeding. Every development of the technology will ultimately serve only to improve people's instinctual ability to pick up on incresingly subtle "fake" signifiers. You'll look back at something from 20 years ago & say, "oh, that's completely awful, how did anyone ever think that was realistic?", even though at the time everyone was raving about it being almost human.

dj spooky gave a talk at the university i worked at a while back, and the out-of-touch head of academics introduced him as "dj spoopy"

  On 12/16/2020 at 10:04 PM, snack master said:

dj spooky gave a talk at the university i worked at a while back, and the out-of-touch head of academics introduced him as "dj spoopy"

reminded me of that seinfeld episode. 

Big Spooky fan here. I haven't read anything of his and don't think I will. Lots of good artists come across as tools in their political/philosophical writing, not least RDJ and Jenkinson. 

  Quote

To truly untangle the mindset that music tech will save us, we’d also want to address power relations more systemically, and how decisions are made. We would need to think about how to truly shift power so that musicians, music workers, and music communities could have a say in how socialized streaming services are built, and participate in how they’re run. We would need to democratize the governance of music streaming. This would represent a broader move towards a cultural sphere where people have a say in shaping the digital tools they rely on every day, and in making sure these tools reflect the interests of those who use them.

Socialized Streaming: A case for universal music access (Real Life)

Once upon a time a musician had the other musicians in the city/village he lived as competition.

Lets say you play violin/guitar, there is a few other people playing in your town, youre known as the town violinist/guitarist.

You live in a hunter gatherer village there is maybe one or two other musicians.Maybe a few more but not thousands.You're respected as such.You're the music guy in the place.

There is maybe 5-10-20 competitors in a bigger town.You have decent chance making a living.

Then cities.Maybe the ones in near-by regions come around sometimes.A few more competitors.

Then the world changed and you were in competition with people in other countries that are traveling.The pool gets bigger.

But now with the internet and total globalization you're in competition with the whole world directly.The pool is HUGE.

No matter what your talent is you're in the race with the talents of ALL the countries in the world AND on top of that you have the whole ecosystem going against you, marketing, big labels, streaming services.

It's like there is 10 millions people going to the same job interview as you, some may have massive contact to get in and the job wont pay and rip you off hahaha

The game is rigged from the beginning against musicians to make a living off it in the modern context.

If bread could be downloaded-streamed, and be in competition with the bread from every bread maker in the world, the local baker wouldnt make a living either.

You gotta do it for the love of it.

Maybe you'll be lucky and make a living but probably not.

Support music all you can and still make the music you love, but it's a crazy new big scale, big profit, globalized-and-not-so-much-at-human-scale world we live in, and things like artists are not the priority.

But eh loads of good music tho.

It's kind of a golden age in a way as well.

LOTS of good music from all over the world.

Double edge sword of modern life and modern technologies.

What is better before? or is it better now?

In some ways yes it's better now but in some other way definitively not.These are the cards we are dealt with.

but you could probably score a gig in your hometown if you put some effort into it, maybe get to know an ildsjel (this is a norwegian word/expression, literally translated it's a firesoul, I can't find an english synonym for it, someone enthusiastic, a driving force in a scene, someone that has a burning passion) in the process, maybe some of those people have connections, maybe you can use those connections if your stuff is good enough, play another city, meet other ildsjeler etc etc etc,  or you could just make tunes and smoke pot, maybe throw some of them online and have a good time with it either way, but that probably won't get you anywhere. I think it's still viable to make a living off music/reaching an audience, but sure, the competition is fierce.