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.

  On 8/4/2020 at 4:39 PM, milkface said:

are there streaming services that aren't as bad?

not really. 

Id rather go back. The artists were better, the budgets were better. The skill level of engineers were better , the music sounded better. You had A&R men who had a skill for spotting incredible talent. They are dead now.  There is no comparison. I know it's all egalitarian now, and everyone gets their little 15 minutes of pats on the back. You like that. I guess that's ok too

You get post malone now, not AC/DC

Im not including underground talent. There is always a scene hopefully with good taste and know to get their shit recorded well. 

I say all this as certified music downloader. I am as guilty as everyone else

^ rtr, steinvrod, & heorge tho

  On 8/4/2020 at 10:46 PM, marf said:

Im not including underground talent. There is always a scene hopefully with good taste and know to get their shit recorded well. 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by marf

my bad.

really geting sick of how bad people just keep existing

  On 8/5/2020 at 5:09 AM, cyanobacteria said:

really geting sick of how bad people just keep existing

it's the worst. 

  On 8/5/2020 at 8:53 AM, prdctvsm said:

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AND VICE VERSA!

  On 8/5/2020 at 12:06 AM, prdctvsm said:

my bad.

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No revenues from radio plays or licensing?

Synch is licensing, no?

Spotify lover here too! But, like others I'll usually buy something from Bandcamp as well if I like it (EOD is a good example of this - double bubble for him!)

I've never used spotify or any music streaming service.

Just wanted to show off about that.

Vinilz and bandcamp only.

Soulseek for when the artist doesn't deserve money (for example they've been Cancelled eg wiley) or for music my wife wants (invariably made by cunts)

  On 8/4/2020 at 10:46 PM, marf said:

Id rather go back. The artists were better, the budgets were better. The skill level of engineers were better , the music sounded better. You had A&R men who had a skill for spotting incredible talent. They are dead now.  There is no comparison. I know it's all egalitarian now, and everyone gets their little 15 minutes of pats on the back. You like that. I guess that's ok too

You get post malone now, not AC/DC

 

Im not including underground talent. There is always a scene hopefully with good taste and know to get their shit recorded well. 

I say all this as certified music downloader. I am as guilty as everyone else

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Couldn’t have put it better myself. We won’t be seeing any Fleetwood Macs ever again from the looks of things. But we might see a few critically acclaimed lukewarm rehashes of Fleetwood Mac, or Arcade Fire. 

just unpacked my stylophone today. it didn't come with batteries so i'll be re-listening to Beck's 1994 album Stereopathetic Soulmanure. 

i just can't listen to anything done after trump/brexit/pizzagate. fuck it maybe i can get one of those plastic tubes that tip sideways to make a sci-fi sound, hopefully it'll arrive before the batteries.

also currently wanting to do stuff with a delay pedal but i need the right kind of phono lead. obv. ALL this stuff goes through amazon prime. fuck capitalism.

  Quote

Art is work. The fact that people do it out of love, or self-expression, or political commitment, doesn’t make it any less so. Nor does the fact that it isn’t a job, a matter of formal employment. Chefs often do what they do out of love, but no one expects to eat for free. Civil rights lawyers do it from political commitment, but they are compensated for their time. Self-employment is still employment. Even if you don’t have a boss, and even if you do not hate it, it is work.

If art is work, then artists are workers. Most people don’t like to hear this. Non-artists don’t, because it shatters their romantic ideas about the creative life. Artists don’t either, as people who have tried to organize them as workers have told me. They also buy into the myths; they also want to think they’re special. To be a worker is to be like everybody else.

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We Need to Treat Artists as Workers, Not Decorations (William Deresiewicz, LitHub)

  On 8/5/2020 at 2:59 PM, Candiru said:

We won’t be seeing any Fleetwood Macs ever again from the looks of things.

Good.

TBH, I loathed the big name rock rock bands and the culture associated around them so I don't really care what happens with them. Pink Floyd is about the only one I can stand.

And genres like jazz and modern classical seem to be able to put out high quality stuff even without millionaire rock stars in limos drinking champagne.

  On 8/3/2020 at 7:41 PM, marf said:

yeah, but that barrier gave you better artists. You had to work very hard to be great. We have more noise and less quality and poorer artists. Things are not better now. Not at all for musicians.  You must be really young. 

Horse has left the barn now, but to say things are better cause you can get a few thousand plays on band camp versus what we had in the past.  

 

I agree there's far more noise but I believe there's also more great music being created now just because of the sheer amount of it being made nowadays.

Guess it's impossible to really quantify that however.

  On 8/6/2020 at 9:43 AM, dcom said:

We Need to Treat Artists as Workers, Not Decorations (William Deresiewicz, LitHub)

Yes so treat them based on how much money their work can make you, oh wait...

I've been exclusively bandcamp for awhile now. You can beat other outlets' pricing in most cases, 24 bit wavs are default rather than a Bleep upcharge and if the propaganda is to be believed, it's a good home for artists. 

This streaming utopia is a nice dream and all but it doesn't square with reality. America has pretty shite cellular/internet infrastructure as a whole but holy shit--try taking a drive through anything that's not a city >200K people. When I visit my parents in the country, my phone's signal indicator will actually say shit like 2G or just give a swirling, I-don't-know-where-the-fuck-I-am indicator. Imagine you're about to hit minute 13 of violvoic and the stream cuts out. In a life riddled by guilt and existential anxiety, my SD card of fair trade digital vinyl is one of the few hedges against dread. 

  On 8/6/2020 at 10:02 AM, zkom said:

TBH, I loathed the big name rock rock bands and the culture associated around them so I don't really care what happens with them. Pink Floyd is about the only one I can stand.

And genres like jazz and modern classical seem to be able to put out high quality stuff even without millionaire rock stars in limos drinking champagne.

But we also lose a ton of great music that isn’t canonized. In the 90’s, even the radio could be really nice. People took for granted that even radio fodder and stuff that would become a relic was of very high  quality. 

  On 8/6/2020 at 10:23 AM, vkxwz said:

Yes so treat them based on how much money their work can make you, oh wait...

Yeah, that's what I was thinking also.. If art is work then art is a product or a service. Do we really want to go down that road? I'm not an artist so I don't know.

  On 8/6/2020 at 11:02 AM, xxx said:

This streaming utopia is a nice dream and all but it doesn't square with reality. America has pretty shite cellular/internet infrastructure as a whole but holy shit--try taking a drive through anything that's not a city >200K people. When I visit my parents in the country, my phone's signal indicator will actually say shit like 2G or just give a swirling, I-don't-know-where-the-fuck-I-am indicator. Imagine you're about to hit minute 13 of violvoic and the stream cuts out. In a life riddled by guilt and existential anxiety, my SD card of fair trade digital vinyl is one of the few hedges against dread. 

Yeah, that's the weird thing about US that mobile internet is both shit and expensive. When I go visit my parents in a 40k town in Finland and go outside the town about 30km to the summer cabin I can happily use the 4G network to work remotely and join video calls. The unlimited 4G costs me 26€/month.

And even when I'm traveling and using local SIM cards most of the time 4G has been working for me even in places like Southern Africa and Middle-East.

  On 8/6/2020 at 11:11 AM, Candiru said:

But we also lose a ton of great music that isn’t canonized. In the 90’s, even the radio could be really nice. People took for granted that even radio fodder and stuff that would become a relic was of very high  quality. 

Yeah, in US maybe the radio was better in the 90s but I think in Finland it's probably improved since 90s. Finland didn't even have private commercial radio stations until 1985 when they were legalized. Before that you could hear rock music from radio for an hour per week in specialized programming for youngsters.. During the 90s the things started to improve and in 2000s we have actual specialized radio stations for electronic music, etc.

$120,000.00

  On 8/6/2020 at 11:02 AM, xxx said:

This streaming utopia is a nice dream and all but it doesn't square with reality. America has pretty shite cellular/internet infrastructure as a whole but holy shit--try taking a drive through anything that's not a city >200K people. When I visit my parents in the country, my phone's signal indicator will actually say shit like 2G or just give a swirling, I-don't-know-where-the-fuck-I-am indicator. Imagine you're about to hit minute 13 of violvoic and the stream cuts out. In a life riddled by guilt and existential anxiety, my SD card of fair trade digital vinyl is one of the few hedges against dread. 

Yup, same in Germany. Many internet blackholes and generally slow internet (less developed in that regard that a lot of "third world" countries) and on top of that providers that offer unlimited LTE charge really high prices. In places like Denmark, Estonia or Finland you can get an LTE (mobile internet) flat rate for like 30 EUR a month, here it's often exclusive to business contractors and costs are ridiculous, something like 200 EUR a month. And if you stream a lot your data volume might get used up quickly if you don't have unlimited data. There are however contracts that offer unlimited LTE exclusively for certain apps such as YouTube and Spotify. Another way to monopolise these services.