music is dead - and streaming killed it

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

some might think im nuts WHAT SADDAM MUSIC IS FREE AND CAN BE ACCESSED INSTANTLY WHAT DO YOU MEAN i will tell you what i mean since the fall of CDs and MP3s and rise of smartphones and streaming its like music has died theres no more big album releases no more attention to detail cover art or real artistry left theres no sense of community people just stream random bands its not like people lining up behind a store to get the latest hot album we don't even have to follow correct formatting like albums LPs EPs etc cause people just put it on spotify now theres millions of people putting out music and no real stars anymore

TLDR music feels dead am i crazy for thinking this

also pardon my grammer

 

[The REAL Hatsune Miku]

I think in general a lot of the exclusivity and small-scale community people were able to partake in before social media really took off is dead. There's probably a reason zoomies like myself get so into Discord or forum drama because we don't really have anything else we can be involved in that feels "niche" or "exclusive". If you like you could say that movements to include everyone in hobbies regardless of how shitty they are for them led to this stuff as well, idk tho

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

TLDR music feels dead am i crazy for thinking this

I kind of hate saying this, but I agree with you that music has lost a lot of magic.

We don't "own" music anymore - we rent it, at best. Sequence and narrative is gone. Listening to "most popular" tracks from an artist or album is nothing like listening to Side A/B, in order. Going way back, listening to the full, in-order Rumours or Hotel California or Off the Wall or Strangeways, Here We Come or Rio or a billion others were important, cohesive events (and I'm not even getting to concept albums). And when I'd spent my money on them, I was invested. Now - how do you get invested when it's passive and not even yours?

Everything feels disposable, even if it's great quality, and that is saddening.

 

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

I kind of hate saying this, but I agree with you that music has lost a lot of magic.

We don't "own" music anymore - we rent it, at best. Sequence and narrative is gone. Listening to "most popular" tracks from an artist or album is nothing like listening to Side A/B, in order. Going way back, listening to the full, in-order Rumours or Hotel California or Off the Wall or Strangeways, Here We Come or Rio or a billion others were important, cohesive events (and I'm not even getting to concept albums). And when I'd spent my money on them, I was invested. Now - how do you get invested when it's passive and not even yours?

Everything feels disposable, even if it's great quality, and that is saddening.

exactly also another thing i would like to add is the unified experience for example if one big artist made a music video that was popular literally everybody knew about it all your friends knew about it and it was a big deal now you can have a 100 million view video and still get confused looks talking about it

 

[fake farts]

TLDR music feels dead am i crazy for thinking this

Not really. In the mainstream everything feels incredibly dumb, and has for a long time. There's on other way I can think to put it. Lowest common denominator music. In the live circuit, everything is overpriced shit. Live Nation is Satan in the music industry. It's former name is well known to us oldfag millennials and gen xers and boomers: Clear Channel Communications, a corporation that was absolutely loathed in the 90s, responsible for making radio even more shit than it already was, shoving out the same playlists of 15 songs across the nation, now known as iHeartRadio. CCC has fingers in the live circuit as well, and Live Nation merged with another Satan, Ticketmaster. Now, you are charged exorbitant fees for overpriced tickets that don't even fully go to the acts. Venues take 30% of the merch table now, something that used to function as a way for the artist to make their actual money back. Bands that play the club circuit often do meet and greets now, where fans can pay to meet them, hang out, get shit signed, watch a soundcheck. This has become the norm because bands can't make it off the door and merch.

Fun fact: Ticketmaster was owned by Jay Pritzker for about ten years. The Pritzker family is also known for the ugly tranny "Jennifer" Pritzker. I'd tell you to do the early life check, but you already know what it is.

 

[Lokenstien]

I have found more unique and wonderful musicians through spotify discover and YouTube aggregate channels than I ever could have in the age of only physical media. Like all digital media, more schlop gets produced than ever before but music has certainly improved greatly due to modern tech despite the saturation. Most of my all time favorite albums were released after 2010 and by independent artists precisely because the modern landscape allowed their sound and style to be broadcast to many despite not having major record labels and radio stations backing them.

 

[Dutch Courage]

Music merely joins books and film in the cemetery. Eventually, all of it will be created by AI anyway, and it will all become a post-postmodernist mishmash. It's about halfway there already.

 

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

exactly also another thing i would like to add is the unified experience for example if one big artist made a music video that was popular literally everybody knew about it all your friends knew about it and it was a big deal now you can have a 100 million view video and still get confused looks talking about it

You have no idea what it was like turning on MTv for hours and hours just hoping to see [whatever new video]. It was a such a big deal when VCRs occurred, because then you could - if you caught it, in your family room, when no one else was using the tv - actually watch a favorite thing again. Other than that, it was buy the record/tape and wear it out. Or record the radio onto a cassette.

I love how so much is so accessible now. And that I can pull up music that gets no airplay or some obscure band I last heard in a recorded concert on the radio in 1984. As @Lokenstien mentioned, accessibility means the opportunity learn of new things with very low barrier to entry, whereas when I was a music-hungry teen, you had to work for it. But "working for it" made it exciting, and the discoveries were worth the work. And when you work for something, I think you often treasure it more. On balance, I think it's a net loss, though I have mixed feelings on that.

 

[Lokenstien]

You have no idea what it was like turning on MTv for hours and hours just hoping to see [whatever new video]. It was a such a big deal when VCRs occurred, because then you could - if you caught it, in your family room, when no one else was using the tv - actually watch a favorite thing again. Other than that, it was buy the record/tape and wear it out. Or record the radio onto a cassette.

I love how so much is so accessible now. And that I can pull up music that gets no airplay or some obscure band I last heard in a recorded concert on the radio in 1984. As @Lokenstien mentioned, accessibility means the opportunity learn of new things with very low barrier to entry, whereas when I was a music-hungry teen, you had to work for it. But "working for it" made it exciting, and the discoveries were worth the work. And when you work for something, I think you often treasure it more. On balance, I think it's a net loss, though I have mixed feelings on that.

Thats a very fair point. I have grown up in the world of excess and as such my ability to appreciate more than is humanly possible is extremely diminished by my inability to compare that to a lived past of limited access.

I love the access that the modern world has brought me to the listening of new music. But Its very obvious to me how much that strips away the social aspect of finding niche music. I'm not a familiar in a record store because I don't buy records, I don't get linked to people of similar tastes because I can find all my music privately. My idea of finding new music is greatly warped because I can listen to 10 albums and judge them mostly for free in the same time frame as buying and fully listening to one record it took in the past. I still "work" to find my music because I'm picky, buts its nothing compared to what people before me did to find their music.

 

[Chuck McGill]

Whenever I was walking around a mall or I put on the local rock station as a teenager, I would get songs that were popular at the time. I do that now, I still get songs that were popular when I was a teenager. I have to assume it's because streaming has made everything decentralized, and no one in their right mind wants to play whatever shitty mumblerap got a million plays on SoundCloud. I'm sure when WAP hit the market there were a lot of people slamming their head against a wall.

I blame the widespread use of mp3 downloading and later Spotify. These two factors made music effectively free, so the only artists that could make money anymore were the ones that pander to the dumbest groups in the planet, namely teenage girls and boomers to a lesser extent. There's a long-running meme about things for girls becoming universally reviled amongst everyone ither than said teenage girls(Justin Bieber, Twilight, etc), and I suspect this phenomenon happens because out of touch marketing managers see the numbers and start pushing them on everyone, unaware or uncaring that their market is an extremely small subset of the population.

 

[Dustlord]

The music industry should die.

We've entered a golden age where anybody can learn to produce music and share it online. They also have way more tools to reach out to consumers directly and people will support what they enjoy naturally.

Its not the death of music, its the death of the kingmakers in the music industry and that should be welcomed.

 

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

Whenever I was walking around a mall or I put on the local rock station as a teenager, I would get songs that were popular at the time. I do that now, I still get songs that were popular when I was a teenager.

exactly people still listen to the old stuff because modern music is dead

The music industry should die.

We've entered a golden age where anybody can learn to produce music and share it online. They also have way more tools to reach out to consumers directly and people will support what they enjoy naturally.

Its not the death of music, its the death of the kingmakers in the music industry and that should be welcomed.

while thats great the issue im talking about is theres millions of people like that who nobody will ever hear effectively playing into the void vs back in the day if you were a local talent selling CDs and somebody picked it up you were world famous

 

[Dustlord]

exactly people still listen to the old stuff because modern music is dead

while thats great the issue im talking about is theres millions of people like that who nobody will ever hear effectively playing into the void vs back in the day if you were a local talent selling CDs and somebody picked it up you were world famous

You don't have to be world famous to be successful though. A lot of smaller artists make a solid living just via stuff like patreon and merch sales. The ones that transition into twitch streaming can make tons of money.

That does have the downside of making music more personality focused, but with the media doing its thing, when has popular music ever not been personality focused?

 

[Chuck McGill]

The music industry should die.

We've entered a golden age where anybody can learn to produce music and share it online. They also have way more tools to reach out to consumers directly and people will support what they enjoy naturally.

Its not the death of music, its the death of the kingmakers in the music industry and that should be welcomed.

The inverse of that is that you now have to compete with every kid with a broadband connection and a copy of Fruity Loops. At least in the old days there was soft gatekeeping insofar as you needed to have access to analog sound equipment and have someone around with the expertise to use it. Now you don't even have that anymore.

 

[Dustlord]

The inverse of that is that you now have to compete with every kid with a broadband connection and a copy of Fruity Loops. At least in the old days there was soft gatekeeping insofar as you needed to have access to analog sound equipment and have someone around with the expertise to use it. Now you don't even have that anymore.

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That's true, and some types of music will be way more effected by this problem than others.

In a smaller music scene, I still believe what I said holds fully true - the good will rise above the bad naturally. However with certain genres you're competing with so many people that it is likely a real challenge to get your stuff out there, even with all the tools we have today to self publish and self market.

 

[Aether Witch]

Honestly, I would have agreed with you all the doom and gloom many of you seem to share 4 years ago, before I discovered bandcamp. Even though bandcamp is a centralized platform, it has allowed me to discover so much great music, I really have to hold myself back from buying, because I'd end up broke broke if I got everything I want.
I've probably spent 4000+ $ in the past 3 years little by little, because there's so much incredible music I discovered in there. Stuff from genres I don't usually listen to, as well. And most of the money goes directly to the artist, which is amazing (I think bandcamp takes like a 20% cut), and they regularly do bandcamp fridays, where bandcamp waives their fee.
Artists can sell vinyls, cassettes, and merch in general, and you own the stuff you buy, you can download it immediately after purchase in any high quality format you want.
Many small independent artists on there (which is 99,99% of the platform) say they make more on bandcamp than they ever have through streaming, and if your music's good, you'll eventually develop a devote following. I'm very loyal to the artists I like on there (I don't buy anything I don't like just because I like an artist's work in general, but I make sure to always check out whatever they put out, because most of the time it's worth it).

What sucks is that there's no current competition for bandcamp, and in the past few years it went from being a small independent site to being bought by Epic Games, which is owned by Tencent. It has changed hands again recently, and I'm glad, Tencent is garbage. But I just hope the platform stays good, at least until there is decent competition.

But as of right now, I don't see any reason to worry about the future of music. Mainstream brain slop can rot, for all I care.

 

[Aether Witch]

As @Lokenstien mentioned, accessibility means the opportunity learn of new things with very low barrier to entry, whereas when I was a music-hungry teen, you had to work for it. But "working for it" made it exciting, and the discoveries were worth the work. And when you work for something, I think you often treasure it more. On balance, I think it's a net loss, though I have mixed feelings on that.

I've discovered loads of gems by perusing other people's collections on bandcamp. It can be a real rabbit hole, to be honest. If you enjoy hunting for good music, you really should try it. I'm not hired by them, by the way x)

 

[The Ugly One]

Music is dead because it was the soundtrack for rebellious young people breaking the limits and restrictions preventing them from enjoying all the drugs and sex a 22-year-old could want. There's nothing left to rebel against in 2023. The rebels are now the establishment, and music has now become just another tentacle of power.

 

[Muttley]

I actually agree
now retards just let spotify decide for them
and it's created this weird environment where we have some bands doing pretty well on Spotify
but in reality it's contained to that environment, and doesn't translate into actually having fans buy records.

things were better when it was like the record store, shows, myspace and soulseek were how you found new music

 

[fake farts]

And most of the money goes directly to the artist, which is amazing (I think bandcamp takes like a 20% cut), and they regularly do bandcamp fridays, where bandcamp waives their fee.

Always try to hit up a Bandcamp Friday, even though they don't happen too often. Not only does the artist get 100%, but Bandcamp itself uses the 15%/20% they get from you to donate to various astroturfed causes. Sadly, that's probably true of all these shit corporations, but at least with Bandcamp you get that day as a chance to opt out.

The best way, especially if its local and club acts, is too still support them live, even with all the garbage that's going on in the live music world now. Also hit up record stores in your area or record shows. I'm lucky a few still exist where I live. Support local businesses.