Spotify Is An Enemy of Sustainable Arts

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Rosskolnikov, Mar 7, 2019.

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  1. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    According to you, what motivates a streamer such as yourself is a superficial need for cheap "background noise", as you stated music is nothing more than "background noise" to you.
     
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  2. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Oh so it's like a pyramid scheme.
     
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  3. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    This is a ridiculous and specious argument, like all your others. The music on my CDs hasn't gone out of fashion, like a Members Only jacket.
     
  4. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Sorry, I'm not drinking your streaming Kool-Aid. And it might be here to stay, but it will definitely mutate in the coming years as record labels set up their own streaming services, and more artists get tired of being tossed $.006 or less a stream for their artistic content.
     
  5. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    I'd rather have a rusty screwdriver jammed in my ear than ever have to listen to a streaming playlist about "Love, New Relationships, and Positivity" featuring songs by Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.
     
    Last edited: Oct 31, 2019
  6. HotelYorba101

    HotelYorba101 Senior Member

    Location:
    California
    I have a feeling this thread may go the way of the other thread about streaming versus physical mediums - deleted, in terms of looking at the common denominator of this and the aforementioned CD/streaming thread which is, a couple of the same people taking up 80 percent of the thread lol
     
  7. Lemon Curry

    Lemon Curry (A) Face In The Crowd

    Location:
    Mahwah, NJ
    You've gone off target.. your original point, to paraphrase, was get a real job if you can't stand low wages.
    I'm not into the charity angle, but I'm into supporting the artists and art you love with your time, energy and investment. That's what Astrid and Klaus did in Hamburg. The music moved them, so they gave back. Where is that today? We train people to expect nearly free music, no frills. So, the content is tailored for that medium - one dimensional, diposable modern art made with Pro Tools loops on a laptop. Cuz you're getting paid by the note, the measure. And no one really, passionately cares about it.
    So turn off your spotify, go to your window, open it and shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!". Love music? Connect with the blogs and journals, see some shows, pay $20 for the band's EP. Support what you love, don't look for it on sale. It is via this slippery slope of easy, flaccid convenience that spotify is an enemy of the sustainable arts.
     
  8. humanracer

    humanracer Forum Resident

    Location:
    Edinburgh,Scotland
    The record industry must be one of the most short sighted industries in the world Virtually no one, even as Napster was launched, predicted large scale piracy or file sharing. In 1993 the record company was going crazy over shops selling used CDs, not realising that the Internet and Amazon was just around the corner. In other words they have always been 10 years behind the latest developments. Spotify emerged because the industry were too slow to respond to changing times. It's like people complaining about Amazon for closing shops on the high street when such stops did nothing to entice people into their stores.
    You will never get people to go back to CD over digital. It's just a pipe dream. CDs are just a delivery method for digital music with nice artwork attached in a booklet. I am not saying Spotify is the answer but the industry had a chance to come up with something different and it didn't. It was because it pretty much run by clueless old white men who had no foresight. The same thing is happening all industries. Artificial Intelligence and automation will replace many industries and many people will lose their jobs but virtually no one is talking about it.
     
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  9. humanracer

    humanracer Forum Resident

    Location:
    Edinburgh,Scotland
    I agree with your views about going to concerts etc. However I also think a lot of the big super stars of the past (60s-90s) rightfully wouldn't be stars today. I say this because man people bought a CD album based on a star name only to find 2-3 tracks were good and the rest were duds. In the digital age we can try everything first. People aren't going to accept "filler" tracks anymore. Musicians should be expected to earn a living yes but not expect mega stardom. Those stars of the past were lucky they were around in a time where people didn't have much choice. It's too bad a lot of such stars squandered their riches on drugs etc.
     
  10. Veni Vidi Vici

    Veni Vidi Vici Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    Streaming is here to stay, for sure. But it's quite likely that Apple Music will face the same kind of competition from rights holders as, for example, Netflix is now facing from Disney. This is nothing new, it echoes past struggles like ASCAP v BMI.
     
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2019
  11. Veni Vidi Vici

    Veni Vidi Vici Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    Sure they did. Anyone who saw what had previously happened in the software market for personal computers, which had been suffering piracy for two decades before Napster came along. It's exactly the same phenomenon. Napster did nothing original; the key innovation was developers taking advantage of improvements in processing power and storage space to extract the audio data from CDs (which previous generations of personal computers were insufficiently powerful enough to make feasible) and networking.
     
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  12. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    That's a very narrow view of what I said. What I mean is that your average music listener today doesn't sit in a specific listening room full of components listening to an album from start to finish for 50 straight minutes with nothing but an album cover and a lyric sheet to occupy their attention.

    That was the very definition of an evening of entertainment in 1978 back when we only had 8 blurry channels of antenna TV, when photographs took 10 days to develop, when a Casio LCD watch was a luxury, when movies had to be watched in a theater, and when we got our news delivered on paper at 4pm. In that context, man, dropping the needle on the new Cars album was mind-blowing.

    Today, music is just something we listen to in the background as we do other, more interesting things.
     
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  13. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    No, it's like a bee colony.
     
  14. Veni Vidi Vici

    Veni Vidi Vici Forum Resident

    Location:
    Chicago, IL
    :biglaugh:
     
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  15. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    Sure it has. CD's aren't about the "music" on them, remember? You are allowed to sell your CD's anytime you like, buy them used too, just like a car or a toaster, remember? CD's are a product, a technology that's out of fashion. The music is not part of the conversation. Your sentiment, not mine.
     
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  16. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    So after losing his argument that "streaming is doomed!" Rocky now is preaching that "streaming is going to be so successful that entire legions of new platforms will emerge!"

    Yet he has never streamed an hour on a smart speaker from a paid subscription in his life. Strange, coming from someone with such expertise.
     
  17. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    "I'd rather bathe in an inkwell bought in a shoddyocracy than climb into one of those iron horses, you're not going to find me in that contraption trying to see the elephant. Now pass me my lantern, Mildred, I'm going wakesnakes in the outhouse."
     
  18. Archtop

    Archtop Soft Dead Crimson Cow

    Location:
    Greater Boston, MA
    I don't care how people listen to music. I only care about it in terms of how I listen to it. I've gotten to the point of never listening to it as "background." I refuse to denigrate the most noble of arts to background status. I still buy CDs and LPs, but at a lesser rate as my funds can't support it the way they could in years past. But I have a massive backlog and for that I am thankful. I've supported the artists, as it should be. If I occasionally stream on youtube, it's only because I might and have bought more (see Soft Machine and Henry Cow). But I'm more or less done purchasing after this year (some Sun Ra and Henry Cow on the way along with Grateful Dead and next year's subscription). Beyond that, I can't say. But giving the musicians their due is critical to me and avoiding the concept of music being background is tantamount to breathing. YMMV.
     
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  19. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Like polishing your $22k watch?
     
  20. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Maybe in your Apple homepod they are out of fashion, but according to Nielsen's mid-year sales stats there were 25 million CDs sold in the first half of 2019. Maybe you aren't buying them but obviously someone is.
     
  21. muzzer

    muzzer Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Haven’t read the whole thread, sorry. As I understand the position:-

    1. Spotify is owned by some of its “clients” - the “content” providers. A clear conflict of interest.

    2. It doesn’t pay per stream - the labels have done deals for their bigger artists based on volume.

    3. It doesn’t work like a collection agency - if you’re a small artist you’re less likely to get paid at all.

    4. Obviously, the rates it pays are miniscule.

    If you want to make a difference to an artist’s livelihood, buy physical media directly from them, go see them live and buy an overpriced t-shirt. Help crowdfund their recordings.
     
  22. Rocky's Owner

    Rocky's Owner I Don't Rent Air

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    You need to work on your reading comprehension skills. I never said streaming is doomed. I said I don't like it. And I said it will mutate and change when record labels start their own streaming services. And that people may stop streaming if they raise prices, because $9.99 a month forever is not feasible.
     
  23. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    But hasn't "the music" always been free? And hasn't "the touring" been where the money really rolled in?

    The labels take all the risk, they stick their necks out and spend millions to support 15 artists in the hope that just 1 makes a killing. They get paid in those first few months the album is hot, then they're out, the label's ability to generate significant revenue from that investment is over. And the artist who just barely broke even on album sales and paid off their advance? Well they're a household name now, everyone in 1990 heard of The La's and now they can tour for 50 years and earn a nice living.

    The nice thing about Streaming is that it still works that way but now sales revenue from that album can continue in perpetuity for both the label and the artist. More money for the artist, a bigger safety net for the labels to take chances.
     
  24. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    Music, unlike film, is meant to be heard in little 4 minute segments and amongst other random 4 minute segments. People don't sit down and say "Gee, I'm in the mood to listen to some Columbia Records tonight". If they want to hear the best disco songs of the 70's they're not going to be confined to a single label. It's never going to happen.

    And, seriously, who would spend $5 a month for Billy Joel Streaming? And why would Elvis Presley's heirs want their rapidly shrinking walled-garden to shrink even further?

    Never forget- Records were never about selling records as much as they were about promoting a band. Labels got their reward early and were done, maybe got another album or two out of their investment. Artists got their reward on the long-tail of a year of fame followed by decades of touring. Neither is possible without maximum exposure. This theory is like a band deliberately walking off of AM radio in 1970. Would never happen. It's suicide.

    And a significant amount of Spotify's revenue comes from the free tier and advertising. Narrowing and niching out your audience is suicidal on that revenue stream as well.
     
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  25. schnitzerphilip

    schnitzerphilip "Modern Dad" Unlocked Award

    Location:
    NJ USA
    Your Napster analogy is a good one for another reason:

    If Streaming went away and/or became a fragmented series of label-apps, you'd be right back in the Napster days again. But instead of millions of people illegally downloading MP3 files they'll just be streaming millions of playlists instead. Napster taught the industry that people wanted to build vast libraries holding a ton of music. iTunes taught the industry that they'd pay a fair price for it. Streaming took Napster + iTunes and added a touch of randomness and a whole lot of machine learning to advance it to the next level, where the platform does the thinking for you and mashes up your all time favorites with brand new tracks that it knows you will love before you've even heard it. Magic.

    Without the randomness and the machine learning, you're back to iTunes, but no one will go back to iTunes and downloads of singular albums and having to create your own playlists. The horse has left that barn and there's no putting him back in.
     
    maui jim likes this.
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