“Music is moving away from genres” says Spotify CEO

I don't use it so I'm not really qualified to comment, but I would think that a completely open playlist with an algorithm that makes suggestions could work wonderfully, like YouTube. I love it when I see posts on an old Nat King Cole video from young people saying Finding Dory brought me here , or whatever. You'll never hear Nat on Power-105 or whatever. It has potential.

 

Goofy, imo.

Oh wait, thatll get me to Disney Channel music, huh?

 

I think (without knowing for sure as I don't use Spotify), that it's not deciding for you what music you are going to hear - it's nothing so insidious. I think it's just suggestions, like the suggested books you get on Barnes & Noble or the "people who bought this also bought" suggestions on Amazon, no? I'm not sure that's so troubling although there are certainly privacy issues that some might find troubling if it is done without their consent or knowledge. I actually like those Amazon suggestions - doesn't mean I'm going to buy, but I might listen to some tracks.

The alternative is presumably still available - set your preferences for a particular category (say, Even Bob Dylan only, for example) and include instructions not to suggest anything else. That would be the same as locking in to your favorite station, but allowing you to be even more selective. In a way it seems to be the best of both worlds.

 

'Genre' is an enemy of the arts. It's a scientific approach of classification that has never been appropriate in the creative realms.
What we have in the arts, is 'modalities'. People are in different modes when they put on a concept album to the one they're in when they want the Greatest Hits.
Genre tries to make sense of this. It can't.
Even the psychoanlysts knew that MAN X BELIEVES A AND NOT-A.

Somehow, amid all of our exploded multi-media the 'critical authorities' still work things out as if they're doing Science.

The pervading idea (several generations deep) is that 'the youth have no attention span'.
This is spurious as the idea that I prefer reading short Facebook posts to reading a novel.
These are modes. And today's kids may be on Spotify all the time for demographics purposes (Science) but they sho buyin a lot of vinyl too.

 

Why? These days you can basically sample every piece of available music before you buy it. Why is the subjective categorization a requirement? Just push play, make up your own mind.

 

This is just craziness. It is the best thing that has happened to me, as a music fan and consumer, since maybe the introduction of the internet.

 

Because I don't want to sample a thousand death metal or polka tracks when I'm in the mood for bluegrass?

Or I'm in the mood for death metal and I don't want to sample a thousand bluegrass tracks?

I certainly don't want to decide between music to exercise by and music for Sunday brunch.

 

"music is moving away from genres" = people losing their taste and differentiation. Not good.

 

Maybe this works for people who embrace a wide spectrum of genres, but that's certainly not everyone. Including myself. I'm very picky as to what I listen to. Though, I'd never use a Spotify playlist to begin with so I'm not exactly the target audience.

 

Yeah, I'd thing one black brick would look pretty much like another black brick to a computer.

 

“People don’t search for Hip Hop or Country anymore, but rather they search around activities or a particular experience.”

Whilst this don't effect Me, and I've only just gotten round to getting NowTV and Netflix(well tha Missus has, we dumped Sky) But when I search it is for a particular Artist, Album or hell even with DVD/Blu ray again Artist,Actor,Genre.. But never searches based on Activities or Experiences..

But if more Spotify users are Happy and more Music is being listened to.. Great..

But I'm not wired tha way..Elevator Muzak For Your Life.. ..

atb

 

this deserves to be repeated, especially around here. on the same page, even.

there is a great deal that is unnecessarily restrictive about thinking in terms of fixed groups (genres) and not modalities. and we've reached a point in history where, for the first time, many individuals are unintentionally doing so simply because the data are so ubiquitous and pervasive. really, for better or worse, we're living the postmodern dream.

so how does it feel?

 

A lot of modern artists are merging genres. Listening to the Mercury Prize nominees one can see this, particularly in electronica and jazz crossover. It seems natural therefore that Spotify and other streaming services would move away from the rigidities of the past.

 

If a bunch of useless leftover radio industry subgenre jargon get replaced by the marketing algorithms of a Swedish music-rights bundler, it means nothing to me.

Rock, jazz, classical, blues, R&B/soul, hip hop, folk, country, and a few useful geographical categories from Africa, Latin America, etc. Everything fits somewhere in this short list, as far as I'm concerned, although lots of great music crosses lines freely.

 

I've tried Spotify on the free trial and can understand the appeal as it did suggest some stuff that I'm really glad to have discovered. But I balked at it being cloud-based because it's trying to retrain me into having my 'stuff ' on somebody else's kit and getting into a mode where I'll someday accept a fee for each access of 'my' stuff. F dat. Already experienced the downside when I tried my telephone company's 'voicemail' in the nineties which was great in reducing that awful stress that came from rewinding the ansaphone cassette but then, when it went down, left my clients thinking I'd gone AWOL while I didn't know they'd been calling.

So when Spotify CEO says 'Music shifting away from genres' that's just code for 'Pay me to access your records'.
Thanks but I'll have to just grit my teeth and, like, just work out my musical taste myself together with the terrible inconvenience of having to put it on the deck and stuff. Gosh, am I serious?
Maybe I should just SUB$CRIBE TODAY!

 

Literally not what he's saying, at all.

Literally don't have to do that either, at all, ever, when using the service.

 

And the parting on the left
Are now parting on the right

 

Our ability to recognize patterns and categorize in part prevented our ancestors from getting their asses eaten by saber tooth tigers. This same ability has allowed their descendants to carry on this conversation in climate-contolled environments, hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. Music and art can be categorized just like anything else. Any listener who cares enough to categorize music will recognize the grey areas between genres.

 

Not about the listener. It's awful for those who make music for a living. The royalty rate is just criminally low. That's easily researched. They pay almost nothing to songwriters and artists.

Ed

 

...did something happen to you in the two hours between this post and your first one?

I still enthusiastically agree with your first post, but none of this at all, really. and your second paragraph seems to contradict your earlier position.

(also, spotify is not that type of cloud-based service. it doesn't accept user uploads of any kind.)

 

Don't forget the cleaning the leaves out of the gutters music.

 

I dig Spotify but as a musician I agree with you 1000%. Those royalty rates desperately need to be changed.

 

I think this comes up on every spotify thread, somewhere. the absurdly small payouts everyone is all-too-familiar with are the royalty rates from spotify streams paid to the artists by the major label conglomerates. spotify pays the labels an enormous chunk (seventy percent!) of their gross. then, the major labels conveniently exploit a loophole in their standard artist contracts equating spotify plays with terrestrial radio plays, which pay out those minuscule royalties. and the labels keep the rest.

so, the labels are responsible for keeping themselves afloat on the backs of their artists by using creative accounting. same as it ever was.

 

These days, to me, music has three genres: Grinder crap (think of LMFAO), excessively loud crap (play this song here (YouTube link) which I think is a good song spoiled badly "in the mix" as it were) and then everything else. I like the "everything else" genre.

 

You're mistaken. Go check out how much Spotify paid to Pharrell for "Happy" and you'll see that it's far worse than what you're talking about. It's got tens of millions of streams and he got a check for a few thousand dollars. If this were an indie artist with a small following, they'd have gotten nothing.

Streaming is the very worst thing to happen to the working musician. They simply don't get paid for their work.

Ed