Spotify controversy continues, Joe B weighs in

I prefer to defer to experts rather than to assume that I know everything.

 

I mean, I was in a few bands that made CD's in the 90's when I was in high school. Nowadays we could just release it on Spotify. No one's going to find 19,000 of those, just like no one outside of our high school ever heard our album. But for the 1% of those bands that are actually something special, it at least means their music is out there to be found, which is the basic step one of being a musician, that was largely walled off by labels and distributors before the digital era.

 

I may have to stop reading this thread now. - we've just hit peak SHTV today

Well done

 

The music industry functions on the premise that every 10 years another 12-year-old is born and that 12-year-old will listen to a copy of A Hard Days Night and go and buy it for himself.

The industry is not built around a single copy of that album being released in 1965, paid for once, and then handed down for the next 100 years to 10 different owners.

 

“I bought a ticket to see Star Wars in 1977, it cost me $6. What do you mean if I want to see it again I have to pay for it again?”

 

True, this is of course an unknown.

Something else could replace streaming that works better for musicians or greed could reach a critical mass with many subscription services each offering different rosters of artists that ...in the long run... limit consumer choices to what each customer can afford with artist royalty payments being all over the place.

Public domain laws could restrict musician royalty payments to a limited period of time or musicians could get more control over their back-catalogs and release their own prioritized remasters on physical media for their fan base at premium prices.

Who knows what things will look like in five or ten years,

Cat

 

Sure, if you have a pencil and paper handy while you are driving in your car, and then when you get home take the time to search for each one on a keyboard, and then purchase the 10 CDs that those 10 songs live on, and pay tax, and pay for shipping, and then wait a few days for them to arrive, and then sample them and decide if you want to keep them. If you don’t, pack them back up, put them in an envelope, drive them to a UPS store, put them in the mail, and wait for your credit card to get refunded.

Or with a streaming subscription, you just ask Siri to play them for you.

Maybe it’s just me, but one seems a lot easier than the other.

 

And it would serve them right for eliminating the option to purchase and own music.

(Which is why that won’t ever happen.)

 

The algorithm mearly takes thousands of plays that you have made over the years and makes a decision, for example, that since you have never listened to Latin Jazz and that you always, for example, listen to Alternative and Classic Rock, that it’s not going to feed you a dozen Latin Jazz songs today. Instead, it is going to offer you songs in the genres you like that have a vague similarity to songs you like.

24,000 songs get uploaded per day to Apple Music and Spotify. If you in your wildest dreams think you can do a better job of discovering new music then having algorithms suggest a subset of the massive amount of new songs been released every day you need your head examined.

 

Thank you for calling them ‘musicians’ and not ‘artists’.

If they were artists, their music would be generating enough money to not have them whine for a living.

 

I don’t take CDs with me. Too bulky and I’ve had so many stolen from cars over the years. My 160 GB iPod Classic and my 120 GB phone provide plenty of storage for most trips, even though my overall library is much larger.

 

You pay into Social Security for future retirement, don’cha? Well, guess what, ...like it or not, your a socialist!


Cat

 

This.

And it’s not like the iPod’s I purchased 10 years ago with 20,000 of my songs on each have been thrown in the trash. I have three of them in my three BMWs, they sit there in the center console plugged into a USB port, and at a moments notice if I feel like listening to my physical collection instead of streaming it is exactly one button press away.

 

If you’re not a car salesman, you should be. Your posts read like a commercial for BMW.


Cat

 

I get $0.0053 per post. It adds up.

 

This isn’t the way most folks ...especially collectors... shop for CDs. Sometimes it’s just a matter of hearing a song on the radio you like and deciding that the album would be worth a listen. Conversely, the CD buyer may have heard all of the songs on an album and shop around for the best master or remaster. For these folks, it’s about sound quality, not humming tunes in the shower, ...or on an iPhone ...or listening over a car stereo or three.

Content-wise, you’re being overpaid.


Cat

 

I was being entirely serious. I like when an algorithm discovers stuff for me. And Math does rule.

 

People who questions algorithms generally don't understand them. It's just a mathematical expression of choices our fellow humans have already made.

 

One other element that people who disdain streaming don't consider is that there are plenty of carefully hand-curated playlists out there.

I don't use Spotify, but the fine folks at the Numero Group have dozens of brilliantly assembled playlists (Note: I'm biased because one of them was done by my wife Vickie.)

These are put together by experts in particular genres with plenty of music that you are never going to run across on your own without a guide.

 

Very cool. Thanks for sharing CDV.

 

Yes. Or in layman's terms, it's my friend Cliff telling me "Hey, you like Queen, have you ever heard of Jellyfish? Here, listen to this." No different. Just a machine who knows my musical preferences a lot better than Cliff does, and who can keep up with the 24,000 new songs added to Apple Music and Spotify every day.

 

Cliff is unlikely to be an expert in Basement Beehive. Or Kid Soul. Or Exotica.

 

Exactly.

Something is lost in the weeds here; because there are so many more new songs from new artists going live every day it's impossible to keep up the old way. Gone are the days of record store displays and Rolling Stone reviews, here are the days of machine learning and playlist sharing.

One needs technology because technology has begat infinitely more new music.

 

Check out some of these from Apple Music like:

Midnight City: A late night ride through your local city is typically made up of long stretches of green lights, little-to-no cars on the road, and a necessary feeling of tranquility. It’s at moments like these where Apple Music’s Midnight City blooms into sensibility. It’s a mass of gummy pop and purplish synths that send shooting neon lights from the eardrums into your peripheral vision.

New Fire: For the best in breaking music updates across all genres, New Fire is the one stop shop for keeping in touch with the music industry writ large. It doesn’t try to connect the dots, and that helps it to act as a sampler of the latest and greatest.

The Best Apple Music Playlists Right Now

 

What I really want is a tool that will translate playlists from one service to another. I don't use Apple Music or Spotify, I use Google Play Music.