"Streaming has killed the mainstream"

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Purple Jim, Dec 28, 2019.

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  1. Jimmy Agates

    Jimmy Agates CRAZY DOCTOR

    Couldn't agree more
     
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  2. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    Not true. Judee Sill was signed to a major label, the same one as The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. Her records were available. She also appeared on TV at least twice. Hundreds of thousands of people watching her at the same time on two separate shows. Nick Drake was signed to Island by Joe Boyd, a man so passionate about him, he had it written into his contract that his music never went out of print. He also appeared on BBC radio and on an Island sampler LP. There will be reasons they never made it into the mainstream, but it didn't have much to do with gatekeepers or exposure. All of the artists you name had issues, be it drugs, drink or depression. Truly sad and tragic, but also barriers in getting their music heard.
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2019
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  3. HotelYorba101

    HotelYorba101 Senior Member

    Location:
    California
    "Streaming has killed the mainstream", posted on a forum that frequently rejects the mainstream and has long before streaming was ever a thing


    Streaming is the modern music boogeyman. It isn't nearly as catastrophic as the numerous threads about it may make it seem
     
  4. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    I was at a record fair yesterday, one I've attended for over 25 years. I couldn't believe how busy it was and how many young people (probably under 30) were buying records. It was the busiest I've ever seen it. It's very likely the younger people were buying music they'd heard through streaming. Streaming can help with music sales, like a far more advanced and personal radio. There's no reason why streaming and buying records or CDs can't work together.
     
  5. Spencer R

    Spencer R Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oxford, MS
    To my mind, the gatekeepers weren’t the labels, but the radio and TV stations. Especially in America. To the best of my knowledge, Judee Sill never appeared on US network television. She appeared on the Old Grey Whistle Test in the UK perhaps twice? It didn’t do the Velvet Underground, Stooges, or Ramones any good to be on major labels when radio wouldn’t play their records, although all three acts are now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

    If the gatekeepers under the old way of doing things decided to put Nirvana on heavy rotation on MTV, good for Nirvana. Not so good for Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., Guadalcanal Diary, The Connells, and dozens of other equally deserving acts who never made it past the gatekeepers.
     
  6. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    I admit I'm coming from a UK perspective. It was easier for unusual bands to be heard here, through the likes of John Peel, Andy Kershaw, Tommy Vance and others on the radio, and shows like the Old Grey Whistle Test and later The Tube on TV. REM appeared on national prime time TV in 1983. A lot of US acts did reasonably well here while possibly struggling to get across in America. It must have been tough pre MTV to get noticed in such a huge country.

    Our music TV now is almost non existent. A real shame. You do lose the thing of many thousands of people hearing or seeing something that they were previously unaware of all at the exact same time through streaming. It's not unlikely that a few mainstream people will have just happened to have seen REM on tea time TV early on and thought 'I like that'. Streaming does scatter things a lot more, for better and worse.

    Judee Sill was on Whistle Test twice and the BBC have wiped one of the shows. :realmad:
    There is speculation that Nick Drake appeared on a regional TV show in 1970. It would be sensational if that showed up!
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2019
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  7. Brian Lux

    Brian Lux One in the Crowd

    Location:
    Placerville, CA
    I've never streamed. But I've creaked a bunch of times.
     
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  8. Spencer R

    Spencer R Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oxford, MS
    Yeah, you had state-run media with space for fringe voices, whether it was John Peel or the Old Grey Whistle Test. Even the ostensibly “commercial” stations such as Granada tolerated and allowed the likes of Tony Wilson to put the Sex Pistols on TV in 1976.

    They appeared on the upstart David Letterman show at one in the morning. I don’t think they appeared on network TV again until the Arsenio Hall show in 1988 or early 1989. Even after scoring top ten hits with The One I Love and Stand, they were blackballed by Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show, the premiere US late night program, well into the late 80s and early 90s. They didn’t appear on Saturday Night Live until 1991.

    I would argue that the kind of slightly left of center artists that I presume we both like - Sharon Van Etten or whoever the British guitar hope of the moment is - are far better served by bypassing the gatekeepers who once might have deigned to throw them the bone of a tea time spot and instead communicating directly with their audience via YouTube or Spotify.

    The gatekeepers did their best to keep the Smiths off of Radio One and out of the official top ten singles charts, the Arctic Monkeys, by contrast, used the Internet to bypass the gatekeepers and score a #1 debut single, on an independent label, no less.
     
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  9. houseofglass83

    houseofglass83 Forum Resident

    We look at streaming through the eyes of the voracious music listener who grew up in the vinyl, cassette, and/or CD eras. Of course it’s great that we can pull up just about any album we can think of instantly. But we already have a deep appreciation for music having amassed collections of physical media over long periods of time starting from adolescence. Media that we paid for and had to put in effort to acquire. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia, but I remember waiting patiently for my favorite bands new album to come out. Sitting by the radio with a cassette ready to record the new single when they premiered it. Rushing to the record store the day it came out. I remember how much I appreciated that music and how much I enjoyed it. That’s an experience that a young person will likely never have ever again.

    It seems like maybe there is a correlation between streaming and how much one values new music. I even find myself not caring as much when a band I love put out a new album. Or I’ll listen to it a few times and then move on. There’s such an oversaturation of media that it’s hard to even keep up with anything. It’s kind of rare that I’m compelled to actually go and hunt down the cd of a new album. Streaming definitely dulls the impact of new releases for me.

    I can only imagine the perspective of a teen nowadays and what their attitude is towards music. My wife is a high school art teacher and plays lots of music in her class. She says that by and large the kids literally don’t care that much about music. It doesn’t have the same value to them that it did to us (we are Xennials). From what she tells me it seems to be all about Instagram, snapchat, and YouTube personalities with the kids. Obviously that’s just a microcosm of our area but I imagine it would be the same case in many other areas too.
     
  10. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    When it all falls into place, like it did for the Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines, more recently with the most unusual K-pop phenomenon BTS, it does work incredibly well.

    The early REM Letterman clip is fantastic, but I love the one of them on a show called Live Wire, which looks like a 60s pop TV show. Great to see a mixed audience on it too. What is this show?
     
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  11. BrilliantBob

    BrilliantBob Select, process, CTRL+c, CTRL+z, ALT+v

    Location:
    Romania
    More is less. :-popcorn:
    [​IMG]
     
  12. Hot Ptah

    Hot Ptah Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    Kansas City, MO
    I am 63 years old and had those experiences too. I have them now with streaming, exactly the same way I felt about buying a newly released LP in 1972. I have been excitedly counting down the days until the Zappa “Hot Rats Sessions” box set hits Spotify, with the exact same amount of anticipation and longing as I felt about rushing to the store to buy “Exile on Main Street” on the day of its release in 1972.

    Streaming is just not such a big deal. I am astonished at how the older members here (my age) think of streaming as a sociological and cultural Armageddon. Streaming changes nothing, in my experience. It is all just listening to music in the end.

    I found the difference between LPs and CDs (when CDs were brand new) to be much greater than the introduction of streaming.
     
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  13. Purple Jim

    Purple Jim Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Bretagne
    That might have been the case for the U.S. but in England, access/exposure to music outside of the mainstream was very easy because we had... the BBC! On the radio there was John Peel and and Alan Freeman for example who were pumping out psychedelic, prog, country rock, metal, folk, reggae, indie, you name it. There were also weekly In Concert performaces from all the artists in those domaines. On TV there was The Old Grey Whistle Test (and its predecessor Disco 2 - nothing to do with disco), So It Goes, In Concert,... plus screenings of Stones In The Park, Cream At The Royal Albert Hall,... it was very rich and complete. We filled dozens of cassettes with all this fabulous music.
    Once I got to college, I had access to better libraries (university and municipal) which were crammed with LPs from all genres and it was a wonderful experience to grab a carrier bag full every week (sometimes from two libraries at once), then spend days and nights of intensive, concentrating listening. More and more TDK ADs got filled until I needed more shelves and it was the same for all my mates. Everything was there to consume. Nobody "gave up" and just listened to what the mainstream had to offer. Those with no fascination or curiosity for music simply didn't bother to expand their horizons.
    Streaming is a Godsend formusic explorers of course and it also gives muggles a better chance to discover other musics by chance with little effort.
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2019
  14. Anarchrist

    Anarchrist Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Downunder
    Myself as well... but one day those kids are going to be talking about how they had to wait for Spotify to recommend them new music, and you had to use a thing you held in your hand to find it and that no one appreciates music anymore because it’s beamed into your head once your AI clone discovers everything you will ever like for you... The way my parents complained about CDs...
     
    Last edited: Dec 29, 2019
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  15. Spencer R

    Spencer R Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oxford, MS
    Live Wire aired on the cable channel Nickelodeon. In 1983, maybe a quarter of US households had cable, and, according to a quick Wikipedia search, Nickelodeon was dead last in the cable ratings. My house didn’t have cable then. I was an R.E.M. fan at the time, and didn’t know that the LiveWire performance even existed … until decades later, when YouTube came along, ironically enough, and allowed me to see what I couldn’t and didn’t see then. Likewise, the David Letterman performance that you cite as proof that R.E.M. got a shot from the gatekeepers wasn’t remotely comparable to a British artist appearing on Top of the Pops or Jools Holland. In 1983, Letterman’s show was a year old, started after midnight, and wasn’t even carried by every NBC affiliate nationwide. R.E.M. would have appeared at the end of the show, towards 1:30 a.m., and perhaps several hundred thousand nite owls caught their performance. Again, I didn’t. I never saw it until years later on the Internet.
     
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  16. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    Amazing work from the person who recorded and kept that. Have a look at the guys YouTube channel. He was recording stuff as early as 1979-80 as well as tape trading with people in the US. He's uploaded some very rare stuff.
     
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  17. Spencer R

    Spencer R Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oxford, MS
    I grew up in the era when it was harder work to find out about music and to acquire music. To a large degree, I agree that when music was harder to seek out and to buy, I tended to appreciate it more. Reading a review of The Cocteau Twins or Slowdive in a weeks-old import copy of the Melody Maker, and then tracking down their import single and buying it unheard, had a “thrill of the chase” aspect to it that made me treasure the records more. On the other hand, I had never heard of Big Star or the Velvet Underground until I got into R.E.M. and Peter Buck mentioned them in interviews. The gatekeepers of US radio and TV had kept me from knowing they existed. I had heard “Walk On The Wild Side” on the radio as a child, but had no idea that Lou Reed had ever been in a band in the 60s. It took me months to track down a Dutch? import copy of the Velvet Underground’s third album, which blew my mind when I finally heard it. There is a romanticism to that, but it sure would have been nice to be able to hear about a band like that and go on Spotify and listen to their music without going on a quest.
     
  18. Spencer R

    Spencer R Forum Resident

    Location:
    Oxford, MS
    Indeed praiseworthy that a devoted few preserved such broadcasts. Again, the reality is that next to no one saw them at the time. I didn’t, and I was interested in R.E.M. It’s YouTube, which has smashed the monopoly of the gatekeepers, that allows us to see and enjoy them today.
     
  19. DTK

    DTK Forum Resident

    Location:
    Europe
    The anti-social bit can't be applied to streaming, it's way more social than collecting records, as you say, for discovering new artists and sharing etc.
    I think the anti-social bit was in regards to people constantly being hooked up to their phones in public places, which is true where I live.
     
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  20. ZippyPippy

    ZippyPippy Forum Resident

    In Soviet Russia, TV watch you.
     
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  21. houseofglass83

    houseofglass83 Forum Resident

    That is true. I couldn’t imagine being one of those people though!
     
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  22. Sandorelli

    Sandorelli Forum Resident

    Location:
    Us
    Interesting that there does seem to be so little interest in decade-ending recaps. I know I’m not particularly quick to look back, or forward for that matter.
     
  23. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    The bastard gatekeepers get in the way when they take stuff down for copyright reasons. Fair enough if it's the actual record, but when it's a rare live TV clip that's just stuck unseen for years in an archive otherwise it's annoying!

    Check out the guy's clip of Blondie in 1978 on the Mike Douglas show. It's great and wasn't on YouTube until a few weeks ago.
     
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  24. Man at C&A

    Man at C&A Senior Member

    Location:
    England
    I can't relate to those people at all. Not even slightly!
     
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  25. HotelYorba101

    HotelYorba101 Senior Member

    Location:
    California
    I can attest to this - I am in my 20's and I have been purchasing more music than I ever have before, solely because of the sheer amount of great music new and old that I have discovered through Spotify and Youtube
     
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