"Streaming has killed the mainstream"

I asked you this almost 2 weeks ago and I'll ask it again: Why is how WE listen and enjoy music so important to you to the point that you feel the need to insult people who dare doing things differently?

Today, I'll add: you seem quite insecure and, obviously, streaming music isn't enough to help you with your problems.

 

Show me where I've insulted anyone. Show me a post where I'm doing to someone what you're doing to me right now, calling them out personally and insulting them like this.

Perfect example of what I'm talking about. Again, show me a post where I'm saying something like this to another poster. I dare you. Spend all night, search your heart out. You won't find one. "Insecure"? "Problems"? That is not an appropriate thing to say to another poster.

My mother is 80 years old, she still loves her Bose Wave CD Player that I bought for her in 1998, and she shops for CD's at her local convenience store. Those are facts.

 

Rip off.

 

My local store charges £7-£8 and upwards for used CDs (around $10). I rarely buy there, although I did get a WG Allies target CD for £8.50, which is well below online asking prices. They also had a Led Zeppelin IV target for £4.50, but it was a bit scratchy. There are some blu-ray releases at around £10, which may be a bargain as many are OOP. I usually shop in stores where prices are anything between £2.99 and £7.99. Online you can find rare and OOP for as little as a few quid.

 

Referring to new prices.

 

And a disposable culture tends to consume and create disposable music.

 

Modern Troll Dad insults and tries to marginalize whole GROUPS of people. Taken many shots at older people, audiophiles and so called snobs as he puts it, Beatles fans, and harshly defames Ringo Starr in an incredibly excessive, dismissive, and hateful manner. Modern Troll Dad has spouted multiple times that Ringo has “ruined” three Beatles albums, including Revolver, because Ringo’s vocals are present on those albums. The “woe is me, people are picking on me and being mean” sob story lacks credibility, is very hypocritical, and rings completely false.

 

What does a "disposable culture" mean? Do we dispose of our popular culture ?-- I look around me and I see people watching the same popular movies over and over again, with cable TV playing may 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 year old movies over; I hear popular songs of the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years still played on the radio, and see people reacting to them by singing along, dancing to them, gleefully cheering when they hear them, singing the in karaoke situations; I scroll through the TV channels and see new and old TV shows still running. These things haven't been disposed of by the culture. Our pupular culture isn't any more disposable or disposed of than the popular culture of 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 200 years ago. How many minstrel show songs do you know? That was dominant American pop culture for 100 years. Can you do an allemande? How about a bourree? Popular dance steps now forgotten. Most cultural output gets forgotten, some gets remembered. By what yardstick do you mark some cultural expression as "disposable" and some not? How would you know unless you could travel decades into the future what is remembered, what is forgotten, what is considered influential, and what is not?

 

Fair enough. 15-20 Euro is quite expensive. I thought £14.99 for a sealed copy of Richard Hell's Blank Generation RSD 2CD release was expensive, and more than I would normally pay (although it was a lot cheaper than the sealed copies on discogs). £7 ($10) for Neil Young's Decade remaster is a more typical spend.

 

I think most forget that the engine behind pop music is that it is tremendously disposable. And I mean that in a good way- if songs didn't go stale after two weeks there would be less new songs to replace them. We filter the songs that mean something to us and file them away for future use, but the mass of popular songs we hear two or three times and never again. Pop music casts a wide net, appeals to many different people in different ways. It's made for some very different genres, a constant flow of emerging new artists, and millions of unique 4 minute creations over the years.

Chicken and egg going on right now with much of today's music. Did artists get formulaic and lazy and bore us to the point that music isn't as important? Or is there still great new music being made but society has replaced vinyl listening rooms with big TV's and Netflix and PlayStation? I think it's both, frankly.

 

It's happened: The major labels are now generating over $1m every hour from streaming - Music Business Worldwide

 

YES!

No wonder I don’t hear any artists complaining about compensation anymore; they are making big bank just as we said they would.

 

I think the issue remains how much of that million dollars an hour is flowing to artists, but streaming is clearly more and more important to the industry as a whole.

 

Yes, e.g., here in Baton Rouge there is a rapper named NBA YoungBoy. He just turned 20 years old and has sold almost no physical records or even digital downloads. All he has done is make videos of songs and post them to his YouTube channel. But that's been enough - as of now he has 18 singles certified at least Gold by the RIAA, and also four Gold albums, and several of these are also platinum. He was a millionaire at 19. The YouTube stats say he is currently making about $750,000 a month from YouTube views of his songs.

That was basically impossible back in the old days of "form a band, work the clubs for a few years, pray for a record deal, sign the deal, record an album, be in debt to your record company even if the album sells, etc."

Never been a better time to be a new up and coming music artist than right now. Streaming has liberated artists to capture a much larger share of the income they generate.

 

More of those millions are flowing to artists because the way streaming works is that they all get a share of the pie. So the bigger the pie, the more they make, even the smaller artists. People may mock or be jealous of people like Ed Sheeran, but the better the top tier artists do the more it trickles down to everyone else.

And we're still in the very early stages of the streaming revolution. There are approximately 300 million subscribers worldwide. The world's population is 7.7 billion. There is a lot of runway. The next decade will be extremely fruitful for artists and performers.

 

Hear hear. It's great for artists and its great for consumers. Streaming truly has saved the music industry. I'm proud to be small part of it. Especially when I stream songs and albums I already own. It pays artists again for works I purchased decades ago. Feels good.

 

It has definitely democratized the landscape. The cream will always rise to the top!

 

I would argue that it hasn't "liberated artists", it's simply lowered the bar so far anyone can join the party.

 

True, but that also means two things:

First, the obvious one, it means that more artists have a chance to get discovered and make a living through their music as they are no longer beholden to the old system of toiling away, begging labels, hoping to catch a lucky break. Several of today's big stars were YouTube sensations. Tik Tok too.

Second, when some claim that streaming is bad for artists or not compensating them enough, it's the fault of other artists. So many cooks in the kitchen these days. Spotify alone uploads 40,000 songs per day. More music means more competition for the listener's ears. Yes, it would be great if artists had better deals with their labels, but fundamentally where there used to be 10 songs competing with Here Comes The Sun today you've got 10,000.

 

That was the ideal of punk and 60s garage rock: that anyone can do it.

 

They still got paid doing it.

 

I bought the new Weyes Blood album on cd, which she will get some money from unlike if I streamed her album. Because I want to support her and see her make another album. And I now own a digital, lossless copy of her album. This CD thing might become big?

 

Some people here thinks everything post Beatles/Stones is disposable. I remember when one person claimed Springsteen hasn't around long enough to be regarded as an all time great, despite his first record being 47 years old, because you know, we might forget him in three years

 

Not sure the guys in the Count Five or Electric Prunes got paid in any meaningful sense.

 

A few of them did, but most didn't, because one thing is the same as it ever was, namely that for 99+ % of all musical acts, there is effectively no demand for their product, where by 'demand' i mean in the economic sense that others are willing to pay for it. For these artists, nobody wants to pay them to make a record, nobody wants to buy their records if they do make one, and if they put on a concert and charged admission, effectively nobody would show up. That is always as it has been and likely always will be.

But what about the less than 1% that are successful? It is pretty clear that if you are successful new artist these days, you can make good money a lot quicker thanks to streaming than you could in the old days under the physical media model. That's because platforms like YouTube and Spotify allow you to bypass record companies all together. Then, when you have a hit on those formats, a record company that wants to sign you has far less leverage than in the old days. They need you more than you need them, not vice-versa.

So what about the legacy artists? Legacy acts that complain about paltry streaming income, the ones that say things like "my song was streamed 500,000 times last year and I got a check for $200" or something are basically complaining about the way things were done in the old days, because it is those "old days" contracts with record companies that dictate that Spotify, Apple, etc. pay the record company for the streams, and then the artist gets the tiny slice of it called for by their contract. The problem, such as it is, for these acts isn't streaming, per se, it's that their share of streaming revenue is still governed by the "old school" contracts they signed long ago.

So, complaining by legacy acts is really evidence that things were worse for artists in the Good Old Days.