How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop(gamechops.substack.com) |
How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop(gamechops.substack.com) |
This is a really interesting quote. I definitely feel that there are analogies in other fields as well.
The Truth: Lofi Hip Hop continues to flourish far beyond the profit-prioritized walls of Spotify's garden, a meticulously manicured space where genuine discovery is choked out by the weeds of algorithmic control. True artistry is blossoming in the wilder, freer spaces online.
Also I really recommend Shlohmo & quickly quickly for some fresh Lofi.
For those on Youtube, check out OGDONNINJA. He has a channel of literally thousands of old-school underground boombap hip hop tracks, in their dusty and 12-bit glory.
Is the model profitable? For some. Good for society? Perhaps not.
EDIT: also want to concur with others here that the problem here isn't necessarily AI but how we're selecting what music we're listening to. In the book, Pelly specifically identifies channels like Chilled Cow as being part of the watering down of this genre, since they have a similar incentive to play music at as low a cost to the channel as possible versus playing the best music available to them.
As much as I love the fact that teens these days are growing up with the same songs I grew up with as a teen, I also view it as a problem. The shared cultural experience that radio generated was powerful.
We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste. An algorithm might find similar songs based on musical features, but the same sounding song over and over is boring. AI just makes more boring songs because it's largely looking to replicate popular song features as well. This can be passable for purely background music meant to fill space with non-distracting sound, but is terrible for active listening.
Radio was good at mixing in variety within the confines of the genre and audience expectations. Heck, many channels use to program to support the mood during the commute and work hours, and outside of those main audience times would allow the DJs to get a little wild sometimes. Growing up the only place you could catch early EDM was on weekend late-night broadcasts on the local alt-rock station.
It's not like radio of a sort does still exist - just download the GNOME Shortwave client and you can drown in channels there. It's just not powered by the marketing that supports Spotify.
edit - I think it's interesting that the comments I'm seeing below this so far are talking about recent radio. I should have been more clear. In the U.S. markets at least Radio "died" during a great consolidation wave in the earl 2000s when Clearchannel and a few other media companies slurped up all the local channels, switched their formats and started playing consolidated playlists.
It really did used to be the case that your local station DJs were local brands, each with their own curation of songs. Some stations would even have local music festivals and were big promoters of local talent. I spent many evenings calling up the local station to request songs to be slipped into the playlist, sometimes to promote somebody I knew and get them some airtime.
Most radio stations only played the most blandest junk music, even from great artists. Seems they would rotate the top 3 songs even from the absolute most popular musicians. I must have heard Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden >500 times on the rock stations in Stockholm. The Prowler? 0. Maybe some 3am DJ could play some cool songs on occasion, like you said.
There was always very little variety.
Historically radio worked because their was actually money in the advertising, but also because radio was inherently regional. You could license content at a rate that made sense for your station's reach.
Now it's trivial to broadcast over the web to a huge audience but the floor has fallen out on monetization. Podcasts and streaming both work because they don't rely on licensed content, but music can't make the jump.
Ad-supported radio eventually guarantees that only genres with desired-by-advertiser demographics exist on the radio. So it's hard to say if any curation radio was ever doing was out of love for music, or the genre, or simply to keep a certain timeslot valuable.
I will say up until about 1997 I feel things were meeting in the middle fairly well. Radio was cool up until then. In the early 90's at least where I was from there were 8 or 9 radio stations of various genres, so lots to hear.
> We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste
This is what freedom looks like. But not everyone wants it. AI will be the thing to keep them happy and contained at some point and that is the prize for not caring. These same types of people would not have cared about the difference between Queen and Nickelback and probably have barely really listed to any song on the radio other than a few lyrics that resonate with them.
If ever there was a more censorious medium, I have yet to see it. Not only content dictating _what_ could be played, it dictated _how_ it could be played. This wasn't just about contemporary HipHop and vulgarity - even instrumental songs like Nick Wrays' 1958 song "Rumble" were banned from radio play.
The list of songs banned by the BBC is a fantastic read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_banned_by_the_BB...
I disagree with this assertion and find it cynical. The golden age of radio was a far more 'aesthetic flattening' experience. And yet we wax nostalgic about it all the time. I think there are good things that come about from less than ideal situations. Back then there were next to zero ways for your art to get noticed, but on the flip side the shared experience of having only a handful of 'hit' songs still had its merits.
These days distribution costs have all but disappeared, so the barriers to being heard are far lower than ever before. Yes greasy corps like Spotify will continue trying to take their cut from every angle possible even if it dilutes the pool, but that's nothing new. So instead of making no money and being heard by no one, bands continue making no money but people actually have a chance of discovering their music. SoundCloud, YouTube, streaming services... it has never been easier to find and listen to music.
Consequently have we ever had a time of more diverse musical tastes? I don't think so.
It's probably a good thing it's hard to pull off because you'd see Taylor Swift streams going for 10 cents and aspiring artists paying you $0.0001 to listen to their work in the background.
the initial release of Discover Weekly 10 years ago gave everyone such uncanny recommendations that it was a cultural event, people were talking about it, it was written up in major newspapers. Apple Music had just released a few months before and was a serious threat to Spotify, so Discover Weekly changed the trajectory of the company.
It was also technologically interesting because it was one of the first times that a recommender system incorporated deep learning (on the actual song audio) in addition to collaborative filtering.
It was really amazing! Now instead, they are shoveling whatever garbage costs them the least. Depressing.
And by "they", it was a few executives in those corporations - it was never a meritocracy and those people never cared about music they peddled either.
So what exactly did it change here except the fact that now we're not at a mercy of a megapublisher to actually ship tapes/CDs across the world to hear a smaller artist?
Maybe I am out of touch but that dynamic seems fairly lost, and we only temporarily discarded the mega publisher dynamic, which seems to have returned.
Note that Barnes & Noble has been successful since its last change of ownership because the CEO cares about books, not because he’s trying to squeeze every penny possible out of it.
I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million.
If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this.
Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.
Historically, we retrospectively recognize the seminal importance of scenes that had virtually zero participants, and rather than regretting that those scenes were so tiny and demonizing the distribution networks that served less-seminal music to the vast majority of listeners, we romanticize the marginality of those scenes.
But when we see the same thing playing out contemporaneously, with creative niche music reaching tiny numbers of listeners and not getting traction via the distribution networks that serve the vast mainstream, we treat it as a crisis.
If you want to discover new music, YouTube Music and SoundCloud seem superior.
One of the biggest impediments to new artists making a living from recorded music is not the existence of Spotify and other streaming platforms, rather it's the massive and growing library of existing music, some of which is excellent.
But it's not impossible. My neighbor manages his music career himself. In 2024 he went from having 250,000 monthly Spotify listeners to 800,000. A few months ago he was able to give up his job and devote himself to music full time - he is getting decent streaming royalty checks.
If you complain that Spotify is contributing to a generic and bland listening experience then that is totally your own fault. Spotify will give you excellent and adventurous listening experiences, but you have to put in the time to 'train' your personal algorithms first, mainly by liking tracks, saving albums and playlists, and making playlists. Also: by paying attention to DJs/curators and researching dark corners of the music blogosphere, SoundCloud and Mixcloud.
We can also just buy their albums like ye olden times. Buy tracks for $1.29 like ye slightly less olden times! If you have disposable income, buy albums! It's easy and also fun.
However, I only buy albums (preferably physically, will accept flac download), so they won't be getting money from me.
I guess the closest equivalent is Bandcamp where artists can still use a pay-what-you-want model
Spotify killed lofi hip hop? Lets continue use spotify but use playlists.
I trying to figure out where the author got this from? Audio hardware/software hasn't changed that much in 20 years, and Nujabes' lofi aesthetic seems intentional.
According to Wikipedia, it originated from an effect button on Roland samplers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofi_hip-hop
He was using old equipment such as the MPC60 and SP1200. The SP1200 in particular has a "sound" due to its 12-bit architecture. And when Nujabes was writing said music in the mid 2000s, that gear was 20ish years old. MPC60 was 1988, SP1200 was 1987.
An sp-1200 can record less than a minute if i remember correctly.
The resulting sample rate reduction creates a crunchy vibe to the sound.
I laughed at this too. Oh yeah, back in 2005 there was no way to get good sound from that dusty old equipment.
I mean, some of the best sounding albums of all time are 50+ years old.
That is.. arguable
Lofi IS instrumental hip hop. Dilla was doing this in the 90s.
It comes off as someone who's ignorant of the topic they're writing about.
For the uninitiated, Champloo is the second anime series by Shinichirō Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame. Where Bebop is science fiction meets jazz, Champloo is medieval Japan meets hip hop. Weirdly under-rated IMO.
To this day I still bump into fellow Nujabes fans in the wild and it’s like having a secret handshake
Another Japanese producer I like who straddles "lo-fi hip-hop" (but perhaps with more classical and vocal elements) is DJ Okiwari. Here's the track "Brighter Side" which draws on the vibe of '90s uplifting progressive hip-hop / R&B - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l23qmgf51z0
The AI generated stuff will probably be good for its intended purpose white noise with a beat to help you study but its unlikely you'll find you're next favorite artist
The Musician's story adds to the vibe. If someone can relate to the creator, it helps to create more connection with the audience than a pure algorithm. The human curated/generated animations seem more coherent...even if it's on a loop.
I like some of the new AI animations for being novel...mostly futuristic. Though this will soon become common & something new will show up.
Surely there are many genuine, human Lo-Fi artists, and I'd love to know who they are.
Just another example of an artist doing well for themselves still.
But whether any specific artist gets to play or not doesn't concern me that much. I've found that single artists rarely preserve the feel so much as ones in a genre.
Reminds me a bit of "nerdcore" hip-hop; which also made little sense because e.g. Del the Funkee Homosapien and RZA were also nerds making VERY nerdy music, but for "some reason" weren't seen as the same thing.
With Youtube, I feel like I am the product, and they can't wait to put "sponsored" songs into my feed.
It's just too damn bad that Pandora refuses to keep up with the competition and add higher quality streams. It sounds noticeably bad by comparison when using modern sound hardware. I just use them for recommendations now, so that I can curate my playlists in services that do offer high quality sound. They could easily be the only music service I pay for, but I'm not going to pay for subpar sound.
I can understand listening to genai music as a background space filler but music has more functions.
It is a signifier and mnemonic, and sets mood for production.
Everything on https://cybershow.uk is made in house, on the fly as needed. We mostly use Ardour, Audacity and some weird old computer music tools like Csound, Puredata, Supercollider for all the beds and backings, many of which are in the old-skool, lo-fi styles because these sit behind talk as 'beds' very nicely.
It would be easy to grab licensed tracks or use "AI" to make music, but we don't do that. That's mainly because its better to keep control over the feel and exactly craft everything. An example is this poetry episode [0] where everything is cut specifically for the poem, and this latest episode "Owned By Bots" where the grungy "crime beat" is a main feature [1]
For all it’s “Ai playlist promotion is bad” Spotify will only play things that someone somehow got through their editorals
My other playlists I listen to are rock and related. Lofi has utility if such a comment I saw in this thread is a way to describe it
I've been called a Luddite so many times on this website asking basic questions of how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living, and nobody has an answer.
Bandcamp might be a different story since it has a policy it stands by (for now), provides access to the music downloads and doesn't try to artificially alter their listings, but that can soon change with the new ownership.
Buy music directly from the artist or on bandcamp, stop supporting Spotify if you give a shit about music
That is a strange way to view music to me.
Just because people can make music doesn't mean others will enjoy it. It isn't really obvious to me that overwhelming the supply would decrease demand. I mean, look at any extreme pop genre.
One would assume that there are more complicated economics at play.
But the thing about fads: if everybody and their dog knows how to make "proper" punk, low-fi-hiphop or whatever, the result will be bland, uniform, shapeless and generic. That doesn't mean the genre stopped producing great music, it just means you will have to wade through the bland stuff to get through the gold. And few people are willing to keep doing just that.
Plus even that aside, people often crave change. No genre of music has ever remained entirely static. And all styles of music comes in and out of fashion.
The article doesn’t seem to me to scapegoat AI as much as the dual role which Spotify has being both the dominant distributor and recommendation source as well as creating their own content: even if they were paying studio musicians that would still be a major conflict of interest, just as it is when Ticketmaster/Live Nation controls band management, venues, and ticket sales or when Amazon uses their knowledge of buying habits to compete with their own sellers. We should have laws requiring separation between the delivery layer and content creation, but sadly that is not the era we live in.
'ease of creation' has never been the metric by which popular media has been judged.
Meanwhile, you have all these people on YouTube that distill something out of that lineage and just make tons and tons of boring versions of it. As more people encounter it, divorced from it's history, the term takes on a new meaning and now the boring version is what the label means.
So I guess you could say the lineage is alive and well while the genre is boring and dead. And I agree, it's not AI's fault.
The article sounds part whiny and part boosting Wish on the Beat (multiple mentions of their linked playlist) - which I am supportive but also don't believe all the content in the article as a result.
I remember back in the 90's a friend who had the same critique of EDM and Daft Punk.
After all, you have to do is learn how to write and play some catchy melodies on a keyboard, learn synthesizers, samplers and sound generation, percussion patterns, and use a DAW.
Is it much easier to self produce Lo-Fi now than it would've been in 1995? Sure, but that's true of music in general. But one isn't going to be able to produce a song similar to what GameChops puts out in 10 mins, even if you are an expert.
That AI is making it hard to have a decent signal-to-noise ratio in Spotify isn't doesn't mean the genre is dead.
(Assuming the general style of the genre is staying similar and you don't listen to specific songs you discovered but just put on some collection of songs from the genre.)
Is there new elevator music being composed all the time too?
How corporations killed stomp clap hey!
As in, put on a playlist, then finish it without having repeat on. I find some of my favorite music from the following tracks. It helps if you have a very varied playlist - it discourages just playing tracks from the same artists.
Schur's music does have a very catchy and upbeat vibe, I like his stuff. I guess it's possible he could have had a track featured on a TikTok video that went viral, without being aware of it.
So for him his best channel is Instagram. I noticed that he's using Insta ads, I'm getting them in my feed, but I follow him too.
If you're going to do all of this, what's the point of the algorithm?
I won’t use the word “Luddite”, but your argument could be applied word-for-word to automatic looms:
“[The automatic loom] is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth… how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living…“
Historically, automatic looms were a net benefit to society. I think this indicates that your argument against development of AI is insufficient.
What I care about is all the musicians, the designers, the artists, the writers, who to be clear, are already and have been for many years struggling to earn a living plying their craft, who are in for even more torment for trying to just... live. For trying to turn their given and practiced talents into money so they can not freeze to death.
And I'm frustrated that they need to go without a means to live because billionaires, apparently, need more billions. And I'm angry that our society has allocated power solely to those billionaires to make those decisions. And I'm nursing a visceral hatred of every single one of them who are preparing to break the social contract to millions of people so they can have another, and I can't stress this enough, absolutely meaningless massive amount of money, to go with their already massive amounts of money...
For. Doing. Nothing.
So yes, I am a Luddite. I see monied classes financially backing new technology that will allow them to generate more products of lower quality using fewer (if any) human laborers so they can pocket even more money while fucking over working class people.
The usual answer is something about how rich people want to rule the world and not pay for labour … but then that world will become pretty unpleasant for them to live in so that doesn’t track to me.
I think that glosses over some critical historical facts. When the saw mill upfitted with "labor-saving" machinery, those displaced saw hands didn't necessarily "upskill" themselves to get office jobs or start waiting tables. Chronic unemployment and an early grave from drink was a pretty likely outcome.
Where AI is different is that the scale and speed of job displacement is going to be unprecedented. We will need a new operating principle for our societies, and it will have to come about quickly. Otherwise, millions of displaced workers will have no reason not to defect from the social contract.
Eventually, humans can act as a managerial class for AI agents, just as we manage existing technologies. But you have to transition to that point without blowing up society.
It's little comfort that current AI has some rough edges. Sure, current AI might be adequate as a junior graphic designer or junior software engineer. But in the process of using these AIs, the senior humans will be generating the data to train the AI to replace at least mid-level positions. This doesn't require "AGI", just that the AI can follow instructions at one level higher abstraction and critically judge its own work.
This is a subtle and uncomfortable argument to make without falling into the "class warfare" or "luddite" tropes.
Also AGI is a floating signifier thats going to mean whatever is useful to marketers once they've used up the easier ones.
Also, if you havent read the wikipedia article on the luddites you should. It's not as bad a moniker as revisionists would have you think! (Hint: they were protesting labor abuses, not simply opposed to advencement.)
No it hasn't, the global poverty rate has been falling for 20+ years. 69% of people globally lived on <$5.50 a day in 2000, that number is down to 47% today.
You can also look at China and Vietnam, countries that have had drastic improvements to standards of living and collapsing poverty rates after abandoned communism. Or you could look at the divide between East Germany and West Germany or North Korea and South Korea. Or the economic collapse in Venezuela. The communist experiment was tried and it failed miserably.
Songs played by the BBC were, for the most part, chosen by the DJs (particularly true after 19:00.
Just in the last 6 months I found two local bands in my backyard (it's a big city) through Spotify related atists. I streamed some of their music but also bought vinyl and saw them live and I will continue to do so.
These are small label artists and this is how they actually make it big enough to do it full time. I don't understand why people overlook this.
Maybe there's a significant percentage of Spotify customers that give two shits about the art and just want to play some background music. That's ok. There's also artists that can thank Spotify for new fans and new listeners that can thank Spotify for new artists to listen to.
This moral outrage over Spotify tends to overlook that there are tradeoffs and every market has these problems. Blaming Spotify for killing a genre is crazy dumb to me. I'm not going to stop listening to lo-fi hip-hop cause Spotify has ghost artists and AI music on it. These bedroom artists have done what would have been impossible 40 years ago and the fans they've gained aren't going to go away. That's a testament to streaming platforms.
If you want to direct a few dollars to an artist you really do need to buy their music (or mech), or somehow give them a couple thousand streams.
I think that further underscores my point of having a varied playlist, since you're only eligible for Discovery Mode if you have >25,000 listeners.
i get what you're trying to say but ultimately it just seems like you're pointing at everything positive and saying "capitalism did that" without much effort or investigation. there's too much to cover in an HN thread but one thing thats interesting is that when this ideological sentiment is brought out no one ever seems to want to deal with the backslide in equity that happened across all measurements after the fall of the USSR. i think partially because westerners dont seem to be able to engage with the discussion without immediately whatabout-ing and claiming that doing the analysis is somehow stalin worship.
I'm willing to bet if you email the artist they will be happy to point you where to purchase their music digitally.
We're left to wonder about his potential.
Jam Master Jay (of Run DMC fame), Dilla, Nujabes, all gone in their mid 30s.
By historical norms, music is hilariously cheap. And $12 isn't even the floor, you can get a $17 couples plan, or a $20 family plan split 6 ways. Or $6 for students and they throw in Hulu TV with it! And theres are 2025 dollars.
In peak CD mall rat era, Northeast HCOL area minimum wages were $5, gas was $2/gal and CDs were $20+ for new releases, each. Or inflating that $20, is $38/album in 2025 dollars. And teens with allowances and/or jobs would buy more than 1 per month.
No matter how the pie is sliced up, there just isn't that much revenue coming in the front door.
You look at people like Bezos, Musk and Zuck and tell me they have a shred of self-awareness.
There is plenty of evidence against the principles and implementation of communism.
This post was about lofi you started about Marx and capitalism not me mate
The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.
A local example is "Easy 104.1" here in Reno. I stumbled on it by complete accident about a month ago, and after said month's worth of daily listening I haven't heard a single song played twice. Everything from funk to R&B to alternative rock to adult contemporary to new wave and everything in between, from the 1960's to the 2000's. Songs I've never heard before, songs I've last heard years ago, songs that I last heard yesterday. Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers' Dance" came on today and that's a song that'd been playing in my head for multiple decades with no idea whatsoever what it's called or any of the words in it (eliminating any possibility of looking it up); now I've finally found it thanks to some random radio station that plays everything that the other stations don't. And if that ain't enough, the "commercial breaks" usually are just one commercial - or hell, often half of a commercial.
Because of the way a lot of stuff around broadcasting works, a small-ish life insurance company ended up with a 100 kW FM station (along with their existing TV and AM stations), a lawsuit challenging their AM, FM, and TV licenses over their (implicitly and explicitly racist) behavior, and as a result, a bunch of very diverse DJ's, mostly in their 20s, with almost no oversight.
When the station was sold, the new owners immediately switched to country, which AFAIK it still is. The fact that local bands at the time wrote songs about it should give you a hint. Yes, the movie is a big late-Boomer/early-GenX reminiscence-fest, but there's a lot of interesting detail there. The DJ's partnered up with producers, bringing big shows to a relatively small city. Some started a record store. One ended up in charge of organizing group tours to concerts in near-ish cities (still 3 hours away in any direction) because, as he put it in the movie, he had a better weed connection than anyone else at the station and so could actually bring enough for everyone.
It sounds like you were listening to top 40 stations exclusively.
Gotta check out the good stuff, stations like KBCO in Colorado or any of the more local, music focused stations
By that metric, Spotify is actually doing better than they did, if memory serves.
The modern equivalent would be a curated stream, station, etc.
You could time-travel into the future by moving your radii from somewhere else to a musical cultural center like New York or Seattle. People would pay for subscription services to listen to radio stations from those areas.
My latest and possibly last track is called "I ain't even writing music anymore byeeee" because AI can take the shit I hear in my skull and translate it pretty good to an mp3.
I'm done. I made so much $0 that I'm set for life from my music.
https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music...
You can peruse my older tracks. My soundcloud is hotlinks and esoteria, not my collected works.
edit: i should explain that track. It was conceived, "written", "mastered", "cut", and then published by me within about 30 minutes of the news of the South Korean Coup attempt. The lyrics are in Lojban. about 5-8 minutes of that 30 was arguing with chatgpt-4o about the proper Lojban transliteration of coup d'etat, i put my foot down, and the lojban translation of that specific word is mine, everything else is from an online translation site. So i wrote the lyrics, managed the translation, and udio or whatever did the music. it took ~12 minutes to re-run the generation and extend it to find the correct "sound".
This is almost exactly what i heard in my head when i heard about the coup attempt. Oh also i don't know how to write "metal" or "djent", so this is what djent sounds like to me; i hope this helps clear up any confusion about why that specific song "sucks" or whatever.
The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.
> For. Doing. Nothing.
That's obviously not true. I've tried doing nothing for a long time, and am not anywhere close to a billionaire.
It's not about love. Tons of creatives work jobs they loathe just as much as any other profession, but it's what they're trained to do. It's their specialization, one honed over their entire lives, which can be like 25 years, or 50, or 70. What are those people supposed to do when the job market for the skill they're in rapidly shrinks?
And, in a larger view: what do you think is going to happen to the society you live in when thousands, millions of workers who work these jobs, now no longer can make rent? Can't pay their bills? Can't buy food? Like this is one of the better arguments against socialized medicine is that we have millions of people in the USA who work in the insurance industry, both for insurers, and for doctors offices. Medical billing is an entire job description and skillset, and like, I don't think that should be a thing, I think we should get rid of it, but I'm also cognizant that we'll have tons of white collar professionals who will need financial support and job training as part of that because I'm not a heartless monster and don't want to send millions of people to die on the streets.
> The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.
A tiny, tiny minority get wealthy. Most creatives, even successful ones, earn like... a middling middle class income, in good times. But that income also comes with a lot of it's own issues: having to arrange their own insurance, their taxes are a nightmare, and the income stream isn't steady like a paycheck, it's gig-based.
And a whole lot more do it, indeed, for the love of their craft and oftentimes have other jobs to make enough to get by.
As others have mentioned, we have gone through this in human history before, say when looms became automated and huge employers disappeared overnight. Things change, and those that come after us, wont miss the things that disappeared; nobody is calling for the destruction of automated looms today in order to restore those manual jobs.
To my mind, the problem is one of expectations, and wildly out of control governments which empower corporate monopolies. It has disempowered small, local communities to trade and lift each other up, in small and simple ways.
The problem is not being 'owed' an income. The problem comes in when there end up being a class of people that can't make a living doing anything. When this class becomes too large bad things tend to happen. Be it government enabled purges or the masses breaking out guillotines or riots burning entire cities down.
I, an invested member in the continuation of society, would like a rather non-violent world to be in our future.
Of course, but we don't get there following fantasies. The truth is, through most of human history, most people were peasants eking out the most meager of lives. Often dying of disease in childhood, or at least well before their 30th birthday.
The problem is not poverty today.
By all realistic measures, nearly every single person in America (even those living on the street) is wealthier than most of our ancestors. The problem isn't even wealth inequality, since that's always existed as well, (and probably always will since it seems impossible to devise a political system that is durable and corruption proof).
The problem is unrealistic desires and a fantasy that everyone can live a rich life unconstrained by material limitations. The incredible wealth that Americans had enjoyed post WWII (arguably at the expense of much of the rest of the world) has set up unattainable expectations in people.
That's not to say we can't do better, but we need to reframe the entire problem and set it in the context of human history, not the last few hundred years of unsustainable growth.
https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...
When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.
"Hello. This is Rosko. WKTU, New York." And then he'd segue into "Always and Forever" by Heatwave.
It was so scripted that at one point I started listening closely to see if it was recorded, but there were enough intonation and pacing changes that it was obvious he was doing it live.
Haven't lived in NYC in over 30 years but I miss that station.
I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.
College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s.
40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.
There were 12k broadcast stations in the 1980s [2]
Given we can assume little to no automation, or at least a DJ human making sure the equipment didn’t break, and 8 hour shifts, that suggests 36k people were employed as radio DJs in the 1980s if we only count their time on air, assuming a 24 hour broadcast. If we include their other duties, probably the total DJ time resource required would increase, and so would the number of employed DJs.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1034A1.pdf
https://www.zippia.com/disc-jockey-jobs/demographics/
https://usinfo.org/enus/media/overview/press11.html?utm_sour...
A good radio-DJ might be hired to fill a key block of time in a major metro. They may select to play a local band's new song during evening rush hour and suddenly 3 million new people know about it instantly moving them up the charts. They were just as much a part of the tastemaking stream as the labels and often provided interesting color commentary, local community info, places for meet and greets, upcoming concert info, and so on.
I live in a top-10 metro in the U.S. and I think it's very telling that the FM dial mostly plays pre-2000 music, with very little commentary by DJs if any between commercial breaks. They may as well just be a streaming internet feed pumped through an antenna. Some stations just play the same songs I remember from middle/high school decades ago and they aren't even advertising themselves as "classic" or "nostalgia" in any way.
Once the big consolidation events happened, it seems like the ability for popular music to really get ahold of the zeitgeist died with it and now tastemaking seems to be almost as much a function of push by labels and artists/influencers than a pull-and-present by people sitting in curation seats.
Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.
Man, I read stuff like this and it's just so far out of touch it blows my mind. Let me introduce you to the internet. You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.
Wonder if those Zippia estimates include internet radio. Imagine it misses quite a bit given how difficult it would be to break down streamers on every platform.
There were essentially no video game DJs in the 1980s, though, so maybe what we seek from what media is just as responsible for the shift.
It's this segment that I would have high doubts to have decreased even with the prevalence of infinite playlists.
Edit: Basically I don't agree with the premise that the way we consume music today is any less local or curated. There's just been a shift in the way we consume.
1 - 90% of everything is crap.
2 - > if you actually make an effort so now I have to be the curator! But I don't have time to sift through the 90% of crap. That's the point somebody else used to get paid to separate the creme from the top. You may have and unlimited amount of low value time to dedicate to listening to thousands of artists and tens of thousands of songs, but I certainly don't.
3 - even among curators, 90% of them aren't any good at it either, which is why, even if you shared your personal playlist of your very carefully curated list of songs that you spent 2000 hours last year carefully putting together, I'm more than likely to not like it myself. Being able to find good music, and then find an audience for your curation that is able to connect millions of people to those previous unknown is also a skill.
> You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort. 4 - then where are your multiple times a year new breakthrough artists that show up out of nowhere, dominate the charts for two weeks then are subsumed by newer geniuses? The charts are slammed full of artists who've been top of their game for 10-20 even 30 years now. It's the same old artists over and over, but that pales in comparison to the before times when you'd get something new and big and hit big every week.
I'm looking right now at the U.S. top-40 pop charts and there is on it this week -- no shit get this: Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Charli XCX, Akon, Alphaville, Kendrick Lamar, Ariana Grande, and a few more that, let's face it have careers that are nearing drinking age in the U.S. Great artists all, but that used to be the age music shifted up-frequency to the oldies channel in the past.
If you disappeared from the planet in 2005 and showed back up today, you'd feel that the list was familiar. Where are your endless parade of geniuses on the top-40? We could have tight-beamed these old artists' entire discographies to Alpha Centauri and Back and they'd still be relevant and dominating the charts.
Top 40, billboard, and the grammys aren't representative of contemporary music quality or the depth of talented musicians out there. It's not a secret and every musician knows it. Pearl Jam '96 grammys. It represents the consumers of music.
If you can't be bothered to watch or listen to some kexp live, audiotree live, tiny desk. Or listen to internet radio. Or read any of the numerous music publications. Or dig through related artists on a streaming platform. Then it's a problem with you the consumer of music, and makes you really no different than all the other people that make those top 40 charts what they are. It has no bearing or makes no comment on the overwhelming amount of good music we have today and how accessible it is.
I'm not interested in regional music or a regional scene.
The music on any given SomaFM station is not "a sea of mediocrity". It's generally excellent genre-specific stuff (old and new), and I love it (if I'm somewhat into the genre).
I can appreciate that others may not, but please don't over-generalize or assert that your preferences are the only ones out there.
Genres span borders now. Look at the Midwest emo / mathrock scene and how it made its way to Japan and Taiwan.
We can romanticise the old days of radio but local scenes aren't dead and these little genres are still going and new ones are popping up.
I might just be out of touch, so show me the innovation.
Rap simply didn’t exist in the 60’s. What’s around today that wasn’t in the late 90’s? Not just minor evolution but new ideas. It’s been 25 years any other stretch of that length since 1900 had several radical new ideas.
Even if you just look at popular artists: Mk.gee, Collier, Domi and jdbeck, Beyonce are some examples of mold breaking.
What exactly are you expecting, cantina jizz? If so there's no shortage of extremely out there stuff.
Rap, Country, Electronic, Funk, Hip hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, Punk, Reggae, Rock, Heavy Metal, Soul music and R&B
I’d even take Polka. My argument is we’re missing the kind of regional cross pollination that gives rise to such things.
Every noise at once attempts to show the extremes to which music can be classified if you haven't seen it.
I don't see any signs that this evolution has ever stopped or will stop. Artists are obviously limited by physics, what sounds pleasant to us, the instruments that are available, and what is currently in fashion. That we'd have more unique music in a more isolated world seems like a pretty crazy claim to me.
> I don’t see any signs that this evaluation has ever stopped or will stop.
It wouldn’t be difficult to name something as new if there was a lot of meaningfully different new things to name.
Now I’m not saying things will be static, obviously we people will create. But I think it’s clear things have slowed down noticeably, and that means something really has been lost.