I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these platforms are neither neutral nor meritocracies and don't care about the content that they host. Sounds obvious, yes, but reading about the concrete consequences of this fact, namely the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively, definitely got me to reexamine how I was using Spotify and consuming music in general. It really drove home the fact that some people treat art as a fungible object, and that these folks are the people deciding what music we're hearing unless we really make an effort to seek it out on our own.
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.
AI seems like a scapegoat here when I think the real answer is simply that it was a tired genre that died out like many music fads over the years. (Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.)
> Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market
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.
If people's ability to produce slop outpaces the ability for content delivery and discovery platforms to separate the wheat from the chaff, the category as a whole will diminish.
As a musician I agree that "regular people can make it without sacrificing their soul" is not an indicator of bad music. Some of the greatest, most creative music I had the honor to listen to was made by drunk teenagers who didn't know how to tune their instruments after all.
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.
The problem when a creative niche gets flooded with low quality ripoffs is that people end up fed up with the entire genre.
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.
I don't know that much about current music, but I do spend a lot of time listening to LoFi study girl live stream, is that music the genre being discussed here? Perhaps it's just the normal hype cycle and then things settle out? Innovation, enthusiasm, copy cats, burn out, a solid genre for decades?
Pop by definition is catchy music and the actual sound underneath is adapts to current trends. It's an ephemeral genre. LoFi is a specific sound and so if people are bored with the sound it'll stop being popular.
But that doesn’t diminish its utility.
Spotify wouldn’t have entered the space if there weren’t listeners, and it’s not their responsibility to be some kind of garbage collector for aging genres.
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.
>Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI
'ease of creation' has never been the metric by which popular media has been judged.
I think like anything, the lineage evolves. If we're to call Madlib and Dilla 'lofi', as the wikipedia does, then we can follow that lineage to someone like Knxwledge, who just this week won a grammy for 'Why Lawd?'.
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.
knxwledge famously hates spotify and has posted how little they pay which is why most of his catalog is on bandcamp
True but its clear that these systems allow this process to happen at rates orders of magnitudes larger than without it. That changes the severity of the problem and definitely turns it into something people need to intervene in.
The problem is actually Spotify was a bit of a market maker here in terms of getting access to peoples ears. AI probably hollowed out the quality of the music for all but the most dedicated listeners as someone who has listened to lo-fi for a long time. Spotify probably also boosted their own preferred content.
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.
> Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.
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.
A genre is a conversation you have with other people.
And the emphasis lies on people, without people there is no meaning.
Lofi music is a really popular genre to listen to as background music, I wouldn't say it's a tired genre. Perhaps for creators it is, but for listeners it's not.
How much background music do you realistically need though? If there's a few thousand hours, would you notice if it repeated at some point?
(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?
The rebellious authentic music from the current middle-aged or old people's youth is todays elevator music. I've heard the Pink Floyd's the Wall being played at a soothing volume in the grocery store as I tried to find lactose free milk for my adult children's visit.
Out on the road today, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back. You can never look back."
Atleast for me the repetition is the point. It's calm enough when I'm working but I get a little jolt of joy whenbi recognise a groove I really liked before
Sounds like u just dont like the genre
But that doesn’t diminish its utility.
Next up:
How corporations killed stomp clap hey!
oooo lawdy
There seems to be a lot of anger around Spotify these days, often misplaced I reckon.
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.
I find that the Spotify algorithm is great if you ignore all of the Spotify-branded recommendation junk, and just use the 'Keep Listening/Autoplay' feature.
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.
A lot of that music is now payola, placed into those "organic" autoplays via Spotify Discovery Mode, which requires artists and labels to take a 30% discount on royalty rates for their music to be played in this context.
Neat, didn't know about that program, thanks. It seems Discovery Mode is more tailored towards their Spotify-generated playlists/radio but also seems to mention Autoplay.
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.
Did your neighbor share with you what worked for him?
It's interesting, Schur (artist name) hasn't had anyone ever review his music as far as I can tell, none of his tracks have ever got much traction on YouTube, none of his releases are even listed on albumoftheyear.org, low traction on SoundCloud too. He said he gets fans via Instagram (34 k followers). He's not on TikTok. Looks like he's not on any official Spotify, or other popular, playlists.
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.
I think for Schur it really is the 'vibe thing' that works for him - he makes music that resonates with people. Spotify makes it so easy to like songs and every time someone likes a track it becomes more likely to be featured in the algo playlists and so the vibe snowballs.
>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.
If you're going to do all of this, what's the point of the algorithm?
How can the algo know what you like if you don't tell it?
> We can support musicians we like by adding them to our personal playlists and playing their music every day.
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.
A growing number of artists don't make albums anymore, either physical or something that can be purchased. I don't understand, but their choice.
However, I only buy albums (preferably physically, will accept flac download), so they won't be getting money from me.
It's kinda funny, lots of artists will sell you a vinyl or cassette tape before they make their music purchasable digitally. I seems to be that the market for digital downloads is completely dead and not worth the effort.
I mean yeah a growing number cause the internet let’s u discover more coming up artists but I’d say nearly all established ones do.
I’d love a way to directly Cash app or Zelle my favorite artist
You kind of can with Bandcamp's "pay this much or more" model, though obviously there's a substantial percentage taken.
Bandcamp docks 15% for revenue share and charges a payment processor fee. Someone recently paid $4.00 for an album I published and Bandcamp gave me $3.15 of it
and if the online calculators are right, I think it would then take several thousand streams to earn close to $3.15 from Spotify
Assemblage 23 used to do this on their website. It was labeled something like "for anyone who pirated our music and feels bad about it, you can chip in here". But it seems to have been long removed
I guess the closest equivalent is Bandcamp where artists can still use a pay-what-you-want model
Same though.
Spotify killed lofi hip hop? Lets continue use spotify but use playlists.
I don’t do any of the streaming services, but the bugginess around owned music in the Apple Music player is getting seriously frustrating.
Who gets the money?
On Bandcamp Fridays 100% goes to the artist/label
if you are putting $12/mo into a big pot via Spotify there's way less money available to pay artists than if you buy a few albums outright a month, it takes a lot of Spotify streams to earn an artist a dollar. If you stream an album a few thousand times on Spotify maybe it works out in the artists' favor, I suppose.
Spotify the split is 70% rights holders and 30% for Spotify
and crucially, it's not taking 70% of your $12/month and parceling it out to the artists you listen to, it's taking everyone's money and putting it in a big bucket and parceling out it proportionally by stream numbers, so you can't direct $8.40 to an artist by only streaming them.
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.
> For Japanese soundtrack producer Nujabes, the “lofi” sound wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was an artifact of creating such forward thinking music with the dusty equipment from 20 years ago.
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
> Nujabes' lofi aesthetic seems intentional.
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.
This is due to sampling limitations in old machines. The hiphop producers would record samples from vinyl playing as fast as possible on the turn table and then pitch down in the sampler. This to get around memory restriction.
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 trying to figure out where the author got this from?
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.
No, when he was making it twenty years ago the equipment was then 20 years old so it's now 40 year old equipment.
> I mean, some of the best sounding albums of all time are 50+ years old
That is.. arguable
I'd count Tom Waits' Nighthawks at the diner as such an album. Do you disagre on some other ground than it being just almost fifty years old?
Some Steely Dan albums are 50 and over. Say what you want about the music but their albums are sonically incredible.
The Dark Side of the Moon will be 52 years old next month.
Are we talking the original recording or one of the many remasters because to my not 50 year old ears the originals for most old super-famous music sound terrible. Musically great but seemingly limited by the technology of the time.
Those 50+ year old albums weren't using samplers.
>The Lofi style itself is nothing new, Lofi beats bear a striking resemblance to instrumental hip hop of the 90s and 2000s.
Lofi IS instrumental hip hop. Dilla was doing this in the 90s.
It's probably better to say that lofi is a genre or type of instrumental hip hop. You wouldn't listen to e.g. Endtroducing... on the lofi girl stream.
You definitely would have played Endtroducing when it was relevant in places lofi hip hop is played today, used to be played in coffee shops, hairdressers and ad agency lobbies constantly
Sure, I agree. 40 years ago you would have been playing Feels So Good in those same places, and that's not lofi either.
The way this was phrased made me disregard the rest of the article.
It comes off as someone who's ignorant of the topic they're writing about.
Dilla is still the greatest to ever do it.
Lofi peaked long before the term lofi even came about
The people behind the california beat scene https://pitchfork.com/features/pitchfork-essentials/9716-the... made the blueprint then 'lofi' came after
Debatable - is Pete Rock not up on that same level? What about DJ Premier?
Dilla is one of the best, but I think apart of why he's so highly rated is his early departure.
We're left to wonder about his potential.
IMO it's more that his approach to rhythm truly was original and unique in contemporary music, and was so influential you hear it everywhere. In fact not only has it not faded, but it continues to grow in prominence year after year. Jazz drummers study dilla beats now. It's used in gospel music. It's very rare for a novel technique to so clearly originate from a single practitioner and then go on to be used as widely as that.
Some of the best hip hop producers were taken too early.
Jam Master Jay (of Run DMC fame), Dilla, Nujabes, all gone in their mid 30s.
The first two albums by Nujabes, the "godfather of lo-fi," are some of the best I've ever heard. Metaphorical Music and Modal Soul.
I was delighted to see Nujabes and Samurai Champloo cited right off the bat.
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
Calling it lo-fi is almost an insult - Nujabes is a category by themselves
Yeah, it is nothing like the lo-fi of today. Nobody else has ever made an album quite like Modal Soul and nobody will again.
Thank you! Listening to Metaphorical Music right now and it's hitting me just right. (fistbump)
Nujabes tragically died in 2010, at the age of 36.
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
I used to work in the record industy. If you want to understand how artist royalties work the seminal article on the topic was written by Steve Albini and is highly reccomended. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
Spotify and other streaming sites also killed mixtapes of rappers on other people's beats.
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
Datpiff mixtape era was one of the best. It is where I discovered Kendrick Lamar before his fame today.
Lofi Girl still has an active audience. >100k for each video. GameChops has a channel as well with >5k & <100k for each video.
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.
Speaking of the artists, I keep seeing articles about Lo-Fi being AI generated, but nobody ever lists who the authentic human artists are. The folks who love the genre and are making music because they love it, not just slinging out track after track where each one is being uploaded to Spotify under multiple artist names.
Surely there are many genuine, human Lo-Fi artists, and I'd love to know who they are.
You should check out the artist "Home Alone." Their stuff has a very neatly crafted vibe. It's lofi esc maybe a bit more jazzy than you'd expect. But their album covers are great and albums are coherent.
Just another example of an artist doing well for themselves still.
Does anyone ever comply with these "As listeners we must band together" things? I couldn't care less. I like the lo-fi sound myself and put on some Nujabes while in the kitchen. It's a good time.
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.
It's a collective action problem, solving it through our own behavior is impossible.
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Punching down is rarely helpful.
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He's the modern GOAT of that genre for sure - but Nujabes' productions literally pay homage to the sounds of the SP1200, MPC60, etc that really made early hip-hop what it was in the early 90s. If we are to think of who is the GOAT of this genre we need to think more like Pete Rock, DJ Premier, RZA, etc
As a long time (actual) hip-hop fan, I do find it quite hard to muster sympathy for this weirdly isolated, and perhaps disposable, genre? Kind of like, okay, how much did you try to build with the origins of the thing you're using to make new music?
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.
The same thing is happening to jazz playlists. Spotify is cramming jazz playlists with bland interpretations of standards that they paid bottom dollar to desperate conservatory students for. As a long-term jazz fan, I know what I am looking for and it ain't that. But for someone new to jazz who doesn't know exactly what they are looking for, their attention is being diverted to this slop, and they may never discover any dimension of jazz music beyond it, which is kind of sad.
I mean, I don't disagree with you, but nobody should have to compete with AI on the biggest market out there. If the genre was dying because it isn't cool anymore, whatever. If more people are listening than ever, but they're just getting AI lofi to avoid paying artists, then it's bad news.
This presumes AI makes competitively good music. I'm not saying it's not possible or even maybe it's happening somewhere -- but I've yet to hear really good AI hip-hop competitive with humans -- while on the other hand, the "lo-fi" I've heard already sounds like AI-level effort. Not bad, but entirely forgettable.
I'd like to do a tangential mention of SomaFM, web radio that does electronic chill and mood music very well and has survived for a long time on donations.
Spotify is ardently anti-consumer and anti-artist. Their business model extracts revenue by siphoning off artist royalties through label rev-share and then compounds the issue by restricting royalty payouts. Further siphoning off revenue by loading the playlist with AI-trash is not even their worst offense. They're a company begging for an artist boycott.
Yeah, can't wait to go back to Sony installing rootkits on my playback device to make sure we don't pirate their CDs.
Isn't this the result of consumers devaluing art? We want a $12 all you can eat plan, which tends to favor package contracts on the supply side. The direct-to-consumer model for music has been mostly rejected.
Consumers want fast & cheap then want to find fault and point fingers when it isn't good.
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.
Did (most) consumers ever value art? There has always been the very wealthy that commission art, but it seems like throughout history more for less is the typical behavior.
Well, the 90s, I guess.
This is the result of companies screwing over consumers for years.
The model to look to is bandcamp
Sony being bad doesn't mean Spotify isn't also bad.
No, it means that Spotify is way way better - for both us, the consumers, and the authors which can reach way more audience way cheaper than through the old publishers.
A DRM scheme from 20 years ago is not the one and only alternative to Spotify.
I can 99.999…% guarantee that if you buy a CD and rip it today you won’t be rootkitted.
No, you're right - any modern alternative is going to be massively more invasive and abusive to conumers than CDs ever were. And it'll only work on one or two brands of players.
Is there a website that let me auto-queue music based on what I have listened to in the past, and is not a for-profit algorithm like Youtube and Spotify?
With Youtube, I feel like I am the product, and they can't wait to put "sponsored" songs into my feed.
The only good recommendation engine is Pandora's Music Genome Project. It's the only one that auto-queues songs that sound like what you've seeded. Every other service will play you other songs from the same artist or genre, even though they sound nothing like what you've seeded. And then they pepper in other things that have nothing to do with anything - the "sponsored" crap.
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.
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> For us listeners, it’s more important than ever to seek out real artists.
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]
Lo-Fi hip hop already sounds AI generated. It’s music for bubble tea shops.
Or noisy RTO code shops.
I do not dispute that Spotify creates "perfect fit content" tracks. What I will dispute is that, artists with generic bios and AI sounding tracks, are always Spotify tools.
I love lofi I was actually creating a few lofi tracks and doing so taught me a new style, mixing and mastering and release process. If course no money no followers but it’s the creative process. Lofi girl is about the only thing I listen to in that genre on Spotify.
For all it’s “Ai playlist promotion is bad” Spotify will only play things that someone somehow got through their editorals
I listened for 5 minutes and and was confused, as I was waiting for a track to build up to a climax, only for the track to transition to something else of a similar . It's the sort of ambient music played at a store.
You are correct, the tracks do typically remain in a tempo for the whole track. I play it when working and in the background at home because I enjoy the ambience and sometimes I find some unique things in a track and get inspired. It can annoy family members. It’s not for everyone.
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
AI is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth.
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.
I think you’re arguing against continued development of AI? (Apologies if I’ve misunderstood)
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.
Perhaps we need to differentiate between "end products" and "intermediate products". Cloth/fabric is an intermediate product. You use it to make things to sell, so increasing its production while decreasing human labor input is net beneficial, since it increases demand for jobs downstream of the supply chain. Music and art are enjoyed as end products, though. There hasn't been an industry-wide supply chain shortage of music since the invention of the record player (an invention that took music to the consumers, increasing demand from artists).
Truthfully, I don't give a shit about AI. It's a tool to generate mediocre garbage, be that writing, be that images, be that music, whatever, and in those tasks, it can largely succeed. If you want a lifetime of generated Lo-Fi to listen to, it will do that. If you want a lifetime of generated hentai to fap to, it will do that too, and the outputs meet your standards, congrats, you are an average consumer of mediocre art, one among millions, perhaps billions. I wish you personally no ill will.
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.
I started writing music in the mid-90s, did 7-8 albums with intrepid demise, and a few solo albums as well.
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.
Money flows to the things people want. The real housewives, the view, twilight, etc. Hell people make millions simply playing video games on twitch. But nobody is owed an income for doing something they love.
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 their specialization.
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.
> 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.
I also wonder what everyone is supposed to do if skills are simply AI’d in to uselessness.
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.
This presumes the rich are looking further ahead than next quarter which doesn't scan for me considering the sorts of things a lot of them say.
Rich people seem to be content with building a luxurious emergency bunker in new Zealand and then just rolling the dice on whether the world will go to shit or not. The only conclusion I can really come to is that they know the world will be going to shit no matter what they do or something.
Rich people have a prisoner's dilemma if they are sufficiently self-aware. Maximum individual wealth and profit will come from maximally embracing AI. But if everyone does that, they are indeed rolling the dice on whether they'll instead be eating canned beans in New Zealand instead of upgrading their 150ft. yacht to a 155ft. yacht.
> sufficiently self-aware
You look at people like Bezos, Musk and Zuck and tell me they have a shred of self-awareness.
There is this narrative that "every technological revolution eventually created jobs, and this one is no different."
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.
Would an AGI that is “intelligent” enough to replace any kind of human labor deserve independent personhood and remuneration, or would they just be the perfect slave to capital?
The second thing.
Also AGI is a floating signifier thats going to mean whatever is useful to marketers once they've used up the easier ones.
Thats because there is no answer. Marx and all of the people who developed his theories after him have exhaustively and scientifically proved this. That's really whats happening: its not that people dont have an answer is that they're not admitting to the exploitative nature of private capital accumulation. The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.
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.)
> The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.
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.
"capitalism solves this problem, just look at all the revolutions communists did that erased more poverty faster than at any time in human history"
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.
So communism it’s the answer cuz Marx?
its funny, it seems the point of this kind of response is to imply that my analysis is naive or overly simplistic but there are hundreds of thousands of pages of math and science and philosophy on the topic. im not just making this up, im simply explaining why its happening. these smug responses never seem to actually engage with anything except simplistic propaganda substituted in for the actual argument being made.
How can it be propaganda? It’s a short question based on your comment. The onus on you is to expand.
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 answer doesn't seem to be late stage capitalism.
No but some form of socialism mixed with capitalism
I highly recommend people stop using music streaming services, they take away the control of the music listener and producers.
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.
Spotify is a blight upon music and it would be better for our culture if it would cease to exist - I have been boycotting these vultures and culture-vampires since day one but apparently I’m a big weirdo Luddite for that.
Buy music directly from the artist or on bandcamp, stop supporting Spotify if you give a shit about music
Without Spotify and the rest of the streaming services most of the people would just pirate music. I would probably spend less on music than I do now on Spotify per year.
They also wouldn't know about many of the artists in the first place.
It’s trivial to discover new music on platforms like bandcamp, soundcloud, YouTube or even Spotify and then go and pay for the music where it reaches the artists.
Exactly. I've spent thousands to that effect.
That's the point. YOu listen to shit.
You would still give more money to artists directly though — most artists get basically nothing from Spotify
I think it say something about the relatively low-effort nature of this genre that it could be so easily codified and displaced by AI. The human-produced examples in the article follow simple and predictable rules and already sounded pretty artificial before the robots got involved.
Shout out to Flow State (https://www.flowstate.fm/) for their daily album recs which have served me as a nice alternative to Spotify's lofi for the past few years
Wish on the Beat is on Bandcamp as well, although the embedded youtube track isn't available :( https://wishlyst.bandcamp.com
> as most punk rockers and rap artists will tell you, once your sound hits the mainstream it’s time to move on
This is a really interesting quote. I definitely feel that there are analogies in other fields as well.
I always loved lo fi hip hop, even produced some in the 2010s, but for concentration music I now moved on (or went back) to listening to old jungle.
Glad to see the latest generation coming online has rediscovered and embraced adult contemporary genre / muzak / elevator music / smooth jazz.
Yeah, this article misses the mark. The author definitely frames the issue of AI-generated music and stock music in Lofi Hip Hop through a Spotify-centric lens. While they acknowledge that lofi originated and gained popularity outside of Spotify's control, particularly mentioning YouTube channels, it's BS to act like Spotify is the be-all and end-all of this (or any) genre. Disclosure: I've never paid for a Spotify account.
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.
+1 for Shlomo.
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.
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The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Sure songs would get overplayed, but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes.
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.
I couldn't disagree more.
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.
Always extends before you were born and things used to be different. Even fairly recently the exceptions were awesome. Over 25 years ago a friend setup a fairly expensive satellite dish system specifically to be able to listen to WFMU. It’s a NYC station he loved that was being rebroadcast for people who left the area.
The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.
Most, but not all. There are still stations out there bucking those trends.
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.
Before the mid 1980s radio was much different. Basically MTV started the era of music industry consolidation and the Billboard charts getting corrupted. Before the mid 80s there was more regional music and the charts pulled from most cities. Then they switched to just 8 or 12 markets and incorporated other factors that allowed for a #1 based on Corporate influence.
To be honest, I only ever turn the radio in my car on once a month or so, specifically because of this reason. You listen for one hour, you're all set for the month. You've heard everything that channel will play all month long. On repeat, with ads every 2 or 3 songs.
Since you are, I assume, Swedish, this has essentially no relevance to your life, but if you get bored, and you have some way to access it, Mississippi Public Broadcasting made a movie ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31805076/ ) about an FM station that broadcast from 1968-81 in the modest-sized market of Jackson, Mississippi (uh, about 250-300k people at the time).
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.
I couldn't disagree more.
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
Spotify is both in one.
The modern equivalent would be a curated stream, station, etc.
Primetime was very different than late night
yeah it's a hilarious complaint seeing as most radio stations have been a playlist on shuffle with algorithmically determined tracks and no real DJ for over twenty years. It's not different at all from most terrestrial radio. (shout-out to KEXP and KUTX for bucking the trend)
GP is talking about more than 20 years ago, I think.
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.
Some of us on HN are old enough to have grown up on radio more than 20 years ago. It's not ancient history, it's within our lifetime. We experienced the consolidation and genericization you are complaining about personally as we saw our favorite local stations get ruined.
What's really unfortunate is how archaic licensing models makes this nearly impossible to even attempt to address.
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.
> An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide.
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.
>but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes.
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...
Songs banned by the BBC were banned by the management heirarchy.
Songs played by the BBC were, for the most part, chosen by the DJs (particularly true after 19:00.
Internet radio still exists like actual radio streaming online and online only radio (such as radio paradise). With the latter you often can find community around then, voting on what comes next and the financement model are very varied. I know I rather spent the equivalent of a Spotify subscription as donation to independent radio instead of suffering the crass absurdity of an algorithm ala Facebook.
Do you have any proof that radio DJs are less prevalent now than in the past? I'm having trouble finding evidence of that.
Clearchannel (which became IheartRadio) owns most radio stations (>850) in the US. They fired hundreds of DJ's in ~2011.
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.
In the early 80's living in Brooklyn, I would tune into WKTU at 6:00PM every night just to hear
"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 guess Clearchannel/IheartRadio is sort of a private equity "success" story because it is still operating.
Internet DJ’s can’t feed off each other to produce regional music. It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.
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 are 33k broadcast stations in the USA [0], and 11k people employed as disc jockeys [1]
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...
Yes, I agree with your statements. This was a quick attempt to roughly bound the problem. Comment I responded to was surprised that the field had shrunk, I feel this clearly shows it has shrunk at least by a factor of three, but yes, probably more anecdotally as I also live in a large metro area and the only live radio DJs are very niche or very syndicated.
> 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.
If you are including streamers writ large, I would argue we are no longer really talking about the same thing. If we are talking about just internet radio, I would bet any paid, full time DJs there are intended to be included in the Zippia number.
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.
> the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively
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.
I understand it’s trendy these days to shit on Spotify but when I read about this practice it kind of seems like a non-story. Spotify are adding low cost tracks to their curated playlists (which are usually quite boring) to save themselves some money. If you don’t like this practice just don’t listen to their curated playlists. There are so many better user generated playlists out there.
Something I've mulled over in the past is what a market-driven pricing model for streams would look like. Newer songs are generally worth more than older songs, and lean-in listening costs more because the user actually wants to hear a specific song, while in lean-back listening, anything with a similar vibe works.
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.
Sure that would be nice but how do you know what music is lean in/back music?
Active song selection and playlist engagement.
the curated playlists used to be incredibly good.
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.
In the book though she doesn’t talk about discovery weekly being tainted by these low budget tracks. It’s only the curated playlists
I have gotten to the point where I only listen to music now at live performances. Expensive, yes, but streaming music has made it dull and meaningless. I went to so many great underground shows in college and music was something I could feel. Now its just noise.
I'd still like to hear how is that exactly different or worse than the old "publisher" model, where everything is gatekept by publishing megacorporations and they decided what the taste of the decade was.
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?
Influential DJs in influential markets could discover a band or even a group of bands and drag attention other DJs would follow.
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.
Umm, gonna hard disagree. At least before the consolidation of media (whether publishers or record labels), the people who ran publishing houses and record labels did it because they loved books or music as appropriate. Publishing was never a big money maker and book and record stores fall into a weird part of capitalism where they don’t make a lot of money and they have a much larger number of distinct products than most other businesses do. I would guess that the local Target has fewer SKUs on the shelves than a modest-sized bookstore.
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.
There isn't a single story of a successful band that wouldn't hinge on having a big publisher exec approve them and work with them to change their music for acceptance. I think you're heavily rewriting history here.
What about them? One of their biggest early issues was EMI as a publisher not doing enough to promote their songs. Sounds familiar?
I will read that but...
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.
People are also free not to have a FB account. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't criticize the problems that FB has created, amplified or perpetuated through its practices.
I would defend the right to criticize. My point is that artists and consumers have a choice.
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.
Did you know the musicians get paid very little for there music on Spotify? Look I understand the support from music listeners, but Spotifiy as a service really harms musicians. Its really shortsighted to only look at part of the equation.
Doesn't count downstream revenue. Do you see live music? Buy physical music? I do. Many of those artists gain their audience via streaming.
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.
It's an evergreen moral panic.
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.
I’ve moved away from Spotify, and it’s actually quite hard to buy music. Bandcamp has a lot of indie music but not so much for the genres I like. There’s Apple Music but I don’t have Apple devices and Amazon music doesn’t work in my country.
What genres? A lot of labels bundle digital with physical copies. Most/all new vinyl I've bought recently did this. Some like ninja tune have digital only options.
I'm willing to bet if you email the artist they will be happy to point you where to purchase their music digitally.
I could try emailing them or the labels, but the genres I listen to are mostly Latin American
Agreed. it's not like we have to choose. I find Spotify to be pretty good if you want to listen to the rock classics and adjacent music(b-sides).
If you want to discover new music, YouTube Music and SoundCloud seem superior.