Has music streaming killed the instrumental intro? | Hacker News Reader

Has music streaming killed the instrumental intro?

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79 pointstosh85 comments

I do instrumental exclusively, unless you count weird vocal synths. Maybe the author of this study shouldn't have constrained it to the top 10...

There's a huge world of music out there. The most popular stuff is a tiny little sliver meant to appeal to the greatest number of people. For me, things have only gotten better since discovering a bunch of weird niche stuff in the '00s, especially since Bandcamp and Soundcloud gave indies a place to find an audience without investing in the infrastructure needed for streaming and sales.

I was going to say something similar but not as harsh. I definitely think that the internet has made finding niche music that less of difficult a thing, but when the set you normalize over is the set of popular music rather than all music, his argument is sound.

An interesting question (and more difficult one to answer) would be whether access to niche music has increased and more people pursue niches in general today than before.

I would think you'd have to argue that the answer is more. The crux being that mega companies no longer have absolute control over a limited number of distribution channels (e.g., traditional radio).

That has to have led gaps for other genres to edge in. Look at EMD a couple years ago. That, I don't think, was driven by top down marketing dollars. I think you're likely talking about less accessible genres, but I think the EMD example still applies.

EDM? (Electronic Dance Music)

Or am I missing something and EMD is not a typo (quite possible)?

Yes. Typo. Sorry. Thx.

EDM? The resurfacing of 90's Eurodance? Is there anything more commercial? Maybe that's my European viewpoint, so please elaborate if I am wrong.

Yes. But in the US it was never given much respect, and thus no mainstrean viability. That changed. I'm suggesting it could be because the gatekeepers lost their control.

There is nothing harsh about it (in its current form; for all I know GP may have edited something out). The author of the study deliberately and explicitly limited it to top-10 singles.

I think a much broader study would be less interesting in the sense that the top ten music reflects trends in popular music production. The long tail is probably harder to generalize.

This study says something about how many people consume music, or at least how the big peddlers want them to consume it.

noobermin might have read some anti-pop snobbery into my comment. I actually think pop is highly skilled. You don't just throw down some notes and vocals on Canon in D's chord progression and make a global hit. It takes real, skillful work in composition and sound design to make that happen.

Yeah I would definitely say electronic dance music, at least how it exists in Europe, is a definite counter example. A dance track will always have a intro and a outro for mixing purposes and will probably be between 5-7 minutes in length, regardless of weather its uploaded on Soundcloud or a limited press on vinyl.

As far as pop music goes, it seems only natural that music which was for decades made for radio will change once the primary medium changes. The main purpose of intros seems to be for the radio DJ to talk over it.

And that's why the more pop-oriented tunes have a so-called "radio edit" which skips the intro. Take, for example, Tim Deluxe's "It just won't do". This[0] is the dj-friendly club version. This[1] is the radio edit.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gw78LeYk8

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfluyMiVuTs

[EDIT: fixed the first link]

[I didn't read the article, but] I think the move to buying songs one-at-a-time has hurt the whole 'album' concept, including long intros, long interludes, and the idea of a body of work that builds on a theme.

Yeah, this makes me sad. I mostly listen to music when I'm working, and hearing the same mix of 50 "top hits" gets tiring really fast. 45-60 minutes of music that has some similarity and continuity is WAY better.

If this were true, wouldn't radio have had the same affect?

Radio used to be advertising for albums. Two are three singles from an album would get featured over the course of 6 to 9 months and if you liked them you'd buy the full album.

Yes, though a radio station would often times start with an intro and let the record play through the next track (speaking as a child of the 70's when progressive rock / concept albums were at their peak). DJs & programming directors knew that certain tracks would not make sense on their own and would adjust.

I have a hunch that it's not streaming that's really responsible, per se, but the "Shuffle" function that's been available since the CD player. I tend to have a large playlist and more often than not, I set it to shuffle the tracks. But I did essentially the same thing when I had a 60 CD changer years ago, too. I think this trend probably started there, accelerated when MP3s and ripped CDs became popular (prior to steaming services) and streaming is just the next step in that progression.

The way we consume other media is likely to part of this as well, so saying it's streaming is perhaps a bit of a stretch even if streaming makes it possible to jump more easily.

(for the record I have not read the article, though I scanned it to be sure they were talking about streaming services).

SiriusXM's Beatles channel plays pairs of songs together when that is the norm on the radio. Some White Album songs basically lead into each other, iirc.

Queen's "We Will Rock You"/"We Are The Champions", Boston's "Foreplay"/"Long Time", and Alan Parsons Project's "Sirius"/"Eye in the Sky" are examples of this. It's almost strange to only hear one half of the pair, and in the case of Foreplay and Sirius, those are completely instrumental.

Good radio stations still honor these unwritten requirements.

Also, "Eruption"/"Running with the Devil", too.

You didn't have much choice back then. A few songs were released as single tapes, but a full album wasn't much more expensive, plus many stores did not carry singles, or if they did, the selection was often small. There was no concept of a single CD.

That's not quite true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_single

But they were never very popular.

interesting. learn something new everyday.

Not to jump on, but there were definitely single CDs - the singles charts (Top 40) were compiled from the sale of CD Singles (and Cassingles, as the cassette versions were called). A #1 hit was determined by who sold the most CD singles, not albums - which is why pop music dominated the Top 10 singles charts, but rock bands would dominate the Top 10 albums. In Australia, a CD single cost $5 up to $10, while an album cost $30.

Also, CD singles were collectors items, because they would often come with bonus tracks that weren't available on the album or anywhere else. Sometimes they were just live recordings, but sometimes they were fully produced studio recordings that didn't quite make the cut for the album, but were still amazing. (Nirvana's "Even In His Youth" jumps to mind, as well as The Prodigy & Tom Morello collaboration "No Man Army".) I still remember my local 2nd-hand CD shop selling a rare Nirvana CD single for $100, and as a kid wishing I could afford to buy it.

More directly, it has hurt the monetization of those concepts, which inevitably affects their popularity. The concept of the album is still dear enough to many people that there it will continue to exist in the fringes until something else comes along.

I think that was true for the iTunes years before Spotify and other streaming services came along. Before, you had to pay for each song so you picked just a few you liked. Now, it's just as easy to play the whole album as to play one song. (In facts, it's easier to queue up an album than to play one song at a time since you have to choose what to play fewer times per time interval.)

Anecdotally, we've seen whole-album concepts become big hits in recent years: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, etc.

On top of that, almost all hip-hop songs these days have intro tags (which producers worked on the song.) Not instrumental of course, but non-song content none-the-less.

That's great to hear (heh). I haven't used those services because I buy albums and listen to college radio. But when Pandora first came out I was pretty blown away.

On still the other hand though, an awful lot of people these days just cue up some music style or artist as opposed to choosing what specifically to play. I know that's what I tend to do. I think it's hard to argue against the idea that the album concept has mostly declined in relevance since its heyday.

I'm sure lots of people do that, but it's actually easier with the streaming services to listen to an entire album than it was a few years ago when iTunes 99c/song was the dominant model.

Pay-per-song encouraged playlists and "greatest hits" type mix CDs, but didn't encourage anyone to purchase B-sides or interstitial tracks. At least with services like Spotify et al, you aren't paying per track, so you have the option of listening to a whole album as a single body of work.

Of course, not everyone wants to do that, which is cool.

Also wanted to mention logics new album, Everybody, and his previous album, The Incredible True Story, are great example of the whole-album concept but specifically interweaving storytelling into the album idea which I believe made the albums much more engaging and enjoyable to listen to.

Before you could buy music one song at a time we complained that the music labels would release a new album with three new songs and the rest was just the same old songs from their other albums. And then comes the "Greatest hits" collections with even more copies of the same stuff.

I feel like the long intro-outro are better reserved for the live performance and I thought this long before digital singles.

I suppose there’s more emphasis on streaming and singles, but when someone actually aims for an album, it’s as good as ever.

If you want to avoid this, just don’t listen to popularity based radios like spotify. EDIT: Apparently it's not popularity based. I still find it's difficult to avoid single-oriented contemporary music. Ironically I've found pandora to be pretty good at this.

Just ordered two new vinyl LPs this month :)

Spotify is not a popularity-based radio. It includes that feature, but in my opinion the product is more suited for selective listening. Maybe you meant to say Pandora?

Streaming allows you to pull the whole album rather than making arbitrary choices though which is a good thing.

It has however wrecked my attention span which I’m trying to fix. I bought a CD player with a monitor output and some CDs and some nice headphones. I can actually enjoy my favourite albums now.

I've sold about 12 albums (though most are closer to traditional EP length). Never sold a single. I remember seeing some data that said that was the norm on Bandcamp. I think albums are doing fine, but maybe the amalgam of loosely connected musical product that most albums are is not working anymore.

All the albums I've sold have had a clear narrative thread going through it, while all the random assortments I did early on never sold.

It's almost as if it varies by genre and there is no hard and fast rule if you're talking about all music.

I love albums: concept albums and gapless albums especially.

I think limited storage space on mp3 players did more to damage albums than digital purchases.

I think that was true during a window of time. When MP3 players first came out, you selectively ripped songs because of storage limitations and didn't just fill MP3 players with complete albums as might have been natural to do.

Napster, etc. also encouraged a shift to individual songs before iTunes took off.

In any case, for the most part, people were weaned off of the album concept which, after all, was a construct that was primarily a function of how music was delivered and sold.

I used to think this until I listened to a lot more older music. A lot of pop records cut in the 50s to 60s had no "theme" other than the generic love/sex/dancing themes common to all pop music. I think the concept albums we know now are a few of exceptional concept albums that are just as uncommon then as they were now.

The technology advancement allowed the concept of a concept album.

I think it comes down to personal preferences.

I love listening to entire albums. I don't have favorite songs, I have favorite artists. If I like the artist, I listen to an entire album by them. I have never once in my life paid for a single song. If and when I buy music, it's by the album and not by the song.

Glad to hear this. I thought I was one of the few people left in the world who bought entire albums and listened to them in entirety.

A lot of my most favourite songs are the lesser known or unreleased ones on an album.

Yeah, I've been loving Bandcamp quite a lot for this. Finally there's a truly dignified way to buy and sell copies of albums. I'm free to reencode, batch modify the tags, add replaygain tags based on EBU R128/ITU-R BS.1770, copy freely to all my devices, stream it anywhere.

It's always sad to me when a band moves off the platform, because generally speaking it means that I will not buy their album at all, except maybe on CD, or if they have a similar website which allows me to get an archive of the whole disc in FLAC.

I'm the same way.

For a brief period in my teenage years I would put my entire pirated music collection on shuffle and listen to whatever came on, but at some point I just started listening to entire albums, start to finish.

I think it began when I started listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson when I was 15. As artists they tended to release concept albums or at least albums that told a story from start to finish, with one track bleeding into the next effectively.

Since then listening to whole albums is all I do and when first listening to a new artist i listen to whole albums starting with their first release and working through them chronologically.

That gives me the full taste of what they are about as artists and also lets me experience their evolution as musicians over time.

I recall reading that the push for shorter intros and 3 to 3.5 minute songs was radio, pre-streaming.

This is purely anecdotal, but there are a bunch of songs I can remember hearing on the radio growing up (15-20 years ago, although the songs were much older than I was) that had extended instrumental intros that were almost always cut out; offhand, "Jump" by Van Halen and "Fly Like an Eagle" by Steve Miller come to mind, although I'm sure there are others I can't quite recall (technically the intro to "Jump" was listed as a different track on the album, but it wasn't ever played on its own, as it was only about 30 seconds long). There are also plenty of songs where the radio would play the shorter "single" version of the song, which would usually have instrumental parts cut out, rather than the album version. Although the radio format definitely encouraged shorter songs, there were plenty of workarounds already in use for longer songs.

It's very common with a separate edit intended for radio play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_edit

I was flabbergasted when I discovered the The Knack's "My Sharona" was cut down considerably for radio play. When I finally got the album back in the day, I was blown away by the extra bit (including the whole second guitar solo) that I had never heard before.

The unedited version is so good too.

There are about 30 seconds of intro to Jump, but are you talking about the track "1984", which is just synthesizers? Sure, the track isn't played on its own but it's more of an intro to the album than an intro to Jump.

Every time I've heard it on the radio, it was as an extended intro to "Jump" (which admittedly is a small percentage of the times that I've heard "Jump" on the radio). It also flows quite naturally into "Jump" due to the shared synthesizer effects, whereas a lot of the other stuff on the album has little to no keyboards.

Also from the 70s: Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding by Elton John (on the Yellow Brick Road album, vocals start at 5:35) and Foreplay / Long Time by Boston (on the debut album, vocals start at 2:30). Of course, each of these is really an instrumental piece prepended to a vocal song.

Yes' masterpiece, Close to the edge, has nothing but "nature" sounds for the first 57 seconds. The first human vocal sound (”aaahhhh") is at 2:00, while the first lyrics are at 4:01. But then the song, or suite, really, is 18:45 long. I'm too lazy to check their other long works.

I think in the "45" era, it was common to have under 3 min songs. Elvis, chuck berry, etc.

The graver thing for me is the awful lifting of the volume floor, so everything is loud. Apparently this became a thing in the mid to late eighties and persists. It's said MJs Thriller which has a couple remasterings shows the effect in action as the later remasterings up the effect.

3-4 minutes is also a very common / desirable length of music for dancing. Not sure if it's common now because of the 45 era, or the other way around, but at least in those genres, it would be close to optimal time for DJs.

It was for singles for radio, pre-streaming, but not every song on an album would be a radio-featured single, only a couple; these acted, for the album, the way that trailers for a movie work. (And, often, those radio singles were edited down from the album version of the song.)

Now (more, I think, because of pre-streaming iTunes and the like than streaming) the unit being sold and listened to by purchasers is more often the single, rather than the single being a tool to sell an album.

Personally, with unlimited streaming services, I listen to albums more than I have anytime since everything was purchased on physical media (and more than even then, because for me streaming has almost entirely displaced radio, so less of my music time is constrained by a medium which doesn't really allow listening to albums), but I don't know how common that is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entertainer_(song)

> Another verse in the song references the shortening of Joel's song, "Piano Man", from 5 minutes and 38 seconds to 3 minutes and 5 seconds to fit a radio slot, referenced by the lyrics

    It was a beautiful song,
    but it ran too long  
    If you're gonna have a hit
    you gotta make it fit
    So they cut it down to 3:05.

It's, like, been over 50 years since "the medium is the message" popped out loud and clear out of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message - not bad, but the original short book also delved in classifying media as 'hot' or 'cold', which is an interesting idea in itself. Not sure I buy it, but interesting.)

Is it out of fashion at media studies joints?

If you're prepared to look beyond popular music services, there is a whole world of music out there, of all genres, that is perfectly healthy and doesn't necessarily conform to whatever is in vogue this particular minute.

I haven't listened to a popular radio station in a long, long time, and I don't use any streaming services either. I find music the old fashioned way I guess, but I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no real substitute for getting your hands dirty and digging around for the gems. I found 3 excellent new (to me) bands just this month!

We all have our passions, however, and it takes considerable time and effort to dig. For some, I guess they have other hobbies that consume that time and they're happy to hear whatever comes their way on the radio (or the stream).

The conclusion of the article seems a bit of a stretch. I'd guess long intros existed at least partly for radio DJs to talk over.

But maybe it's still right: the structure of music is dictated by who spins the media.

I've about had it with these "Has X killed Y?" headlines. My clickbait detector is tingling.

You're missing out. It's a shitty title but the content is pretty interesting.

I run a record label[1] and for our music that we think could have a broad appeal we are at pains to ensure there isn't too much of a instrumental intro for the reasons this article describes. It makes me a little sad that this is the case, but it is. We can watch the drop off stats after a long intro-ed song.

[1] Records On Ribs - http://recordsonribs.com

Yep, I hear it all the time. "No, that song is boring! No, not that one either!". Daughter with friends trying to find good hardrock songs, listening to Nightwish and such. They are 9 years old. Parents cringe and have a lecture in intros.

> Records on Ribs gives away its music for free.
> To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets. Desire cannot be quantified thusly.

> We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received. We want to beat the system but we have to survive within it.

Do you fund the recordings? Are these a lot of home studios?

Genuinely interested. Music is way more interesting than programming to me. I may have more questions for you.

New Model Army, Vagabonds, around 1.15M hits:

https://open.spotify.com/track/41bdgBL7tjwQOl7RpwubKU

The "real" version, with a fantastic build-up violin intro that to my ear at least, makes this a truly great song. Not sure how many hits, but it doesn't make it into their "top 5", so presumably below 350k hits:

https://open.spotify.com/track/3WBwyZLd4hzMibFg6tVqh9

Just one datapoint perhaps - but a great sounding one :)

intros have been poorly done by many artists. When Pink Floyd does it, wow. When The Tea Party does it it's gimmicky.

I could not imagine VH's Hot for teacher without that intro.

5 year old: "Daddy, what's that??!?!??!"

Me: "A drum solo"

Two minutes later: "Daddy, I want to play drums!"

If anything there's more purely instrumental music now.

Contrarian view: Instrumental intros weren't ever that popular, we just didn't have an easy way to skip them 2 or 3 decades ago.

What? This is absurd. Trends in music change over time. New instruments, new musicians and new styles.

... and new formats

And the last change really changed music itself.

Radio DJs have been cutting out intros for at least 50 years. When I was a kid I didn't have enough money to buy albums and got all my music from the radio. When I finally did start buying music I heard all sorts of intros I never knew existed.

Simply put the long musical intro in a separate track. A lot of albums do this.

It’s no wonder that Fela Kuti (though legendary) and Antibalas have never gone mainstream with most songs being purely instrumental for a good five minutes or more before the vocals start.

I love Fela's long intros! They're long enough that you start to think they're the song. And then here comes this whole other groove and THAT'S actually the song.

people not wanting to here intros killed them.

"Don't bore us, get to the chorus!" :) https://youtu.be/YFHD7kuAqu4?t=2m0s (D.Grohl on writing a hit)

Stoned Jesus - I'm the mountain

The music business as we knew it died. It has been replaced with this streaming content business. We're lucky we get any new music at all.

You have not spent much time on soundcloud or the like then?

Most of it lacks polish, but there is still a lot of good, fun, stuff being made in many genres.

I haven't bought a physical album or digital song in years. Most of my friends haven't either. I am always shocked whenever I see an album sell over 1 million in the first week. These labels have to be buying their own music, there is no other explanation.

I've started buying CDs again for my car. I have bluetooth on my phone but don't want to be distracted by it and I find the built in controls on my player nicer to use. Also I see it as a way to more directly contribute to the artist vs streaming on spotify.

I've started buying albums as more of a collector's item, especially for lesser known artists.

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