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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

As a musician, I'm sad to see that social media are almost exclusively visual. Very few browse their feeds with sound on, videos have subtitles, and any audio content needs a big "SOUND ON" banner to even have a chance of being heard. Music streaming services have all but sunsetted their (admittedly lame) social features and focus on their "1-click mood/activity-based background music" experience. Music fans are relegated to toxic echo chambers like reddit.

I recently heard someone say "music was central to youth culture from 1965 to 2005, but that is no longer the case". I can't help but think it has to do with the 'social media on smartphones' experience, the medium is the message and so forth.

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The music industry have undoubtedly contributed to that. You can't put music in video content without risking takedowns. Or have it in a stream. You're not allowed to have a music culture in fixed recordings.

(I'm a long way from youth culture myself, but I get the impression that what we have now is not "culture" but "cultures"; rather than a single convenient for historians "scene" per time period, all sorts of scenes exist at once. You can't tell me that kpop stans aren't a global youth culture, posting their fancams all over the place. Now wondering if that contradicts what I said above..)

The music industry's culpability in this is even greater than their absurdly litigious approach to intellectual property.

Consider how music videos came to be, in a world where the music industry was struggling to stay relevant in an era of CGI-laden PG-13 Hollywood cinema, arcades, home video, and cable television. Music videos were a way for the music industry to get in on the advertisement and product placement action, from which all the other forms of media were able to profit.

Now that most valuable music today has a very strong brand identity, targeted demographics, a tried-and-true promotional formula, and many times even a full-on music video to go with it, the industry perceives it as a true risk for someone to hear a song and not see the "approved" visuals to go along with that song.

Kevin Macleod has probably enshrined himself in auditory history just by making so much royalty free music that has taken over platforms that aggressive copyright systems police.

I swear I hear something of his multiple times a week in totally random places just because it has suffused so many segments of creative culture online.

> The music industry have undoubtedly contributed to that.

We're really generally talking about megacorporations here, and thinking of them as within any particular industry is unintentionally deceptive. Best to think of them as the wide-ranging financial institutions they are. Very few musicians have any power in the music industry.

I'd go with saying what we're talking about here is a range of products, not a culture or cultures.

> I get the impression that what we have now is not "culture" but "cultures"; rather than a single convenient for historians "scene" per time period, all sorts of scenes exist at once.

I believe this has been true for some time. I remember noticing it in the late 90s, but I suspect that it may have always been so, that the stereotypes of a particular era may have been our simplifications rather than their truths.

If there are any real historians here, I’d be interested if my belief is true or false.

> Very few browse their feeds with sound on,

You have the aggressive advertisers to thank for that. It only takes a few loud ads blaring through the speakers before folks mute web content by default.

I dunno - I think that the old MySpace autoplay bullshit was my first experience of "Ok I need to learn how to stop that ever happening again"

I love music, and I'm open-minded enough to listen from everything to classic rock to the sounds of water dripping.

When I am reading, any unexpected sound is disruptive and disturbing, and I'm grateful that I can largely eliminate it from my Web experience by disabling only two settings in my browser.

I think it is a bit arrogant to push different forms of content on someone who doesn't want them.

I would say that YouTube is a notable exception here. There is a lot of music to be discovered and I personally rarely watch videos there without sound.

Youtube is great for music but I wouldn't call it a social network.

Not being a social network (according to the currently popular^W successful model) is a feature if you ask me.

Tiktok being the notable exception since most content there is pointless without audio/music on.

True, although I would say the content would be even more pointless without the video - the main idea is clearly to present yourself visually. My daughter uses it a lot and an interesting side effect is that she knows a lot of music I didn't expect her to know (various 90's hits etc), but she only knows the hook/chorus or whatever 10-20 second part is used on tiktok.

> Very few browse their feeds with sound on

There's a VERY good reason for that. I can just about stomach autoplay videos, with all their network stuttering and CPU hogging on mobile. At least I can scroll past them. I can't do the same for audio.

Browser makes have had to expend considerable effort to rein in the abuse potential of autoplay videos and tabs that emit sound. Loudness wars made mainstream music lose dynamic range for more than a decade. Advertisers never gave up, they still grab every opportunity to hog attention - and what better way than to come with an audio clip that BLOWS YOUR EARDRUMS?

The reason audio is so disruptive is that we humans process written text with the same parts of the brain we use to process speech. Music with any vocals will interfere with reading. And loud audio from a random ad is enough for us to close the entire browser rather than try to hunt for the tab causing the noise.

You are right, medium is the message. I'm sorry that your medium has been hijacked by parasites and highway robbers.

What about Soundcloud and Spotify? Were there more people actively listening to music before the internet? Maybe more that actively listened to full albums, but I find the music community to be pretty vibrant and diverse, albeit in a very stressful situation right now.

I feel like that is a very optimistic view of social media channels. One of the things that would bug me is when I would tell a fan they should listen to the new album by X. They would go on Pandora and say "play X". They would get a hit song by X (or a song Pandora thought fit their tastes) and then also a bunch of songs by Y and Z. Who knows why it picked Y and Z? Because it was already people they listened to? It was like music they were listening to and Pandora didn't really have a reason to broaden their tastes? What if it was because some songs are cheaper to stream than others?

I have become disillusioned with Social Media as a discovery tool, compared to trusted recommendations or just random sampling.

I agree wholeheartedly and I hope I can change that soon.

By the way, GalaXynth looks awesome, giving it a spin now.

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