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Comment by jorvi | Hacker News Reader

> Even a decade ago he could see the danger in most people getting their news from un-curated, un-vetted content.

I feel this is also a problem with music. The last 10 years you can just dump whatever you want on Soundcloud or go private release on Spotify.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not celebrate the label system at all, and maybe that freedom of getting your music out there is worth the cultural cost we pay, but for example what East Coast Hip-Hop had with Stretch & Bobbito, that kind of curation is sorely needed. These days for curators it’s all about hype and whatever gets you a buck, but as was said in Stretch & Bobbito’s documentary “we’d play stuff that probably only appealed to like a hundred people out there. But it was dope, and dope deserves to be heard”.

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On the contrary I think the music industry is way better now. Curation is already handled for us by algorithms like Discover Weekly.

I’ve discovered far more songs and bands through Spotify than I would have in the pre-Spotify era. And many of these songs are ones with just a few thousand views, as alluded to in your comment.

The modern music industry allows for the best of both worlds.

I've had a different experience with Spotify - their discover Playlists are trash for me

My god. I got stuck hole where every path led to Cindy Lauper.

Not the worst outcome.

I find I have a better experience discovering music by making a playlist and then doing the playlist radio to get more music similar to it. Eventually it just plateaus and keeps giving me the same artists as the playlist, but there's a kind of sweet spot where I've found stuff I wouldn't have found otherwise.

Music curation was done by actual people before, almost every social circle had some kind of DJ or music digger providing new stuff. It's another point where technology had a negative influence on the social fabric of society.

It's easy to underestimate how important scenes are in music - clubs, musicians, DJs, producers, promoters, managers, vinyl stores, even musical instrument stores - all cross-networking and building organic scenes which incubate influential styles.

Scenes exist on social media, but they're much more diffuse and for some reason are more likely to tinged with irony and/or nostalgia. So they seem to be less effective and - ironically - less experimental and creatively diverse.

It still is done by actual people, just not as many who do it professionally.

The vast majority of my music recommendations come from friends and acquaintances who share tracks in FB groups, chat, amateur Bluetooth speaker "DJing" at gatherings and so on.

"Hey man, you gotta hear this one" is alive and very well.

Amusing. This is still pretty common. In fact, I'd say there are more of these than before. The change you perceive is more likely to be a characteristic of you and your social circle (perhaps you are older, perhaps the friend who would have done that is now taking care of his firstborn, perhaps you've outgrown those groups).

You'll see this same thing in so many different places. People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.

The "problem" is the oversaturation with good enough or listenable stuff, meaning that careful curation by people doesn't have the social impact it had. Curators are middlemen and become obsolete similar to traditional media in aggregation theory.

A reaction or evolution from that is that many who were curators or DJ's get into music production, which means that they hang out in music studios of some kind, forming different social connections (e.g. with musicians). It creates a social divide between the people who just consume from algorithms and those who create.

>You'll see this same thing in so many different places.

Because it's an inherent feat of technology. Groups also form because different people bring different things to the table. One might be into music, the other one into cooking etc.

But cooking isn't enough, it has to be keto & vegan. People move up one level which changes the composition of their social circle.

>People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.

I wish it were like that because I'm a tech geek myself, but thinking more deeply about the topic and the composition of groups has changed my mind. The divide created by technology is real imo because it isolates groups.

>The divide created by technology is real imo because it isolates groups.

The divide is real when it's blindly applied without thinking about social disruption is what I wanted to say.

> Music curation was done by actual people before

You can find such thing now as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23717756

It still is. DJ mixes

As long as your favorite music is “overproduced electronic music” in a couple different flavor this is the best time to be alive. Everything else is dying.

what a lame comment, plenty of obscure indie bands are thriving thanks to spotify

If by thriving you mean “make almost enough money to cover the cost of renting a studio” then sure.

Spotify discover is great but they haven't solved the problem of flow. Songs that don't fit in context are played next to each other. I wish we had John Peel back in its place, but then I suppose it's on me to find a good dj.

This is precisely the reason why I prefer playlists to anything Spotify recommends. Playlists are human curated. I kinda wish Spotify just bought Pandora and their music DNA. I really mis Pandora’s recommendations

Steve Jobs made a similar comment about artists uploading anything. This story is from the founder of CD Baby:

The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In A Keynote https://sivers.org/itunes

I strongly disagree on entertainment, what appeals to a specific person is a function of that person and the skill the performer has in the aim to hit that spot.

A performer, no matter how more talented that person is, will deliver a worse performance if they are trying to aim more broadly.

Whereas with news the issue is that news died when they optimized for ads/engagement, but that is fundamentally why Facebook, Twitter etc are all terrible. The interests of the user and the interests of the creator are mismatched.

what stops there being soundcloud djs who curate and play the good stuff on their podcasts?

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