> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product.
Man, that's depressing.
Man, that's depressing.
> Man, that's depressing.
If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?
The thing is that "music", is not "one thing". It all depends on the purpose, if there is one, and on the intention of the composer and of the players and of the audience.
Here, Spotify's CEO adresses a very specific market in the music industry, not "musicians" per se.
There is an art to building software, no doubt, in terms of it being a craft. But I think you've misspoken about functional things being artistically beautiful. What you really should mean is that functional things can be aesthetically beautiful, which is true and different.
Art is primarily defined by expression and exploration, particularly revolving around human emotions. Software products, in the end, do not fit this category. There is a vast difference.
Edit: I defined it elsewhere a bit smoother. I define art as the exploration of emotional expression. Art products are the end result of that exploration. Live acts or art or performances could be viewed as a sort of merger between the two, either as a reenactment of the exploration or as a new exploration happening in the moment.
Of course there are loads of software that people use in art. But in the end, those are still solving a problem and are not art. Examples are TouchDesigner, Processing, Logic, Studio One, Pure Data, vvvv, and much more. These software products are not art themselves but are rather solutions to problems to allow artists to create art easier. They are not art products, in my opinion, since they aren't the result of an exploration of expression.
Where the line is blurred for me is in live coding artistic performances. The software there is considered part of the art, as part of the performance. But even then, the software is a tool. If a person uses a hammer in a live art piece, is the hammer now suddenly art? No, I wouldn't think so. It's a tool serving as a utility or maybe medium. It isn't art itself. The art is the performance.
Of course there are always exceptions which cannot be captured in every argument. Something that blurs the line is something like DIN . But see, in such a software product, we begin to see expression and not just a thing solving a problem or being a tool. Similarly with Orca (although I wish they would change the name so as to not interfere with actual orcas which some populations are in danger of going extinct).
In the broader set you have interactive fiction and a whole slew of art that shares a lot in common with time-based art. Demoscene is a good example of the latter.
My favorite game designer is Fumito Ueda. His games of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian are prime examples of games can be art.
"I have always viewed hard, firm, and soft as a description of the ware's malleability. Hardware is not easily changed or updateable, if at all. Firmware is typically code deployed to stay in hardware like an EEPROM, flash, or FPGA, where it can be changed but not necessarily dynamically or easily. Software is able to be easily molded and changed."
And whilst videogames do require traditional artists so do the construction of other mundane software products. Also invoking other disciplines rather ignores a lot of the work that goes into the gameplay itself which is entirely software driven.
Not to mention the other examples you studiously avoided.
Did you think about or read what I described? Because I specifically addressed how I think video games being art does not make software products and code art. You aren't elaborating and then just restating an opinion I've already discussed.
If video games being art means that software products and/or code is art, then you need to consider that the material (paint, metal, etc.) used in paintings and sculptures is art as well and all the other repercussions of such a conclusion. No one would argue that. The paint in paintings is part of the medium and brushes and other such things are part of the tools of the process. In the case of video games, the software is a kind of both tool and medium of how that art is created and experienced. No one is saying software can't be a medium for art, but it isn't the art itself. And again, like I've already said, I don't think video games can simply be defined as software products. Other things called software products, like mobile apps, also have artists and designers, but there the situation is even more removed from art because the app is not expressing anything but is rather solving a problem, providing a service, or giving functionality.
> To quote your own recent definition of software
That quote has nothing to do with this discussion, so I'm not really sure why you're pulling it here. It was from a completely different post, and a non-native English speaker had remarked about how they had thought that the firm in firmware meant something else. I wasn't defining software but rather discussing how hard, firm, and soft in hardware, firmware, and software could be thought of.
> Not to mention the other examples you studiously avoided.
I didn't avoid anything. I didn't feel I had anything to say that adds to the discussion without repeating what I already said. Yes, they're examples. And?
However, I find that they didn't really make a statement about how they view art, although elaboration would help. I think people are confusing things being artistic versus being aesthetic. When people say "code absolutely can be art", I find it's too generic that it does indeed become a silly statement. It dilutes what art is and is overly biased to code, especially since it's likely to be coming from a software developer.
What I really think someone means by "code can be art" is that "code can be aesthetically pleasing", the latter of which I agree with. There's also a difference between "<some thing> as an art" as in doing the thing can be an art or craft and also calling the thing art.
The problem now is an application must look like all other applications or you would see more creativity. Making parts of the app 60% visible so the background came through had a cool visual effect.
Software can be art in itself. Consider quines [1]. (Programs that, when run, produce themselves) They serve no real world purpose, and I consider them beautiful. Kind of like the restrictive format of a haiku. (Edit: Or perhaps tesselations, e.g. Escher's work [3])
I particularly enjoy what this artist(?) has done with their 128 language uroborus quine. [2]
Edit 2: I expect the objection will be that this is not functional, or a "product", however the uroboros quine does have practical uses. E.g. as a system stress test. If it were marketed as a stress test, its artistic value would still be apparent to a programmer examining its structure.
[1] https://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm
As for viewing it; there are also many places where people participate in coding competitions or code golfs, where others judge and appreciate the code.
Is that really so different from going to a concert or an art gallery?
The thing that people don't realize is that it is in fact quite comparable: the binary that one works with to hear a song is not intrinsically worth any more than the same bytes that produce a software application. I'm a musician who now primarily makes music with code. [0] I've decided therefore to always make my music available for free, without exception. We all agree software can and often should be free - music, to me, is exactly the same way.
"First STEM says that the humanities are worthless. Then they say how, really, STEM should get all that glory too because, really, it's the same thing -- but better."
Or this quote:
"Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk."
Interesting quotes. Reminded me of a conversation I had with some local artists a while back who were staunchly in favour of their kids going into STEM because the humanities don't have a direct application to industry any more. They didn't want their kids wasting money on exploratory education, or in pursuit of the arts which they saw as a dead-end. I found that really sad, but it stemmed from an acute awareness of the direction industries like music are going.
Historically, the sciences emerged as areas of philosophy, but they've since become detached from those roots. Those roots have a grounding effect, a sense of the greater context of human life, that's missing in the culture around STEM today. I see echoes of that in the rationalizations made by Spotify's CEO: Who cares if the album is dead? Get with the new program, whatever the cost; it was inevitable anyway.
Philosophy as a grounding context of human life? Talk about historical revisionism. Philosophy has long been about getting beyond the dreary context of human life into grand abstract universals. Even the ones which had pretenses otherwise like Marx-Engle's descendants or primitivists still engaged in the same thing. Revolutions were lead by college students instead of factory workers and farmers based upon theories that find validating observations not just inapplicable but rude and offensive to even propose. That they define themselves as fundamentally not scientists is the biggest tell to the ailment.
The Non-empiricists got left behind long ago, unchanging and then insist that the world has lost touch and not them. The split from philosophy and natural philosophy and from natural philosophy to science was from an inability to accept that they must acknowledge the world as it is, even if they wish to change it.
By doing so the old institutions and concepts refused to change and are "undead" - not truly gone but not growing or adapting to their environment like a living thing. To paraphrase from the Sixth Sense they're dead and don't know it. Now like Bruce Willis thet are wondering why their spouse silently refuses to speak to them at the dinner table and never listens to a word they say.
Harshly yes, you should get with the program because not doing so in some way (even if it is defiantly crafting their own path which may or may not fail) is denying reality.
According to Duchamp an urinal can be art. Presumably code can also then, but it doesn't really confer any addition prestige on code and developers.
* infinitely reproducible for near zero marginal cost
* subject to changing tastes and style
* easily obtainable through illegal means
Edit: I also find that most people treat most music as a commodity much of the time. Why else would random feeds of related music be so popular?
Not for American games, of course, we basically destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts, thanks a lot guys.
"Finishing" a game is a weird concept. I don't know anyone who finished chess.
Small games aren't necessarily cheaper than big ones; it depends on popularity to sustain a low unit price.
That's not even remotely how most art grants work though? The selection process in most (democratic) countries is quite detached from the government.
Your sentence, while it reasonate with me, is seen today as naive and non realistic.
With the success of things like Fortnite seeing games being released for free and relying on the DLC's and skins and rewards as the product.
on the other hand, I think F2P monetized with cosmetic items is a pretty good model for a multiplayer game. anyone with a computer can enjoy the game, and the people who care the most (or have the most disposable income) support ongoing development without messing with the balance.
Software, with rare exceptions, is solving a problem—music is not.
I define art as the exploration of emotional expression, and software simply does not fit into that category except in the cases of using software as a tool or mechanism in the exploration.
The "need" in creating art is often described by artists in that the act of creation is fulfilling an internal need. Writers, musicians, etc. often describe their works as pouring out of them, almost by necessity. This is rarely the case for software and engineering products which seek to fulfill an external need. Software, like engineering, seeks to solve problems. Art can but does not in general.
I personally find it mindblowing and a bit disturbing that I see people in this thread equating software to art. It's a bit disrespectful and elitist to claim that they're the same. Artist make pennies and are being forced by market dynamics to change their expression to merely survive. Meanwhile, software engineers make six figures and retire early playing a game of connect the dots. It's flippant to those artists who struggle for years and years in the hopes of even a modicum of support or recognition and live on pennies.
Software is the product of expression.
Music is the product of expression.
They both can use emotion when creating.
They both can evoke emotion while experiencing.
Who retires first debate: the famous musician or famous programmer is still unsettled.
Classically an artist put themselves in difficult situations in order to grow as a person so the art can say more. Don't be angry at others making money because an artist has choosen a different path.
> Software is the product of expression.
What emotional content are you expressing when you write software? When someone writes a book or music or paints a painting or live performs an art piece, they are expressing emotional content, feelings, stories, etc. Please view my other responses, as I don't want to repeat myself here, but art is different than "<thing> as an art", which relates to art as in craft, and it's also different from things being aesthetically pleasing.
If we're going to dilute the term of what art is so much, then it's pointless to just stop at "software is art", as we should then just say "everything is art" and stop using the word.
> They both can evoke emotion while experiencing.
That's a poor definition. If something simply evokes emotion, that doesn't make it art. Literally everything evokes emotions in humans.
> Who retires first debate: the famous musician or famous programmer is still unsettled.
It's usually not best to discuss edge cases and is better to stick with the general population. Your general software developer is going to be many times well off than your general artist.
> Classically an artist put themselves in difficult situations in order to grow as a person so the art can say more. Don't be angry at others making money because an artist has choosen a different path.
You're implying that artists intentionally suffer? Some artists may, but I think it's more the case that most artists are not given a choice, which was basically the original discussion here. The discussion started off as musicians are now having to compromise and shift from creating music as their end product to simply using music as part of the marketing component of a brand, image, lifestyle, etc. And no one said to be mad at people making money. But the people sitting in one of the most well-paid positions in history, i.e. software developers, shouldn't be making loose allusions to what they do is the same as people living in poverty and the lower class struggling for society to recognize as what they do as useful.
You can also phrase brain surgery and movie watching as "modifying the inner thought processes of the subject", and as such there isn't a clear distinction.
One is art, the other is trade.
One can of course make art one's means of substinance, and one can master one's trade artfully.
I think this is fairly accurate. In software, you can write some for marketing, but keep some proprietary.
Publish your work on github. Software is not your product, it's your marketing.
But then look at games - companies release X games yearly or rely heavily on fans.
But I think that's because open-source software development companies are the exception rather than the norm. No one expects you to open-source your software and then hope someone hires you for your services or buys one of your t-shirts. It's still the norm in our industry to write something and sell copies of it.
Plus, software pays more. Software developers generally don't get squeezed. Musicians, on the other hand, never seem to catch a break.
EDIT: Or, even better, it's the norm to sell a monthly right to use what we wrote.
Also, freemium games have business models very similar to music. Yeah, there are some successful freemium games out there, but in general it's pretty brutal and depressing.
Where I live, they do...go live in one of the countries where software gets outsourced. People are paid < $200 monthly here.
Software developers have skills that are easily transferable than musicians. If software developers stop learning, they will quickly be devalued with legacy maintenance as an exception. We used to value musicians more because of supply and distribution problems. It was an artificially constrained labor market. Now it is not. That's why they aren't getting paid the same. Similar to how writing html and css would get you a good paying job, not now though. Musicians need to change and adapt. They need to pick up more transferable skills.
Basically, in software, you can choose to open-source your software as marketing if you want, but proprietary is still a sustainable business model. The claim here (which I am in no position to evaluate) is that for music, you no longer really have any choice: selling music itself is no longer a sustainable business model; you can only give it away in hopes that you can sell something else as a result.
That is pretty depressing.
Yes, absolutely, 100%! By all means care about image and marketing, but if your actual product isn't good (software, music, or anything else), then who cares?
For music... I'm far less qualified to say, but there's still a notion of (subjective) quality, which is only loosely correlated to marketing. I suppose we could say "good" music is that music which people enjoy, which still is driven by the actual music and not marketing.
However, use-value makes for a very poor metric for evaluating music (I am ignoring arguments about the "usefulness" of music when it's played on a factory floor, making workers slightly more productive). So what must we use to evaluate its "good"-ness? Anything you propose here will have certain people agree, and others disagree, e.g. one set of people say good music must make you dance, and another set will say good music must make you feel relaxed (the opposite of dance).
When aggregated, these individual differences will cancel out. So the average most marketable music must, therefore, be as bland as water.
In the same way, everyone likes different music. It's just that some music is "harder to like" than others. Just as in software utility.
Adobe Photoshop and GIMP are two competing softwares for a specific task - editing photos. Not everyone needs to edit photos. Those who do are voting with their money, because Adobe Photoshop worked faster and more easily at the same task than GIMP. (This can change, with the recent subscription-model only Adobe is pushing that is irritating its core users, but that's a different topic)
Let's return to dance music. Let's say we create a category on spotify and call it - "does it make you dance"? Well, for a swath of youth, EDM makes them dance. But for a swath of Latin-speaking users, bachata music makes them dance. Let's say they are of equal number in the population. You can see here that even averaging based on the category of "does it make you dance" will produce some rather unfortunate results (a combination of half-EDM-half-bachata that will fail to tug at the heartstrings of anyone at all, but might be vaguely palatable vaguely dance-y playing in the background of a grocery store). However, this kind of music - the one that can vaguely capture both audiences - is exactly the one that will get the most people to listen to it, and based on Spotify's model of quantity over quality, it is the one that will get most rewarded.
Some people like vim. Some people like VS Code.
I still don't think it's really different.
I think it's a little sad that you can't write some great software that solves a problem for people and get paid for it anymore. Or at least not as easily as in the past.
The changing business model has a lot of negative externalities, too. Like the temptation to monetize user data instead of monetizing the value of the software directly, and the temptation to push the line on privacy.
I think that you're ignoring the fact that you were actually getting paid for solving their problem, not for great software per-se.
Just because the constraints on different parts of the value chain have changed, altering where the convenient bottlenecks are for extracting payments, doesn't make the past environment any better overall, just different.
It did happen. We call it "In App Purchasing". And we ALL loathe it like the plague.
In the case of open-source software, they're probably marketing consulting, books, training. (I think conferences would likely be part of the marketing.)
And that, folks, is how we end up with those crapulacious open-source software tools (libraries, whatever) that are deliberately incomprehensible to anybody outside the producer bubble. e.g. Bouncy Castle: Utterly shite API to the point of unusable, despite the undoubtedly well done implementation underneath; completely absent documentation in any useful/usable form. Everything around it is just, "Buy our books, come on our courses if you want to use this library." The code itself is obfuscatory. Not a design document or user-guide in sight.
(Other examples abound. I just pick on the one that burned me the worst.)
So, back to music. How is this a good result for the "market"?
We end up with a flume of mediocre-to-crap music (but frequently! as if that's a good thing all by itself) all in the name of marketing,... what precisely? Where's the passion gone? Where's the art? Where's the music I'll listen to over and over again for decades?
It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.
It's rare that an album contains all gems.
Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better.
There's a story about a ceramics professor that would divide his class in two at the beginning of the semester. He would grade one group by the quality of their best piece at the end of the semester and the other group by the weight of all the pieces produced during the whole semester. The professor said that invariably, the best pieces were produced by the people in the group that was graded by the weight of their pieces. His hypothesis was that people graded by the weight would produce a lot more pieces, so in the process they would also get really good at making the pieces, whereas the people graded by their best piece would just spend too much time on their pieces trying to make them perfect and wouldn't get enough practice to actually become better at making them.
That's true for engineering, but for music it only goes so far. A lot of musicians working this way will, after a while, find a formula that repeatedly sells, but loose a lot of originality in the process.
Not a popular opinion here, but I really don’t think that coding is very comparable to pure art like music or painting, and I think that a lot of these ideas come from that place(that coding is art). Coding is art like electrical work is art—there is certainly a distinction between work crafted by a master and something muddled together by an amateur, but at the end of the day it’s functional. In these trades it’s perfectly okay to have creative fatigue as long as all the parts are good. If you have great variable names, nice modular form, terse functions, excellent descriptive comments, etc, its actually better if you have a monolithic unchanging form. Pure art, that is art meant to be consumed in the form its created, by contrast, brings with it all kinds of aesthetic values that are put by the way side in coding, and novelty and creativity are front and center.
That's one of the aspects of the new economy... only a very small minority of artists can literally go dark for 3-4 years to write something that will rise to the top instantly.
Think of it like a software roadmap: Is it better to wait 6 months and release a bucket of features twice a year, or to release features gradually throughout the year and measure their effectiveness? Some might say that releasing features gradually is "rushing things out", while others might say that it's the only way to ship non-broken software that people actually want to use.
That’s just producing a commodity.
Some groups have got it together and are able to fund years of quiet work before releases, but no matter how much I enjoy creating I would hate to be so bound as outlined above.
I’d argue that it’s worse, though. Shorter cycles are even less healthy.
And just because it’s been done before(-ish) and other endeavours run in this timeline doesn’t make it good or beneficial to anything but those who aspire to only make money off of it.
The fact is, good music doesn’t require business to be good music. And the business doesn’t necessarily require the music to be good—it just requires that it directly or indirectly generates revenue. From the perspective of commerce the rest is incidental.
Encouraging the commercial perspective over something more balanced is a net negative for culture and society. At least I think so.
https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic...
It turns out that the students who were just churning out pots ended up making the pots that were ultimately better.
I think there's probably something to be said for constantly creating.
In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.
A lot of things can be said and some expressions of the same thing are just better...
They do their best on every song and that's just how it turns out.
I can imagine it's true that churning out quantity is its own education but I can also imagine there's a plateau past which deliberate practice and polish matter quite a bit.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance"
Some of Steve Albini's interviews are really on point with regards to this stuff. Really worth listening to if nothing more than to provide contrast to comments like the one above (which seem pretty reductive and flippant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAc3hx5pok
Now, being a musician or an artist, you decide what you do with it. If you consider that what matters is your sales and nothing else, Spotify's stance might apply to you. But you might have different point of view as well, still make music, and still live from it, perhaps.
I also find it depressing. It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology. We see it everywhere from the STEM myth to arts educational programs and artists struggling just to survive. Even earning my living in science and technology, I personally have grown to believe art is far more important for human progress and development than science and technology. It's a real problem that we blindly let markets decide what is important because it is in fact humanity's lack of progress emotionally, which is unfortunately tied strongly to our biology, but our insane progress in technology that causes almost all of our problems.
> It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology.
Want to give a couple of examples against this:
- some of the most valuable software out there is free and open source. The authors of said software don’t get compensated anywhere near the softwares value. Coz everyone uses it for free.
- I very much value the games I play on my iPhone, but I have never paid any money for them.
- I will buy Opeth t-shirts, and Akerfeld custom guitars, but I’m never going to give Spotify as much money.
So, I don’t think your claim is so clear cut as you state it.
I don't find this depressing. I don't even find this societal at all. What would be depressing would be to take Spotify's view of "what music should be" or "how musicians should work/behave" for a relevant, world-wide truth. When it is only a very specific, skewed and biased take by someone's who's got a direct interest into making people believe that it is the only way to go.
That many people go this way does not mean they are right, neither they are winning.
If you instrumentalize music to maximise your influencer career with the content of the music as an afterthought what you get isn't art but a mediocre commodity.
It's like Ricky Gervais remark at the Globes, the actors aren't actually actors any more, it's a competition for the best looking, most ripped steroid junkie.