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Comment by oconnor663 | Hacker News Reader

I think it could be depressing if we think of "your product" as "the most important part of what you do". But we could also think of it as "the thing that you need to make money from". If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!

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> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed, rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance"

> If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!

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.

Faster, smaller releases, compared to one new album every few years do not necessarily need to compromise on quality.

It's rare that an album contains all gems.

> but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases

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.

> Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better.

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.

I really like this anecdote, I find it very prescriptive for life, but I don’t think it applies. Professional musicians aren’t learning how to make music like the students of the ceramics class, they are mostly fully developed artists with their own artistic style and voice. I think that constantly producing art leads an artist to become a slave to his prior work, a sort of creative fatigue. In order to foster development of an artist’s voice, they need space to get away from that style and explore other styles and forms of art.

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 not the only argument that Ek is making.

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.

You don't necessarily have to "rush" for faster releases, you just have to think about releasing in a different way.

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.

Not if you’re coerced into having to produce a piece of music every month/couple of months to keep the machine running.

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.

A lot of creative endeavors run on this timeline. It's just a shorter cycle and it's not new.

You’re right. It’s not new. Not for pop music anyway.

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.

I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work.

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.

Just FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions

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.

It definitely works for the "writing a song" bit.

A lot of things can be said and some expressions of the same thing are just better...

I am not a musician but my guess is that they don't sit down and say "I'm going to record an album with 9 bad songs and one good one."

They do their best on every song and that's just how it turns out.

After hearing this story for years and finally trying to source it, as far as I can tell it's not entirely clear this experiment was ever actually run -- and in fact is sourced in the link behind your link as a "parable."

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.

Well t's a better parable than the one about boiling a frog, so I guess it got that at least.

It’s still possible to batch composition and production with this release model. The lead time saved from releasing digital only can be used to polish the earlier tracks in the schedule.

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