On the other hand, when did we get to a point where an artist should have no control about how their work should be presented?
Anyway, presumably you can still copy the album to a playlist and shuffle that.
Anyway, presumably you can still copy the album to a playlist and shuffle that.
Since forever? When did artists have rights to control how their work is presented? There are restrictions on making derivative works (but that goes beyond simply presenting the work in a different way), and there are explicit permissions to present works in ways where artists are likely to disagree - e.g. parody and satire; and at least in USA the courts have repeatedly rejected the notion of "moral rights" i.e. being able to restrict the context the work is used if the economic rights have been properly licensed.
The composer does not have the right to restrict me from playing their song on an out-of-tune instrument while trying to fart in unison; the poet does not have the right to restrict me from reading their poem with a horrible pronunciation and with commentary that completely misses their point; the painter does not have the right to restrict me from using their masterpiece as a literal doormat for wiping dirty boots. Copyright grants them exclusive rights on making copies and a few other things, but not control about how these copies of their work should be presented or used.
I only play songs for the music and rhythm. I cannot easily make out the words, nor do I care to. If I did write songs, I would not care if someone listened to them in order or not, to each their own.
There are forms that do tend to have a creative unit larger than one 3-10min "song": opera, symphonies, musicals, song cycles. But in pop music, there sure is a lot of work out there designed to stand alone as a single.
Moreover, they're not removing the ability to shuffle and album; they're just making it play in order by default, which is a very sensible default and all but certainly the expected behavior.
> Spotify users could still choose to shuffle an album, but the system would default to playing tracks in the order chosen by the artist.
The ~20-min/side LP record was introduced in 1948, according to Wikipedia, while jukeboxes date back to the 1890s.
Also apparently the term "record album" comes from the books people would put their collection of singles in, before the advent of the LP. Sort of like the folders we stuffed our CDs in to haul around in our bags in the 90s, except bulkier. Publishers would put a collection of songs by a single artist or group out in an album designed to hold them, with cover art and presumably liner notes; once the LP format was introduced, this got collapsed into a single disc in a package that was still called an "album". Now I know why it shares a name with things like a "photo album". I have never questioned that word use in the entire fifty years of my life, and now I wonder why I never did.
Wikipedia also notes that it is arguable that the first "concept album" - a record album designed around a theme, with the intent of being listened to as a single unit rather than a collection of songs - is a 1940 Woody Guthrie album full of songs on a single theme (semi-autobiographical stories about being a migrant laborer in the US during the 1930s), but they didn't really get started until after the LP made it a hell of a lot easier to make a package where breaking the order up was a lot harder.
(It would be interesting to see if there is any data on whether there was more sheet music of single songs or long-form works published in the days when that was the primary method of music distribution.)
Personally I generally listen to my music collection in shuffle-by-album mode and never even use Spotify, I am perfectly fine with the existence of music designed to be listened to more in hour-long chunks rather than 3-5 minute chunks and I generally find listening to my entire collection on shuffle-by-song to be a source of incredibly jarring genre whiplash, but the history of recorded music has a lot of work whose natural unit is measured in single digits of minutes.
(And mostly this comment is just recording my notes from the brief wikipedia hole I fell in about the history of recorded music.)
anyway now I think I need to make a playlist where I take a couple of self-important albums that really want to be listened to as a Single Unit and stick them next to TMBG's album "Apollo 18", which contains 38 tracks, 21 of which are 6-61 seconds long. :)
Well, the problem is that the US is the farthest from the international norms of copyright, so while in the US you can do that, in other countries (maybe except Canada if I remember correctly) there's a concept of absolute moral rights.
So assuming that Spotify can fought it back in court in the US, other countries like Japan might give it to Adelle, and so the shuffle button might only appear in the US while other countries might think if they want to adjust moral rights.
Artists own their creations and maybe have the right of not wanting to call it their album if it is not shon as they want.
On the other side I guess they could just choose another platform and I am pretty sure that Spotify did because they think it is better for their business, whatever that means.
Literally millenia ago.
Their work (ie. the song) could be presented however anyone felt like it.
They do have control, they can merge all the tracks into a single long file and sell it like that, but this is not what is happening here, she decided to murk with how the consumers choose to engage with the artwork
It doesn't seem so long ago we didn't have much of an ability to pick what music we listened to. This will seem alien to younger HNers, but it is true. You listened to what was played. Sure, there were records and 8 tracks et al, but portability was limited. Not being able to choose what we listened, when you listened to it, or how you listened to it to peaked with disco - the backlash hit simply because you could not escape it...it was EVERYWHERE....radio, tv, movies, commercials...it died of overexposure.
Then for a hot minute - about 35ish years - we had complete freedom to choose how and what we listen to. Starting at about 1980 with the Sony Walkman + cassette, you could organize music to be portable the way you wanted, at a price of time and effort. This price dropped to almost nothing by the mid 2010s with mp3s and mp3 players. Complete musical freedom!
The problem? Even "almost nothing" wasn't good enough, we demanded it to be "nothing". So here come the streaming services to rescue us from the burden of work required to maintain our freedom....
The artist has no control. This is how it has always been and how it should always be.
Second, that link says nothing about audience consumption, it only preserves the provenance and integrity of the work. As mentioned elsewhere copyright covers the rest but both of these constructs are mental and somewhat illusory. More importantly your audience has to subscribe to them to follow them.
Third, at first glance that appears to only cover the USA.
I am advocating for a rejection of these principles.