A few things I’ve come to believe in my years in music tech
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1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book
So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways.
That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like.
The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.
For the genres I've been listening for a while or jamming to with my rig Reddit is usually underwhelming and I have more success by starting on everynoise.com or Beatport (which I generally dislike for discovery because their gatekeeping of genres is bullshit) and then listening to new stuff that the label for the artist I found is putting out.
I may look into pursuing a side project next year along the lines of rhythm gaming and inspiration from current music tech: discovery might not be a strange goal to pursue in that domain. In any case, that Twitter thread couldn't have come at a better time for my own brainstorming.
I'm not sure how that fits in your list... maybe a variation of reading liner notes?
I'm working on the topic day to day in an adjacent field (movie & TV show discovery) and I'm currently not aware of any startup that has managed making money with the discovery experience itself.
It takes a lot of effort, data and persistence to get reasonable algorithms churning out something sensible and then, nobody wants to pay for it. If anything, it's usually an upsell to monetizing the content itself, which is why the only serious contenders to me here are basically Youtube and Spotify.
Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm less than thrilled.
And that's exactly because once you've got the perfect algo together that would be able to recommend you that niche movie Netflix features you've never seen in the interface that you're _really_ interested in (I can recommend "Last Breath" in that regard), the VP Content comes in and tells everyone something like "hey folks, whatever you do, make sure you're only promoting our originals, because they cost us far less in licensing... oh and let's give an extra in-your-face boost to King's Gambler to give it that extra buzz that lands us in Variety"
Discovery is hard, and once you made a name there, it's rather easy to screw it up by monetizing it.
Do you mean not a viable VC-funded business, or not viable at all? From context, I think you mean the former. But there are plenty of "traditional" businesses (e.g. clubs and radios) that make a living through discovery.
Maybe the problem is VC funding then? Maybe one day we will hear of some bootstrapped strartup coming out of IndieHackers?
for radio, that is ads or subscriptions, but radio revenue has been down like the rest of traditional media. for clubs, that is the multiple rounds of overpriced drinks, and maybe a cover.
Spotify's monthly cost is comparable to about two or three mixed drinks, maybe one in an expensive city like New York or Miami. People blanche at paying any higher; remember how people reacted to Tidal being comparatively expensive?
that doesn't contradict the assumption that it's a viable business. Search engines and social media services make money from ads but I don't think it would be fair to say that search engines or social media services are not viable business.
yes and DJs can be seen as discovery facilitators as per grandparent's comment, so it is fair to say that this is a viable business, which is based on content discovery - or maybe I misunderstood what you're saying?
> radio stations are typically national and have the record labels pitching new content to them
leaving aside the fact that you just described a very narrow subset of all commercial radios - how does this make radios not related to content discovery?
IMO, Netflix's recommender system suffers from the simple fact that the company itself doesn't want to collect accurate user ratings and make recommendations with them. If they did that, then a not insignificant portion of the content and deals they invested in would get memory-holed due to bad ratings or lack of interest, and that would make the company and its leaders look bad.
they should be able to tune the recommender so that it doesn't completely forget about lower-rated content the way you're saying
They did away with that system and replaced it with their custom recommendation engine. I believe, without any evidence, they did this to make bad shows look better. They once hosted a documentary about sex workers (can't recall the name, sorry) that had an average rating of around 2 out of 5 stars, and after the recommendation system change, it turned into a "75% match" on my account.
The auto-discovery can be really hit or miss (mostly miss) - but so was picking CDs without listening to them. But the nature of streaming means I can flit between genres day to day, maybe I'm feeling psychedelic trance one day, the next schlager, the next prog rock. Prior to digital music I'd discover a lot within my focused genre (ambient electronic) but little else. But now I have the chance to find songs that have that similar feel for me but vary wildly in genre and style without sinking hours into music I don't enjoy.
Yes it requires more intention to discover new music than the streaming services built in recommendations but I feel like my music library has never been so varied and rich.
> 1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book
All of these things point to the fact that listening to music is about cultural participation as much as anything else. And TikTok represents a culture and many subcultures, and seeing people you already like (people you follow) appreciating a certain type of music is powerful.
“Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," re-entered the Hot 100 more than 40 years after hitting No. 1 on the chart, spurred by a viral video from user Nathan Apodaca… The album from which it hails, Rumours, also rocketed into the top 10 of the Billboard 200.” [2]
This one ^^ is particularly compelling to me. It’s easy to dismiss cases where growing artists grow faster because of tiktok. But this is clearly caused by tiktok alone. Also if you want examples of unpopular artists who grew a ton from tiktok those lists are very easy to find.
[1] https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2021/09/for-better-...
[2] https://ew.com/music/megan-thee-stallion-tiktok-top-artist-2...
ie. If <teen boy> show <teen girl with ass hanging out> if <teen girl> show <teen boy with tattos and shirt off>
Netflix's recommendation engine is just as bad. It cant even work out that i watch a show all the time to put it to the front of my list. I type 2 letters into the search bar, and all it does it search alphabetically give me a stupid suggestion.
Is it? When I grew up, all they played was top 40. Stuff more than a year or two old just disappeared. Even today, they'll run the same hit every 20 minutes. Makes me want to scream.
Going to college was a revelation. So much I'd never ever heard before.
The same thing when I started going to clubs - great music I'd never heard before.
Now, of course, my "listening area" is the whole internet. KCSN in Los Angeles is a rock-focused public radio station; KCSM up in San Mateo is a terrific Jazz station; Great Big Radio is an internet-only station that's technically oldies, but covers everything from the 1960s through the 2000s and likes to get into deep cuts. I do subscribe to a streaming music service and use it pretty frequently, but I suspect I find just as much new music through internet radio as I do through "discovery." (Although both curated playlists and algorithmic recommendations surface stuff I find interesting occasionally.)
One of my friends only listens to pop, and most people are like him in that he doesn't go out of his way to listen or watch anything new.
Probably because it's not so much about discovery, and more about rewarding conformity. I only used the app for a scant few hours, but all I saw were musicians from large labels being echo-chambered into every video I could find. The few "diverse" acts that I came across were already huge in another country or being pushed heavily as a result of massive advertising investments. Like the other comment suggests, TikTok is as much of a discovery service as radio is.
Last.fm is really good about this. I can't stand Spotify recommendations in comparison because of this exact problem.
I'm perfectly capable of Googling "bands like X" and gleaning a surface-level idea of similar artists, which seems to be the extent of Spotify recommendations. Meanwhile, Last.fm is programmed well enough that it goes beyond the surface-level recommendations, and finds things I would never have found otherwise. I'm talking about bands and side-projects that broke up 30 years ago and only released a demo tape, but that demo tape is gold to fans of band X.
- I recently discovered Spotify's Release Radar. It's incredible.
- On a whim, I went into a random bar in NoLA and discovered an incredible funky country band.
- I get daily txts from friends with new music.
As you said, these discovery channels are just as enjoyable as the music itself.
When it comes to "discovery", I want to find things I never knew I wanted to hear.
I love bandcamp and most artists I've found lately have their music there, but music discovery on bandcamp is extremely difficult. All the music I've found there is due to people linking bandcamp on other websites/mediums.
So self plug: https://bandhiking.isandrew.com/ - it's basically a bandcamp radio (if anyone's interested). There's room for improvement but it works IMO, I've found good stuff regularly using it.
Release Radar was my most listened personalized playlist and it constantly introduced me to new artists in and around the genres of music I was listening to. I listen to a pretty diverse range of genres (everything from death metal, edm, hip-hop and country).
Perhaps I never grew up having to dig through piles of records, I was a child of the era of 100+ page books of CDs and the introduction of Napster but I still very much find discovery through these services to be hands down more efficient and cost effective for me. I could not afford to listen to the amount of music I consumed last year if I were purchasing records/CDs/tapes.
And I also agree on the efficiency. My first music purchase was a record, then tapes, then CDs and so on. Getting recommendations right where I listen to the music makes it trivial to add to my list - usually via the desktop app while working or via CarPlay while driving.
People pay for subscriptions on Spotify, Spotify also sells ad space which is profit. All artists never make a full penny per stream like we did on Mp3.com 20 YEARS AGO... It's insanity pretty much. I stopped promoting the services that don't work and only promote the ones that do, and I constantly monitor them each for positive and negative policy changes regularly. I never deleted my mp3 library, and I only buy phones that allow micro SD storage, because I'll be damned if I let a algorithm with an agenda to pick my music for me if I can help it.
In all those cases, I would probably be listening to known music, not discovering new music.
I for one, would probably pay the same for Spotify even if it did not offer music, but just the discovery features offered by itself and by 3rd party apps in it's ecosystem.
When using discover weekly, usually when I hear something I like, I mark it as liked which adds it to my library and then enqueue the top tracks of that artist/each artist if they are artists I never listened to before.
3rd party apps allow me to do this more often, or follow other discovery paths.
Apple Music is better about keeping out of the way, but their generated playlists often feel either boring or stale; good when I want to listen to throwbacks but I can’t recall the last time I heard a new artist I really liked from one.
In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio, especially college radio. The good news is that having been a part of college radio pledge drives, I can pretty confidently say that the discovery service provided by local/college radio is indeed a viable product. Just not in the algorithmic world-scale sense tech companies want to see.
I have no idea, but my take is that streaming services are trying to find other artists within the same genre, or using the listing patterns of other users to match you up with new music.
This makes a weird assumption that I actually like everything a band makes, which is rare, or that because I like an artists or a few songs within a given genre, then I must like all music with in that genre. Mostly I listen to music from a wide number of artists, across generes. There a musicians where I like most of their work and some where I just like the sound of one particular track.
What I want, is button, when I press that, "The Almighty Algorithm" will analyse the sound, the beats per second, the vocals, the instruments, the lyrics, anything that affect the sound and locate other songs with similar profiles. Bonus points for letting me input stuff like: higher tempo, less bagpipes, the singer has a high pitch voice which hurt my ears.
The social stuff is easy and the streaming platforms can quickly implement something similar and put you out of business. Actually analyzing the sound profiles and using that to help you create playlists and discover new artists, that not something I've seen done and I bet it's because it's will require actual work.
It doesn't give me any control of which attributes I care about, which frustrates me to no end, but it does fairly well at turning up things I haven't heard before and like if I can give it a decent set of seed tracks.
I also occasionally go back to Slacker/LiveXLive for it's fine tune controls, DJs and news. But it's discovery system isn't as good and it's had plenty of bugs (like playing wrong songs/titles). So I stick with Pandora for that radio experience tailored to me.
Agreed 100% on this. I find I like a certain BPM and "type" of sound to songs I often have on repeat.
And sometimes I don't even know why I like a particular song. This is especially true when it comes to the concept of catchiness. There is certainly some music theory around hooks, chord loops, etc. but I honestly haven't found any of it anywhere near as explanatory or predictive as more well-established classical western music theory concepts like harmonic function or voice leading. So often it really just feels like "that song is super catchy just because it is."
However, that method has the property that the algorithm can’t judge any new music, it always requires existing ratings from members of the platform before it can recommend a song to other people.
Then there’s the additional issue that a person’s musical taste changes over time.
Spotify has the tech to do this, they've demonstrated it with a genre explorer tool, but they clearly don't use it in their radio stations and recommendations.
As several other comments have mentioned, music companies inevitably end up being redesigned to match the desires of rightsholders, and not users. The only way around this would probably be some kind of legally mandated compulsory licensing, so that any streaming service or end user can play any content if they pay the predetermined price, removing contract negotiations from the picture.
This might be possible in theory but part of the issue is that the algorithms input parameters are not the same from person to person. The parameters you described are mostly technical attributes of the sound, but what about cultural/political affiliation? Do you care if the lyrics are in a different language (some people do, some people don't). Do you care if there is a political or religious message (and are you particular about which religion or political tribe)? Can Spotify take that into account somehow? Maybe, but it seems very difficult to tailor that to the user.
Speaking personally, music is more than just an aural experience for me. At times it's about connecting with my social group, or cultural traditions, or a spiritual experience. At other times it's just the music. When I listen to mainstream stuff, Spotify is ok. When I get deeper into edge-case territory, Spotify doesn't really know what I'm looking for and often makes suggestions that appear to demonstrate a shallow understanding the cultural meaning of the music I'm listening to.
Zune had the Channels concept - essentially what Spotify-owned playlists are nowadays - but they partnered with radio stations and Billboard (among others) to provide content.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUU3R-Y21I
(Notice how 10 years later that UI is still largely fresh and modern; I miss Zune)
I really loved my Zune, the desktop software was some of the worst ever created. It helped pushed me towards eventually just getting an iPod to flash with Rockbox so I could just use common lightweight sane software on my desktop to manage the library on my devices.
Things are so much better now that I can just load up 200GB of music on my android phone, manage it via a normal file explorer on desktop, and use the VLC app to listen and create/manage playlists.
I doubt myself in this, of course, because it's patently idiotic. Is this anything you have the slightest recollection of?
I really didn't remember it being called that, but reading this makes me vaguely remember my assistant manager making fun of the feature name because she also had a Zune.
> Discovery is not a viable product
I'm parsing "viable" as "commercially viable". You may solve the problem (for some definition of "solve" and "problem"), but can you make money doing so?
I don't know, I have no experience in this field, but OP seems convinced that the answer is "no".
In my region(s) of France, they either suck or only play very big names. I envy people who live in range of a good local radio.
What discover tab are you referencing, I've never found a place in the app where you cannot directly play from and all their apps support cross device management.
I went back to check today to confirm that even if I had an existing network device selected it'd disconnect that and only play locally, but clicking on the tab just showed an error page. I force quit the app and relaunched, and now the tab is gone entirely.
Guessing I was in some A/B experiment of a pre-release feature, it'll probably have more functionality in the full release (assuming they didn't can it)
I really get the feeling that the folks and Bandcamp are actually into music.
Everything else I've tried just seems to make it very hard to break out of the bubble they decided to put me in.
1) https://www.indieshuffle.com - a music discovery blog
2) https://www.submithub.com - a service that connects musicians with music curators
I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products. That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the Twitter thread this article was based on: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves, focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-spotting!
And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in, making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up my whole morning, well done!
It gave about 20,000 plays which BLEW MY MIND at the time. Nothing like waking up to a huge increase
Today I’m a modest success. Several songs have 1-2m plays on Spotify and I make $800 / month from streaming. It’s just something I do in my evenings for fun.
I owe my success to outlets Indie Shuffle and SubmitHub—- I’ve found Spotify really privileges discovery for major label artists.
Instagram made photos social in a way that Facebook never really did. I think taking a photo and applying a filter as a way to express mood/personality is just an easier thing for the average person to do. It also requires almost no license. The user took the photo with their phone, no one else owns it. Even if a short snippet of a commercially created song is a perfect explanation of my current mood, I can't widely share it on a social network without license.
I think that revolution could come but it requires something fantastical. It would require a music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera. Some method of expressing mood/personality using sound that is effective.
The technology is kiiinda there, look at the iPad music production stack. If you have what it takes you can put up a complete track only in your iPad.
I think there's at least two big issues:
- Iterating on music until "it's good enough" is not as fast as iterating on a picture or video where you can do multiple takes and check exactly what's going on in your screen.
- Conveying your feelings with music is kinda like learning a new language, and then becoming a poet. Like for example everyone has access to sharing text now, with your friends or with the world, yet not everyone is making poems or short stories that convey their emotions effectively.
What I mean to say is, the average person is certainly able to write a better Tweet or take a better Insta snap than that same person could reasonably create a pleasing snippet of audio worth sharing. That would be true even if they took the time and effort to learn to use even the simplest iPad music production stack.
Could be cool to see some simple generative music like pick a genre, a beat, hum a melody and ML composes something.
Or a quirky fun karaoke social app. Add remix, duet, group lives like tiktok IG have.
Youtube is closer to being "the" social media for music: concerts are published on it (sometimes live even), special events and channels like Cercle/Colors/etc, performances of artists self-published (covers included), music videos get posted there and being a "billion view" video is still a bit of a marker, "radios" appealing to very specific descriptions of all kinds exist with 24/7 activity, multi-million views channels aggregating new artists acting as discovery (Chillcow, Koalacontrol, and thousands more), etc. "Discovery" on youtube alone is pretty poor I'd say, but as mentioned in the tweets it's not really a viable product in itself anyway.
On the subject of the songs not being a differentiator, I completely disagree. The songs themselves are memes. People use them to signify the type of video you are watching (or to attempt to subvert your expectation).
To be fair though, if you shared your gender with tiktok, it'll have a very strong prior about this.
I think the fact that you can click on a sound (a “sound” is the song that gets played in the background of a video) and see the top posts from other people using that sound is interesting and unlike anything else. It lets users get a profile of the type of person who typically likes a given song.
I also think that many people underestimate (or at least don’t talk about) how much of music is about cultural signaling. Tiktok serves this function well, especially for young people who want to appear ahead of the curve (god forbid someone accuses them of being “basic”), and so they want everyone to know that they’re listening to the next artist before everyone else.
Also if it even needed to be said, popularity as a sound on tiktok directly translates to plays on streaming services. Songs with very little attention will suddenly blow up to millions of plays after going big on tiktok. This, to me, clearly suggests that tiktok is more valuable to artists than just being “ad space.”
Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising. Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item. Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making money with music I think. I looked into whitelablling cannabis products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in legalization legislation because it's such an obviously good idea.
There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to.
I agree with the advice, that discovery isn't a product, and the big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new artforms if that's not going to happen. Otherwise it's like trying to sell math.
That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.
Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's, etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each. Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who make music have, by far is selling people the experience of listening to that music, either in person or via recordings.
The merch table is one person (maybe 2-3 for big bands) selling stuff with margins of hundreds of percent.
Did you know that outside of tiny bar level gigs nearly all deals for bands to play live involve a split of the actual ticket sales between artist and promoter? Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?
And so on. I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
You're referring to large amphitheater and arena shows, for big artists. This isn't (necessarily) true of most touring acts.
I suspect this is 2 factors: 1) music is something people care about, therefore they have opinions on it (whether or not these are justified). And 2) Gell-Mann Amnesia: You're familiar with music, so you quickly spot the bullshit that, in reality, suffuses almost all online discussions.
Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers, basically.
For reference, she pulled in $100 million in 2018, the year of her last major concert tour. In 2020 she made just $23.8 million, only 10 of which was from streaming [1]. She is consistently one of the top streamed artists in the world, and was ranked as the highest paid musician in both 2018 and 2020.
So yes, touring is a huge revenue generator for music artists, even beyond just merch sales. It's even more important for artists that cannot rely on top tier streaming or physical sales numbers.
> it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists.
When the songwriting and production credits for a track look like a laundry list of names pulled from a hat, that's good evidence of Song Factory writing with little to no involvement from the performing artist. This is very common in the popular music industry but there are exceptions, such as with Taylor Swift. For her and other artists that emphasize "singer-songwriter", you are likely to see only 1 co-writer, whom also serves as producer, for several tracks.
Besides the character of the music itself, this has consequences for compensation, as there are less people to split the earnings to. Then there is masters ownership. One of the reasons Taylor eeked out the top spot for highest paid musician in 2020, is because she now owns the masters to her recent albums (which are also her most streamed). This entitles her to a significantly bigger cut. Most music artists do not own their own masters (on top of often not writing their own songs).
> it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
This is certainly still true but maybe less so than in the past. At least, artists can "get big" (be discovered) without much of a team because of the likes of streaming and TikTok. Staying big, and musically relevant, probably still does require a big team. Making a living from your music, much less becoming actually rich (and staying that way unlike the likes of M.C. Hammer and TLC), is some kind of voodoo magic.
1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/taylor-swift-to...
That's why established bands often have incorporated. They can keep some of the overhead for themselves by doing the work or paying someone a salary, which establishes a healthier power dynamic than "we'll cut you a check with whatever is left over after expenses."
Bands are poor because It's All About the Music means they get fleeced left and right. They don't call it the Music Industry because it's all roses. They call it that because something is being chewed up at one end and spat out the other. The Grist Is Made of People.
As a musician who has toured and recorded, and someone who has worked for multiple concert promoters and streaming services, I think GP frames it extremely well. it's not a nihilistic view, simply a realistic one. If you love music, don't get involved with the music business! At some level it becomes unavoidable, but they are separable things.
Music has always been in partnership with other passions and vices, and since the time cynics and nihilists have been able to capitalize on that relationship, they have.
And as a nitpick, business of music existed long before ragtime and jazz. Both classical music and folk music (all around the world including in Africa) predates modern music. And they were often paid for performances.
Ragtime and jazz are fairly recent.
I think there's a lot of people DJing, producing or jamming that would be ok with just getting pennies from their music being streamed or downloaded or whatever. Not every artist needs or wants to live from their art. For a lot the extra money is welcome specially as an incentive to do all the mastering and release work that's involved in releasing digital files or being on a streaming platform, which is not zero.
I agree it's similar to selling math, but for some reason no one completely understands people "bond" to "brands" of music more often than to "brands" of math. From my perspective, at least until there's thousands of festivals across the world per week to share proofs and formulas and programs, I think it's deceiving to think selling music is like selling math if you uncouple the music from the merchandise.
A bit into the handwavy, but there's two famous quotes, one from Goethe about architecture being 'petrified music,' and another about how 'nobody can dance to architecture' which were just as quirky as what I'm saying, but when you view skateboarders as, literally, dancing to architecture, with festivals everywhere around the world, the ideas of music, architecture, math, and what dancing to them all might mean suddenly becomes plausible and conceptually much closer to one another.
The economics of skateboarding (as essentially a dance form) are pretty much the same as that of music, and math. It's the dismal aspect of Economics that provides this kind of indifferent nihilism between the concepts, but when you're trying to create a product, the economics are the necessary lens. Though I will admit it's a different frame of mind.
I wish I had more time or contacts to actually put my money where my mouth is, so unfortunately so far I just have an opinion.
A music catalog is transferred for pretty much the same fee as one football player, AFAIK.
Whereas with football, supply of watchable players is highly constrained. Nobody is coming to your pub to watch the local five aside on the TV. Plus there's the gambling aspect...
You can't treat information products like fungible commodity goods. Thinking that way leads to all sorts of nonsensical results.
A backstreet pub isn't paying for "football" in some general sense of "video products of football matches". They are paying for *the specific currently-occurring matches that the patrons want to watch". That is a very rare product that commands a high price. If you put on "Australian footie highlights from 1987", you aren't going to have a full bar.
Sports games are almost completely non-commodity and non-fungible and the pricing reflects that.
Music is semi-fungible. Patrons have strong associations with particular songs and love to hear them. But there are generally enough songs that meet that criteria, and enough patrons that don't really care, that a bar just needs a bit mostly-interchangeable bucket of songs. The price reflects that.
But where does this leave players vs bands'/artists' whole catalogs? A club paying for a Ronaldo/Messi/Zlatan has to make that up pretty fast (disregarding brand value/brand management), whereas a Beatles/Dylan/Rihanna catalog will keep bringing in revenue for ages. As (I believe) you hint at, music has a whole different staying value compared to (many/most?) other forms of entertainment.
Barcelona is still getting value from Cruyff, Maradona or Ronaldo, and will still make money from the Messi years for decades to come, even if the merch sales for his shirts drop to zero. Fandom leads to more fandom, and that comes from good results. A team like Manchester City has put top money into their team for decades, but the team's value lags a bit not because their short term results: They've been great for over a decade. It's the residual value of decades of good performance from other teams that they have to compete with.
The idea here seems to be that until churches and bars started hiring musicians in order to attract clientele, nobody had ever tried to make money from music. And since then, no significant portion of the music industry has ever been about a pure exchange of money for music, it's always been driven by ulterior motives.
Is there any reason to believe any of this? What about the history of classical music concerts? Operas? Broadway? Buskers? Mariachi bands? I'm sure I'm missing many non-western examples.
Music is fun, people like fun. That being said, there were almost always churches of some sort who would tend to play music too.
It’s conspicuous consumption. You keep musicians on staff to demonstrate that you are so rich and powerful that you can afford to blow it on something so frivolous that it doesn’t even feed anybody, it doesn’t stick around, and you’re either there to hear it or you’re not. See Haydn for the very best example of this model.
Sheet music then becomes the “advertising” so that people can be aware that it’s happening.
However, I think sheet music eventually became (and later, records/CDs) mostly a pure exchange of money for music.
I guess what I’m trying to say is something in between: the exchange itself can be pure on both sides (creation/consumption), but music is “of” society/culture and almost always serves many other purposes in the power structure of societies.
In its very purest form, buskers have almost always been very poor.
I don't think it's really relevant that many musicians are poor. Most writers in history have been poor, but the history of the book business is still mostly about people paying money to read a book.
Sheet music was a sizable industry before the phonograph.
Interestingly, at least for classical music nowadays in my limited experience, the most reliable way to get a regular gig for most ordinary musicians (who aren't going to be opera stars or something) is to work for a church still. But perhaps my instrument choices (voice and organ) have skewed this disproportionately.
Hilariously, it's because women just don't care about this. [1]
Excerpt from a study:
> Men were more strongly attracted to women with whom they shared musical tastes than to women with whom they did not. The sharing of musical tastes had only a negligible effect on women's attraction to men, however.
Many men place a huge emphasis on musical compatibility, but very few women do, and IIRC it's a fairly poor indicator for relationship compatibility. Young single men would probably be better off letting this one go.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009365089016002...
Anyone out there into long walks in the dead winter woods listening to Lustmord, hit me up.
This has interesting side-effect: hiring a live musician or a small band became an attractive alternative, and so the restaurants and bars are filled with live music on the weekends.
I think live music is probably something we should get back to. Musicians would obviously be on board because they get to make a few bucks, customers are happy to get some live entertainment with their drinks / meal, business owners are happy because the customers stick around longer.
In the digital era, recorded music wants to be free, but it's absolutely an inferior substitute to live performances, and I strongly feel that anything that helps musicians support themselves via performances is good for our culture.
Kinda like what Beatport does but with a more social and better website, and without the gatekeeping and heavy editorializing. I think Last.fm was on the right track with social features but didn't get the streaming right (I think mostly because of IP issues). What some projects like everynoise.com do with Spotify tags for genres is pretty amazing but of course it's missing the social features.
This is a fine point, but sometimes I wish we weren't always optimizing for infinite scaling everything. Some of my favorite places are tiny corners that are intentionally tiny corners.
I was disappointed that I had to switch to Spotify. Spotify does the bare minimum here. You can only see what your friends are currently listening to. Maybe their history as well, but I don't even feel compelled to check. I hardly even notice it there in the corner of the window. And it only exists on the desktop client, last I checked.
I can't even share a song with a friend within Spotify, I have to copy a link and paste it in a chat window, or connect on Facebook (which I don't have). Why wouldn't they want to encourage intra-platform sharing? The only social feature I've found useful is building playlists.
It's baffling to me. But obviously they know what they're doing.
A market place for gig tickets, with open data for artists.
That's it.
Embrace touts, allow resale, reduce fraud (counterfeit tickets)... by making tickets ephemeral, transferable, verifiable. At this point all you've got is a more legit version of what happens in the real world.
The data part... give artists and their promoters full access. The benefit is that it removes a huge part of uncertainty for the artsists and their management. They can now more accurately predict total ticket sales, comparable ticket sales, see ticket sales across other acts in the same city on the same night, etc... meaning they get to do two things: 1) They choose more appropriately sized venues (which makes the event more vibrant as it's fuller - a fuller venue makes better margins as the fixed opex is spread over higher revenue - less lost revenue too as more fans get to see a band and less money left on the table), and 2) They get to set the price of a ticket more accurately to what the market can bear (which means they get more of the ticket value and touts get less, so the artists come out better and more realistic pricing will make a better end-to-end experience for music fans).
The data part is so valuable for filling small and medium venues that it can start to break the stranglehold Ticketmaster have on venues. The tenure of most promoters is around a decade, and Ticketmaster exclusivity deals with major venues come up within a similar time period. By building a grass roots effective ticketing system built on data you have a 10 year bet on knocking out the incumbent if you can keep the promoters and artists on your side as you and they grow. The Ticketmaster stranglehold isn't impenetrable, they have venue agreements with large traditional venues - but there are a lot of alternative venues whose seat you can fill easily, i.e. theatres and cinemas.
Within a single "generation" of music (less than a decade), you should be able to take the majority of small and medium venues, most festivals, and have serious inroads into the territory of Ticketmaster.
Are there things like this? Not really. Sure things like Dice in the UK for clubbing does the resell tickets, etc as a full and complete part of the original ticketing experience, but I do not know of a single company that is really creating anything like an open and transparent dataset that the participating artists and promoters can use without fee. Songkick were going to be my bet on who could do this, but once they went down the Ticketmaster affiliate route I no longer believe this is possible.
Ticketmaster owns the contracts to every major venue.
Great... there's a hell of a lot of smaller venues, festivals, and other events that can be taken whilst Ticketmaster ignores you and you add significant value. By the time you worry about Ticketmaster or they worry about you, you already have momentum from artists, promoters and fans, and due to the bad press Ticketmaster gets through their tout-resell sites you also have political pressure.
Ticketmaster is built in to this plan. Their presence makes the grassroots stuff even more compelling as you don't have to boil the ocean, you figure out how to make it work on a small venue level, city level, and go for scale in the bottom layers.
Worst comes to worst, they're forced to consider purchasing you as you take all of the oxygen out of the system that feeds artists and promoters into them.
"5. Middlemen are not inherently evil - they are desired if they can provide more value than they extract"
This reminds me of bureaucracy - people only call it bureaucracy when it fails or takes special attention or impinges on expected rights or privileges. When it works, there's not really a name for it (it's still bureaucracy)
Even with “indie” artists (many of whom are ironically mega-millionaires in their own right), there’s a workflow aspect to the promotion side of things. You can do it yourself, but there’s no money in streaming (artists in 2021 are influencers first and foremost who look at streaming as a way to acquire new listeners) so you gotta go through concert promoters, which usually means means hiring a manager to rep you. The money is in the live shows these days — which is why the pandemic hit musicians so hard. But the fundamental problem is still getting people to listen to your stuff, same as it ever was.
The project has been a labor of love between friends and I would really love to find a few more users out there!
Or, as one of my favorite metal bands put it when asked about going on tour: "Our music is a solitary experience."
From: https://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-blut-aus-nords-vi...
This is my favorite. It applies to pretty much any technology or business idea.
Depends on your own goals too. Beeing able to live from what you do while working with people who's work you like, in an environment that is not the mainstream music industry may sound dystopic, but it could totally be the other way around as well.
And even if your goal is becoming big, growing out of a certain culture can be useful as well (depending on what your app does), e.g. think about soundcloud.
Music is inherently human and more people than you think show genuine talent at their chosen musical craft.
Hype separates the cream from the milk. Cream here is a value judgment that can best be described as “not milk”, and therein lies the capriciousness of…
…marketing.
Look around your workplace. Do you see an iota of evidence to suggest that marketing is going on? Welcome to the competitive hell of anything akin to the music industry. You and I are brethren here.
Honesty, looking at A&R at least they are open about being 99% hype and 1% talent. Can SNAP say the same?
I guess define viable?
The future has got to hold more ways to relate to music than the main apps of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., which push music in a very specific, generic way. Mostly around top 40, opaque personalizations, algorithms and “algotorial”.
We’re never getting back to a place where your identity is defined by which record store you go to.
But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener?
(my hat in the ring: https://avant.fm)
Maybe, but where's the money in it?
I know Pandora used to (still?) was doing this, but the features were never exposed to users, and were very music theory. (Apparently I like vamping, but until I looked it up, I couldn't tell you want it was.)
But there isn’t a user friendly way for people to browse multi-dimensional vector space.
But the embeddings (vectors) are capable of Kanye West - Jay Z + Frank Ocean , but don’t have a UX to match.
Cause otherwise music is definitely a social thing…
And the same comment applies to nearly all the points there…
Launching soon.
nightly beta: https://mixtape.ai
app store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mixtape/id1391354414
but going to a record store was/is. if you could bend your mind to think of a record store as "music tech" this might suggest a possible place for other humans within finding-music 2.0.
I assumed he was referring to the discovery of music, as in "coming up with a new algorithm or process that recommends music to people does not, by itself, amount to a financially sustainable product".
It reminded me of Steve Jobs' reaction to Dropbox: that the entire product was more like a feature that some other product should have. Of course, Jobs was wrong about that, and this guy may also be wrong about his intuition here, even though he is informed and experienced at his business.
Not sure if it's a problem of their engineers or executives sucking, quite the contrary, I think it's a problem that needs to first be solved at a smaller scale before it catches up. Music streaming was also a niche thing when not many of us had a portable device that was connected to the Internet.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
* Video does not add to music, it turns it into a mere soundtrack to move one or more products.
* Recorded music is always inferior to live music performance.
* The enslavement of music, like all enslavement, diminishes the culture that practices it.
MTV was an entire television network surrounding music videos. I grew up on music videos.
In the world of Web 3.0. It might not be true. Smart contracts builds a way for creators to realize a larger share of the value they create, and for listeners who discover them early to be rewarded as well. In web 3.0, you're not rewarded with hearts, but tokens which can be traded for dollars.
This is a really cool project https://mirror.xyz/davidgreenstein.eth/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw...
It's all really exciting and has never been done before! Just buy some of this Invigeron, the reverse funnel system!