Hacker News Reader

Comment by scantron4 | Hacker News Reader

If generic jazz can easily substitute "important" jazz it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it, especially not in the context of "things for background music."

I don't think this is saying anything about more active music consumption where people are actually listening to it. I personally get annoyed if more than 20% of a mix is songs I haven't already upvoted so there isn't a lot of room to bring in weird knockoff artists into my streaming--in fact I saw a recent article that talked about the current problem with streaming is that 90% of profits come from titles older than 18 months so it is harder to break through with new songs (the opposite of radio-driven sales where most profits came from new albums). That seems to be the opposite of "no one cares what they listen to so spotify can just redirect profits wherever they like."

View on HN

If generic jazz can easily substitute "important" jazz it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it, especially not in the context of "things for background music."

This is a modern version of Seeburg background music. Seeburg was a jukebox company, and as a sideline, they also sold a background music system. This used a special purpose record changer that played a stack of records over and over.Seeburg made their own records, recorded by their own orchestra in Chicago, and distributed them through their own jukebox dealers. So they didn't have to pay anything to record companies. It was a subscription service; every few months, subscribers got a new set of records with 1000 songs, and the old set was taken back to Seeburg. The records were not copyrighted, which cost money back then. Instead, they were 9 inch diameter, 2 inch center hole, 16⅔ rpm, 420 grooves per inch, 0.5 mil diamond stylus, all of which were incompatible with record players of the era. They were not sold, just rented, although often nobody bothered to ship them back to Chicago for crushing, so many have survived. DRM, the early years.

You can listen to them here.[1]

[1] https://streema.com/radios/RadioCoastcom

Interesting, never heard of this service. Its purpose was to compete with Muzak, I assume? The use of nuclear weapons has been authorized.

Its purpose was to compete with Muzak, I assume?

Yes. See [1]

The Seeburg 1000 could play a stack of 25 records, both sides, each side good for about an hour of music at the slow speed. Thus there was about 50 hours of audio in the stack, enough to keep it from being too repetitive.

Musak worked by distributing audio over phone lines, rather than using an on-site player.

Streaming no-name covers of songs as low-cost background music is not new at all. From a historical perspective, that's the history of music - mediocre musicians playing background music for little money. For a brief period of history in the 20th century, being in a famous band was a Big Deal. That started with mass-market record production, and ended when there were several million MySpace bands.

All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000

We had a system like this when I worked at a retail store, and later a movie theater. It was a double-sided cassette that had 60 minutes of audio, and would auto switch from A/B side and back again. Most of the year it was just instrumental background music, but Christmas was a really hated time of year, as all those songs have lyrics (that's what makes them Christmas themed) and it was very obvious how long you'd been working your shift when the celebrity version of "Jingle Bells" played for the fifth time that day.

I avoid all shopping around Christmas for that reason, it is just too terrible to hear the same crap over and over again in every store.

The worst thing is that now Halloween music is becoming a thing.

I note that streema.com is trying really hard to get me to install "easy search tool" by favouring the START button above the PLAY button. If it's not them directly, it's a dark-pattern ad they are running

Sorry, I had that blocked, so I didn't see it.

Here's the raw audio stream: http://198.178.121.76:8157/stream

Music historians note that the creation of the "cannon" of classical music occurred when public orchestral concerts arose around the early 19th century (and often paired with the rise of the middle class). Prior, you'd need an invitation to a private concert put on by a noble.

Mostly "old" music was played at these concerts. A public concert had to at least cover its cost from ticket sales, so eliminating commissions for new works was necessary, if a big break from tradition (most music was written expecting little more than a single performance). Because the pieces that kept getting played at concerts became part of a standard orchestral repertoire, a cannon emerged which became harder to update. A commonplace that circulated when I was a music student claimed that Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (1943) was the last thing to make it into the standard orchestral repertoire.

Maybe there's a similar underlying process at play in which any commercial process naturally tends to promote a smaller "cannon" of block-buster crowd-pleasers (why would you not promote your best-selling widget?). Our own listening (now) prefers not only music we already know, but the exact performance we already have heard.

Shostakovich is not considered "standard orchestral repertoire"?

His most played works are (I think) symphonies 5 and 7. The 7th was written in 1941. That said, I've seen a bunch of his later works performed too.

But this is just nitpicking. Without a good definition of "standard orchestral repertoire" and a good dataset of orchestral performances we're just making things up.

9 is pretty common as well I think

It was a claim I heard numerous times as a music student, and find it to be a pretty good fence-post. I always understood it to refer to the "usual suspects" that turn up on concert programs, but it would be interesting to work out what today's standard orchestral repertoire actually is by collating and analyzing orchestral concert programs.

I'd say Shostakovitch 5 might be considered to be part of the "standard" repertoire, but that was composed in the '30s. Maybe his later symphonies turn up more frequently on programs today than does Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra - I'm skeptical but don't actually know.

Canon? (Unless you're talking specifically about the 1812 overture. :-) )

I wonder how copyright extension has affected this phenomenon. Works taking decades longer to enter the public domain, leading to the existing public domain (old) music becoming even more solidified as classical canon? If anybody knows about this I'd love to hear more.

Are these artists even "fake"? Are they "bad"? Or are they just mediocre and good enough for background music?

I guess the complaint is that jazz is still kind of a niche genre, compared to "background music that generally resembles jazz". But maybe real jazz is actually less good as background music compared to not-quite-jazz. Otherwise, why aren't actual jazz labels putting effort into playlist placements like these so-called fake artists are?

Or is the assertion that Spotify themselves is populating their platform with no-name artists, to avoid paying record label royalties? Maybe you can take issue with vertical integration, but that doesn't make the artists involved "fake".

Most people I've run across who say they like jazz do not like music by contemporary musicians who consider themselves to create jazz. Jazz right now is wildly diverse but overall pretty weird, pretty electronic, very sonically influenced by hip hop, metal, and pop. Lotta sampling, drum machines, even autotune.

> Jazz right now is wildly diverse but overall pretty weird, pretty electronic, very sonically influenced by hip hop, metal, and pop. Lotta sampling, drum machines, even autotune.

This sounds interesting, have any artist recommendations?

A random sampling - Thundercat, Louis Cole / Knower, MonoNeon, Nate Smith, Vulfpeck, GoGo Penguin, Snarky Puppy

Interested in other recommendations too!

Robert Glasper, Esperanza Spalding, Shubh Saran, Tigran Hamasyan fit in that crowd too.

I just discovered Slip by Shubh Saran — wow, what an interesting and unique song. I’ll definitely check out these other recommendations, thank you!

I believe the most apt analogy would be Amazon promoting Amazon-commissioned knockoffs of its merchant's products, something that's already drawn the attention of antitrust authorities.

It will be interesting to see whether antitrust law can be applied to Spotify in this context, since its actions are arguably anticompetitive.

> I personally get annoyed if more than 20% of a mix is songs I haven't already upvoted

I am at the complete other end of the spectrum-- I prefer to hear music I've never heard before at least 80% of the time, provided it fits with my taste (which is broad but picky). There is so much great music I will never hear, I want to be exposed to as much of it as possible rather than going over familiar ground all the time.

I have a feeling I'm in the minority on this, but my point is that there are definitely those of us who appreciate algorithms which bring in more "weird knockoff artists" to our streaming mixes. Another factor is that it opens up greater possibilities for seeing live shows.

" it just means your important jazz doesn't have the value you ascribe to it" that's one hell of a stretch.

Failure by a broader audience to understand a genre (or only want to casually consume one part of it passively) doesn't invalidate it's canon. By that measure Kenny G should have usurped John Coltrane as the saxophonist of note, and by any standard except coffee shop and elevator back ground noise he's done no such thing.

John Coltrane is only good on paper and there’s a cult of personality which exists around his work. I can’t really say that I think much of his improvisations and in general, what people believe is “incredible” could be cranked out by an algorithm. Miles Davis is the real deal of jazz for me. Never cared about notes, fame, or much other than being free. That’s jazz.

> John Coltrane is only good on paper

"Cancel yourself with one terrible take" is a thing that only works on Twitter, I think.

Hey you seem to think that being in a cult of consensus is a good thing, but perhaps it isn’t?

I just can't figure out what it would even mean for a jazz saxophonist to be "good on paper". What does it mean? Did he hit 100 RBIs? A take such as "I don't care for Coltrane's improvisational style" would be beyond debate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltrane_changes He and The Beatles and a lot of other musicians from this era have been subjected to a form of schizophrenic post-hoc pattern matching. In English: someone doodles on the sax or does a tune a little different and suddenly there are 100 papers about the specific and intricate genius of The Rolling Stones making a love song in the Second Person!!! and it’s the same sort of crap in the end, one is doodling on the sax and the other are playing some guitar chords.

These people are also somehow ignorant and independent of Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and of all famous literary authors and poets who have done the same before.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t like The Rolling Stones or John Coltrane but they’re just something you like. Thats it.

I see you getting a few downvotes, but for the record I agree completely, to the extent that your complaint is about the members of the cult and not the object of their veneration.

Yeah like I said, if you like him that’s great! If you like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones I will happily listen with you! Because that’s just taste and I think in general most people make pretty good music. It’s all these really weird arguments that have to tell me “no, it’s not doodling on the sax it’s something else!”. When again I feel like you’re extracting patterns to justify the doodling rather than justifying the sound or melody. (Often, people like that don’t care about melody)

"John Coltrane is only good on paper"

Which is still a warmer sense than the room temp take you just attempted.

Your entire comment was either trolling, or some seriously petulant, and gap-laden understanding of both Miles AND Trane. Not saying you have to like Trane, but damn if your comment was just musically and historically ignorant as all be damned.

It’s even more simple: I don’t care about being appealing to you.

Edit: also you saying something like “you’re wrong” and then not giving reasons is actually what trolling is. Go look in the mirror my friend.

I think it moreso goes to show that value is subjective and contextual, not that the music you like "doesn't have the the value you ascribe to it". Things always have the value people ascribe to them. It's just that one person's trash is another person's treasure. And that context matters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com