New numbers on music consumption | Hacker News Reader

New numbers on music consumption

tedgioia.substack.com

164 pointsjseliger203 comments

His conclusion seems like measurement bias. Cloud-based streaming now means we can measure what people listen to, rather than only what they buy. Back in the days of LPs and CDs, it was natural that people only purchased new recordings, but most people maintained at least a small collection of favorites, often years old, that they listened to over and over. Likewise for movies and TV: TV broadcasts and movie theaters presented new works, only new works, but a favorite movie could be purchased once and watched as many times as needed. Or it could be rented.

Now that we can measure all media consumption, we're discovering that people like to listen to their favorites over and over, and somehow concluding that's artistic stagnation.

This also explains why the value of catalogs has gone through the roof.

This is evident by the huge valuations of the majors eg Universal going public, indie publishers such as Reservoir and Hipgnosis, and artist and writer catalogs eg Queen, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, etc. A few times a year I will read about a writer/artist catalog getting sold for $100M. Except for maybe a death like Whitney or MJ, that never happened 10 years ago.

Is this the long tail we heard so much about?

It’s kind of the opposite of that. Almost all of the value in music comes at the “head”. Something like 80% of the value is in the top 100K tracks and 95%+ in the top 1M.

100K tracks are added each week but most don’t have any commercial value. Even if you are modestly successful with say, 1M plays, that’s not enough to live on for very long (about $10,000, split by however many people in the band, publishing costs, etc.).

That is, IMO, is spot on and I cannot upvote you enough. In addition to that it is a question of accessibility. In the old times, let’s say in the 90s you discovered an obscure piece of music from 70s. Good luck going to a CD or vinyl store and digging it up. Now the whole discography of that artist is on your fingertips.

As a kid growing up in 80’s and 90’s Liverpool (UK) I was into US west coast hip hop.

We did actually have a decent record store but once you’d gone through the rap section a dozen times you were stuck with months old photocopies of the source and ordering from the store that took months.

Then ‘Yo mtv raps’ aired in uk on our nascent satellite service that hardly anyone had so we’d pass around blurry copies on vhs.

Then a voice said ‘let there be music’ and Napster happened and my life changed forever.

Napster to Kazaa to bit torrent to Usenet back to torrent then finally iTunes Match and Apple Music.

And I still listen to ‘All Eyez On Me’ at least once a week.

Where it began, I can't begin to know when. But then I know it's growing strong.

It is also measurement bias in choosing what to pay attention too. The content of high budget films makes for a poor metric for creative output.

High budget films inherently have huge financial risk, so it reasonable that the decision making is risk adverse. Meanwhile, the rest of the ecosystem is flourishing with creativity. We have an astonishing selection of works in indie films, HBO, and Netflix programming. As a consumer, I've never had more high quality options to choose from.

Hollywood of old used to crank out and an enormous number of films, almost none of which were big budget. This is the same as today where streaming services crank out an enormous number of creative entertainment options.

The oligopolies of recent years may find that their business models are challenged, but the industry as a whole hasn't lost an ounce of creativity.

TV stations only showing new material? I think you'd need to go back a long time before movie rentals for that to be true?

We recorded movies from TV onto VHS, it wasn't unusual for them to air again before we watched the taped copy.

Yeah broadcast TV content has long consisted in large part of reruns, syndication, and older (cheap to license) movies, think of what was showing during non prime time hours when you were growing up. If anything there’s much more new content now thanks to the streaming wars.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the demographic streaming music is getting older, as the older generation are still increasingly getting online. The pandemic certainly helped this transition. They probably won't change their taste in music as they start renting their streaming services.

I don't feel like 18 months and not currently on the Billboard charts is a particularly reasonable cutoff for "new vs old" music.

I listen to tons of new music - current, young artists, who've released all or nearly all of their music the past 5-10 years, that's most of my listening.

In spite of that, I expect that 70%+ of my listening is over this arbitrary cutoff and would count as "catalog" . Even if I find a new band opening at a show - probably they've been around a couple years and if I dive into them the majority of their music is >18 months.

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The other aspect is I'd like to see age demographic data for the music stats. Older people have largely only gotten into Spotify and the like more recently. Are young people listening to less new music, or is this just a reflection of now having a wider age range in streaming stats?

Yep, besides, by the definition on the graph their own examples of Kate Bush's "Running up that hill" and Metallica's "Master of Puppets" would not count as "catalog" and counts as 'new music' while The Weekend's "Blinding Lights" counts as 'catalogue' music (i.e. 'old' music in the context of this article).

Seems overly simplistic to me!

It's also worth accounting for how music is consumed and how this is accounted for - i.e. I assume the shift to streaming platforms would naturally cause reporting of old-listens to increase (i.e. if you buy a CD once in 2015 and listen to it every year, this would be recorded as a single 'non-catalogue' sale, while in the streaming world it would be classified as 'two non-catalogue listens and then five catalogue listens'), so I assume more people streaming would drive more 'recorded' catalogue listens unless this is carefully adjusted for.

Yeah I see a lot of complaints but this is the salient one.

18 months is not that old. Even mainstream pop radio stations are still going to be playing a stuff that’s 3 years old regularly.

Maybe it’s not brand new but it doesn’t fit their rhetoric later on.

The NYT ram an article a while back on Spotify listening by age; they found that people tend to latch on to what was popular when they were in their early teens.[1]

So yes, on the music side this is probably dominated by demographics. Old people listen to old music.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/favorite-s...

Deezer made a study that evaluated peak music discovery at around 25 years old.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/people-stop-discoveri...

This graph is hilarious: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

The putative effect is not statistically distinguishable, as observed by the fat overlapping confidence intervals. And the word "old" growing in prominence in movie titles is a very weird, unreliable proxy for the effect at hand. The rest of the article is similar drivel.

This looked odd to me too - and suspiciously like a p-hack.

Besides - if the grey shaded area is where we are supposed to believe the 'actual' number should fall, we actually know the 'actual' numbers (the dots) and 60% of the datapoints fall outside of the shaded area, so this seems like total nonsense to me (presumably 95% of the points should sit inside this area?).

On top of that - if you added the actual numbers to this graph (which I expect are 1-4 films a year) only a handful of releases can completely skew the data.

And then even if you ignore the above, the whole premise titles such as 'old school', 'no country for old men' and 'the 40 year old virgin' are picked because of a trend towards 'old stuff' isn't in any way backed up by either data or common sense when thinking about the movie titles.

When you get a graph like this which has such basic failures in stats and common sense, it does make you question the data and rigor behind the rest of the article.

Ha yeah you've got to love a graph that looks like random noise until you throw a fancy looking R trend line on it. Most of the data points are outside the confidence interval!

Irrelevant. The confidence interval is for the uncertainty of a parameter, the overall mean/trend: if most of your points fell inside it, that would not be good but extremely bad (you have that much imprecision that your estimate of the overall mean could be anywhere inside the range of observations?). Ideally, your CI would be so narrow that ~0 data points fell within it. (An example: you take a population census of adult heights and find the mean height is 5'7 ± 0.001 inches, say. Very few people will fall within that CI. But that's because it's such a good precise CI due to so much data, not because it's a bad CI.)

You seem to be thinking of a predictive interval (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_interval), which, however, is not what is being plotted here.

Notice also that we are looking at a “minimum 1k” observations, and the y-axis is labeled in increments of one-one thousandth starting at zero, so really it’s “1”, “2”, “3”, etc. The observed fluctuation may be attributable to removing the components of the top-1k which were not movies (reducing the size of the denominator).

I don’t know if I would go so far as to call the rest of the article drivel, though. There are some pretty interesting points made elsewhere, especially the average age of actor plot.

The chart is measuring an effect way down in the noise. 0.3% is the top of the chart!

Read the fine print on the bar chart. They're measuring catalog by trying to figure what the current top 100 streamed songs / albums are.

I can only name a song from one top forty band from the last 10 years. (The HU; I have no idea how mongolian throat metal charted in the US; check them out.)

However, I regularly stream dozens of albums that came out after 2020.

The article seems concerned that pop music is dying. Good riddance?

I'd be much more interested in a revenue-based breakdown (inclusive of concerts, merchandise, etc.), and the number of musicians grossing over $10K, 100K, 250K 500K, 1M, etc. per year over time.

If the population of musicians earning a middle class income is increasing, that'd be great news, and would be well-worth having fewer break $10M per year.

Edit: misspelled "The HU"

* You mean "The HU", unless there is another international mongolian throating singing metal band out there with a similar name.

The HU likely charted because of their inclusion in the OST of a game by EA - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. I was pleasantly surprised to see them start prominently in the opening of that game!

Doom Eternal, for the record, also had some Mongolian throat singing from the late vocalist of Tengger Cavalry.

Presumably they were also easier to get than The Who.

In order to find "new music" the listeners themselves have to put in some effort, be curious and open to the experience. It helps if there is a culture around it, not around "genres" but around discovering music (be it old or new) in general.

When I was a kid I always enjoyed walking into my uncle's living room being awestruck by the enormous hi-fi sound and his massive collections of LPs and later CDs. He, at times, offered me to play what I like. Because I had no real clue about music back then, I just picked the ones with "interesting" cover art. I vividly remember picking Bauhaus' The Sky's Gone Out or King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, totally alien music for me but quite the listening experience.

This kind of ceremonial setting and the work and care around it, is missing in the days of immediate availability under our impulsive fingertips and with it the disposition to take a good listen with a clear intention, with a beginning and an end. It seems that we are more or less offered to be drowned in music streams making it hard to discern, unable to recover with fresh/curious ears without taking breaks and the possibility to listen more sparingly.

> In order to find "new music" the listeners themselves have to put in some effort

This is a very good point. I listen to a lot of great "new" music, but I do that by listening to oddball radio stations (like KCSM San Mateo), going to music festivals (just got back from the Sicily Jazz Festival in Italy), and "new music" events (like the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music https://cabrillomusic.org/ ), and I play the piano with amateur groups and in amateur recitals.

It takes a lot of work, but all I hear is new music, or fresh takes on old music. But sadly, the audience for this is either people like me (men 55+ and some women) and kids who are music majors. There's little in the middle.

I think the average kid who simply followed pop and rock back in the 70s knew more about "music" than the kid today to whom it's just a branding, or a backdrop for a TikTok. They don't listen and pay attention. Pop culture doesn't resolve around music anymore. There's too many other things (games, social media) to worry about.

No offense, but the "new music" you're talking about, that primarily appeals to men aged 55+, is new jazz and classical music? Kids these days don't pay enough attention to the hip new composers? Come on.

Nobody would call modern art music "classical music."

When I was high school/college age, I certainly paid attention to the composers who were writing for film, or synthesizers, etc. I just don't think enough kids today are positioned to be able to appreciate it.

The artists performing this aren't all old men, for the most part they're a diverse group of young people.

From my perspective, you really are stuck in a bubble of old music, whether or not those takes are "new". Modern art music is old music. Jazz, even the most forward-thinking of forms, is old music. I don't think you're able to draw the conclusion that young people aren't interested in music from the concerts you attend, because you are simply listening to old music.

If you want to see hordes of young people who are genuinely interested in music (new music), you'll find them within the sprawling umbrella of club music. Not your local top 40 pop club, but the underground places.

Young people who are interested in music are focused on novel atmospheres/noises coupled with danceable rhythms. They're not interested in harmony, chord progressions, or sounds created near-exclusively by acoustic or electroacoustic instruments. That's the purview of old music, and that's why you'll only find it in music schools (which are fantastically archaic) + old people.

On that note, I'm willing to accept the hypothesis that the "average" young person today is less interested in music than in the past. It's probably true. But your evidence is... well, I think in a bit of a bubble.

Counter to this, I know some teenagers who are obsessed with music in the way (time wise) mainly only teenagers can be. Currently enjoying a summer off doing 10+ hour days focused on that, collaborations with other people online, everything digital or digitized.

You know what they won’t be doing? Any of the venues and sources you describe. Not a value judgment, by the way, just an observation and a curiosity of what you are really seeing is a silo effect where you just don’t see what they are into and vice versa.

> You know what they won’t be doing? Any of the venues and sources you describe.

And I get to hear a lot of their music. It's very clear they haven't heard a wide range of music, and thus for the most part they make music within a tiny range of what is possible, and you get painfully conventional music.

Being ignorant of the past doesn't make you a better musician.

Not one song on the pop charts this year would have sounded particularly out of place in 1992.

In 1970, the music on the charts would have sounded like alien voices to people in 1940.

Well maybe. These kids are listening pretty broadly too, fwiw.

Actually why I don't see AI generated music a thing.

What I think we do as humans participating in culture is "select" music, I'm not sure music is every truly created or composed but stumbled upon and then selected. It's selected at a rate which we can manage. A large part of the fun comes from sharing music with others. When everything becomes personalized, we start to lose this.

If I had library of never ending new great AI generated music, what would happen? I guess I'd just keep browsing forever and never really know what I like. Arguably this is already happening. I've been a musician from a young age, and I now actually find it difficult to know what to listen to. Before I had steaming services, it was a lot easier a lot less option stress.

> This kind of ceremonial setting and the work and care around it, is missing in the days of immediate availability...

I'm riffing off of this, and saying it's about the same as trying to find a new opinion by reading Facebook.

If the main way you're trying to find new music is algorithmically, you're only going to find fairly similar kinds of music. This differs hugely from the music festival, or even being able to go into a music shop and ask a human for something interesting and new.

That's without talking about how garage bands and live music have mostly died a sad death.

As well, I'd say listening to complex music, or even a different genre of music, takes focus and patience. In gaining the algorithm-driven, attention-seeking internet, we've lost a lot of that focus and patience.

Yes, it involved more effort, and did not have competition like all things the the internet offers.

I'd guess like most people, my greatest period of music discovery was in my teens and 20's. Listening to music with friends, we'd share new discoveries, hoping to win over a new fan.

Music stores were great, too. Putting on the gross headphones at Tower Records and sampling the latest releases, let me find new bands without risking my limited teen cash supply.

Even better, I could go across the street from Tower and pick the brains of the people at the punk/metal shop, or convince them to play something that Tower would never stock. The people there always had a better understanding of your tastes, far better than a genre listing.

The most fruitful source of new music was going out to see shows. Going to a show to see one or two bands at any given show, there was a good chance I'd come away a fan of one of the openers.

It's seems like what you're describing would help you find music that's new to you, not necessarily music that has been produced recently like in the article.

I imagine this is especially true with today's data driven recommendation engines.

When I discover new music it often turns out to be made in 2010 rather than 2022, and tbh it doesn't matter to me since I haven't heard it before either way.

Music discovery has been replaced by playlists that you can subscribe too. They are the new radio and now actually drive radio plays.

Something like this happened to me when I was at debate camp in high school.

I roomed with a super-chill guy who had an enormous (at the time) volume of CDs with him. I told him I was starting to listen to rock music more seriously (something I hid for a long time; I'm Black and Latino and got made fun of by people when I told them I listened to Blink and Taking Back Sunday). When I told him I was listening to KROQ, he said "No. Here's a Bob Dylan CD. Listen to this; give it back to me whenever."

Loved it.

He then gave me White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground, which is what basically _really_ started me on punk, which I still listen to a ton of today (less Blink; more SNFU, Bad Cop/Bad Cop, and the like) and has kind-of formed a part of my identity (or at least the part that is always ALWAYS seeking new music and doesn't fixate on the music of my college years).

Sharing music is a huge part of discovery.

I think the "music is boring" sentiment could be about the lack of shared experiences due to hyper-fragmentation. It's easy to access all genres of music from one app at flat monthly rate. The mainstream, then, is the lowest common denominator much more so than before. Specifically it doesn't need to embrace any rising genres. And there are no longer pronounced subcultures either, if there's no friction e.g. queueing up in front of the record store - that facilitate socializing with like-tasted fans.

I think you'll also find a sentiment going back decades that "today's music sucks" or "today's popular music sucks." That said, there's certainly a lot of fragmentation even if there's still a big pop culture head too. In TV certainly an HBO or Netflix hit has nothing like the reach of a network hit a couple decades ago. And, of course, watching is less synchronous too.

But I believe we are still in universal agreement that Dusco sucks. Always has, always will

Disco is certainly the genre from what would normally be my peak music taste acquisition time--college and the period thereafter--that I could never stand and which none of my peers were into either.

D: Wtf this stuff is great https://youtu.be/LUGga_VPeTo

This is survivorship bias. There was a lot of mediocre dreck shoveled out in the late 70's that is largely unlistenable. Everything was rerecorded in disco style even if it wasn't a good idea.

Hey disco is coming back. If these trends continue... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6LOWKVq5sQ

Aww. Disco spawned house music[1] and, from there, all of house's subgenres and massive influence on popular music. Listening to old 80s house is full of samples of disco beats and string grooves. You can still hear it in popular records; disco influence is all over Daft Punk's discography[2]. I think it deserves some credit and fond appreciation :)

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daft_Punk#Musical_style

then you must hate edm bc that is technically like disco v4

I think the end of musical subcultures may be significant. It used to feel like there were many isolated musical bubbles, separated by geography or language or social class or simply aesthetic choice, and each one would develop its own unique musical idiom. Every now and then some cultural explorer would bring one of these idioms back to the mass market, introducing a new flavor into the pop music melting pot, and a surge of innovation would occur.

Of course the flow of attention back into the previously-isolated musical subculture tended to be destructive, as far as its inhabitants were concerned; the musicians who rode the wave out to mainstream popularity were often scorned and labeled sell-outs, for making private profit at the expense of the community which had supported them.

When there is no more isolation, all music shared everywhere over the internet all the time, how can a unique new cultural strain develop? When any new ideas one musician comes up with just get dropped into the global soup, instead of taking time to ferment in a smaller, more focused environment, how can any distinct new genre emerge? It seems like we are seeing a different model of musical creativity, which is likely to be broader and smoother; more gradual global drift and fewer irruptions.

> When there is no more isolation, all music shared everywhere over the internet all the time, how can a unique new cultural strain develop? When any new ideas one musician comes up with just get dropped into the global soup, instead of taking time to ferment in a smaller, more focused environment, how can any distinct new genre emerge?

The bar of checking out a new genre has gotten lower than ever, yes. But I don't agree that it's one big global soup now. Recommendation systems of Soundcloud/Spotify/Youtube often give you stuff from the same genre/niche of music when you listen to a given niche, and conversely they don't recommend you stuff from unrelated niches. So small niches might not be discovered by average listeners unless they are going viral.

Furthermore, the gatekeepers of the mainstream are still in full power. Things like radio stations, shopping mall music, etc. all are still controlled by a small elite. Even social media platforms often perform curation of things featured on their front or even trending pages. So there's still often a "this isn't going to work with average listeners" kind of decision going on, done by a human.

I'm not so sure about the end of musical subcultures. The house/techno/dnb underground here is still strong, there are events focused around those genres every weekend and during the week here. I almost went to a warehouse party last night but was worn out from walking all day. And I just got back from a festival in another part of the state that was almost exclusively bass music.

And this is completely separate from the larger festival circuit, EDC/CRSSD and the like. I actually don't like going to bigger festivals, the vibe is all wrong and its way too bro-y.

The subcultures are still there, they're just not easily organized or present on Spotify. I judge a DJ by how easy it is to Shazam all the tracks he plays, the good ones aren't getting their shit off Spotify thats for sure

My sis has been diving headfirst into goth culture, and exploring their musical palette. She goes to events centered around the music they listen to. And on and on.

I think it's demographics. The 2 latest generations are such a minority and so dominated by older generations that they can't find each other, and their voices can't be heard or amplified

>And there are no longer pronounced subcultures either

This article is an elaboration on an earlier post by the author about there being no countercultures in today's world:

"14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture"

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-ar...

This is lame. It spends most of its time going over film and architecture in order to prove that music is stagnating. It’s not a good comparison. Film is stagnating creatively because the budgets are too big to take a risk. The same is not true of music at all.

One real point they make is that people are listening to older music. So what? That’s what we do in a culture. People continue to be inspired by the classics because they good.

And my last snarky point is that if you think music isn’t good or creative anymore, you just aren’t paying attention. Go take a dive on a streaming service for a while. It’s an amazing time to be alive for music.

Shows like "The Boys" are produced with higher writing and cinematic quality than most of the recent Marvel movies if you ask me... There is always deeply creative stuff out there being made on shoestring budgets. The rewards for those undiscovered creations are dramatically less now because the Internet buries them under algorithms, and far less people are aware of hidden gems within a sea of bad and cheap content.

According to Wikipedia, The Boys had a budget of $11.2 million per episode in S1. So that's not a great example of a shoestring budget. (Though I agree with your basic point. I'd rather watch The Boys than pretty much any Marvel film.)

There are many facets to the discussion of course, but many examples of movies and shows that were exceptional based on lower budgets. When comparing the budget of an entire season of The Boys to almost any single Marvel film though, the wasted money on individual Marvel Films is far more apparent.

Movies like Desperado, Way of the Gun, No Country for Old Men, Fall (by Eric Shaeffer) and many others are far more enjoyable to me than big budget blockbusters, but others may disagree... Those had far lower budgets than many ensemble cast/empty script superhero movies, but preferences are always subjective, so it's not really something I'd really want to argue with anyone about.

I don’t understand what is so surprising about this. The world has been producing high-quality music for decades. The catalog of old music will always grow in size relative to the catalog of new music. Were we expecting the dominance of old music to decline for no reason?

This is it. Music production technology made incredible strides from 1960-1990, as well as new ideas around production that the new equipment enabled. Thus, in that period, pop music sounded "old" very quickly. This all culminated with a computer-driven "we can do anything" style in the late 90's, where people like BT made awful hi-tech productions. Now, with hindsight, we see that 40-year old albums like Thriller still sound amazing, there simply is no new tech that can improve it.

While I personally don't much care for much new music I hear, I'm hesitant to chalk it up to music being worse rather than I'm somewhat set in my preferences. That said, pre-COVID I had definitely reached the point where I had never heard of the bands playing trade show parties and the like and, when I did hear them, my impression was somewhere between meh and it's noise.

Hold up, I certainly didn't mean to imply that music has gotten worse - only that it stopped getting better (from a purely sonic perspective). There's lots of great new music coming out, but a lot of it has a retro sound anyway.

you could have said the same in the 40s , 50s , 60s etc. A lot of new music was made in reaction to what was considered very formulaic old music.

People mostly play old and familiar content likely because it's totally exhausting now to find favorable new content.

Too many of my older favorite artists like Tracy Chapman don't even release music any more because of the lack of reward and respect involved in releasing music now, it's disheartening to post your hard work and not get any notable views, especially when they're a grammy winner. Even notable musicians from the past don't get views now, not because the music isn't good, they don't get views because often the music isn't "TikTok Clip Worthy".

If TikTok only had a tool to scroll through songs (music videos), with a much better method of preventing spam, playing everything uploaded fairly, and that was better at preventing repetitive plays, that's likely what would make new music discovery far far easier for everyone.

This article is making a lot of assumptions that I'm not sure are correct. For example, it claims older music and older movie franchises are gaining in popularity for the same pervasive cultural reason. That's an assumption, especially because he only mentioned two categories of artistic endeavor. What about others? Old books vs new books? Old video games vs new video games? Painting, sculpture, architecture?

I can't point to numbers that say he's wrong, but for my whole life I have never felt like I had access to a smaller variety of media than I had before. It's just not on billboards. It's more individualistic. None of my friends read the same books or listen to the same bands as each other.

Yeah. We probably know some of the reasons action movie franchises (in particular) are big. Budgets have gotten huge and predictable effects-laden action franchises are very important for the international market and theater goers apparently flock to them in the US as well. The good news is there's lots of choice if that's not your thing.

> It seems impossible—after all, billions of dollars are spent every year by entertainment corporations in their quest for market dominance. Yet, despite this constant spending spree, almost every week brings a new sign of cultural stagnation.

The author fundamentally misunderstands how business works, I think. Lots of money up for grabs in a highly competitive market equals hardcore conservatism from investors (the labels in this case). They will heavily bet on artists following a "winning formula", and buy up the independents that invent new winning formulas. You see the same exact behavior in every creative industry, because the money is relying on past performance to predict success.

Exactly right. Everything is boring because reliable is boring. A lot of what we see output by major cultural businesses is basically algorithmic:

We need a well-known actor (so one of maybe 50), supported by some other known actors (several of a few hundred), in a story that's a continuation (so a dozen or so franchises), where he beats up a bad guy or two, doesn't die, and doesn't offend anyone. We'll add explosions, magical creatures, and physically impossible stunts, because people like that. We'll fill it up with either well known tropes or ironic spoofs of such for a bit of variety.

Songs are similar. Make sure the chorus is good, repeat it a few times, don't make people wait too long before the memorable bit, add a featuring artist who is going to get their own release soon.

What we saw in the past was people would try something new, and quite a lot of those things would crash and burn, but now and again you got a really great hit.

Part of why I don't consume much mass culture is I see this algo all the time. It's a bit like a foodie who's seen all the ingredients and all the ways to cook them: you stop thinking this new dish is new, and you just want to appreciate a well-made thing, which is also something that fits in this formula, but doesn't require constant innovation, and crucially doesn't require constant consumption.

Explore/exploit tends to exploit when there's a lot of money on the line. Same reason drugs are invented by little companies that get bought by the big ones.

Yup, not just the entertainment business.

It takes a different kind of vision to predict things which are orthogonal to past performance.

In so many areas where corporate control has been consolidated, there is more complete dominance of bureaucratic hierarchies that just happen to more systematically exclude those rare innovators and creatives who could occasionally punch through to earth-shaking effect. The allowance for true innovation is almost extinct. The difference is it's nearly universal now.

People like Thos. Edison and Nikola Tesla wouldn't have a chance today, they already had it difficult in their time where the downward pressure was already palpable, and each came very close to not having a worldwide imact, just like everyone else. Keep in mind their productivity was actually decimated by going against the current like this, so their known milestones & breakthroughs are only the tip of the iceberg compared to what "could have been" in a more supportive cultural environment.

And that was then.

Even in places which pride themselves in non-traditional corporate behavior, the same anti-creative characteristics have become generally acceptable by comparative example, all up and down the entire chain of command. Especially among the money people, increased greed is the antithesis of increased innovation.

If the only thing you want to do with money is make more of the same, that's legitimate especially if you're in debt or something, but that's not how you make more of new other things which could turn out to be more valuable than money.

People in general have gradually settled for so much less innovation, in exchange for the very little financial improvement that might result without such a distraction.

And creatives who would have had a (already slim) chance in previous decades are having none of it.

Woz dropped out when it started getting so bad you couldn't deny it.

Plus "star-making machinery" itself became so much more prominent and more like an insiders lottery. The establishment of a mechanism which can "make anyone a star" ended up being needed just to get recognition for the occasional jaw-dropping talent. But once that mechanism is in place, there's almost no talent needed after that.

Everyone who is now the age that Ozzy, Slash, and Alanis were when they did the work that made the world pay attention, was born after 9/11. Meaning, in that climate. They were never conscious of a world without the web, Facebook, and YouTube. Rock, as Marilyn Manson noted, is deader than dead. That’s a formidable and fertile tradition going back to the blues that’s just over and done as far as the mainstream is concerned. Forget Metallica- we don’t even have Nickelback and 3 Doors Down anymore.

Instead of reaching for your logical fallacies and statistical poindexterism to pseudo-refute the article, maybe have a think about why it might actually be describing an actual phenomenon.

That’s an interesting point. How would you characterize growing up in the shadow of the Global War on Terror vs growing up in the shadow of the Cold War?

The shadow of the global war on terror has been more intimate. Surveillance, airport security etc. During the cold war the fear was that we would all be blown up by the same thermonuclear bombs in a nuclear holocaust. What you could do with a passenger airplane was not the main problem.

"Music consumption" is an ugly turn of phrase.

The music industry execs are the ones hurting here. The music industry has done fuck all for music and culture for decades. Now they have painted themselves into a corner with their paint-by-numbers crap and can't even out-compete the pop/commercial stuff from just a few decades ago.

Culture is innovating just fine, all over the world. Anyone with talent and heart can gain a following large enough to support them. You just can't package culture up and sell it in a mass market anymore.

Consumption and purchase of music are different things. The culture has not stopped. The kids just aren't paying. Thier parents are paying for easy access to Queen songs. The kids get thier music elsewhere.

Can you please tell us older ones where the kids are getting their music these days?

When I was young I used torrents and filesharing between friends or local networks.

YouTube (and TikTok to a certain extent).

Definitely TikTok, and Instagram as well. Yes, really, there's a huge independent musician community on Instagram.

Seconding YouTube.

No so young anymore, but I listen to SoundCloud at least 50 hours per week (after heavily curating who I follow and writing my own SoundCloud frontend to make the site usable, fwiw). In fact most artists I follow do not publish anywhere else, except maybe Bandcamp (whose usability is even worse).

ps: to any SoundCloud pm listening, I would have gladly paid for a purely linear timeline of my follows that remembers its position across devices, but no I had to build it myself.

> Bandcamp (whose usability is even worse).

I guess this is a matter of taste. Personally I find Bandcamp super usable. It's one of the gems of the internet if you ask me, up there with HN.

There's so much amazing independent music on BC and the revenue cut for artists is extremely fair. Money spent there is well spent.

All extremely true, but the damn friction when buying tracks there... (jwz put it best [1])

> If I put 6 albums in my cart and check out, you make me enter my credit card info SIX TIMES. This is insane. You realize this is insane, don't you?

> You have used Amazon, right? Click once, receive candy. You need to be like that.

(Maybe they fixed it? Haven't bought multiple items at once in a while)

Also I would gladly pay for SoundCloud if most of the money actually went to the artists (if any SC pm is still listening).

[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/10/shouting-into-the-void-this... (you will have to copy and paste the link manually because he loves to block HN referrals for self-amusement)

They must have fixed it, I buy a lot of stuff on bandcamp and I've only entered my card once.

The only friction is waiting a few second per track for them to prepare my 12 flac downloads, clicking through payment only takes a second or so.

I had the payment problem the other day and it's because I wanted to pay with PayPal. It seems if you use a card they can roll together all the items, but PayPal can't.

My biggest frustration is not being able to download a zip file of all the tracks I just bought. Going one by one is tedious, especially because I tend to download both a FLAC for backup and 320 for everyday listening.

I also love bandcamp! Very simple design, very mid-to-late 00s but without clutter. I want it to last forever.

A massive chunk of my music collection recently came from random strangers.

I found a waterlogged phone on the beach. No amount of dry rice could resurrect it. But I located the owner and, via a micro SD card, returned a 100GB of family photos by EXIF GPS data that led me to their house. Happy repatriations. As a side effect I snarfed about 100GB of high quality MP3s. I'm still listening to bands I've never heard of before. On reflection I rather liked that. It shows my ego-driven so-called "tastes" are perhaps an over inflated sense of identity and that whether I'll like random music or not is only a little higher than chance.

Another time someone gave me a USB with a PDF to read, and the rest of the drive was chock full of their whole music collection. Now that thumb drives are so HUGE and I literally have boxes of them lying around I wonder whether to just preload them with a shit-ton of cool music and give them to people I like. Like old mix tapes... it's nothing to do with the cost/purchase... it's a whole new formula for discovery and restoring a social dimension to music.

Back when coffee shop wifi was a new thing, and AP Isolation hadn't been invented yet, I used to discover a lot of music on Network Neighborhood at my local Caribou Coffee.

A lot of folks would have their file-sharing settings wide open, so I could just click around the WLAN and look for mp3's. Found all sorts of interesting stuff, and if someone left a writable folder, I'd take-some-leave-some in kind.

Those days are long gone, so lately it's estate sales. Show up on the last day of the sale and pick up a whole milk-crate of CDs for $40, probably 150 pieces in there. Basically if I recognize and like a few artists in the collection, I figure this person's tastes overlapped enough with mine that I should give the rest of the collection a spin. Oh, wow.

Best part is, it's all physical media which can never DRM itself out of my collection again. (I've ranted previously about random tracks just "turning gray" on my Spotify playlists, presumably because of some licensing dispute or whatever, and how deeply offensive that is to the fans who curated these playlists and assign significance to the songs therein.) It's a bit of work to rip and encode, but it's not like the old days where a 60-minute album might take 90 minutes to rip and encode. CPUs are quick and USB CDROMs are cheap; I can do 5 albums in parallel in 10 minutes. Then stuff the milkcrate in the basement and forget about it.

Unexpected good music can be quite fun.

I found a pretty good band while giving advice to a coworker on how to explain away inappropriate language at work if someone complained to HR.

The coworker was putting together a new workstation for someone, and said "I need a network card". The person at the next desk said that they had an extra and tried to hand it to the guy building the workstation.

He said "I don't want your sloppy seconds". Then he remembered the origins of the term "sloppy seconds" [1] and wondered if he's allowed to say that at work.

I overheard and told him, "Don't worry. If someone complains just say you were talking about the band. Every sexual term and phrase has a band named after it somewhere. Even if HR tries to check, you can just say it was a band you heard at a bar when you were in college".

Naturally I then Googled "sloppy seconds band" and sure enough, there is a band by that name and the first Google hit is a Wikipedia article about them [2].

The first two paragraphs of that article say:

> Sloppy Seconds is an American, Ramones-influenced punk band sometimes referred to as a junk rock band from Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, that started in 1984. They gained notoriety in the underground punk scene with gritty and controversial songs like "Come Back, Traci," "I Don't Want to be a Homosexual", "Jani is a Nazi", "I Want 'em Dead" and "So Fucked Up."

> The band's unusual and controversial lyrics encompass pornography, classic horror movies, classic television shows, comic books, alcohol, being fat, and getting drunk.

After that second paragraph I had to check if they were on Spotify and they were. I listened to a few of their albums the rest of the day and sure enough, there were songs on all those things mentioned in that second paragraph, some of them quite good.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloppy_Seconds

I'm not quite young, but I listen to lo-fi hip hop streams, video game soundtracks (Guilty Gear Strive is my current recommendation), DJ streamers, live cover streamers, and space music on public radio (WXPN). I doubt any of these get reflected in the official numbers.

This can't be anywhere near all of it, but check out the chat on the Lofi Girl YouTube channel, one hundred percent kids studying algebra and worrying about testing. Just like a chatroom in the 90's.

Tiktok

Apparently TikTok

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/22/1080632810/tiktok-music-indus...

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tiktok-music-i...

Don't look at algorithm services, look and follow smaller record labels (on bandcamp maybe). Some of the labels i follow: unseen worlds, drag city, hausu mountain, hyperdub.

I am turning 33 next year, I have yet to have a year where my heart almost doesnt explode from joy and amazement at all the music people are make. Every year I feel luckier than last to be alive to hear the new things coming out. I really can't relate at all to most of this discussion.. It is very alien to me.

Spotify, youtube, indie discord servers, musician friends, SoundCloud, Instagram accounts of artists, live shows, just everywhere you turn there's a goldmine of indie music

Certainly the culture hasn't stopped, but how would you say that music has moved forward in the past decade or two? While I can name a lot of groups that make new music I enjoy, I can't say that there have been revolutionary genres created for awhile.

Ohhh it's out there... I'm not sure "when" dubstep was created, but it's starting to spawn new explorations. Take Clown Core, kind of a dubstep/metal/jazz/comedy fusion... thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT7x1NvGf5k Before you write it off entirely (I don't blame you), take a second to notice the synchronization around 0:55.

That's pretty cool, thank you!

Have you heard of live coding? Writing code in front of a live audience that plays music? I doubt anything like that has been done before the last couple of decades. I don't know the history, maybe people dabbled with it way back when, but it's an actual thing now. I hope it really catches on!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts

Algorave?

Sure there have been totally new genres within the last few years: Russian hardbass, phonk, hyperpop, etc. Art is constantly evolving, even though not necessarily evolving in the mainstream.

Phonk isn't new and a lot of the new stuff is more of a caricature of phonk (though some is quite good as well)

Nils frahm, jon hopkins, pomme, go_a, all awesome and the last two are fairly recent. I think there's hundreds of new genres, but we're all finding what we love. I don't have to listen to college radio at 1 AM and hope for the best anymore.

Yet all the summer music festivals are packed, sold out within minutes. It's just that the kids value live experience more than they value mp3 or Spotify.

I have a theory around this.

Short version: Music is no longer the center of popular culture.

Longer version: the 60s/70s/80s saw a technical revolution in producing and distributing music. Each year, new and even more amazing things were possible, and a steady stream of geniuses came in and produced groundbreaking masterpieces using the new tech. It changed the world, and the world loved it.

But now, that's all pretty much done, and the exciting things are happening elsewhere.

You can see similar cycles earlier in history when novels or films were where new amazing things constantly captured the world's imagination.

What's the current "thing"? Computer games, internet stuff, maybe streaming TV.

Short clips as TikTok

Which ironically contain music. Often it's TikTok specific remixes of famous older songs. But does that mean that culture still revolves around music?

Short clips have trivialized the value of music. If you go on TikTok, the same songs rotate very very frequently because TikTok pre-designates what trends. Only a handful of music artists are added at a time to the cue, and everything else (the independent (and often far more desirable/creative/undiscovered music) often languishes with little to no views in virtual storage there. TikTok is a smokescreen for major music label influence based on my observation, and boy is it tediously repetitive, even when you click the "I don't want to see this again" button.

Vr. AI assisted art.

I consider the use of auto-tune in Cher's "Believe"(1998) the very last example of technological innovation in music.

The current "thing" (which is gaming/virtual) contains cinema/tv and music, but does not replace them, in the same way that cinema did not kill music.

The current "theme" however, is attention deficit. Artists dread the skip button or the scroll down and this has an effect in the type of music they make. If the Pink Floyd were releasing today, Shine On would not be 9 parts but 2 , a drum machine would roll after a few seconds, and white noise would be added to fill in the spectrum. It's a race for ears more than a demand to be heard

How about getting rid of these ridiculously long copyright terms so that people can actually reinterpret and remix and reinvent the cultural artifacts of their youth?

Isn't it kinda obvious that these copyright terms - tailored to suit corporations almost exclusively - are like a straitjacket in terms of creativity? All human cultural work always built up on what came before. We are - as the saying goes - standing on the shoulders of giants. But since about one generations, the giants have started to refuse to let go and don't let us climb on top anymore.

So, yeah. When you prevent the old giants from dying and stop their corpses from becoming fertilizer for new ideas and approaches, that's just what you get; a stale 'creative' industry, ever regurgitating the same ideas without real innovation and experimentation.

I agree with you on copyrights in general, but I'm not sure that's the issue here.

1. Movies and their sequels/prequels: If anything, copyright should make it easier to make NEW stuff. But while there's lots of interesting movies being made (check Youtube and tiktok and vimeo etc, and even the mainstream streaming services which have tremendous long tail of weird content!), as far as cinemas specifically go - that's less and less where we watch our video entertainment, attention span is lower and lower, and people are choosing safe choices with their limited money and time, so cinema-oriented companies are making tremendously expensive visually impressive safe content. I can watch experimental interesting stuff at home. I go to cinema at cinema prices for a safe movie that has astonishing special effects that I cannot feasibly watch at home. It's an outdated medium, but that doesn't mean art itself is dead - it just moved to new forms.

2. Music may well be a discoverability problem. There's a RIDICULOUS amount of new stuff being made. Experimental and traditional, interesting and boring, in all shapes and formats and kinds. Go to reddit and see the amount of cool stuff people make at home. But it's also positively overwhelming... whereas I know I like Sultans of Swing and will always like Sultans of Swing :). And we have to consider who is the paying audience and how they pay - is the cool stuff teenagers and youngsters watch and listen to captured through traditional channels? Cool new stuff has always been shared and bootlegged.

So I think cool innovative art is being made all the time, more than ever in fact; but not necessarily much or all of it is being consumed and importantly tracked at mainstream level. And that may be OK and normal. The article is looking at outdated art format/consumption, and noting that they are showing outdated content. It may be more tautologically true than an enlightening/warning sign.

Music discovery is my number 1 problem with finding new music because computers made the barrier to entry so low there is now a lot of recorded crap.

Lots of the discovery algorithms seem to be paywalled, which I don’t want to do, I want to find good music for free and CHOOSE to support artists.

If music discovery is your number 1 music problem, why won't you pay for it?

How does software discovery seem to always be free, but music gets special treatment?

I have the same issue finding new good video games to play.

Software discovery isn’t easy either.

I kind of miss Yahoo categories and lists.

I don't think it is. Or at least not effectively. When I need a utility or have a requirement, I struggle mightily to find reliable software I can trust to fulfill that purpose. A lot of signals that would've worked 10 years ago don't anymore. Paying for software, which would be my preference, in no way guarantees that it will fit purpose, won't install Malware, Won't abuse my trust or won't be handicapped in some way. Search will lead me to slightly scammy software, and so increasingly will SEO-ed paid reviews on websites and even forums. I live the trustless Web and I hate it :-D

So for me at least, easy seamless software discovery is completely lacking.

Now, this is HN. I am sure there are number of people who will enjoy spending many hours Nd days on reddit and github sifting through opinions and source code, trying many things and then tweaking them until they get what they need. I used to be one. But that's not easy software discovery, that's hard physical labour for 99.99% of populace, including today myself :->

Whereas frankly, Spotify does ok job in building a radio station from a song or playlist. Unsolved problem is still finding a song that's alike to this song in some specific way that makes sense to me... But I expect that to be unsolved in my lifetime.

Music discovery/recommendation and really discovery/recommendation more broadly are just really hard problems. I know someone who gave a number of talks about the difficulty maybe 15 years ago (I think at SXSW among other places). [1] And it really hasn't gotten any better.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2009/mar/17/sxswi-reco...

I don’t want to pay to listen to bad music to find good music.

I want to support artists I like, but it’s hard to find them in an endless sea of crap.

I use RateYourMusic and Last.fm mostly to find out about new music:

1. RateYourMusic has a wonderful feature of democratically tagging albums with genres. People suggest this or that genre, then if it gets more than 2 votes (or something like that) the album's page is updated to feature the genre. You can then browse the genre page and swift through other similarly-tagged albums. Here's an example[1].

2. I find Last.fm's "Similar Artists" section to favor niche artists more than, say, the Spotify equivalent.

[1]: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/casper-mcfadden/medi...

Look up Rick Beato + spotify* on youtube.

People are making crappy music.

You can't really blame copyright for lack of talent, marketing, and lack of taste.

One of the things that was most interesting to me was the linked Ringer article that shows the advancing age of leading stars in movies: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/6/27/23181232/old-acto...

I think this is pretty fascinating, and I think points to what I call "The age of data optimization". That is, starting in the early 00s, pretty much all businesses everywhere started to have much more actionable data on consumer trends and preferences, primarily due to the Internet.

This culture of "neverending analytic optimization" is by its very nature risk averse - these data algorithms don't deal that well with a completely "new" input, like a young, untrusted actor.

So, instead, these algorithms are fundamentally biased towards "what worked before", meaning actors that were able to come of age before all this data analysis started. And to be clear, I'm not saying movie studios have a single algorithm that they run that says "pick me a leading actor". But major studios have all gotten much more "data driven" in general in the past 25 years', where before that time movie making was much more of an "artistic" and personality-driven affair.

This seemingly applies to virtually everything now too. It makes me wonder how direct the connection is between this phenomenon and young people feeling like the system is rigged against them. I don’t necessarily think it’s new or unique to society but it does seem exacerbated because of this.

I'm thinking Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

"AAA" gaming is also headed in a bad, but different, direction. Most money now comes from microtransactions, and the temptation to sell what amounts to an unregulated slot machine with a game attached will be hard to resist for most publishers.

In fact, the current CEO of Unity (One of the most popular game engine) said that anyone who's not baking monetization into their games right from the start is "f*king idiot".

This is the second time this guy's blog has been featured here in a week. His articles are borderline trolling to for old guys. I am not even young myself.

"They don't make anything new :(". No, bruh. It's you

I’m a younger guy, but the sentiment of the article does ring true to me. There is an overwhelming amount of regurgitation, at least within the realm of popular culture.

Time to put your big boy pants and see the real world. Ta ta taaa.

It's pop culture. Regurgitation is the very essence of it.

I’m not sure you are understanding the point of the article. It’s not a matter of if there is good art to be found if you go looking, it’s about whether modern society is undergoing a cultural decline.

Meh. What we are seeing is the fall of "the" mass market. Starting with Elvis, and going nuclear with Arnie, there were literal billions of dollars poured into promoting particular star actors / singers / entertainers. We can all name them because we all grew up with newspapers radio TV and cinema pouring them into our brains. These stars were acceptable. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes mediocre, but they could appeal to at least one or two standard deviations of paying customers. They were the tomato and cheese pizzas of the global entertainment industry. And we ate them in billions of tiny portions, even globally. The way it works is if the film succeeds in making its money back more money goes to that star to promote the next film.

Then something like the internet / youtube / social media happens.

Suddenly I can get spaghetti bolognese or fish and chips and someone else can go for a light omelette. And the money still works the same way - but on much smaller scales. Spag bol will keep growing, never reaching the heights of previous generations but plenty good enough.

But the pizza distribution network still exists. It just has no more pizza - every young star is really spag bol or omelette- the venn diagram of who previously had tasted pizza will now have two smaller circles - spag and omelette. And it's not worth throwing pizza levels of distribution money at either spag or omelette.

So the money has to keep throwing it at the aging pizza.

One day even the pizza will retire or die and then we will look back on a time when everyone had seen one movie of tv show.

From a sales-only perspective, this article makes sense, but the very obvious influence of TikTok seems noticeably absent from the analysis.

TikTok, by nature of its scale, has completely changed how the music industry works. If you want to prove this, check the top 40 chart of your favorite music streaming service or listen to your local top 40 station for a bit. Both of these were originally designed to provide a good metric on what songs people enjoy listening to from beginning to end. However, they're now almost entirely populated with songs made popular by 30 seconds to a minute of their content rather than the entire work.

TikTok has created a fundamental shift in the metrics by which people collectively evaluate music's popularity. Forty years ago, what was most "safe" for radio (in the sense that it was palatable enough for most people) was what got played. Now, the shareability of even a single segment of a song is its entry point into the feedback loop of exposure that creates viral hits.

Whether this is a good or bad thing is honestly subjective (and likely polarizing to some) but the article's failure to recognize it feels significant. In a system where the extent to which people get bored of listening to a song in its entirety is no longer a concern, people are revisiting old releases and finding that they perform extremely well under the current metrics. That's why we have Kate Bush and Metallica in the top 40. Their songs performed well under the previous system before fading into irrelevance, and they just happen to perform well under this new system as well. Stranger Things may have given them the push they needed to re-enter the public conscience, but what followed was the same process that would have happened if their music was released, say, ten years ago rather than 40. Age itself is secondary when shareability is king.

Personally, I'm of the belief that this will stabilize in the long term if short-form shareability remains the dominant metric of a song's popularity. In the same way that radio stations stop playing songs as people get bored of them, so too do older songs fade from popularity on TikTok as they begin to become tiresome to enough people. Combined with the fact that this happens at an extremely fast pace and that the amount of legacy pop music is finite, this means that TikTok users are bound to run out of sufficiently popular legacy content to use eventually.

The author has some great points here and it’s interesting to see parallels drawn between both music and movie/film/streaming genres. I was a radio dj in college and the only real rule (aside from legal stuff etc) was we could play an artist only once per quarter - the result for me was just playing the newest music that was coming into the studio. It’s quite appropriate imo to identify music streaming as kind of a common denominator for music age - people just play what they’re familiar with. I love music and a big big part of this is the discovery process; the radio is great for discovery but it’s ephemeral - and a streaming or listening service such as spotify is a great way to expand on those leads. No firm opinions here, it just seems like more people listening more to older music makes sense and is kind of a weighted average. The “moving picture” medium is a different thing, maybe..

The article may have an interesting premise, however the only statistics we are offered in support of the author’s claim is two years’ worth of data (2021 and 2022). What about the more long-term trends? We might be missing the big picture for short-term cyclical trends. Also, the data for 2022 is, without doubt, incomplete.

Is it just me, or are posts moaning about the quality of contemporary music not as good or original as old-school articles moaning about it?

For sure. Gimme some good ol' "Pop Punk isn't Actually Punk" articles. Now THAT was some great music culture criticism. Kids these days....

I would posit that the "numbers on music consumption" are incorrect, and that Billboard, iTunes, Spotify, radio, television etc have no connection with "the whole creative culture". They are by their very construct focused on "old songs" and an old way of thinking about art. I am a musician and deeply grounded in virtually every genre of music. Not a day goes by that I am not blown away at some no-name musician on YouTube or other medium - at how they have extended the whole performance capability of their instrument(s) and of the creative process itself. Keep music LIVE!!

I'm a big fan of Tidal's recommendations. It somehow thought that I'd like Rush a few days ago (not wrong) and started playing popular 70's music. My initial reaction was "I didn't even know that it could do that!"

Usually, it's people that are one step past YouTube track, and actually have an album out.

“The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he wrote. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/06/the-record-eff...

Traditional top music charts didn't exclusively show "music" per se. They would list comedy and spoken word albums as well if they sold enough to be on the main chart. Music was just the lion's share of prerecorded auditory entertainment.

Fast forward to today and the situation has changed. Instead of listening to traditional radio, a person can get audiovisual stimulation from TikTok. TikTok allows people to remix the sound and/or visual component from other people's clips into your own. So there can be thousands of people making TikTok content from the same exact music clip. But, as before, it's not necessarily "music" that counts. People will remix audio from movies, old cartoons, comedy bits, random spoken excerpts, non-charting independent music, etc. However, unlike Richard Pryor comedy albums, these little clips aren't showing up on Gioia's traditional chart sources. Is prerecorded auditory entertainment getting less creative or is it just less bounded by what we traditionally think of as music?

Frankly I doubt lack of creativity is even a problem. Quite the opposite. The very fact that old stuff is still popular shows that people don't care if music is "creative" or not. If the traditional mainstream music industry is searching for the next big thing to revive sales, an exciting new genre, I don't think it's going to happen. More "creative" buggy whips isn't the issue.

If this is what you believe then you're simply looking in the wrong places.

I firmly believe all the best new art (including music) is digital. Everytime I go looking for it I'm astounded at what I find.

How much of this is due to some fundamental cultural decline, and how much is due to the fact that, starting relatively recently, old music stopped being something that you had to seek out and obtain, and instead became something that's provided almost effortlessly via vast archives and recommendation engines?

There is an enormous amount of old music out there, and while only a small percentage is really good, that still amounts to an enormous amount of non-new good music that competes with new music.

Not even sure it's decline so much as cultural fragmentation. The head pop culture creations (hollywood movies and the top streaming songs) are things with universal awareness (so things that came of age before the internet and mass media was created by a few brokers). The tail has been growing absurdly. Go ask a teenager what they like to watch or listen to, they'll probably mention some youtube/tiktok streamers you've never heard of, and have a tiny cultural footprint.

If you’re looking to discover some up and coming bands from across many genres check out https://mileofmusic.com/ a crazy good festival in northern WI (Appleton). Free outside of beer, food, and the merch you pick up to support these bands. They have a channel on Spotify of each year’s 150 artists, all doing strictly original music. (I’m one of “older ones”)

I understand the point the author is trying to make but some of it unnecessarily mean-spirited and ageist. I haven't seen it yet, but by all reports, the new Top Gun movie was very well received. And no one has even seen the new Indiana Jones film yet, so is the AARP dig really necessary?

There are better ways to make your point about recycled content and franchises than saying "lol, these actors are old".

A few months ago, I posted a comment on an idea that I sent in to Apple[0].

I also mentioned how pessimistic I was, that anything like it would happen, because, even if they did, they'd poison it with commercialism, and wreck it.

It's like when a favorite local food treat is brought out by a major conglomeration. Everyone is thrilled, because their local fave will now be going national.

Except that the conglomerate "waters down" the treat. They may do some stuff to help with preservation and transport, but the stuff that kills the product, is the "taste adjustment." Maybe they reduce the spiciness, or substitute a cheaper ingredient, or one supplied by a crony company.

Soon, absolutely no one likes it; including the folks that invented it, and the product dies.

I see that happening in many creative industries.

It's also happening in the tech industry. As megacorps borg smaller companies, they start bowdlerizing the work.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30996691

"The largest investments in music are the acquisition of old publishing catalogs, while almost nothing is spent developing new artists."

While music companies are certainly spending big on old publishing catalogs, the second statement here is fact-free. Investment in new artists still represents a very substantial portion of the big three record labels' budgets, and is very much still viewed by execs as the most important part of the business.

I'd like to add that the most significant innovations in popular music have not been a result of record label investment but rather of grassroots creative work by individual people and communities, largely unpaid (and thanks to technological innovations and new instruments more than anything the labels themselves do) - the record labels just pick people out of a preexisting music culture and turn them into stars and brands. The labels are ultimately not the driving force behind musical innovation, so this article comes across as unnecessarily alarmist.

There's a time for everything. Cinema was so '60s , the glamour, the star system, music was so '80s-90s, we ll save the world with music. That's old history now, the human reward systems have adapted. Nowadays it's probably shifting to a combination of porn/sex addiction sprinkled with hallucinogenics, as predicted by Aldous Huxley

This article made me type "most popular albums 2022" into Google.

Funny: When you click on the albums on the top of the page, there always is a YouTube link that brings you to music.youtube.com where you can listen to the whole album without any fuzz.

Why would anyond still buy this music if you can listen to it for free?

So far, I did not like any of the albums though...

90% of music market share in the US belongs to three companies. Warner Music has a 12.1% market share. Sony has a 23.4% market share.

Universal has a 54.5% market share. Over half the market share of music in the country is from one company.

It's a long way from magazines like Broadside and Sing Out and independent record labels like Folkways and Vanguard. Even songs on major record labels were influenced by this milieu. Most songs today are a corporate product packaged for consumers. The article says people seem to prefer music made before this all happened. The grunge/alternative scene that was commodified in the early 1990s is the last independent music scene that was mainstreamed that I can think of. Can't think of anything else - Reggaeton or a variety of other things never really became mainstream.

Has anyone thought of this in relation with age demographics?

Declining birth rates in developed countries => shrinking share of younger people => most of the demand is created by older people with lower neuroplasticity => older music stars are more popular

Perhaps then the best investment for music labels would be to fund research into drugs that increase neuroplasticity.

The "new" numbers? This is new? Wat?

Yes, many people would probably like a little more experimental music in the public sphere, no, we probably won't get that, but also this is sort of established knowledge. It would have been nice if the author spent less time talking about the trend and more time on their suggested next steps. Or, doing better data analysis than 'the number of times "old" is in movie titles went up'.

Sooking about a supposed societal collapse correlated with bad music is annoying, questionable in a statistical sense, and unhelpful in a practical sense.

> Even arts and entertainment businesses require constant infusions of fresh talent

Who cares about art and entertainment _businesses_? We care about artists and to some extent entertainers.

> It seems impossible —after all, billions of dollars are spent every year by entertainment corporations in their quest for market dominance. Yet, despite this constant spending spree, almost every week brings a new sign of cultural stagnation.

The author seems to conflate money expenditure with cultural activity, in line with the conflation of business and art.

Possible explanations:

1) our average age is older, so of course we have older actors, music, etc. People's tastes are more malleable in adolescence (usually), and adolescents are a smaller percentage of the population

2) the amount of recorded back catalog to listen to is larger

3) the percentage of music listening which is pre-20th century (mostly classical) is actually falling compared to 50 years ago, so it's not clear that we listen to less old music, we may just be listening to newer old music than Bach, Haydn, Mozart, etc.

Every medium of expression has a finite band of creative potentialities which are pioneered and explored, then exhausted. Expecting new artists to achieve what the Rolling Stones achieved with their music is as asinine as expecting me to achieve as much as Lewis and Clark when I go on a hike.

There are new media of creative expression to explore, if you know where to look. Not that originality for it's own sake is intrinsically good.

I noticed that many artists that I like put out albums in 2021, but far fewer have put out albums in 2022, even accounting for the year only being half over. I think this is partially due to the pandemic: with artists unable to tour, many took the time to release new music. That music largely came out in 2021. Now in 2022 they are touring to promote the new music rather than releasing new content.

(just an anecdotal hypothesis, no data)

I'm reading Gioia's history of jazz right now, haven't gotten past the swing era. But one impression I've already made is that there was a period of time when someone could aspire to a modest but decent enough middle class life as a musician. I think that I grew up at roughly the tail end of that era.

As for trends in the movies, I'm not sure they're related.

I can confirm this anecdotally. My teenage niece only wants to listen to music her grandfather was into.

Just terrible, terrible pop music from the 70s.

She might like 89.3 KBCZ. They're based near silicon valley, and play good pop music from the 70's. However, it only comes in on route 9. They have an internet stream.

This might be entirely missing the point, but doesn't simply the production of new music, assuming it has any listeners at all, dilute the listenership of old music?

If there's new music released in year N, and it has some share of the listenership, all music from 0->N-1 will have decreased listenership. Right?

I've no idea what it's like to 'consume' music. I've only ever 'listened' to it.

All I know is that analog Vinyl goes down smoother than digital CDs.

Anyone that claims they can't tell the difference is full of it.

Vinyls are mastered differently. If that same master mix was stamped on a CD and played under the same speakers/dB/amp/conditions as a record player it'll sound the same. Some people do the whole pre-amp and EQ thing and you could do that to a CD player's output too.

But nothing beats the big jackets, and there's magic in mixing between turntables that isn't there with any other method.

This is overwrought. It’s demographics weighting the population statistics.

Movies star old people? Old billboard hits are more popular than new ones? DUH. That is boomer culture. Boomers have the numbers - dollars and bodies. They watch movies with their heros from yesteryear. They keep listening to the bands they discovered when they were young. So would anybody!

To the extent that this turns into a population level phenomenon, it’s just market share. Yeah, the gereotocracy is a problem. Yes, the overall picture DOES look stagnant. But it’s not like there’s zero fresh ideas. Young people are doing it in new places which aren’t counted in the old metrics.

Also, older folks can be creative too. Age is a state of mind, stagnation is a habit. I know plenty of folks who are hitting retirement age but are still interested in new media, new technology, new ideas.

So I think the culture is ok. There’s just a lot of money in nostalgia for an abnormally big generation. As the boomers go, so goes the nation. The real question is: what happens when they’re gone? 10 years out they’ll be tired. 20 years out they’ll be over it. 30 years out, they’ll be gone.

Then we‘ll have a group of long-suppressed folks taking charge. Their ages will be more uniformly distributed. What impact will that have? Will they best people rise regardless of age? Will it be harder to achieve a social consensus? Will new ideas flourish? Will assumed competencies be lost?

I don’t know.

This has a simple explanation. The creative frontier has moved on to social media and the internet. Looking at box office movies and declaring stagnation is like looking at the music industry minus MTV in the 80’s.

How silly: using last century's centralised, radio-based, publisher-controlled popularity index to measure anything after the widespread adoption of the internet. Nobody cares about the top 100 anymore because there are too many possible source to run into any songs that'll get listened to enough to form a generic top 100.

Music has both specialised and generified over the years. The "pop" numbers are all the same, as they have been for the last 70 or 80 years now. Pop music isn't produced out of a desire to make art, it's produced to sell as many copies to as many people in as many countries as possible. Engineered lyrics are exchanged between agencies and used and reused until an artist makes a breakthrough. It's brute forcing culture to make a profit.

That's not a recent thing either. Listen to older songs and you'll find that a lot of it is safe, generic, uninteresting stuff, even from the big bands. We've filtered down about 100 years of music to the stuff that's considered good, but back in the day there was a lot of crap that was in the top of the charts for a single year and then disappeared.

Today, we have a choice. For pennies we can listen to any type of music by bands we've never heard of all day long. Good luck finding a Mongolian throat singing metal band in 1980 if that's the music you're interested in. Good luck finding anything made by someone who's in it for the art if you're in a small town with a small record shop before the internet came along.

The top 100 is no longer centralised by publishers advertising to radio stations. They're still trying, desperately even, to keep this business model going, but by these measurements, it's just not working. You can say that "people don't know how to make music anymore" but you'll have to back this up with actual statistics, not some useless measurement of corporately engineered preferences. Count the total amount of songs you can get your hands on instead. I wouldn't be surprised to find that more music gets added to Spotify in a month than got made available in an 80s record store over an entire year!

And you know what? I don't see the problem with liking older music. We've got almost a century of crisply recorded music available to us right now. You can find enough music to develop and expand your musical preference for a lifetime even if no new music gets published ever again. People will always make music and these days that involves more remixing and more derived work, not because we don't know how to do it, but because we have the tools available to us.

Besides entertainment cooperations and tech algorithms putting newer artists at a disadvantage, I reckon demographics also plays a part. Post WW2 generation has established cultural preferences.

We're no longer only fed music by the top 40. That's not a bad thing. We're in a musical renaissance.

We’re in a content renaissance. We have more access to more content at completely unsustainable prices.

The haircut known as “The Mullet” is making a comeback. This is all you need to know about a culture that is out of ideas and is desperately looking backwards for anything that isn’t today, but is too timid and soaked in irony to sincerely attempt something novel. Something real.

I don’t know but I think something broke during the financial crisis that hasn’t mended yet and it has led to stagnation.

While the methodology may be flawed, the point remains that we’re in an epidemic of artistic risk mitigation, where pre-sold franchises (sequels, reboots and remakes) combined with name brand artists are gobbling up an inordinate amount of attention that could be fueling new art and artists.

Maybe the big studios are, though I feel like I've been hearing this complaint for my entire life. But there is so, so, so (so) much creativity happening in spaces like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, etc. Don't write that off just because it's not coming to your local theatre.

Not in narrative.

Honestly, the crazy wacky internet stuff tours aggressively (how else can they get paid?), and regularly does make it to the local theater (or at least local bar).

The article would have us write off anything that has fewer than a 2-day stint at a local sports arena.

The period between about 1970 (when the huge generation of Baby Boomers started buying records in fantastic numbers) and 1995 (when the first web browser started making large scale piracy of intellectual property trivial) was the only 25 year period in the history of the world when large numbers of artists managed to get fantastically wealthy.

Looking back through the entirety of recorded history, that had never happened before, and it likely never will again.

More artists became fantastically wealthy in those 25 years than in the previous 2000 years. It looks very likely that, with the invention of the web browser, we're back to historical norms. This article has lots of data backing up that return to the mean.

Being a musician or actor is still a good thing, but it's once again not a very probable way of getting incredibly rich, just as it has been, on average, for the past 2000 years.

I wholeheartedly agree. I may add one thing though: it's probable that it is not only measurement bias for a simple reason: demographics. The generations that currently are the most numerous and have the highest purchasing power are baby-boomers and gen-Xers. That same generation witnessed the birth of pop-rock music as we know it and was the first to consume music en-masse. To a certain extent, it's no wonder that those 'old' (i.e. 60s-80s) recordings are those that get the most listened to. This is of course also true for movies and actors, for the very same reason: taste is widely known to be mostly formed by the time you're 25.

Music industry is still recovering from lil peep’s untimely expiration. Things will bounce back. In the meantime, show some respect, please.

I remember feeling very excited about Spotify at one point - I figured there would be ways to get exposed to new and interesting artists. As it turns out, their algorithms, at the paid behest of those reliable old villains, the majors, are dead certain that what I want is the same fifty songs, over and over, that I've been hearing on FM radio for literally my entire life.

Billy Bragg said it decades ago: capitalism is killing music.

Trump and Biden will be 81 and 78 respectively if they choose to run again in 2024 (and assuming they are alive to do so). The average age of congress is the oldest it has ever been. The wealth disparity between those over 54 compared to those under is the highest it has ever been.

This fact pattern is visible in many places.

The data is based on number of tracks streamed.

Are the bourgeois over-54s paying plebs to watch Harrison Ford movies and listen to crappy music now?

Apparently, my misunderstanding of TikTok is much deeper than I previously imagined.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-05-22

A bit out of place: their complaint is asserting teens are listening to oldies

I don't see teens mentioned in the article anywhere. If anything, teens are probably underrepresented in the data due to greater willingness to use non-traditional outlets.

Also "The media kids enjoy today is bad for their health." As true for TikTok seizures and speech impediments as it was for Judas Priest inspired suicides and D&D Satanism.

many people have been innovating the hell out of music... I also work hard to innovate, You just rarely ever see them and I on the Internet, because there is a paywall around independent music... Not just for listeners, it's there for artists as well. Independent musicians now are required to pay the same promotional rates as everyone else for social media boosting, requiring even unprofitable musicians to pay the same rates as major artists to promote their music online.

The issue here seems like the results of the stranglehold that big interests has had on social media and music outlet (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music) promotion for years. Major artists now have views in the millions showing on many of their YouTube videos, but most independent labels (like mine) struggle to get past 1,000 and even 100 views every day for new releases because of the new promotional economy. This is because platforms sit back and do nothing for independent musicians promotion-wise. They've created systems where payola is literally the glass wall to being ever heard to musicians and bands... You can't find and see music now unless you already know about the artists, and artists can't reach listeners unless they pay to boos visibility on each social post they make (at a dramatic financial loss compared to the income the streams make).

Many labels have been innovating the hell out of stagnant-growth music genres for years... But it's in their interest of what little profit is made for dominant music companies to carefully limit the exposure of that new music to dedicated listeners in order to reduce the threat to their shrinking (but often "first in line to the feeding table" position). Big artists have always paid for promotion to an extent, but being featured is so costly, many big artists are doing controversial and embarrassing things on social media just to lower their overall promo costs by staying viral in the news. The entire music industry regularly suffers from the scent of desperation now, because everyone needs to pay to be under the spotlight, while the entities that make the most money have nothing to do with creating and supporting the music or even the industry ultimately... Money is being siphoned out of the music economy (and never reinvested back into it) regularly.

Many "potential hit" musicians work day jobs and do other things for money to supplement their art, that ritually keeps them from innovating as much as they used to when a hit album would normally provide a better life... Now kids being "signed" off of a TikTok viral song literally and totally get ripped off when they are discovered, and likely paid below 10% of the money their song generates overall for use... Back in the day it was TLC getting ripped off, now it's every artist in a way, even the prominent ones, that are making fractions off of the real money that their music generates, while platforms like TikTok and Instagram post profits in the Billions year after year. The stats just aren't right, too many artists are lying about their success (earnings), and the music that makes it to your ears is carefully restricted and controlled unless artists pay a lot of money to promote their work.

The problems with music industry success and innovation have festered since Social Media started charging for post promotion... If you want to hear innovative music, you have to dig deep and go through a lot of not so great stuff to find the real artists making music. I search for, collect, and share undiscovered (and under promoted) music from artists I find exceptional all the time, because I can't enjoy life without exceptional music around me.

The best stuff these days have views under 10-20k on YouTube if you ask me. Our monthly listeners have sat under 50... (Not 50k... F*ckin 50) listeners for over 4 years now... The entry point for promoting on Spotify charges artists a minimum of $250, and that's just for one platform of many that an artist needs to promote for a chance to be heard (with little money returned even if it works).

We only have had under about ~400 subscribers on YouTube for over 10 years, these numbers are crazy considering how long and hard we've worked on our music over that time... While a lot of people would say that may reflect the quality of music, literally on YouTube you know damn well that even fart reaction videos make it regularly into the 1 Million view +categories on YouTube all the time, something is deeply broken. Independent music is being crushed by the Major Industry... Has not and will not stop ppl like me though.

For proper context, our music and collection of tunes is at RuffAndTuffRecordings.Com

(Sorry if this looks like an angry rant, I'm not angry and/or defeated, it's just a result of being overworked and underpaid for ages)

Your landing page could use work. It's a bunch of links to services I don't pay for, and the selections page includes Drake and Wu Tang Clan. I thought they were doing OK? They're not you, right?

http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/SELECTIONS

Anyway, it took me over a minute and three page loads to extract the strings "soopadaark" and "winterman" from your website.

Are those the only two bands?

Their names should be in larger print than everything else. They are under 10 keystrokes and work universally.

Also, maybe embed a video or album preview widget, and de-emphasize the kitchen sink of spelled out link URLs?

The album art could be bigger too. (Most recent release from each band.) Presumably the artwork conveys social cues about the genre of music, and you already paid for it. It probably conveys a lot more information than landing text could.

If you do/did live performances, link to them.

Your tidal metadata could also use work. There is no band picture, and tracks with matching album covers are presented as individual singles instead of EPs. You've already grouped the music. Let me play the group with one tap!

Winterman is on SoundCloud with zero tracks. Soopadaark is not on SoundCloud. Neither have any tracks on Amazon's free tier. (Not sure how much publishing in those places costs, but putting a song or two up is unlikely to cannibalize sales of the rest.)

Good luck! Will give you a listen in a bit.

Thanks for the feedback!

I am working on a site redesign, last round was in 2017... Social Media has consumed tons of my time and efforts outside of working in IT to pay for real living, but the music always comes first...

I really appreciate you commenting, I've produced about 100 songs under those names on top of making the videos and funding/creating everything else... There are 2 other artists, Moving East and Dubvendor as well...

Gaining proper visibility and feedback after all the hard work means everything for musicians and creators like us.

Thanks again, would be interested to hear what you think about the music.

Here are the correct Soundcloud links (Account squatters are a constant problem on social media.. hah)

https://soundcloud.com/ruffandtuffrecordings

https://soundcloud.com/winterman

The curated music (selections) is music I find online that matches our vibes or inspires our work. Many of the artists there are widely unknown, some are popular, I don't discriminate too much... I like to focus on visual music as we make music for film projects primarily.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.

For me, the thing that seems to be missing from modern music is passion. Pop music isn't about art its about sales, it does not want to say anything it just wants to party. Where are the songs that say something and touch you? Where are the folks that can even sing without digital processing?

I think modern tools also have an effect on how we produce music - there is lots of software and anyone can use it but everyone plays in the same playground to do it. Maybe we rely on too much automation, too many reach for the same plugins.

You might like The Mountain Goats, or even the podcast "I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats" where they talk about the story behind the lyrics, and how they used to record the vocals on a half-busted 80's boombox mic.

I think they're reasonably popular. One of the local newspapers recenlty ran a cover story about their new album. Anyway, they tick all your boxes.

For something amazing that ticks none of your boxes, you could check out Igorrr.

Lindsey Stirling, Diablo Swing Orchestra and Sumo Cyco are in between those extremes. Those bands are all very different from each other, and mostly from automatic recommendations.

I’ve been working on an IDE for music composition

https://ngrid.io

Launching soon.

Join the discord https://discord.gg/a5ttYuG

doesn't look like you have enough to show to get me interested, and everything you've put there is either opinion ("Write 10 songs in the same time as you used to write 1.") or things that daws or random ios apps already do.

It's also totally unrelated to the article at hand so this is shameless self promotion of something that isn't really available to promote.

At first I was interested by this. But as I have seen this comment pop up everywhere on HN for a very long time, and zero progress on said IDE, I think it's just spam. Please stop.

Do you think that I would be spamming this of it wasn’t real? I’m legit close to launch now.

Good that you recognize you are spamming - then please stop spamming!

You've been posting about it being ready soon for 4 years now, and you keep posting it in just vaguely related threads despite having been asked multiple times to stop.

You called it spamming, I would not call it that.

Yeah shit took way longer than it should have. Just FYI Bitwig also took a while. Figma too. Desktop apps are hard, and audio desktop apps are double hard.

Almost there though.

> Do you think that I would be spamming this of it wasn’t real?

Does suggest you are spamming it.

It doesn’t.

This doesn’t sound danktacular. It doesn’t even sound like it works. Where are the screenshots, documentation, demos?

It’s being worked on.

cool story

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