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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

Is it though? This never been easier just to upload something and get some amount of listeners. If you lived a bit rural and was a poor teenager in the 60s you could forget ever getting anyone to listen to your music, if you even had the instruments to play it. Nobody is owed a big audience.

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It's never been easier to publish a blog available to billions of people that no one ever reads.

In the 60s you would travel to a music centre. A place where others performing music went. You leveraged a community. If someone in your community made it, it shone a light for everyone and created a scene. People helped each other make it.

That small community with those opportunities have been replaced by centralization without the community or scene multipliers.

In the 60s you could find a few local DJs, slide them a couple bucks or some reefer, and you’d get a non-trivial amount of ears.

With the sheer volume of online music and lack of people to bribe or sleep with, it’s very difficult for a new entrant to get known.

Spotify offers that as well actually, you pay, they put your songs on playlists that match your song's vibe.

And now you can create, distribute, and market you song for free to a world wide audience. The weirdest stuff can get a thousand plays on soundcloud. Much more than you'll get from being played at any random bar or club. Also you would have to make a vinyl print of you song to provide it to a dj.

Signal over noise. You notice more cars driving through a quiet residential street than you do driving 60 on the highway.

Thousands of soundcloud plays means one person one listen and this is over years. Many of those are short listens / skips. In a bar you could have a few hundred people all listening at once passively the entire song while associating with good times drinking.

Sharing a song with a group will create memories and stronger associations

And the sheer volume of high quality legal reefer has also made it much harder to bribe DJs.

Recording your music to any level of quality they would play on the radio back then was expensive. It was really time consuming to lay down tracks and edit them. Like manually cutting tape, etc. Today anyone can make a professional sounding recording at home.

Still possible with many small local radio stations. Mail in a CD with your shit and a genre label and odds are someone will listen to a track or two to decide if it has a place on their show.

This is what a pure meritocracy looks like. There's no more tricks, there's no more hacks, it's just a tight few metrics that you're either really really good at, or you aren't. It's the same with the rest of the country. Turns out a pure meritocracy leaves a lot of losers because there can only be so many winners.

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