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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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rbanffy

The Sphere is just a tool. People will learn to use it, and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

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It is pure tragedy GWAR did not survive long enough to see this technology made available.

I don't think they broke up, just that Dave Brockie / Oderus Urungus kicked the bucket.

I remember really missing the cultural impact of GWAR in 2016.

Edit to add: they're currently on tour! There are no more members left from the original lineup, but the original Jizmak da Gusha, the current Balsac the Jaws of Death, and the current Beefcake the Mighty have held such considerable tenure that they establish a strong persistent core.

GWAR is still around they released a studio album last year and they're still doing live shows.

The whole concept of music as a visual medium is rather limiting. MTV was fucking awesome for little while, then it became entirely routine with maybe one cool new video every couple of months, then it became pretty boring, then it simply stopped showing videos because nobody cared anymore.

Does MTV still show music?

I would expect a smaller repertoire considering audiovisual production is a lot more expensive than just audio.

Is that really down to the medium? I thought rights issues of music videos meant they preferred cheap content they totally owned. I.e. Beavis and Butthead couldn't release complete DVDs with videos implying MTV was excluded from revenue streams until they made non-music video shows.

What could be cheaper than broadcasting content that other people produced, at zero cost to you? Problem is, just showing videos back to back like a radio station doesn't equal ratings, and no ratings means no advertising revenue.

They were addicted to the big budget videos and glorifying production costs at a time when special effects were still very expensive, but the benefit to doing that was inherently dropping since any artist that could expect millions more in increasingly cheaper CD sales had alternatives to an expensive Ad/giveaway.

That doesn't answer any question for me of whether the video medium was good or bad, clearly MTV's monopoly meant the only way to release videos was an economical disaster.

There’s an interesting case study here. Most Indian pop music comes from movies so nearly every popular song comes with a music video at no cost. It would be interesting to see what the breakdown of people who watch the music videos vs only listen to audio is.

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