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Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come.

I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums.

My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands.

That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent.

Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted.

Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny.

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> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT.

By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.

Weren't we all complaining 20 y ago that music labels were giving bands pennies on the dollar and the only way they could actually live off of the music was by touring and selling merch?

I think Radiohead then did the groundbreaking selling of mp3s for a pay what you want fee.

Now the baddie is Spotify.

Worse than that, I remember reading articles about how some artists didn't "make" a single dollar from their first album that sold millions. It all went to the record company and paid for marketing and advances.

Sometimes they didn't begin to see revenue until 2nd or 3rd albums.

Labels did scum stuff like have sublabel go belly up (oops no royalties anymore), not paying royalties, not giving artists royalties when on VA album, and downright piracy, and enforcement of centralization via signing rights away to (equivalent of) RIAA. These are just examples from memory talking to artists.

It wasn't that groundbreaking. Radiohead were already massively popular despite taking the anti-Britpop, anti-commercial rock route in the '90s. The online MP3 thing in 2007 was a bit of a publicity stunt -- the record was still distributed by XL , which retained all the traditional distribution channels.

I believe Smashing Pumpkins actually beat them to it by several years by releasing Machina II for free online in 2000 after the breakup of the band.

It was ground breaking, taking into account that Radiohead released a critically acclaimed album. In Rainbows had a digital release that was pay what you want, not exactly the same as putting something out for free after breaking up.

Sure did

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.

I feel like the biggest loss from the days of big record companies is that no one is going to front a promising young band enough to go away together and make their 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'OK Computer'

* I know both bands probably could've self-financed those projects by that point in their careers, but would they have? And would their role as investors have changed their artistic decisions?

What is noteworthy about these albums that the artists would not have made them otherwise?

Pink Floyd’s next album had the cover and best song dedicated to saying how much they hated the record label

I'm not so worried about humanity's loss of peak works like these since I don't think any young band has it in them at the start anyways. What young artists need is an on-ramp and a way to stay in the business long enough to hone their craft and build a following while turning out a couple Pipers at the Gates of Dawn. Works like Dark Side and OKC are developed, not born, and we need that pipeline.

The problem was that the big companies had the good recording studios and the possibility to make records and distribution. This was very expensive.

Today are studios in abundance. And bands that are good are usually good connected and certainly know a good down mix engineer. Then they can distributed via Bandcamp.

Today it’s much better for artists who want to make music. The big record labels were just gatekeepers.

Doesn't Spotify share half its profits too? From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

Yes, the music labels have a conflict of interest because they took financial positions (equity) in the streaming services in exchange for giving artists lower rates. So they don't really represent the artists. They instead joined up with the streamers to screw over the artists.

Most hits today are produced by Spotify. Actually they are record company. And they also have a really shitty contract. That at the end the revenue stream, for the artist is coming back to Spotify anyway.

It’s easy. 1. Search talent on TikTok. 2. Let them sign shitty contract. 3. Produce them. 4. Market them on Spotify.

5 . Win win. Win win for Spotify not the artist.

What profits?

It's actually 70% of REVENUE according to this: https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per....

>From my understanding it's still the music labels that are not giving the artists their share.

If that is the case, the artists can easily sue the labels for violating the terms of the contract. But the fair share is just what the two signing parties agreed to.

Which is definitely a fair deal signed between equals, right?

Didn’t Louis C.K sell his standup stuff direct to fans for 5$ for a DRM free downloadable mp3, from his website?

Why don’t more artists do that?

They do. Bandcamp is a thing, and it's pretty much that, minus a fee for the infrastructure.

But it's not a panacea. An old classmate of mine who's a decently successful Jazz artist now (by Jazz artist standard), had scammers upload her album to Bandcamp without her knowledge. They defrauded a lot of money from her actual fans, probably more than she ever made on Spotify.

Ironically part of signing onto a label is providing protection from stuff like this.

It's maybe what it's supposed to do, but her label didn't.

* Bandcamp, now owned by Songtradr, that promptly fired half its employees.

As bad as this is...as this thread points out, more of the money needs to go to artists, and supporting fewer employees should let them do this.

As long as it remains a viable platform. Hopefully the cuts weren't a "gut because we want to run this down on life support" move.

Classic Hacker News. “Companies shouldn’t spend money, except if it’s on developers!”

Was your classmate already on Bandcamp?

Yes, through the record company.

I bought it when he released it. It was good for him but arguably he lowered his worth and took a pay cut, and it also set a bit of a price ceiling base rate for comedy specials at 5$, which if you aren’t the #1 comedian at the time like Louis was you can’t bring in the same sales volume.

Amazing, thanks for mentioning this! I had no idea. He looks to sell everything on there, not just mp3s, and they are well priced! Just bought a couple of videos of his performances, and it does indeed include DRM-free .mp4 downloads. Even includes a .srt file for subtitles!

It was also when CDs were $19.99-25 which I distinctly remember because I was 10 in 1995 when I bought my first CDs (smash, it was written, dookie) and I could rarely afford to buy them.

And then artists still weren't getting paid but an even bigger portion of my income went to them. shrug.

Spotify's always been the baddie, they've just hid it well.

I may be in the minority, but I just don't really find the "support the artist" argument that compelling. I have artists I like and I grew up with. If I saw them in public I'd get giggly and maybe try to say an awkward hello. But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them. If they sold their rights at some point in time for money, or pay their tax debts, or whatever, I assume they did so knowing full well what that means. If Spotify is no longer advantageous to them, they would pull their music off and I may search other ways to listen to it.

We have a system to deal with these sorts of things, it's called voluntary exchange and it's the only way things change. If artists pulled their music, Spotify would have to adjust. In the meantime I just don't have the time or energy to track every individual employee grievance

> But I am under no impressions that I have some kind of personal relationship with this artist.

What has that to do with anything? You don't pay because you want them to like you, you pay because you want to give them the chance to keep making music in the future.

For that reason, on free support platforms like Patreon, I'm pretty tough about not "gilding the lily". If someone is clearly well-funded enough to have artistic freedom, with a good margin of safety, I look for someone else to support, even if I love them.

What does that have to do with Spotify? If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in. Just sell me something I want at a price I find reasonable. I don't need a story about how it's so hard for you to pursue your passion or how you can't continue in the future.

> If Spotify isn't fair to them they should pull their catalog. I can't be an arbiter to every economic transaction I participate in.

To me this reads the same as "I can't be bothered to consider ethics for every economic transaction I participate in".

I'm not sure its possible to do it 100% of the time, but I try to constantly consider it.

Again, it's about voluntary exchange. Imagine if someone did that to you? I worked low wage jobs before. If some do gooder started lecturing me about how I'm being exploited I would rightly tell them to f off. If they wanted to throw me some money I may or may not be appreciative but I have autonomy about my choices and I extend that same belief to others

"artists deserve to be exploited because they chose it." Thats a very childish assessment of the music industry and how artists are taken advantage of. It has absolutely nothing to do with "being lectured by 'do-gooders'" either, you're injecting an emotional story as an argument where there is none.

Yea, a lot of the "it's a contract" and "it's voluntary" arguments fail to recognize the huge power imbalance between a label and a band, or any agreement between a single person and a huge company. These agreements are almost never between equals, and are often one-sided and "take it or leave it".

Yes, technically I voluntarily entered into my contract with my ISP, my cell phone carrier, and my employer. But in all cases, it's obvious I'm getting screwed over because of the massive power imbalance. It's a fact of life, but it should at least be acknowledged.

What ethics are there to consider besides 'money can be exchanged for goods and services'? Everyone is a willing participant in the transaction.

Off the top of my head.... -How was the labor sourced for those services? -Child Labor, illegal immigrant labor? -What are the working conditions for the labor?, is it sweatshop -what inputs go into the goods/services? -what do they do with their waste? -where do the inputs come from? My country, another country, my town, a town in my state...

you may think the government plays a role to enforce some of these, and they do to a point...

You can go on in your own head about all the things behind that simple exchange of money for something. If it's a perfectly competitive market sure, that may work but there aren't many if any markets in the US that are that level of competitive.

A personal anecdote for you. My uncle owns an auto parts re-manufacturer, so they rebuild car parts and sell them. I worked there a lot growing up. The normal input is buying "cores" from service stations....your starter motor isn't working and you get a new one, that old one is sold to someone like my uncle who refurbs it.

Often we had people come by with very clearly stolen parts....should we have just exchanged money for those? This ranged from a tweaker who would show up with one part, to full scale organized theft rings with pallets of parts...

So, do we buy those since the price is much, much better? There is a an ethical decision there...

I'm curious, do you personally buy any goods or services? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever purchase or use anything.

I'm curious, do you personally make any decisions? It seems like the logical conclusion to this kind of thinking is to just not ever consider or decide upon anything.

I do make decisions and often times people many degrees removed get hurt or exploited as a result of it.

I choose not to focus on that though, whereas the person I replied to apparently does. I was curious how such a person manages to live a just life in the modern world.

Apparently those decisions don't include answering the question at hand.

I think it’s more of a function of mental leisure time. People like worrying about these things and wrapping up simple transactions (“I’d like to stream music this month for $10”) into some moral and ethical quandary as if they can resolve or contribute to an existing relationship between two other parties.

It’s nice that we have the luxury to think about these things. But for the most part, I ignore it and discount people who bring it up to other people, unless they genuinely think people aren’t aware of the situation.

Maybe it’s guilt over benefiting from this. Maybe it’s just internet points for demonstrating one’s knowledge and virtue. Beats me, I hope it reduces.

You assume a lot, wrongly.

Artists don't have a choice. If the only viable marketplace is ripping off sellers, and sellers chose to remain there because it's the only viable marketplace, and the sellers gotta hear their buyer defending the owners of the only viable marketplace ripping them off, they're not gonna keep selling and you're not gonna keep getting new music.

This race to defend the most evil of corporations, ripping people off right and left, is rampant on HN over the last 5 years. It's like all the hacker turned into lackeys or something. What a shame. The first 10 years of this site the people here had backbones but now they're mostly just bootlickers.

One basic reason to support artists you like is just because you want them to make more stuff.

I think you're of the majority opinion actually. There are loud voices on HN whenever this topic comes up, but clearly most people don't think about these issues much, they just want to access music.

Spotify isn't really the problem. Record labels being the gatekeepers and a bunch of byzantine historic laws that they sit on are the problem. Musicians themselves are the problem - those few who've made it big could band together than change things in various ways for all, but that would mean giving up some money so...

"I assume the artists are reasonable rational adults. If they're on the platform, its economically advantageous to them." - Your assumption is wrong though. Artists aren't on spotify because it's economically advantageous for them, they are on spotify because they have no other alternative. It doesn't matter if it's streaming platform A or B or C, they are ubiquitous and as an artist you want your music to be heard, so you have to play the field. In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.

> skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid

Hasn't Spotify been losing money for all/most of its existence? Or is there some other top of the pyramid?

Daniel Ek sure hasn't lost any of his own money.

Is there some other market system that produced better music?

This one has its flaws but it seems to be optimizing for a great variety.

> In this case, the field sucks and mirrors capitalism, skewing the gains towards the top of the pyramid.

What alternative do you suggest and why would it work better than capitalism?

You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

The best way to support a band, as far as I know, is to turn up to their shows and/or buy their merch. Royalties were always a dicey revenue stream.

> You were supporting Sony, EMI, Universal, Warner, or some other record label.

For fringe metal music? Not likely!

If OP was going to his local record/cd store and not some fringe underground market, he was 100% supporting some record company. Maybe not one of the ones listed, but in the 80s it would have been a company.

By "fringe metal", they're likely talking about mainstream thrash and groove metal. And those bands where on these exact labels;

Reign in blood - Def Jam (1986) Pantera - Atco /WB (1986) Megadeth - Capital (1986) Sepultura - Roadrunner/WB (1989) Anthrax - Island/Universal (1985)

This does read like a slight snark (the step from 'fringe' to 'mainstream' - who wants to be mainstream?). It further emphasises the point that in the 80s and early 90s looking for non-local 'long tail' music as a youth was pretty much impossible. Especially if / when too young for bars and concerts, all you could find had to be signed on mainstream labels. I had the luck in that I could go to local concerts, thus discovering local talent (and buying their cassette tapes). You needed venues and allowing parents for that. Currently listening to several artists with < 500 streamers a month on Spotify. Nothing in the 80s and 90s can compare with that discoverability.

Well, maybe. Around where I'm from, even the chain record stores would stock some unusual music (like metal) if it was locally popular, but the metalheads had their own stores. I think there's still one or two active in Oslo.

A lot of boutique labels are just sub(-sub) labels ran under the big three. Including metal.

Often they’re ran by artists under contract with one of those three big labels and their big sublabels, mostly as a perk/favor to those artists. They have a bit more creative freedom and leeway who they sign, but the money is still kicked upward and the marketing and recording budget still comes from upstairs.

Spotify uses a weighted average - you can't abuse the system like that. The tough reality is that 10k fans paying $10 a month and spending 1% time listening to an indie artist only works out to $1k / month even if all the money went to the artists. Unfortunately that's not the case - Spotify has overhead, artists sign with labels and other middlemen creep in.

As a result artists make pennies. The only way to change this is to get consumers to pay drastically more but that's what killed iTunes in the first place.

It's not hard to find artists who abuse the system like that: algorithmically generated music, from algorithmically generated artists, hundreds of which have almost the exact same number of plays (and thousands more than real artists I've followed for years.

> But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole.

But doesn’t that even out?

Napkin calculations: There are 10 subscribers to Spotify, each paying 10 dollars/month, and everything goes 100% to the artist. 9 of them only listen to Taylor Swift and 1 only to Metallica.

If the subscriptions would go directly to the bands you listen to, Metallica would receive 10 dollars from the one listener.

But the subscriptions are distributed based on the percentage of listeners, meaning that the Metallica fan is only giving 1 dollar to their favorite band. But this percentage is also payed by the 9 Taylor fans, so they also pay 1 dollar. In the end Metallica receives 10 dollars per month.

What am I missing here?

Too bad Spotify doesn't calculate streaming royalties per user. If I listen to a single artist in a given month, my entire royalty portion of my subscription for that month could go to that artist vs. being diluted by the activity of all the bots on Spotify.

Are you implying that Spotify distributes by number of plays, not by number of plays, weighted by account utilization? (where a play on a one hour a month account would count considerably more than a ten hours per day account).

If it's not (inversely) weighted by utilization, then I'd assume that it's less the fault of Spotify but more the fault of licensors being unable to think beyond simplistic money-per-play metrics in their negotiations with Spotify. From Spotify's perspective, it's kind of obvious that the "gourmet play minute" is more valuable than the "gourmand play minute".

Yes, this is how it works. There are separate pools for ad-supported plays, and I believe separate pools per country now (because Spotify premium costs a lot less in India than in e.g. the US), but it's still pooled.

It used to be the case that the big record companies demanded pro-rata licensing. Tidal (before Jay-Z bought it) commissioned studies on user centric licensing and approached the record companies about it, but they were uninterested.

Now, however, it seems the record companies want user centric licensing, but Spotify resists it. It's hard to say exactly what kind of politics lie behind that opposition. I'll note, however, that Spotify seems to have adapted a lot to "gourmand" listening with their background playlists.

Those per country pools are an interesting tool: being as German as I happen to be, my natural reaction to subscriber share (this seems to be the established term for weighted by utilization?) is "can't do that, because Data Protection". We do like to imagine that it should in some miraculous way be possible to use streaming without the streaming provider knowing what we stream, and that Bad Things Will Happen if that miracle fails to materialize.

Separate pools could be the way out: take the division by country and subscription status, but further divide each bucket by utilization. Ten percentile blocks for example. It would not have to be perfect to be well good enough. And I suspect that it would be easier to communicate in negotiations than an accurate formula, similar to how many countries seem to have ended up with discrete tax brackets instead of one universal formula across the entire range.

There's no chance that this is blocked by data protection laws. This is looks exactly like the kind of case where data can be collected and processed without consent, since it's needed to operate the service and meet the contractual obligations of paying the musicians the right amount.

(And that doesn't mean that they could keep the data indefinitely or use it for other purposes without consent.)

On top of that this data can be completely anonymised without compromising the data. All you need is an entry "a user listened to a song".

This probably gets more hairy when it comes to a user's listening history and things like Spotify Wrapped, discover weekly etc., but this is one of those areas that fall under expectations from a service, legitimate interest etc.

I think this discussion was about switching a pooled model to one where a user's subscription payment is directly split according to that user's listens. That requires unaggregated and unanonymized listen data.

Even though they just need a total plays sum to pay out to artists, Spotify for sure stores every play by person. You can request your data from them and see for yourself - it's of course necessary for their recommendation services, and even just providing the listening history back to you is a service many people want badly (it is the whole point of services like last.fm!)

Ah true.

This is solved (well, not solved, but handled) by not having a direct link between usage data and the user. So you store your data as <usage, proxy_id> which references <proxy_id, user_id> which references <user_id, user PII>. This way you can always easily break the connection to PII (if the user requests deletion) while keeping per user data.

But true, it's not anonymized in this case.

Heh, I don't even doubt the legality, I was talking purely about subjective expectations, about how it feels to us.

That's the criticism I can wholeheartedly get behind. I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

The huge fanbase of who listen to Tailor Swift on repeat will have some of their money go towards less popular bands. If all their money goes exclusively to Taylor Swift (and similar artists), it's possible that there will be quite a number of bands who will see their earning drastically decrease.

There's also the question of where will the money go for the deceased artists. Today, it goes to rights holders and effectively disappears with no accountability on the part of the rights holder.

> I'd love for my money to go to the artists I listen to (and not spread among everyone).

> However, I think it's a hard problem to solve.

All you have you have to do is buy the music. From either the band’s website, Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.

Bandcamp gives the highest % to the artist/label, and I would argue also the best place to buy music.

I rarely listen to a band. Or even to an album. I often listen to music of a specific genre, and for that Spotify (and similar services) are great: I discover artists I'd never discover otherwise.

This has always seemed like fear-mongering to me, because for the pooled proportion of plays to be completely different from the mean of the per-user proportion, there would need to be an extreme discrepancy in amount of songs listened to per month and/or in the kinds of songs played by those who pay for premium vs. those who opt for ad-supported. No, if I only play the same artist for an entire month, they likely won't get $10 (-$2 in expenses), maybe it's $7 or maybe it's $12, but I don't see how you can go from there to "Beyoncé is getting all your money!?!?!" Are there any specific examples of artists that get much more or much less than you'd expect, or is this all just a thought experiment?

It's pretty easy to do some math on this.

There are pseudonymous background music artists who have just released one or two tracks, and who have more listens than famous bands with a 30-year history, because they were featured in one of Spotify's background music playlists. It is of course rumours that this music is commissioned by Spotify (which they deny) or that they get kickbacks in some other form.

You don't get exact numbers (because Spotify won't share them!) but there's no question background music is vastly more profitable on Spotify than the kind of music people go to concerts for, and it's at the latter's expense.

That's a good point and a legitimate reason to get rid of the pool, but I guess I was talking more about often-voiced worries that big artists are getting richer and indie artists are getting poorer due to Spotify's algorithm -- and those worries long predate the weird ambient stuff.

If background music is the reason people are paying for Spotify then what would you expect Spotify to do?

The share is determined by contract, not by some fair-minded algorithm. You would have to listen to that artist over 3000 times in a month for them to get $10 at the normal artist's $0.0032/play. Big artists don't see such low figures, though more obviously goes to the system that pays the salaries of the people who get those deals for them.

Well, sure, but whether an artist gets the full amount or a pittance from their label is not relevant to the question of whether Spotify's pooled numbers are unfair to some artists. The ultimate payout is not something Spotify has a say in.

This could be solved by a "donate" button to reward bands you like. Edit: (such an obvious idea, they've already done it: "fan support" feature).

Yeah, or maybe a tip jar? Perhaps some PG at Spotify can copy the stripe tip screen and when before playing a song you get asked the infamous 18%,20%,25%,NO TIP question?

No thank you.

It seems the 'fan support' feature is not available on the Spotify website, only the native app. Explains why I haven't noticed it.

So they finally added a way to directly support artists. That's nice, but disappointing they excluded the web app from this feature. Its omission hurts potential donations. Spotify also lowers audio quality on the web app, gee it's almost like they don't want me to use the web app.

No thanks. E-tip jars belong on Twitch and Youtube Live. Something about that feels very "off", it feeds that parasocial interaction thing in ways that a band selling merch does not.

but... I generally don't want their 'merch'. I don't need another t-shirt, hat, keyring, whatever. It literally just adds to more waste that I don't want to contribute to. We'd all be better off if I had an easier way to just send $4 to a band/artist I like. I do that for some via patreon. I've known people overpay on bandcamp to get a few more $ to someone. There are artists that will never come to my area. There are artists that simply can't travel/perform due to any number of factors. "Sell merch via Shopify or Spotify" just feels like pushing people in the wrong direction.

All music/sports/etc fandom has a similar parasocial element. Same thing, only different manifestations.

> By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

This argument can be used to justify basically any business practice. It's a weak argument. Should I be forced to buy 10 inedible doughnuts to find one editable one in the name of allowing people to practice making doughnuts out of random things they find in their kitchen? Should I have to buy 5 cars before I find one that doesn't break after a a month in the name of supporting the auto industry?

Obviously, this is nonsense.

I think there's a strawman here. I look for different things artistically and functionally about the things you mentioned. Cars should function well and feel good when I test-drive them, but I wouldn't buy a hideous car.

Music is somewhat functional (does the cd or record play? does it skip at all etc) but then you have to listen to it. Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

> Years ago we might have seen a music video, heard a song on the radio, then went and bought a whole album to hear the rest. I guess I'm saying the buying process is different and it doesnt make sense to apply it to every imaginable product or industry.

And I've definitely found songs that so-to-speak came along via an album purchase and which I might have initially dismissed, somewhat eventually growing on me after a while. Not saying that this always happens, and I'm not the biggest music listener around, so take that with a pinch of salt, but still…

When you were born I was a teenager in France recording music from the radio to a tape praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song. And that the song is not cut.

Such a tape was fantastic until you had to use a pen to rewind it.

Spotify at that time was science-fiction movie worthy.

This said, I listened to 20 sounds at that time and I have probably about 50 now that turn around :) The discovery functionality is great though

Lots of us remember taping the radio... I have old recordings where I pretended to be the DJ announcing the next song. Oh man was I bad!

Hey, back in the time I was recording ZX Spectrum games broadcasted once a week over one of the radio stations.

Commodore 64 owners were jealous of us, since this couldn't work with C64 due to different tape recording system.

Maybe they were jealous but you still owned a Speccy!

I remember using my 64mb MP3 player on repeat with 15 or so songs, but never really casette tapes.

I turned into Shazam doing that; I could recognize any song I liked by the first note.

> praying for the announcer to be short and not to talk over the song

Hahaha, I did that in Ireland too. I'm pretty sure DJs deliberately talk over the song intros to make illegal recordings unviable.

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise.

For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life.

KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.

Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.

CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had.

They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular.

In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS.

Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)

That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).

Yes, KEXP is great! I regularly discover new artists there.

> That was expensive. Really expensive. At somewhere around $15-20 dollar for an Album, buying an Album a week took up about all my allowance - and most of the measly income from side jobs I've made as an adolescent.

Interestingly, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€ so you could actually do whatever you want and listen to your music the way you want.

The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

>, Spotify you have been as streaming service and an MP3 shop where you actually pay the music like 0.5€

Assuming you meant to write, "Spotify could have been as streaming service _and_ an MP3 shop" ...

No, Spotify didn't have the leverage in negotiations with Big Record Labels to offer streaming plus DRM-free mp3 files for 0.5€.

Apple is more powerful than Spotify and they eventually relented to Big Labels demands and added a more expensive tier of songs at $1.29 instead of all songs being just $0.99 pricing.

Too generalize... to consider the realism of any hypothetical alternative business models for Spotify to have, you also have to consider whether the Big Labels would have even made those ideas possible when Spotify was negotiating the licenses.

> The current situation is that you don't own anything and you can't just deal with raw files (which locks you into a quite shitty UI).

It has never been easier to own an easily copiable and backup-able form of the music you want and use it with myriad ways to play it and listen to it.

People just don’t want to pay a dollar or two for their favorite songs.

Or... don't want to repay. I've followed some bands from vinyl to tapes to cds to now. I've bought some of the same songs 4, 5, 6 or more times. Listening for 'free' via streaming is good enough for most stuff any more, even if it means I'll lose access to some stuff. If I'm really desperate, maybe I'll look for a torrent, but I haven't done that in years.

if you have the CD why are you repaying? you literally already have the file on a physical medium that can be backed up and copied to whatever device you want

Spotify allows you to play local files, add them to playlists, etc. So no you can't buy the files from Spotify, but if it's important to you, you can buy them elsewhere and import them.

It's an unreliable and jarring experience, I had to give up on it. The app gives no indication when the synchronization would happen, and doesn't explain why when it does not work.

I have a similar opinion, but with one big caveat (which means I'd be happy to drop Spotify in a heartbeat): I still have access to all those old albums I bought with my wages and allowance. I've digitized them, and they have migrated from computer to computer.

And a large number of those albums/songs... aren't on Spotify.

And all the songs I've 'discovered' on Spotify will also be gone some day, because they're not from mainstream artists. If I want to listen to them in another 10 years, I'll have to buy them.

I digitized the CDs I still had left a couple years ago. Over half of them were not on Spotify. And they weren’t even anything obscure, just electronica where licensing is often a bit complicated.

> And they weren’t even anything obscure

A noticeable number of Bob Dylan's live albums are all mutilated in online distribution (streaming and download, everything), because somebody somehow managed to drop the gapless between-tracks transitions. (Those missing bits exactly match the pre-gap on the corresponding CD releases, so it almost feels as Columbia just ripped its own CDs for uploading and somehow mismanaged the process).

I was born in 1986 and we have the same story but my road leads to punk and hardcore. Which I believe the records (CDs, cassettes) are very hard to find compared to metal. I listened to a lot of Dead Kennedys when I was young, so I really don't mind if the quality is lossless or shitty. I am just glad that I could listen to it on repeat.

Pandora is much better at discovery (Spotify is actually really terrible by comparison), and cheaper too. Unfortunately, they refuse to implement high quality streams for whatever reason, or I could finally ditch Spotify. As it is, I just use Pandora's free tier for discovery to help curate my Spotify playlists.

It is drastically better than Spotify. I am surprised this isn't more well known. Maybe people just haven't tried Pandora recently.

The most I can get from Spotify is about 40 songs in a custom Radio playlist that I can't refresh or update.

All of this is because of the technological change (MP3, internet speed) not because of the streaming service.

All of this is *possible* because of the technology. The existence of the technology doesn't mean the software exists, or that the software is any of good/useful/cheap.

> 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT.

except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

and it's $11 every month, forever.

If I bought an album a month for the rest of my life, I would have 600 albums. In the last MONTH I have listened to music from that many albums on Spotify. So the forever argument doesn't really pain me.

If it works for you that's great. The comparison could be made that we can listen to music from [as many albums as we want] for $0 on Bandcamp, then buy the tracks we really like.

There's things missing from both platforms, of course.

not to mention that "forever" with online streaming services tends to mean, "until licenses change" or the company changes hands and they decide to invoke the clause in the ToS you agreed to that says that you dont own and aren't entitled to the thing you paid for.

See recently, Crunchyroll Funimation acquisition. People had bought blu-ray copies at extra cost for a digital copy which was honored by CR and retracted after the merger where they promptly deleted the media that these people owned and paid full price for individually.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

I can count on one hand the amount of times this has happened to me in the last decade.

Is it fair to say that you have fairly esoteric taste in music? I don't think it's the norm among Spotify users to feel that there is a ton of stuff that's missing from the library.

And if you are among the ones who can't find the vast majority of the music they want to listen to on that platform, then that's fair play - it's probably not for you. You likely have alternatives that suit you better. That doesn't really take away from the experience of the normies for whom it's got everything they want.

I wouldn't say esoteric but a lot of non-mainstream stuff; small bands; unoffical remixes that can't be licensed; etc.

I'm sure a sizable portion of tracks I enjoy are on there and agree that for most people it has most of what they want - most people listen to what is marketed to them. This has no bearing on the fact there's huge amounts of music available elsewhere that is not on Spotify/similar.

> and it's $11 every month, forever.

So the complaint is that not enough money is being paid for music and that it costs too much?

There's no complaint here.

But for me, yes paying $132/yr to not own anything isn't attractive.

> except the huge amount of music that will never be on there.

and was there but isn't anymore

There's even a third category: Is there, but only in a defective, incomplete fashion. (For years now, a number of Bob Dylan's live albums have been missing the gapless between-tracks transitions online. It almost feels as if Columbia ripped its own CDs for uploading and accidentally configured the ripping software to drop the pre-gaps…)

> Would you have told me back then, that for just 11$/month I could have all the music. ALL OF IT. And I would have a super knowledgeable entity that suggests new stuff to me. And I could just listen to a track or two without buying an Album. And it wouldn't take up space. And it didn't have CDs that could get scratched - I think I would have fainted.

My question would have been "But how do artists get paid?" Which is still a murky answer today if you're not touring like crazy and going hard on ancillaries, like merch, ads, etc.

Relatedly, the music industry has never really cared if/how artists got paid - all they care about is that the businessmen (and they have primarily been men, historically) get paid.

What I love about Spotify and think shows that their engineering culture is really solid, is their progressive web app. I only use Ubuntu on my different computers, and my first task after a fresh install is to log into Spotify and save their web app on my machine. It just works: the icon appears in my favourites, the app renders really nicely in a native-like window, etc. It is by far the best progressive web app experience I have had. I totally forget that it's just a website with the browser UI switched off.

Back in the day before Spotify existed you could use different options.

You could use Discogs to find similar music. Then you could use SoulSeek to find this music. Or simply join a metal channel/server on SoulSeek or IRC or DCPP and find other fans of similar music. But even before that you could also just look at a label catalog and travel to a vinyl or CD store (where you can listen before you buy...). Or you could use shortwave radio to catch a pirate station. Yes, this even worked for obscure genres like the one you mentioned. I have a broad taste of music and at times I've been into subgenres of the genre you mentioned.

Have I discovered new music via Spotify? For sure. Did different methods exist before? Yup. Is the Spotify method high signal to noise? Nah, the previously mentioned methods also worked very well. And I have virtually and IRL met tons of people, including people within the core of music subgenres. Thanks to Discogs, DCPP, and SoulSeek.

I do like one feature about Spotify showing shows near me (even though I have passed the age / time of my life where I went to artists as I have only time and money to do things like go to theatre with my kids). However that feature as well as buying merchandise also existed outside of Spotify long ago.

We're from the same generation and I also loved heavy metal... I learned about new bands by buying magazines specializing in metal, renting videos from the big bands which usually would include opening acts with new bands (or even the famous guys or their fans on the video wearing other bands' t-shirts), from friends, by going to festivals (there were lots of them around if you were willing to travel around a bit, though I was in a highly populated area so that may not have been an option for you)... there was always more bands that I knew about than what I could possibly listen and buy albums... of course, today it's so much easier, but I feel like the problem today is actually the abundance of choice! You could just listen to the best couple of songs of each band, and still have more than enough music to enjoy. That seems to be what happens if you let Spotify or other services pick songs for you. You can still dig in if you really want, but I feel like most people won't do that... and you start having very high expectations from what a good song is as you only listen to effectively, the "greatest hits"!

I understand you - I am a bit older and did similarly, buying cassettes in the 70s

Yet, I miss the undivided attention of that first listening, listening to all tracks in sequence (picking the track sequence was an art in itself, creating an atmosphere across the album). Feeling the difference between Side A and B.

Those 10$ felt like great return. Exchanging tapes with friends, recording mixtapes, listening sit downs.

A lot of this is lost due to streaming in general. When you can get any song in history in a few clicks, it takes away part of the “mystical journey” of finding your new musical beat. More self reinforcing stuff, just like Social Networks.

About Spotify, I agree with the OP. Interface gets worse, price goes up, podcast content is irrelevant for me (but drives price up). I find it grating since I already pay for the Apple bundle which includes Music (which is somehow even worse than Spotify). If Apple had a better interface I could ditch Spotify.

Guess I must try Cider again.

I trade songs with family on Spotify regularly. I suspect it is influencing our recommendations! You can also listen to music together using Jam, though I have not tried it: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-26/spotify-jam-personal...

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

It does remove songs, or at the very least disables some (you can toggle a setting to see disabled songs) presumably due to copyright/licensing issues. But worse, it sometimes _replaces_ a song with a different version, with no warning and no recourse

It's impossible to listen to some albums because of song replacement. You can try to do so, but when you click play on some albums it replaces several tracks with their single versions.

I noticed this last year with Dark Side of the Moon, although that's since been fixed.

For me this is one of the most compelling reasons to own non-DRM'd physical media: its content is no longer subject to the whims of corporate bullshit after the point of sale. Replacing songs within albums with other versions is appalling.

Sometimes Spotify swaps them for others by the same artist. One of my favorite instrumentals got swapped out for the version with vocals which I can't stand. I can't for the life of me understand why it could be a licensing issue.

It's a multilayered issue:

- licensing could be expired, could change hands, could be removed, could...)

- naming and attribution:

A single song by a single artist will have a gazillion versions (ep, lp, original, re-recorded, re-released, re-mastered, re-re-mastered, best hits, best songs, essential, released for the European market, released for the Japanese market, Christmas special...).

On top of that distributors and rights holders have very shitty metadata that also varies between rights holders.

So if a song changed to a different version, it's quite possible both that the contract for that song changed hands between rights holders and the new rights holder uploaded incorrect/invalid/mangled metadata that Spotify disambiguated in this way.

Or, even simpler: original metadata pointed to the incorrect version, but now points to the correct version. Which is incorrect from your point of view :)

I guess the downvotes come from people who have never dealt with licensing issues or data from content providers. I have :) The above is about 2-5% of the crap content companies (streaming or otherwise) have to deal on daily basis.

Because all of the above doesn't even begin to deal with things like territorial restrictions, content restrictions, territorial content restrictions, territorial content requirements, take down requests from commercial and government entities, rights disputes, content embargoes...

I found your comments helpful. Thanks.

Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)

I'm working on an app to help solve this. It's still waiting for Spotify's approval but I can whitelist some users while in development mode and some beta testing / user feedback would be appreciated. The profile shows my email.

They do yes. But it seems pretty rare. The most recurrent case I've seen, is for remixes of popular song. Probably that labels can signal these.

I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?

Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.

I love fast-paced, riff-focused metal. I didn't find out until I got Spotify that that genre was called thrash metal. I absolutely would not have found all the albums and artists I listen to daily without Spotify. It's one of the few proprietary apps I don't mind on my phone and PC.

> The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember those - the headphones hanging from the wall with 5-10 albums pre-loaded) never had Metal Albums.

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT. The entire backwall of my room was taken up by a stereo and an ocean of CD stands.

Before the general population figured out ripping, you could often return things if you did not like the music.

I often went to HMV (333 Yonge, Toronto Canada), bought 6+ CDs, listen them for a week or two, and return the ones that I didn't like (keep 2-3). I would then repeat the process and buy a bunch more.

They stopped this policy in (IIRC) the late-90s or early-00s, as people were just ripping CDs and returning everything they purchase the day before.

Oddly enough, I feel like streaming music service algorithms only reluctantly serve up new music. To me it feels like a constant reversion to the mean, not a portal to endless possibilities. It’s closer to listening to the radio than digging crates in a record store.

I absolutely can't relate. The monthly streams for the first 10 artists in my Discover Weekly this week are 45k, 90k, 89k, 30k, 121k, 931k, 231k, 25k, 7k, 14k. I would have zero chance to discover these bands in the wild.

To be fair you have to push Spotify a little by listening to tiny bands before it starts recommending more of them because the "gravity" of popular music is too strong. Like what do you recommend to someone who listens to mega popular genre defying artists like Taylor Swift? She's so ungodly popular that they could be a diehard metal head and still listen to her. There's no signal. The set of music TSwift fans also listened to is all music.

In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.

Various libraries in Metro Vancouver still have CDs, though they tend to be more popular artists.

Spotify is a convenient and affordable way to listen to music, but it is not without its drawbacks.

> Long story short - yes, Spotify isn't perfect - but dear god, is it (and related services) amazing relative to what I had when I was tiny

Comparing a product to what it was like decades ago and declaring it good is not the same as discussing it on merit and as is.

They put the fucking unlike button 2 pixels away from the fucking play button. In the app and notification widget. It's irreversible, permanent, and immediately unsyncs the song. There's no development team I resent as much as Spotify.

Takes minutes to load cached playlists. Often stumbles on multidevice playback. It's constantly refreshing and hiding content I was about to click on.

If their recommendations weren't decent is happily yeet them. I guarantee their shit app loses them money.

I was lucky to have a few friends sharing my passion for metal. Anyway there were quite a lot of magazines about metal music. They really helped me to discover new styles, bands, and releases.

Oh how I enjoyed reading the reviews of the new albums back then! Some journalist were very talented in describing the music in tasty details and I was longing for the moment, when I buy and listen to the long awaited CD.

If you were basically born with Spotify, like many of us here (or at least, had it or something like it from a young-ish age), then unfortunately there's no way we will ever appreciate it. It's like someone from a century go saying how amazing it is that we all having flushing toilets in our houses and refrigerators. It's just life now, it's the new normal, not amazing.

Although true in comparison, it is still relative.

I was born in 1991 in an underdeveloped country. Buying CDs was a luxury and i lived out of torrents and pirated CD copies. I still bought original CDs from time to time.

But the biggest appreciation for me, and maybe for the original commenter, is the amount of music itself.

I love music, is my main hobby and passion. And having all of this available at all times is still mind blowing for me.

Ironically, i still buy my favourite music in CDs cuz i love them, but one would not replace the other.

Spotify (or streaming services overall) is indeed amazing.

How do you deal with availability overload?

First half of my story feels surprisingly similar, despite being born much earlier and in a very developed country. Piracy only through tapes, later writable CDs and eventually also mp3 on writable CDs. When the Napster wave hit, I had my first "real" money beyond kids affordance and started buying a little more. Napster and its successors just felt too easy, that music did not feel sufficiently "mine", like a handmade copy on physical media did, despite being just as unlicensed. Very often, the records I did buy were quite a disappointment at first, before they started growing on me, and some of what I consider the best today would have never made it past that threshold if they happened in the abundance of Spotify or the heyday of unbounded internet piracy.

It's actually quite ironic: all my friends who indulged in Napster et al now have spotify accounts, whereas I have just stopped extending my repository of CD rips.

Very much similar! I started taping cassettes when i was like 8-10 years old. I erased some music from my mother’s cassette and she was furious hahah.

What do you mean with availability overload? I would say i am an active listener, my mind is rather a bit creative and i would dare to say that 80-90% percent of the time, i know what to listen. Even if it means to discover something new.

I used to like the Spotify recommendations but i disabled them since 2 years at they became like ads network “whoever pays more, gets more recommended”. I discover music now through personal recommendations, magazines (online), forums, references from artists i usually read about, or music produced by a producer i respect. How do you deal with?

But for example, right now i just wanted to listen some salsa/merengue (you can begin to guess where i am from) i always liked and made my own playlist with own songs.

Cheers!

Ok, but what is your point?

I'm also curious what do you/your generation consider amazing nowadays?

The point being that even though Spotify could/should be made better, it is arguably the best music play and discover tool ever invented.

There are people here alive that have used records, 8 tracks, tapes, CDS, mp3s and now Spotify. There is no comparison that Spotify is better for playback and discovery.

Note: I'm not talking about audiophile comparisons, just ease of use for the average listener.

I'm a big metal and jazz fan. I don't use spotify (or haven't for a while) but on apple music I curate my own playlists and get most of what I would get from surfing the high seas and rearranging folders and albums in a fraction of the time. I know you can do the same on Spotify, so it's good enough for me.

i had different experiences with music, partly due to the time frame, but i share your perspective.

however i don't think spotify helps with discovery for me any longer. it did play a major role until last couple years, even when my tastes changed drastically. now it is hard to find something new that is closer to what i like and is not pushed by the artists trying to promote their work. even using shuffle on a large playlist results in same set of tracks playing every day.

i think these sorts of sentiments are shared by the others here. from price perspective, i actually started spending on music with spotify premium. i still feel that it is worth the money after entering into a much better economic condition.

This isn't different than knowing Amazon uses child labor and works people to death and still using it anyways. Its not really a "sign of how far we've come" so much as it is, "this is convenient for me, I do not care about anything else"

The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I don’t personally mind music services too much. I don’t use Spotify because Apple Music comes with our family plan, but I might use it otherwise. It has value for me because my daughter listens to a lot of different music, but for me personally I frankly only listen to the same old songs most of which weren’t even released in this millennium. So for me spending the equivalent of buying an album every month wouldn’t really be worth it otherwise.

I do think Spotify might eventually suffer from things like Apple and Google bundling music services with other things. I don’t think Apple Music is particular great, but I do like the other things that comes with the family plan so we would have it with or without music. At least until they keep raising the subscription to the point where I’ll actually be annoyed enough to set up something different for storage and purchase sharing. Which is soon. But as long as we have the bundles service there is very little reason to have Spotify, and I suspect we’ll eventually pay for YouTube since I’m the only one in the family who still watches it through Firefox (Adblock), at which point we’ll have YouTube music or whatever it’s called. Spotify hit the market with good timing, but how many young people are going to chose it in the future?

> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I was a roadie on my friend's metal band around 2000-ish, they were not in any record company and just sold their CDs through DIY, during live shows, word of mouth, etc. My point is not all bands are in a record company, most are just doing it via DIY. Now, these indie, DIY bands, whatever you call it can now upload and share their music worldwide. That's a huge win.

A win for availability and potential audience, but if it causes less people to buy your CD/USB stick/whatever at shows - perhaps a significant reduction on income for the majority of gigging bands?

Do any of the streaming platforms let you direct fans to your own website/Bandcamp to make a purchase?

Are more or less acts making a living off their music now or back then? Absolute numbers and percentage-wise?

How do we decide what number is "fair", or what we as a society want? Surely it's not reasonable that every band that's just started out in a garage should be making bank.

I don't think that it's more difficult to be a professional musical artist or musician today than it used to be, although the business model may be different. But even if it is, I think that's a decent compromise for all the benefits the streaming services bring.

My understanding is that essentially zero DIY indie bands are making notable amounts from streaming payouts.

> The flip-side is that most of those metal bands now make almost no money on people listening to their music compared to what they did when they sold CDs through a lot of indie record companies.

I have a few friends who were selling CDs back in the 90s for their own bands, none of them make almost any money out of it. Even the ones that got some kind of distribution deal to some specialised record shops, it wouldn't sell any meaningful amount to even cover the costs of printing the CDs.

The lucky ones with a label deal got almost no money after covering recording, printing, distribution expenses.

The only kind of people who ever made money from selling albums are exactly the same making money from music in 2024: big artists, with a lot of marketing and hectic touring schedules.

Nothing has changed in that front, at least now musicians can put their songs up for the world to consume instead of just the patrons of a corner shop in their neighbourhood.

I can't stand spotify. I need indy artists, DJ mixes, flips and remixes, so Soundcloud is my go-to. Free tier is less annoying too, less ads.

So, your overall spending on music is down about 90% now. I wonder, who took the most of this loss: artists, record labels or music stores?

I'd also add that, in comparison to its competition, it's fairly "open" API-wise.

TIDAL: no API. Soundcloud: API registration disabled. Apple Music: paywalled. Beatport: API registration disabled. Etc etc.

That isn't to say you can get everything via the API (you can't get monthly listeners, only an abstraction of it on a 0-100 scale, or artist's pick you sometimes see on artist pages), but compared to whom they're matched against, kudos to them.

>> there were literally zero ways to discover new songs

Older than you, and into hardcore, not metal, but there were definitely ways to discover new songs back then.

First of all, I had friends that were into the same music, so when one of us got a new record, we all got a new record, I would borrow records from friends and if I liked it I would tape it, and friends made me tapes.

Radio did play hardcore, only they were pretty limited in what they could play, since if a band had a name like "The Crucifucks" or something like that, they couldn't even say that name over the air, but they still had hardcore radio shows that came on in college towns around 2 AM in the morning, and people would tape them and they would get passed around. We would go to a different town and drive around at 2 in the morning and tape straight from the car radio to a boombox just to find new music.

Next thing was compilation albums, so the labels would put out an extra cheap LP that was just a song or two from every band on the label, so for hardcore, Blasting Concept by SST, Rat Music for Rat People, American Youth Report, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, the Decline of Western Civilization, the Flipside comps, etc. Some of those you could even get at the mall.

Wasn't played on MTV other than a couple songs that were humorous (TV Party, Institutionalized) but you could find a little bit on Night Flight. Then there were the zines, Maximum Rocknroll and Flipside, later maybe Forced Exposure. If they compared a band you liked to another band, you would try to check them out. And of course going to $5 all ages shows, if you went to see a band you liked, 3 or 4 other bands were playing too.

So there were ways. I've never used Spotify but I know it is way easier now to find exactly what you want at the press of a button. But the search was part of the fun back then. The lack of technology did not stop us.

HMV; WOW what a throwback.

The fact that you can say "Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever" when they basically pay the musicians nothing is amazing to me. Have we come this far into individualism? "It's good for me, so it must be the best thing ever".

Would you say that the Spotify era is a worse time to be a musician than the UMG / Sony / Warner era?

I’m not a musician but it seems to me it’s always been difficult to make a living as an artist. I wonder if it’s easier to find an audience today than it was 50 years ago?

It is a joke now compared to what it was.

There are entire parts of the music industry that no longer exists.

There use to be working musicians in every city that were basically unknown outside the city. NYC or SF had their own entirely unique music scenes.

There use to be entire bars that were goth bars or punk bars in even mid sized cities. Imagine opening a bar in 2024 that only caters to people who like punk music? It doesn't even make sense.

Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media. To just compare the distribution channels misses the plot.

Every city use to have a knock off free paper of the Village Voice that was mostly for promoting live music. Now even the Village Voice itself is basically dead.

Anyone who thinks things are good now, simply can't comprehend what they missed out on.

Music teaching is a good example I think. There use to be all kinds of professional music teachers. If you were a gigging local musician you had the other income stream of teaching. Youtube is great for a music teacher that happens to win the music teaching lottery at the expense of all other music teachers. Of course, if you ask the youtube lottery winner they will say things have never been better. Scale that process across everything to do with music and that is the reality compared to the old reality.

You can't ask the gigging local musician who teaches on the side how things are because they are mostly doing something else now and don't count.

It is like asking the lottery winners if it is worth it to play the lottery. Not surprisingly they all say yes, best thing ever.

> Music has been degraded in importance by streaming video and social media..."

I don't think this is the root cause of your findings. I rather think that this development started with the DJ and rap culture which made musicians virtually obsolete. It is and was much cheaper to hire a DJ than a band, and people don't seem to care whether it's just a guy pressing some buttons or a bunch of people with real musical instruments. There is no longer any appreciation for real musicians. The public is satisfied with a few sampled tracks or cheap sequencer arrangements. In consequence fewer and fewer people see a need to learn an instrument. As a result, fewer and fewer music teachers are needed.

>The creator economy can't rely on Patreon.

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/the-creator-economy-cant-rel...

But the post didn't say that. It just described the benefits of using it.

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