Are Kids Losing Their Love for Music? | Hacker News Reader

Are Kids Losing Their Love for Music?

theguardian.com

14 pointsgargs20 comments

Has anyone built a screenless music player for their kids, or perhaps other projects that allow safe, independent exploration without a phone?

I'm interested in creating something for my children to discover music beyond my own collection. My kid doesn't have a phone, and so doesn't really have any autonomy in finding and playing music (as the article points out).

I recall DIY projects with NFC-enabled printed albums or perhaps using eink tags (though expensive). Maybe I'd hook it up to some api like Bandcamp (or *arr apps if need be).

iPod?

Yes, I agree with this poster. Just buy your child an MP3 player, they are still made today and lack internet connectivity. You can buy songs on BandCamp, download the files, and then throw songs on the SD card.

Yes, Yoto! It’s not just for (kids) audiobooks, they have music cards too. And you can upload your own MP3s to their blank cards, or use it as a Bluetooth speaker.

Yoto! looks interesting. My nephew got a Voxblock [0] for Christmas and loves it.

Practical and easy. It's not interactive and you can buy an wide collection of audio books (made with recycled cardboard) and listen to it with headphones

[0] https://voxblock.co.uk/

The most practical/cheap option would probably be an old phone with parental locks and access to a streaming service. It'd be much more functional and cheaper than any dedicated screenless device, and it gives a kid much more autonomy. It's understandable to want to protect kids from predatory algorithms, but music streaming services are probably the least predatory out of all the "big" apps. Also they never stopped making cheap mp3 players, if you want to have complete control over their music discovery

Maybe an old walkman, discman? the "phisicality" of the music is a good thing we usually forgot about.

MP3 players aren't hard to find (neither are MP3s for that matter), also used CDs, records, tapes etc, and players for same

This article seems to be an answer in search of a question

They aren’t hard to find but music discovery is problematic at the 1-5grade. Peers don’t have access so they can’t share music interests. My kid only knows Taylor swift and nothing else. There was a similar article on book discovery failing in the 9 + year old range.

> The only way she can access music is by making me get my phone out and play a song on my Spotify account.

I gave my kids Newpipe (that can download .opus files) and VLC (IMO it's clunky as an audio player, but they like it). Occasionally they'll want a full album, so I fire up the ol' Nicotine+ and download it.

Big industry and Ai companies are flooding the Internet with low-grade music. This is their tactic to holding far better independent music out of view, because if indie music took over, there would be no going back to big industry music.

Coupled with social apps like TikTok & Instagram and streaming companies like Spotify not allowing indie artists to grow without paying serious ad money, the larger industry is actively preventing independent music from being heard, and running undercover grifts on artists that aren't making a dime off of their work.

When people go to sites like YouTube and Spotify, it's very difficult to find an artists best work, these sites do everything to steer listeners towards big industry music, rather than helping independents to grow. Tech sites are grifting hard working musicians that aren't getting any reimbursement for their work, and there should be more accountability, because we're all being pelted with artificial and weak music as a result.

Kids love music, but they literally can't find the best of it anymore because of anti-competitive behavior by tech companies and the big music industry.

I hope companies like http://www.unitedmasters.com will help change that trend!

They've been around for a long time now, just another digital distributor that charges artists to upload music... They're also owned by a major industry entity, the same ones I'm posting about... Hardly a game changer. Major labels strangle independent artists and frustrate them to the point where they'll desperately sign weak big industry contracts and then get popular, but ripped off. The whole industry needs a major reorganization from it's current exploitation model.

Honestly I think this is a weird opinion. Tiny, independendant bedroom producers are BLOWING TF UP every single day becayse 5 seconds of their song becomes a tic tok meme. Its a great time for independant artists, financially, and the tech companies are facilitating it, not hindering it.

>Tiny, independendant bedroom producers are BLOWING TF UP every single day becayse 5 seconds of their song becomes a tic tok meme.

That is a common trope pushed by platforms like TikTok & IG to encourage musicians to work on the platform. TikTok does not help musicians to grow in any way unless they are already very popular (over ~100k followers). If you become a popular artist on TikTok, they invite you to HQ where they assign you a client manager that gives you help in promoting your account, but it comes with a price. Social platforms captures the profit that a musician reaps from using the platform without paying royalties in most cases in reality. The music business now is a broken system of payola if you ask artists that weren't born rich.

TikTok is also on the way out as an option as well, as it is supposedly going to be banned in September this year.

> When people go to sites like YouTube and Spotify, it's very difficult to find an artists best work, these sites do everything to steer listeners towards big industry music, rather than helping independents to grow.

I dunno, personally, I was introduced to some of my favorite underground artists purely through Youtube recommendations. People like Sewerslvt, The Caretaker, Ecco2k, Astrophysics, Kero Kero Bonito, and some dark ambient projects like TOWERS/TOWERS. Maybe now that AI’s out there this won’t be possible anymore but for the time being at least, I feel like music discovery on YT is pretty good.

I find most of my music on YouTube as well, and many artists are making ground, but they hit a ceiling. I'm an indie musician myself, so I'm speaking from experience. When you see an indie musician's music on YouTube, 9 times out of 10, they're paying money to promote it on the platform. Streaming sites pay very little, so very few artists make that promo money back until they go on tour, and even then, unless you're selling major volumes of tickets and albums, as a musician you only break even if at all behind the scenes.

The thing is, for musicians, if they spend a lot of time on their work, they don't get paid anywhere near what they should, even after years of work, unless they break into the level of being on TV and Radio, most artists don't have health care or even enough to pay rent.

Just because we may know about certain musicians, doesn't mean they are doing well off of their music, tons of musicians secretly have day jobs, while the tech industry makes billions. Modern musicians often sign record contracts and find themselves in a lifetime of debt before they can even earn their first check, this is what most of their listeners don't know.

I think this is an out of touch perspective. Big industry music has never been more irrelevant since radio stopped being the main way people discovered new bands. I notice that with my peers (early 20's), I listen to at most 20% of the same music as someone with similar tastes to me, and most of what both of us listen to is independently released from small artists. While industry backed musicians are still the largest artists in the world by sheer numbers, they have never been less relevant.

Also YouTube and tiktok are really good at recommending obscure/independent artists if you actively search for independent music. Like Spotify and YouTube aren't actively promoting and finically compensating independent artists because they are being payed off by the "industry" to suppress what you consider "good" music, they just recommend what's most likely to keep someone on their service and they pay poorly because streaming services don't have an actual business model beyond growth hacking.

Most people don't search for "Independent Music" on platforms, they look at what's displayed on the font page and their time lines... Independent artists don't make it on to either of those unless they pay a lot of money to be displayed there, still most can't match the higher amounts that big labels and sponsors can pay to be displayed first because there's no guarantee of ROI.

I'm not speaking from inexperience, I'm a musician and label owner myself.

You may see indie music on sites like YouTube now, that's because that's what you've previously searched for, but most others have no idea of where to start in finding obscure bands they'd like and the recommendation algos only provide default picks unless you search for specific artists, there's also a ton of drivel to sort through before you find the right artists, supermarkets and gas stations only play major artists on repeat all day -- that's why the streaming numbers are so vastly lower for pop versus indie musicians, and a lot of people are completely worn out on the process of trying to find good music they like.

There isn’t a good way to give your kids access to music without getting them access to a phone. Since we don’t own music anymore and it’s all streaming it’s only available on devices that are also internet gateways.

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