Streaming Is Stalling: Can Music Keep Up in the Attention Economy?

The cynic in me thinks that the abundance of old bands on festival line ups is probably more focused on targeting people with disposable income, rather than a young audience who may be very enthusiastic, but are also broke.

I think this has more to do with our culture making everything about the individual. You can’t name bands anymore, because explosive popularity is the realm of the individual artist.

Even massive individual artists, disappear into relative obscurity when they move into a band format (John Mayer).

Kanye, Taylor, Nicki, Lizzo, Justin, Drake, Ariana, Billie, Miley...

Even hip-hop, which seems like a distinctly individual genre, used to be ruled by groups. NWA, Wu-Tang, Roots, etc.

Our current culture over-values individuals and loves the myth of the one wo/man show. Teams are boring. Give us someone to follow.

You see this with founders too. Even if the company was created by a team, there must be one figurehead.

I guess this is because so much of marketing is aspirational. Most people try to purchase the identity they want. It’s easier to sell an identity with an actual person.

>If you make a list of the greatest bands/artists of the latest 10 years and compare it to any decade since pop music got going, it doesn’t compare

Ah, a classic meme: https://old.reddit.com/r/lewronggeneration/

The person you're replying to doesn't say anything about "music from back in the day was better" though. They're talking about the "consumption" of music. And in a way I agree, I generally lean towards limitations being important. Humans aren't good when everything is given to them easily.

I used to think music from back in the day was better. Then I washed my predilections out and did a clean take on modern music. There are some real gems there. They’re also ... new.

Reread your and the previous post. You make hardly a point towards it. What is new with streaming is that music is much faster produced, consumed and forgotten. Streaming is part of the Problem. You cannot expect capitalist in the industry to step back and prefer quality over quantity and the streaming industry neither. As long there is cash on the table some one will grab it. Actually everyone is part of the problem from consumer to artist. It's just the question whether you perceive it as problem or not.

Funny that you say that because I have long thought Spotify kills discovery.

In the 90s, I discovered a lot of great music because it was playing at a listening station at a record store, or because I was browsing through the ska-punk section and liked the cover art, or by flipping through a friend's CD collection. A lot of my early tastes came from gems I found in my parents old records.

It was also really common to buy an album for one or two songs and then "discover" more songs you liked on the album. The scarcity required you to actually give new songs a chance. I feel like streaming caused my music taste to stagnate because there is no reason not to just skip an unfamiliar song.

Like I said in a sibling comment, I love Spotify but I think its recommendation and discovery mechanisms are really subpar.

They're merely "good enough" IMO. I can go to "Song Radio" or "Artist Radio", and browse through related artists and the like. But the latter still requires a significant amount of effort on my part, and the autogenerated radio playlists are nothing to write home about. I think it's fine that things like the "related artists" features exist, they emulate to some extent the old ways of discovering music, but they're also obvious and they would be part of a music service MVP nowadays. What I miss are solid automatic recommendations, more intelligent than those that are available.

As I remember, Pandora blew Spotify's automatic recommendations out of the water as far back as the mid-2000's. The idea of analyzing the song itself is so powerful and I think Spotify barely does it or weighs it way too little, favoring instead social aspects (such as the preference of other users). I discovered insane amounts of music with Pandora when I was able to use it, like dozens to hundreds of songs per week. Whereas with Spotify I go through these bad droughts that last weeks where I'm not discovering anything new that really clicks. I'd definitely pay for Pandora if it was available here in Spain.

It's weird to me that Spotify being the kingpin is so far behind Pandora in this regard. Is it that they don't care because users don't know any better or demand it? Or that what Pandora did was a technical miracle and can't be replicated at Spotify scale? Maybe it's some business model decision (eg, intelligent recommendations would stray users too far away from Taylor Swift)?

Maybe someone on HN can shed some light on this. And if anyone has any ideas for music services with intelligent recommendations available in Spain I'd be sure to give them a try.

Soundcloud solves discovery for me. Every week I look through their search for words i filter on and sample all the songs (40-100 songs, maybe takes 1-2 hours at most) and download them if I like them (some weeks none, some weeks more than others), follow the artist if I like more than a couple (and what they are liking and re-posting), and occasionally pay the artist directly for files even if I already downloaded it.

I stream from my computer to my phone when I'm at home over the local network in the browser and thru a cheap vpn from my computer when I'm not (and/or just copy a random sample to my phone when I don't wanna pay for the bandwidth) if I know long enough a head of time.

Deff wont show up in billboards stats… nor have to deal with the misalignment of incentives when listening to music on the soundcloud trying to push a song from their algos an artist/agency paid them to do (or ads).

I often get told that my music collection is great by random guests and people. For me music discovery is an active act, so every other month I spend an afternoon to find new things read up on certain scenes etc. E.g. I stumble uppon Iranian 60s rock and roll, find a few artists that are more unique in aound and the way they do "rock", I download things, tag them, sort them, create playlists and store them away.

This way when I play the music (e.g. at a dinner with friends) not only do I know what it is going to be, but I can also tell them a little story about it.

"I miss owning my music collection"

there's nothing stopping you from having both!

I havnt done this yet but im thinking about cancelling my spotify subscription soon and only signing up for a few months out the year just to discover new stuff, then put the rest of the money I would have given spotify that year towards buying the music I want to keep.

I won't have to worry about songs disappearing anymore or my playlists not being downloaded offline and more importantly you are giving an artist some money and not just a fraction of a cent

From my own experience, Spotify is better than going in blind but much worse than using RateYourMusic and superficial scanning of music journalism sites. I've started using Spotify the beginning of the year (Before that a mix and match of Vinyl, Bandcamp and piracy; fuelled by friends, a bit of /mu/, RYM and music journalism) and I've discovered a handful of musicians I didn't know before, but it usually just recommends me stuff I already know (and often don't care for). Conceptually I like their mix of the week playlists, but I prefer listening to whole records, so I often just skip through the playlist until I find something that sounds interesting, which isn't much better than RYM/Journalism, but without any menaningful context (so it's worse).

This is pretty much my favorite recommendation by Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9982wYPPm0

Discovery was a social process not an algorithmic one. The person behind the counter in the record store (and/or your friends) would get to know your taste and recommend new stuff to you. In most stores, you can listen to a CD before you buy it, maybe not the big American retail-style ones but certainly all the smaller record shops.

>And lots of songs I don’t like

One of my wishes is that I could tell Apple Music/Spotify that I don't want its playlists/discovery to ever play me music from $X genre because I just don't like even if it's considered really good by the standards of the genre.

I was lucky enough to have a library with a massive cd collection. Moving fast it would still take me 4-5 hours to flip through and grab ones that might end up being interesting.

That and radio were my discovery processes and it worked great.

Go to a good used record/CD shop and they'll let you listen to anything that isn't factory-sealed. Great way to spend a few hours.

> I hear what you’re saying, but Spotify solves a problem I never managed to solve with CDs: it solves discovery.

For years before Spotify went mainstream – going all the way back to the early millennium! – discovery was already provided by services like Last.fm where you could see what your friends and neighbors were listening to, and filesharing communities where you could then freely download the music.

> I enjoy most on vinyl for higher fidelity active listening

Vinyl is not “higher fidelity” than what you pay for on Spotify, at least not in the audio quality sense.

Just download all the music onto your home (bunker) server and stream from that!

You sound like me.

Streaming in general has changed a lot of things. Probably for the better but can't make an omelette without cracking eggs and all that.

Video is the same way. We've mostly lost the collective cultural experience of Must See TV Thursday (or whatever). Or not. I haven't watched the series yet but Baby Yoda certainly made the rounds. Though there is a definitely increased cultural fragmentation of which at least some of the consequences are a clear negative.

In general it's all mostly a positive but some things get lost along the way. Time to play some Apple Music playlist :-/

Or in other words:

Expert in field X disappointed that regular people are not experts in field X :-)

tl;dr, curation and commentary (with insight) are also essential skills like musicianship, where music supply feels endless.

> The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

I'm not below the age of 25 but this seems like a really archaic statement. This is basically equivalent to "Kids these days have no idea what it means to have to watch commercials and shows you didn't want to watch to get to that show you were really looking forward to."

> This really can't be emphasized enough. The younger generation has no concept of listening to a song you "don't like" 50 times, simply because you listened to the album you purchased 100 times.

Not necessarily true. When Spotify reaches the end of one of my playlists, it automatically starts playing a radio of "recommended songs" based on the playlist. However, these recommended songs are usually the same, with only minor changes over time.

As a consequence, I can think of several songs that I don't like that I have listened to more than 50 times, simply because they tend to be the among the first recommended songs to play when I've finished one of my regular playlists.

Let's say you're a youtuber or streamer who listens to a variety of different music, are you really going to pay to license every one of your favorite songs for business use? No.

Instead they go to No Copyright Sounds or Kevin McLeod and grab their stuff instead because why are you going to sacrifice that money to license the music when you're small and starting out?

That is true, to. very large extent. However, paying royalties for music is a chore that even big companies struggle with.

Do you know who to pay royalties to for a piece of music if it's broadcast in the US? In Europe? In Japan? It's not uncommon for a piece of music to be co-owned by multiple companies with weird things like "in the US the rights belong to Warner, in Europe it 27.5% Warner, 13% Sony, 1% the original production company that still exists and the rest goes to UMG"

This is wrong.

If I want to DJ a livestream on Youtube, I can only play certain songs, regardless of my willingness to pay for the songs.

Certain music is prohibited from the platform.

It is not a business, I am not trying to sell ads or promote anything.

Because they don't have to pay for it. They have plenty of free music available and they aren't losing fans over it.

Can they? Is Youtube's system set up to allow that? They'll still get hit by content ID or automated takedown notices from labels or whatever, have to fight each case, and still have the possibility of the strikes causing their channel to close, or the entirety of the income from a video being diverted to a record label.

The system is not set up for this. You cannot play copyrighted music in a stream or YouTube video without jumping through hundreds of hoops with licensing. Especially if you are listening to a variety of songs (e.g. Spotify or a radio) this is a nightmare.

You are right that many (not all) YouTubers and streamers are businesses, but pinning this on streamers for being cheap/greedy and not wanting to pay ignores the reality of the situation. If this was in any way realistic you would see a certain percentage of streamers pay and legally play popular music. Instead, that percentage is zero.

There is no reasonable path to pay for playing popular music, and that is entirely the fault of the record companies.

And they don’t cause... why would they when they don’t have to?

One underestimated part of the gig economy is that eventually everyone will be a business, and eventually they will be on the clock all the time. I guess that will be the end of music.

Do Uber drivers have to pay a license to have the radio on in the car?

ISPs in a proper regulatory environment should have minimal margins.

(Not necessarily in order of importance)

1. Direct voluntary payments by their audience (one-off/recurring).

2. Live shows.

3. Payment by various entities to sing something.

4. Organizations (the state, corporations, philanthropic bodies) which sponsor artists to work on their art without having to also do the work of financing themselves.

Still, it's quite possible that would fund less than are funded today. To that I would say:

1. It would still be a reasonable trade-off.

2. It would level the playing field somewhat between today's popular performers/artists and the vast majority of their peers whom, today, aren't funded.

3. Communities should motivate themselves, and organize themselves, to support local artists on the individual level, and to provide facilities such as music rooms, instruments, recording studios, professional training/lessons - for free or a symbolic fee, to local music artists (and ditto for other kinds of art) - so that at least people don't have to pay to engage in their art.

Just earlier this month I discovered some stunning new music. I paid its producer $10 for the album, $9 (minimum price) to gift it to a friend, and $9 to gift it to another friend. That day the artist earned $28, minus Bandcamp’s cut, from me alone.

Even though that musician enables free listening via Bandcamp, he does not distribute his work under Creative Commons or a similar license, which radically reduces the chance of lucky accidents where people like me stumble across his music.

I believe having more music distributed under CC or a similar license would immensely benefit musicians themselves, other content creators such as YouTube vloggers and Twitch streamers, and the end listener—everyone wins, except maybe for major labels and distributors.

(Note that CC license is different from public domain: the former mandates attribution, the latter doesn’t.)

If you need to "drown out" noise while in the office, I think there might be something wrong at your workplace. For me home, where you and neighbours are typically off, has always been more loud than workplaces where you need to concentrate.

There's liking music and then there's nostalgia. I think they're two different things but they both sound the same.

If a person only likes the music of their generation then they don't like music, they like nostalgia.

There's music I liked as I was growing up, loved in fact, but listening to it now is like listening to myself talking about "what I want to be when I grow up"; it's a child's narrow perspective of the world. Some music that I liked I'm embarrassed by, although I understand it was a journey to my musical appreciation of today, and so I'm deeply thankful for its part in that journey.

I'm not a particularly nostalgic person, so I'm immune to that effect of music, so I think I can offer a somewhat more objective viewpoint.

I can agree, but what makes me doubt it is that "back in the day" (oh shit) we had lots of mainstream music that was different between themselves. we had the hiphoppers, we had the people that craved fast "whitney houston remix" level high energy dance stuff, we had the "hey i'm mean" rockers. all sharing the top charts.

if you take the medium bpm between the top 100 billboard tracks right now it must be somewhere between 69-80bpm and with the characteristics i mentioned above - and it's all a smear between "i'm depressed" and rhythm and blues.

i still can't quite confirm but yes, i am also getting old and cranky :)

but srsly, don't you feel music is just becoming a pasteurized smear of the 'same' ?

> The irony was never lost on me.

As mentioned I came from a music scene that incidentally has its roots from pirate radio, literately guys climbing towers and hi-jacking frequencies in London to broadcast locally as well as online streaming, illegal underground raves so it was typical to see how this very same group of artists and DJs had their own labels to bypass the gatekeepers/middlemen as the sound was too 'strange,' but would eventually get coprorate backing after it became profitable and Red Bull even dcreated an academy for many of the pioneers.

I really thought we would have done away with large labels and middlemen in this Industry by now, because while I only know this 2nd hand touring catches up to you; especially as many went from being teenagers/20-somethings with no responsibilities to middle aged parents so touring becomes impractical and often detrimental to any chance of any work-life balance.

But, yeah it was clear they never cared about the mom and pop and it was always about protecting thier archiac business model. And I really think our DNB and Dubstep scene kept many independent shops and mastering/pressing afloat and it was a big part of the resurgence in vinyl in the 2000s we saw. Even now I get a chuckle of seeing the limited color pressing offers/pre-buys on Bandcamp as almost no one who DJs is on vinyl anymore, unless it's their gimmick, so when it sells out you know its just fans buying them up. So why do we need these people now that distribution and fees can be reduced to what they are now on bandcamp and PR/booking tours is no longer the only thing that made those relationships remotely tolerable?

If you haven't already done so, check out Grimes interview with Andrew Yang. It was kind of interesting hearing her view on things as Canada promotes its local talent and the State gives them grants, which is incredibly odd but kind of novel way of doing things if it generates local demand for events and record sales which they benefit from in tax revenue.

YMMV, but I got 4 months of Tidal for $1 as a Black Friday deal, and I really felt like its "radio" feature was better than other services. It's one reason I miss Tidal over Spotify.

I’m one of the people that still tune in to the radio and listen music programmed by professionals. I don’t subscribe to any streaming service, so I can’t speak for the decline, but perhaps during the pandemic more people spending more time at home find robotic programing on the streaming services inferior to human curated music on the radio.

I feel like Pandora was very good for this, at least up to the point that I left the States and could no longer subscribe.

I make a new playlist each year. I seed it with some stuff, and it’s locked in place at the end of the year. Same Spotify handle as HN. Add a song here and there, perfect the flow, make sure it shuffles.

Bandcamp relies on fans buying the music, whereas Spotify relies on streams. It can take thousands of streams to reach the same cash that goes to the artist after one purchase.

The services have straightforward agreements to their suppliers, which are typically labels or distributors for most popular music. The complaint about the artist's eventual earnings is often actually a complaint about the artist's deal with their label.

For Bandcamp? They take 15%, or 10% if you're doing well. For streaming services, they split their income proportionally amongst all played tracks. That's about 0.3 cents per play on Spotify recently.

I second this. I've got an old iPod and I go on walks daily listening to albums, playlists, sometimes just queuing stuff up on the fly as the mood strikes me. Never skipping a song that starts playing.

Tetris and Quake 3 vs bots also work very well to calm my mind so that I can zone into the music itself. YMMV

P.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jScy-kdCY4M <- this song is beautiful and I hope it makes some of y'all feels some emotions like it does for me : )

I read a study that it only takes like 6-9 days in nature and disconnected to really reset a bit. Wish I could find it, but there really sound advice.

Upon further introspection, you are right. It’s natural to blame it on the internet / social media. Ultimately, it’s my fault to consume it and get addicted to it. These things are notoriously designed for addiction and constantly attention seeking behavior, even if I am self aware of it.

I’ve turned off all notifications on my phone. Made a habit of leaving the phone docked on the charger and not checking it every now and then.

Still suffer from HN addiction :-) though!

That's a bit reductionist. Like in a sense it's literally true but the constant availability of limitless entertainment for every level of "attention energy" has changed reward expectation for our brains. Like how modern candy flavor puts Necco's to shame.

I realize that my having ADHD kinda throws the whole "relatable personal anecdote thing" off but still. There are plenty of things I can focus on even to the point of not sleeping or eating. But I can't focus on music at all. Even in the absence of other stimulus or distractions I will drift into my own thoughts. Music is relegated to a background activity because it has to be layered with something else for me to be able to listen and not get bored.

That the internet has affected human attention span is not an uncommon idea[1]. The submission literally has the internet-age phrase "attention economy," and we all understand exactly what it's saying.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)

I'd be a bit careful in ascribing too much meaning to the differences in music over the years. Remember that your parents probably said the same thing about your music, and their parents before them. We tend to lock in our favorite music in our late teens and early 20s, and while it's okay to have a preference it's kind of silly to ascribe immutable qualities of the music when it's probably just what you like.

Or, to paraphrase something pithy a former boss of mine said: they made the best music back when I was most emotionally vulnerable, and now it seems to have gone downhill since then.

I can't say I agree with that. There is a lot of really good new music, just like there is a lot of bad old music. The difference is the bad old music has already been forgotten, but the bad new music is recent enough to still be somewhat memorable. For now.

Music has always been extremely formulaic. That's its very nature : using tropes we're accustomed to to provoke an emotional reaction. But it certainly is less formulaic now than it was a few centuries ago.

I find a lot of older music sounds very muffled and poorly mastered where as some modern stuff like Tipper are incredible experiences especially on high end headphones. Some of this modern stuff is completely unreal. But if all you listen to is old music and the top 10 pop songs I'm not surprise you would miss this.

Have a listen to this, its one of the most amazing things I have listened to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCIXH6sb1ss

Nothing from the past is able to match this level of incredible stereo effect.

This is the sort of comment that I don't think belongs on HN. You can't trash something you don't understand and claim it a curious and contrarian view.

You mean Warcraft 10.25?

This is the main reason I'm skeptical that other forms of media are distracting from streaming. Someone could easily turn of Dota 2's music and listen to Spotify in the background.

Excuse me, what the fuck?