Music: Sharing and Listening - The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between

[Gorth]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

It wasn't the death of CDs that destroyed the industry, nor did I say so. It was the proliferation of free internet sharing which gave birth to a generation who regards it as their right to have all of their music for free[*]. As a consequence of this, musicians are no longer able to make a living through their music, sales have plummeted to abysmal levels and the industry is essentially dead. Some old names still keep it going, but only for a little while longer. It makes me sad, being such a lover of music.

There are no new major bands, and there won't be. I suppose the most recent band that can still tour stadiums is Metallica, and they were formed in the very early 1980s. The whole of the 2000s have produced nothing of that stature, significance and success. Now, quality is not measured by success, but the current industry is such that you can keep going if you have already established yourself in the earlier era, but it is well-nigh impossible to establish yourself now.

 

[*] A similar phenomenon exists within print media which is in dire straits, and the online media tends to be much, much worse than print media used to be. (But there are exceptions.)

Yeah, no more Samantha Fox on page whatsitsname

You mentioned Metallica, which is a bit ironical. The one time I finally spend many hundred dollars on tickets in Melbourne, they cancelled it (4 weeks before the concert) because Hetfield had to go back to rehab...

Most of the live performances I've seen down here has indeed been established names (The Killers, Incubus, etc.). One band I'd love to see live is Rammstein. Last time they visited Madison Square Garden in the US, they sold out in 20 minutes and broke their website. This has been a pattern then last 10+ years for them... they go on world stadium tours and the stadiums are typically sold out in 10-20 minutes (and those tickets are NOT cheap). I.e. pretty hopeless to get tickets unless you're fast. Their Youtube videos... a few dozen official videos with between 50m-500m views each. No idea what they make from Youtube, but probably a few dollars.

 

But, they are old. Not Rolling Stones old, but in their late fifties/early sixties by now. The last music I bought was the Chtulhu Christmas Carols boxed set... which again was a few years after I bought the Conan soundtrack. Probably 10+ years ago. I've been spoiled by the ease of finding a song on Youtube rather than the old "concept album" idea, where you either start programming your player or listen to all songs sequentially they way the producer intended.

[xzar_monty]

35 minutes ago, Gorth said:

I've been spoiled by the ease of finding a song on Youtube rather than the old "concept album" idea, where you either start programming your player or listen to all songs sequentially they way the producer intended.

Yeah, the era of the album is pretty much gone. They're too expensive to make and there is no audience for them anymore.

The difference between how successful a band is live and how much their albums sell these days can be huge. I mean, Iron Maiden tours stadiums worldwide. But their most recent album sold nothing. Even the best-selling albums sell nothing these days: Taylor Swift under 2 million in 2022, Adele 1.5 million in 2021. The big change happened during the first decade of the 2000s, and I suppose there's no going back. I remember the time when record companies and the business in general was a huge thing (I also worked as a journalist at the time), but once the internet and free sharing really got going, the companies started to dwindle, and these days there's hardly anyone working at them anymore. I don't feel sorry for the record companies, but I think it's awful that the people making good music are not able to make a living out of it.

The whole polarization phenomenon (i.e. the fact that nearly everyone gets nothing and someone gets nearly everything) can be aptly summarized by the fact that the Swedish guy who owns Spotify and whose artistic contribution remains at absolute zero is richer than Paul McCartney.

[Gfted1]

Pirates gonna pirate.

[xzar_monty]

53 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

Pirates gonna pirate.

Sure. But there is no way you can fail to recognize how the situation has changed with the internet. Essentially everything has become available free of charge, and the number of people who are prepared to take advantage of that is huge. It's not a change in people, it's a change in the possibilities: people would have downloaded everything for free from the net in the 1800s, if that had been possible. But this phenomenon has destroyed the music industry and made it so that it's essentially impossible to establish a real career in music these days. I think it's a tremendous loss.

The sales of CDs, for instance, have plummeted from 995 million per year (1998) to 32 million per year (2020). Now, if the increase in digital downloads and all that had managed to fix that loss with the revenue coming from the digital side of things, everything would be fine, but of course it has not. So the record business has basically become a hobby.

Edited May 18, 2023 by xzar_monty

[Gfted1]

Things change with the times. Im sure the tablet carvers were sad when writing took over, then writers were sad when the printing press took over, then printers were sad when things went digital, and digital will be sad when the next technology takes over. And dont even get me started on the decimation of the horse and buggy industry. Everyone that gets phased out of anything will be sad.

[Gorth]

Maybe the time is just running out for rock and pop stars living in 56 room mansions at the beach? Hollywood actors too for that matter. The medieval scribes probably felt it the same way when Gutenberg came along and their livelihood slowly disappeared over the years. The printing press didn't have the artistry of a scribes calligraphy, but it was cheaper and made texts available to the masses. Lamplighters, Switchboard operators... professions come and go.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

My neighbors have been listening to a lot of Lil Nas X recently, who I have recently learned is not a major artist, and honestly I'm here for it. I'd post a video but a lot of them are "explicit" and I don't want Greg Abbot to send the Freedom Police after me.

16 hours ago, majestic said:

 

 

Reported for Russian apologism.

10 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

General rule of thumb is that if a service will let you watch, read, or listen to something, that service has necessarily opened up a golden opportunity for you to permanently own it outside their means of control as well. Whether or not a particular end user finds this of interest or will make use of it is another matter entirely...

Naughty

[Malcador]

17 hours ago, majestic said:

 

 

Insufficient Adidas levels in that

[Bartimaeus]

16 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

I don't take issue with anything, I was simply astonished that someone would know so little about the history of Peter Pan and would actually, at first, take Peter Pan and the Starcatchers as a book that has something to do with the original.

It shared the same name and I didn't think to check the author before starting it. I'm pretty astonished myself that it would apparently qualify as some kind of outrageous ignorance of literature worth commenting upon - exactly what percentage of posters here do you think knew there was a series of Peter Pan prequel books in the first place? Before I mentioned it in that thread, that is. I am guessing it was, and is still, not very high.

[majestic]

 

[Gorth]

A somewhat older Rammstein song  "Don't die before me" (2005 I think). A slightly "atypical" song for two reasons. It features a guest singer and she sings in English...

 

 

[Azdeus]

On 5/18/2023 at 9:54 AM, xzar_monty said:

Yeah, the era of the album is pretty much gone. They're too expensive to make and there is no audience for them anymore.

The difference between how successful a band is live and how much their albums sell these days can be huge. I mean, Iron Maiden tours stadiums worldwide. But their most recent album sold nothing. Even the best-selling albums sell nothing these days: Taylor Swift under 2 million in 2022, Adele 1.5 million in 2021. The big change happened during the first decade of the 2000s, and I suppose there's no going back. I remember the time when record companies and the business in general was a huge thing (I also worked as a journalist at the time), but once the internet and free sharing really got going, the companies started to dwindle, and these days there's hardly anyone working at them anymore. I don't feel sorry for the record companies, but I think it's awful that the people making good music are not able to make a living out of it.

The whole polarization phenomenon (i.e. the fact that nearly everyone gets nothing and someone gets nearly everything) can be aptly summarized by the fact that the Swedish guy who owns Spotify and whose artistic contribution remains at absolute zero is richer than Paul McCartney.

Things like this is pretty relevant aswell when it comes to tours;

 

[xzar_monty]

On 5/18/2023 at 4:07 PM, Gfted1 said:

Things change with the times. Im sure the tablet carvers were sad when writing took over, then writers were sad when the printing press took over, then printers were sad when things went digital, and digital will be sad when the next technology takes over. And dont even get me started on the decimation of the horse and buggy industry. Everyone that gets phased out of anything will be sad.

This is true, of course, but it completely misses what's significant about this most recent technological change.

The music industry has basically had a short history of vinyl, cassette, and CD. To an extent, these "steps" represented new techologies taking over, although they all also co-existed and none of them obliterated any of the others. What the internet and digital sharing of music did was that it created a culture where almost any member of the potential audience could get almost all music he wanted for free. Nothing like this ever happened with the changes from tablet carving to writing to the printing press, simply because it was not technologically possible. Nor has anything like this happened with any changes in transportation, simply for natural physical reasons: there's still a human being who needs to be transported from place A to place B, and no technical shortcut to this is available. But with the music business, it's completely different: if you want, you can forget about spending any money at all on vinyl, cassettes, CDs or whatever, because everything is available for free. And an awful lot of people are doing just this -- and although you mentioned pirates in this thread, the change has been so total that the question of piracy has all but disappeared in this context. This means that there is very little money coming into the industry, and obviously there is no industry that could ever survive this.

This is why this most recent technological change is different from the earlier ones. It has essentially destroyed the most important thing an industry needs: money coming in from somewhere. As I said, the established names can still keep going, largely because of loyal fanbases and mostly through money earned from touring, T-shirt sales and such (as opposed to album sales, which don't exist), but no new names are going to establish themselves anymore; it's just not possible, financially speaking, there's too little money coming in -- even if you have millions and millions of listeners on Spotify.

Spotify, by the way, is also an example of something else that has happened with this most recent technological change, and it's a development that at least some economists regard as rather sinister. Digital technology tends to create extreme polarization, which means that your company is likely to become the undisputed market leader in whatever it does or it's not going to exist at all. If, for example, you're going to compete with Google, what will happen is that you're either going to get ignored, or if you're any good, you're going to be bought by Google. Ditto Amazon. Ditto several other undisputed market leaders. So, extreme polarization: this most recent technological change in the music industry has been, economically speaking, a marvelously good thing for that Swedish guy who owns Spotify. But not for anyone else.

Edited May 21, 2023 by xzar_monty

[Gfted1]

Heh reminds me of the lawless days of the late 70's - early 80's. I used to sit in front of my boombox, the Record and Pause buttons already pushed, waiting for my favorite jams to come on the radio and slamming the Pause again to unpause and start recording, only the have the DJ talk over the last 30 seconds.  Good times. I filled up multiple cases with my fire mix tapes:

 

Maybe they should make on onlyfans, but for aspiring musicians.

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Gfted1 said:

Heh reminds me of the lawless days of the late 70's - early 80's. I used to sit in front of my boombox, the Record and Pause buttons already pushed, waiting for my favorite jams to come on the radio and slamming the Pause again to unpause and start recording, only the have the DJ talk over the last 30 seconds.  Good times. I filled up multiple cases with my fire mix tapes:

Yeah, I have plenty of those tapes, too!

The main difference was in the effort it took: you had to have some money for the cassettes to record the music on, and then you had to do the actual recording. There's no question that all of this activity decreased the sales of some things, but there's also no question that it improved the sales of other things, as in when you became so enthusiastic about something that you had to save some more money to get the whole album, or something (this happened to me a lot).

I suppose the universal annoyance of this era was DJs talking over the fadeout -- you wanted to get the final chorus on tape but that stupid guy just had to come on and try to say something ostensibly clever on top of it. Man, that hurt.

[Malcador]

 

[Gfted1]

^That was good!

[xzar_monty]

Iron Maiden have now, for the first time ever, played Alexander the Great in concert. Some of the transitions aren't all that smooth, and Bruce misses some lines, but I must say I'm well chuffed. They did it!

 

[Gorth]

From my favourite Faeroese songbird... more from the Last Kingdom soundtrack. I *think* she sings in Old Norse

 

[Malcador]

Surpasses The Touch.

Edited June 9, 2023 by Malcador

[majestic]

Music evolution in three videos.

80ies original:

2020ies cover:

Internet Meme:

 

[Gromnir]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

Music evolution in three videos.

80ies original:

2020ies cover:

Internet Meme:

proof that the notion o' evolving standards of decency which mark the progress of a maturing society is utter hogwash. corruption and regression is equal plausible as is enlightened evolution.

...

mostly kidding.

HA! Good Fun!

 

 

[bugarup]

Sigh. Trust majestic to foul the thread with unspeakable horror of dread and doom.   Don't even know how to counter that. Maybe with these fun guys.

 

[majestic]

 

[Keyrock]

28 minutes ago, majestic said:

And since I posted the image I must now post the video:

https://youtu.be/UBS4Gi1y_nc

Well, a link because it's age restricted, probably because of all the foul language(?)