I’ve discovered far more songs and bands through Spotify than I would have in the pre-Spotify era. And many of these songs are ones with just a few thousand views, as alluded to in your comment.
The modern music industry allows for the best of both worlds.
The vast majority of my music recommendations come from friends and acquaintances who share tracks in FB groups, chat, amateur Bluetooth speaker "DJing" at gatherings and so on.
"Hey man, you gotta hear this one" is alive and very well.
Scenes exist on social media, but they're much more diffuse and for some reason are more likely to tinged with irony and/or nostalgia. So they seem to be less effective and - ironically - less experimental and creatively diverse.
You can find such thing now as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23717756
You'll see this same thing in so many different places. People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.
A reaction or evolution from that is that many who were curators or DJ's get into music production, which means that they hang out in music studios of some kind, forming different social connections (e.g. with musicians). It creates a social divide between the people who just consume from algorithms and those who create.
>You'll see this same thing in so many different places.
Because it's an inherent feat of technology. Groups also form because different people bring different things to the table. One might be into music, the other one into cooking etc.
But cooking isn't enough, it has to be keto & vegan. People move up one level which changes the composition of their social circle.
>People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.
I wish it were like that because I'm a tech geek myself, but thinking more deeply about the topic and the composition of groups has changed my mind. The divide created by technology is real imo because it isolates groups.
The divide is real when it's blindly applied without thinking about social disruption is what I wanted to say.
The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In A Keynote https://sivers.org/itunes
A performer, no matter how more talented that person is, will deliver a worse performance if they are trying to aim more broadly.
Whereas with news the issue is that news died when they optimized for ads/engagement, but that is fundamentally why Facebook, Twitter etc are all terrible. The interests of the user and the interests of the creator are mismatched.
I feel this is also a problem with music. The last 10 years you can just dump whatever you want on Soundcloud or go private release on Spotify.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not celebrate the label system at all, and maybe that freedom of getting your music out there is worth the cultural cost we pay, but for example what East Coast Hip-Hop had with Stretch & Bobbito, that kind of curation is sorely needed. These days for curators it’s all about hype and whatever gets you a buck, but as was said in Stretch & Bobbito’s documentary “we’d play stuff that probably only appealed to like a hundred people out there. But it was dope, and dope deserves to be heard”.