That said, I do feel the same as you about the “good old days”. Owning music was a very different experience. It doesn’t help that streaming apps haven’t worked out the UX yet (god knows why, they’ve had long enough).

But... flip side... if I could time travel back to being a teenager and say “for £10 a month (even in that money) you can have access to pretty much all music commercially released” I would have cried with joy at the thought of it. There are so many bands I probably wouldn’t have worked through the catalogue of because they weren’t on my radar or popular within my social circles - even major artists like Bowie or Queen - and Spotify has enabled me to work through most of the great 20th century pop/rock/indie music, plus explore a lot of dance and electro I wouldn’t have.

Problem is I think it’s (the?) jam today and bread tomorrow... I think popular music peaked just before the internet arrived. A good tell is the many festival line ups full of very old bands. 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. I don’t think that’s the commercialisation of music (that hasn’t changed so much) rather the financial incentives are no longer there. Appropriately for HN, a lot of kids dream of a building a startup instead of making music.

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.

People repeat it often, but it's not true, it can't explain Blankpink, BTS, Twice, Red Velvet, etc. It's probably just americanism to emphasize individuals, but big music is produced by teams (and not small teams) regardless whether it appears to look like an individual.

For example Greg Pucaito is killing it. Amazing debut album doing really well in all the charts. 100% in control of his and can anything he wants like his recent "Fuck Content" event

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

http://www.billyjamesmusic.com/erasongs.htm

This is an old meme because it’s been arguably been true since the 90’s.

According to that list, the sixties, seventies and eighties clearly beat the nineties in my biased opinion.

Part of it might just be a genre shift: The only rock songs that made the cut in the 90s were one each from Meat Loaf, Aerosmith, Eric Clapton, and Nirvana.

I think there’s a paradox where more excellent music is being produced every year, but genre fragmentation and the sheer diversity of it means the stuff that bubbles to the top gets more and more generic.

It’s like we used to get brie and roquefort, but now we have a larger vat, and velveeta is what floats to the top.

>I think there’s a paradox where more excellent music is being produced every year, but genre fragmentation and the sheer diversity of it means the stuff that bubbles to the top gets more and more generic.

This is very true and likely part of it. Streaming services and the proliferation of headphones probably exacerbate the effect.

I think the genre/taste aspect is significant. Yes, rock is a great genre, but maybe it is not really possible for a great rock band to achieve mainstream appeal or even critical acclaim just on the back of good songwriting and great musicianship today, because that is not novel or interesting like it was in the 70s.

Personally I find just the sound of Sia's voice makes her much more interesting than a lot of the more generic rock songs from the 70s in that list.

If music appreciation sucks today it can be blamed more on the music industry and their idol manufacturing pipeline than streaming. This rot started well before any of these internet era breakthroughs anyway.

The only difference I see in the Spotify era is that if I want to listen to the Beatles or the beach boys, I can. I might not be able to find the exact bootleg recording of Dylan from some concert but whatever, the internet probably has a forum where you can find it if that's what tickles you. Don't blame streaming for what is fundamentally a music industry problem.

In comparison, spotify will find and play hundreds of fresh songs similar to any song I like. And lots of songs I don’t like - but that’s fine, because more music I’ve never heard before is a click away.

I miss owning my music collection, and I’m very frustrated whenever spotify is missing some of my favourite music. But any scarcity of musical variety you feel is entirely artificial, self imposed and ridiculous.

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.

It is so easy to expose yourself to new music on spotify. Far easier than relying on whatever handful of records happened to be in the listening station.

Fair enough, and yet I probably never would have listened to "Chocolate and Cheese" without seeing the album in front of me.

> (and is accessible on spotify).

It's not the same. Come on.

> It is so easy to expose yourself to new music on spotify. Far easier than relying on whatever handful of records happened to be in the listening station

I agree, and yet, something about choosing from albums curated by store staff felt better to me than being fed music curated by an algorithm like a goose being stuffed for fois gras.

I never bought records, only CDs. My memory is small and low resolution cover art. Browsing album covers on spotify on anything bigger than a tablet will show the art at a bigger scale with better colors.

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.

It's a vastly inferior method to Pandora's song analysis method IMO. I'd definitely use Spotify more if it had that, maybe significantly more - I can use it for 6 hours on a given day but then I often give it breaks because I'm on a discovery rut.

Maybe that's just me, and they know on very certain statistical terms that for most users that's not the case and music filter bubbles work much better.

Or maybe they're completely wrong in their approach and they're making a massive mistake at scale. We've come to develop this bias that tech giants "must know what they're doing" but I think it's often not the case. In ten years we could be reading how a competing service took over by offering the same catalogue with much better recommendation tech or other bells and whistles layered on top.

The story I linked also has a similar feel, the music is basically avant pop and neo soul, and instead of forwarding this cluster to someone with a musical/cultural background, a techbro comes up with their own label that comes off as basically "it reminds me of my favourite thing".

From the outside it seems they are really only approaching it from a purely technical point with a subconscious arrogance, ie they are adding the value not the musicians.

Their programmers probably make more money than most musicians on their platform and that's frustrating as fuck.

People who might in the past have gotten their new music from such deeply passionate music lovers and experts as John Peel, or any number of other DJs, are now often using algorithms in their place. And there is a sense that those algorithms are created by people with no real love for music or personal investment in it as part of our culture, which is kind of sad.

I think this is a big part of why music discovery through Spotify feels so soulless, especially compared to something like Bandcamp Weekly.

I guess their next step would be to start creating the music itself with algorithms. You would simply turn on Spotify and it would start playing a continuous stream of algorithmically created music to match your profiled tastes.

Spotify by comparison will also often recycle stuff I've already heard, but there's still always some new stuff in their weekly recommendations. Sometimes it's a hit, sometimes not, but at least it's something I haven't heard before.

I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing collapsed under the weight of some stupid policy of the rightholders (eg, make sure it plays Taylor Swift every 5 songs, or else!) or some other commercial consideration.

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).

The music I like I can't really find anywhere else to higher degree and ease (occasionally I might find it on youtube, just available on bandcamp, or have to message the artist) so its not really applicable.

> It was pleasant to see this whole world of artists just doing their thing

This is what I like the most, reminds me of FOSS: artists all over the world doing their own thing and occasionally doing it together.

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.

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

Actually it seems the entire music industry including the distributors don't want sales - they seem to prefer streaming.

I remember when apple music came out and I couldn't listen to my music anymore

Though maybe you're saying something differently.

I think the music industry is perfectly happy to sell you music at $1/song and even physical CDs if you like. It's just that, for most people who don't already have large curated collections, it apparently makes sense to subscribe for $10/month rather than buy albums for $10. For me it makes sense to subscribe and occasionally also buy something to add to my owned collection.

I think the music industry doesn't care anymore about selling music - why sell you a song for $1 (that you might copy for your friends) if they can sell you the same song again and again every month?

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

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.

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

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.

This complaint confuses me, as an avid Spotify user. A few times a week when I discover an artist I like, it's one click to look at their entire back catalog, listen to it sequentially, browse the artist bio, click through to the artist's social media to see what projects they're up to, right click and view who produced the tracks to find similarly-produced tracks, etc!

> it was something you waited for

I follow many artists and look forward to their upcoming albums. Why should my wait be extended by manufacturing, supply chains, my schedule to go to a shop, or my own budget to own physical media?

And I say all this as both a heavy Spotify user and a listener of vinyl records. I always get the albums I enjoy most on vinyl for higher fidelity active listening and the physical visual artwork that accompanies the disk.

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

But the main reason I listen to it is not that it's better than Spotify, but that it's a physically beautiful medium with artwork and is still high quality while promoting active, intimate listening.

No it's not. SNR is at best 65dB, low frequencies go through processing before getting cut to account for limitations of the medium and channel separation is less than 30dB. Furthermore, there's wow, flutter and rumble. You also have issues with RIAA equalization (many preamps STILL can't get that right) and cartridge loading, that end up affecting high frequency response. The latter is also affected by stylus and record wear.

With vinyl being such a technically flawed medium, ofcourse you could A/B between that and a high bitrate MP3 file that most probably is transparent to a lossless source. MP3 reaches transparency at lower bitrates, as has been proven by ABX (not A/B, those are useless from a scientific perspective) tests conducted in many communities like Hydrogen Audio.

I love Spotify and the actual way of consuming and discovering music. Some say that music taste stagnates as we age but I come from a metal and rock background and I have been making escapades into electronic music (including EDM), funk, soul, and more in my late twenties and early thirties, and I expect this trend to continue into old age.

None of this ever happened when I was in my teens, where I would just buy the metal magazines, go to the metal record store, and speak only to metalheads. Part may be me, but another part is certainly Spotify / music streaming.

My only criticism is that Spotify's music recommendation algorithms are really subpar. When I like a new song, I tap "Go to Radio" and it shows a playlist of related songs, but it seems like it relies too much on the preferences of other users and on obvious connections between artists.

Pandora in the mid-2000's already blew it out of the water in this regard - I remember going through a personal golden age of music discovery thanks to it. I could not believe how spot-on the recommendations felt and how they could dig out superobscure stuff that resonated with me. I don't know what the state of the service is right now but if it was just as good as in the 2000's and it was available in Europe I would pay for it without a doubt. What's surprising is that Spotify's recommendation tech is so far behind, and that they don't seem to care.

Other than that, I can't think of a single non-essential service in my life providing more value than "$9.99 a month for unlimited music". The utility to cost ratio is off the charts since I use it for six or eight hours daily and it costs peanuts.

If there was a nuclear apocalypse and I had to listen to cassettes on my pipboy, I'd surely be nostalgic about the good old days of music streaming.

Yes, it's a totally different experience now, I don't know how old you are but I suspect we are both of the generation that straddles both models.

On the one hand, I do love the convenience, my phone can identify a song and I can have the artist's latest album a minute or so later. Amazing! But on the other hand music used to be a visual and tactile experience too, enormous amounts of effort went into creating album art and inlays (especially with records), you might study it as you played the music, run your fingers over the sleeves as you chose the next album to play, display your music collection in your living room for guests to browse, etc. Or you keep an old album that reminds you of a time or a place or a person. Or the hours spent with friends traveling to and trawling through record shops in the nearest big town looking for something. Nowadays that activity would be considered a complete waste of time but actually as a teenager those were some halcyon days.

I'm not going to say for anyone else if the new way is better or worse, but for me, something has definitely been lost in the rush to streaming.

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 :-/

There is nothing stopping you listening to the full albums, and platforms like streaming have allowed some unbelievably niche artists and albums to happen that would've never ever made it out of the studio in a traditional record label.

Nobody is stopping you from picking an album and setting it on repeat. Everything you could do before, you can still do, just without heading out nor opening your wallet.

The only thing that concerns me about streaming is that music might disappear in the future. Everything else is just your own nostalgia, I don't miss having to listen to my father's tapes on repeat.

If you aren't pirating, it is a lot cheaper. Whenever this topic comes up, somebody boasts about their 2000 album collection or whatever and simple math demonstrates that you'd get like 100 years of streaming services for that price.

> When all you had was physical media, you listened to albums over and over got to know them, relished the new albums you purchased and had to take the time to decide between one or the other.

This feels like "yells at cloud" to me. I don't buy the "worse product forces appreciation" argument in any circumstance. I am far more able to appreciate a wider range of music now than ever before, in large part because it isn't a $15 dollar commitment to listen to an album and decide if I like it.

Streaming/youtube is so ephemeral, even with history and playlists it's difficult to remember what you found so groovy about a piece when it could all be gone tomorrow. I rarely develop a fixed memory of a song until I've saved it.

People are lazy. Automatic discovery works well enough so why bother unless music is something really important in your life?

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

That is only true if you only use the Radio feature and never notice the suggested artists. Otherwise everything you listed is literally easier than it has ever been.

If you want to complain that other people are doing things wrong, then please stop. You have no control over other people.

Almost every album in my collection has a linked artist bio or album review that lists influences. On top of that, there’s a list of “similar artists for each band, and it’s usually surprising and spot on.

I’m starting to branch out into more of their curated playlists too.

It’s basically everything I wanted a music store to be back in the day.

Maybe the next MySpace will be kinda slow. SD Cards, PO Boxes, eventual consistency, widely adopted formats? Oh my.

That being said, I really appreciate your perspective, and everything you said about physical media, the radio, torrent services, and ultimately limitations to music selection, is all absolutely true and completely resonates, even if I prefer the modern "more music than you could care about" availability.

It somewhat saddens me that anyone under the age of 25 (this is arbitrary, maybe a few years younger) never experienced the sensation of really getting to know every song of an album by an artist who's album you purchased, _even the songs you didn't like_. 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.

It's like actually getting to know a friend extremely well that you've spent countless days with, vs. an acquaintance whom you always have a blast with but only meet at parties once every couple months.

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."

It would be more like saying "kids these days have no idea about waiting for a dial-up modem" which would be true.

Or the prior generation saying "kids these days have no idea about the excitement of having a pen pal and waiting weeks for a response" which would also be true.

Or saying kids these days don't know the sense of accomplishment of being adept at reading a map. Also true.

Or kids these days don't appreciate having to memorize a friend's number and having to speak to their friend's mom first. Also true.

Or kids don't appreciate how when you used to travel to a foreign country for vacation, you were 100% gone and unreachable from your contacts back home. Also true.

Every generation feels this way. I don't see why anyone should get upset at this truth.

The patient had a TV in their room, so they handed the child the TV remote, and the child asked how can they fast-forward the current show.

I do think the act of buying (or taping) albums is a fundamentally different experience than using streaming services for the most part. I infrequently listen to entire albums these days. I'm much more likely to listen to some mix of either my own library or an Apple playlist.

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.