People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse.
Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0]
Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about.
0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...
Well, obviously. I don't pay Spotify per stream, I pay them per month. So my $10 must get split up across every song I've listened to that month. No other model is possible given a monthly subscription.
> The Pro Rata model, currently used by all major streaming platforms, means that monthly revenue from premium subscription costs and advertisement revenues is collected into one pool of money. Spotify takes 30% of that revenue and distributes the rest based on artist’s total listening numbers, rather than the listening times of individual users. Meaning that, even if a user never listens to the most streamed artists on the platform, a percentage of the money they pay will be given to the most streamed artists.
https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/10/a-breakdown-of-music...
* You spend an hour a day listening to A during your commute
* I spend 9 hours a day, my whole workday, listening to B.
In the current system, B gets 90% and A gets 10%, but some people would prefer to see a system in which they each get 50%.
Additionally, I believe they use total streaming time and not total streaming time for paid subscribers. So an artist who is popular among paid subscribers doesn't earn any more than an artist who is popular only among free subscribers.
I guess they could pay based off the theoretical maximum a user could stream. So if the cost of a subscription is $10/month and an artist's song is 3 minutes long, then Spotify could pay ($10 / (31 * 24 * 60/3)) per stream. Thus guaranteeing that if a user streams an artist's song for the entire month, the artist gets the user's entire $10 subscription fee. But that's $0.00067 per stream, which is much less than they currently pay.
Sort of like "send me your slide deck and preferred music style, and I'll compose for it an intro and outrow soundtrack for $XX."
Or at least, what is popular doesn't highlight the good music any longer.
Being easier to write, produce and release didn't seem to have made music better from what I can see and what I have read.
I'm sure there is still good stuff being produced, but by Jebs, it's very hard to find now.
As for whether it will stand the test of time, well, only time can tell that. But most people are forever stuck waiting for more music that sounds like it did when they were in high school and college, which is a mindset destined for disappointment.
And I can't remember exactly what dates the studies focused on as there have been a few I've read. One was over the last 60 years of music if I remember right and across all age brackets in 2022
People have felt this way since time immemorial: the music they grew up listening to in their formative years was just better than whatever exists now.
Your dad's dad, or his dad depending on your age, thought that Led Zeppelin was just a bunch of talentless idiots making noise.
This isn't me just saying something random, it's something I've read about recently and had come out of studies of changes in music over the last 60 years.
There have been quite a few examples of albums that were bombed on release by both critics and the audience, but then ended up as critically (+publicly) acclaimed and massively influential (+still standing the test of time) many many years later just from the past 2 decades. That alone tells me that whoever claims they have a method to predict the future influence and "standing the test of time" on aggregate is just playing around.
Hell, even Limp Bizkit, Limp fucking Bizkit, has been widely retconned into being a charmingly nostalgic relic of music at the turn of the millennium instead of just, you know... bad.
A study in 2022 saying that most people say music from before 2010 was better is meaningless, because a study in 2032 will show that music from before 2020 was better.
those albums you mentioned ARE dreck ;)
Less than half the decade later, the critical and public opinion took a full 180, with plenty of new major artists (like Brockhampton) claiming they owe their entire music career to that album. You could easily hear the influence of that album pretty much all over other artists' works.
Disclaimer: yes, I am aware that over the past few years Kanye had become a person doing things that are hard to defend in any way, but that's not something I am trying to do here at all. A lot of those actions are pretty much indefensible. However, his personal behavior doesn't change the impact of his music from 2008 on the industry and music as a whole.
People have been paying for live performances of music, i.e., "certain sounds", throughout all of recorded history. So it's the opposite of an aberration. "Paying to hear certain sounds" is a time-honored human tradition. If we broaden our definition of "paying" to include barter, I would guess it goes back to the invention of musical instruments.
Indeed I wouldn't
This just means that it is far more complex to be far less likely to make a living.
It’s hyperbolic BS, as per usual when it comes to emotionally charged arguments with no basis in reality. According to every statistic I can find, live entertainment and concert ticket sales have been on a steady uptrend until (as you mentioned) 2020. Here’s one source:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...
tautological - anyone who is thriving has adapted, if they aren't thriving obviously they have refused to adapt.
Probably more likely that many have adapted to the situation but still making less money than they would under the old system, perhaps to the point of not being able to have music be their primary employment.
And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.
Musicians who refuse to adapt won't succeed, and those who do thrive. Would you feel bad for a software developer who learned Visual FoxPro in the 90s, refused to learn any new tools, then complained that their occupation was no longer relevant?
> There is far less live music today, at least in the US, than there has ever been in my lifetime.
Is there any data to support this? I would be shocked if this were true outside of the COVID years. There's certainly more music readily available to people now than at any point in history.