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Re:Don't Fire Your Illustrator by ben_w on Monday August 21, 2023 @03:51PM (#37214464)
Most people are not professional music critics, and most of their consumption is as a backing track to the rest of their life.

You could replace most of this category with a Markov chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most people even thinking about it, and I know because this is exactly how I made music for my shareware video games a decade ago.

Re:Don't Fire Your Illustrator by bombolo on Monday August 21, 2023 @05:28PM (#37215602)
Most people are not professional movie critics and enjoy more a hollywood film rather than me recording barbie dolls and making them talk.

Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with a proper music score.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)

Does your game have a wikipedia entry?

Could I assume that people enjoyed outcast more than your hobby game?

Re:Don't Fire Your Illustrator by ux-app on Monday August 21, 2023 @11:10PM (#37218198)
lol, what a fantastically obscure game to choose!
Re:Don't Fire Your Illustrator by ben_w on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @10:59AM (#37223702)
> Most people are not professional movie critics and enjoy more a hollywood film rather than me recording barbie dolls and making them talk.

Sure, but they'll also watch daily soap operas, and the meme "I showed my favourite film to a loved one, but they paid no attention" predates multi-screening.

> Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with a proper music score.

Even in aggregate over all the games: I wish :P

But the real question is: how much of that was the music?

Even now, were I to redo that period of my life (and so not need to caveat markets changing), the music isn't what I'd focus on changing — shareware was already a bad idea though I didn't realise it, MacOS shareware written in Java just as MacOS got its own (ObjC only) app store moreso.

Re:Don't Fire Your Illustrator by wwweston on Tuesday August 22, 2023 @12:46AM (#37218787)
> You could replace most of this category with a Markov chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most people even thinking about it

That actually makes Spotify worse, because they could have offered that product instead of using huge sums of capital to reshape the expectation anybody with a device is entitled to listen to any work on demand for free.

I guess the good news is that it wouldn't cause a fuss if someone were to change policy so that you can't pay out buffet streaming like it's digital radio and people ended up having to buy songs or at least do the honest work of piracy if they won't accept the app directing programming. After all, most people are just as happy listening to a Markov chain generate bloops for free.