For myself and a lot of people I know, discovery is nearly as much a reward as the music itself. And there is no comparison between the one- or two-dimensional "discovery" offered by social media and streaming platforms and the rich discovery experiences of any of the following:
1. listening to records with a friend
2. going to a dance club
3. attending a live performance
4. listening alone while reading liner notes
5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market
6. reading a book
So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways.
That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like.
The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.
The issue here is that no matter how "engaging" discovery is, it's not a viable business model on its own.
I'm working on the topic day to day in an adjacent field (movie & TV show discovery) and I'm currently not aware of any startup that has managed making money with the discovery experience itself.
It takes a lot of effort, data and persistence to get reasonable algorithms churning out something sensible and then, nobody wants to pay for it. If anything, it's usually an upsell to monetizing the content itself, which is why the only serious contenders to me here are basically Youtube and Spotify.
Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm less than thrilled.
And that's exactly because once you've got the perfect algo together that would be able to recommend you that niche movie Netflix features you've never seen in the interface that you're _really_ interested in (I can recommend "Last Breath" in that regard), the VP Content comes in and tells everyone something like "hey folks, whatever you do, make sure you're only promoting our originals, because they cost us far less in licensing... oh and let's give an extra in-your-face boost to King's Gambler to give it that extra buzz that lands us in Variety"
Discovery is hard, and once you made a name there, it's rather easy to screw it up by monetizing it.
> Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm less than thrilled.
IMO, Netflix's recommender system suffers from the simple fact that the company itself doesn't want to collect accurate user ratings and make recommendations with them. If they did that, then a not insignificant portion of the content and deals they invested in would get memory-holed due to bad ratings or lack of interest, and that would make the company and its leaders look bad.
Netflix used to do that. You used to be able to rate programs between 1-5 stars and see the average rating. I believe it also recommended other programs to watch based on what you rated highly.
They did away with that system and replaced it with their custom recommendation engine. I believe, without any evidence, they did this to make bad shows look better. They once hosted a documentary about sex workers (can't recall the name, sorry) that had an average rating of around 2 out of 5 stars, and after the recommendation system change, it turned into a "75% match" on my account.
That sounds like functionality tunnel vision, to me. Matching users to movies isn’t an abstract metadata networking exercise— the larger goal is recommending things users enjoy so they keep watching. I’m far less likely to suffer a bad movie if it closely aligns with my interests. Poor representations of my passions and crafts frustrate the hell out of me.
Why don’t they want to collect accurate user ratings? Also, they know whether or not you finish something, how many episodes you binge, etc. There are many rating-independent signals.
Last.fm are perhaps the most successful discovery-mainly service. They had a ‘radio’ thing with a licensed catalog, but apparently finally dropped it in 2014. Otherwise, they are somehow chugging along for almost twenty years. However, I don't know how well their finances are, lately. The service doesn't seem popular in the past ten years or so, and I myself have just drifted away (in favor of less predictable and comfortable discovery by chance or by research, actually).
Do you mean not a viable VC-funded business, or not viable at all? From context, I think you mean the former. But there are plenty of "traditional" businesses (e.g. clubs and radios) that make a living through discovery.
Maybe the problem is VC funding then? Maybe one day we will hear of some bootstrapped strartup coming out of IndieHackers?
they don't really make their money through discovery, they make money through things they sell alongside discovery.
for radio, that is ads or subscriptions, but radio revenue has been down like the rest of traditional media. for clubs, that is the multiple rounds of overpriced drinks, and maybe a cover.
Spotify's monthly cost is comparable to about two or three mixed drinks, maybe one in an expensive city like New York or Miami. People blanche at paying any higher; remember how people reacted to Tidal being comparatively expensive?
> they don't really make their money through discovery, they make money through things they sell alongside discovery.
that doesn't contradict the assumption that it's a viable business. Search engines and social media services make money from ads but I don't think it would be fair to say that search engines or social media services are not viable business.
Really? In my experience clubs hire DJs and radio stations are typically national and have the record labels pitching new content to them. I’m not sure either are interested in the “discovery” we’re talking about.
yes and DJs can be seen as discovery facilitators as per grandparent's comment, so it is fair to say that this is a viable business, which is based on content discovery - or maybe I misunderstood what you're saying?
> radio stations are typically national and have the record labels pitching new content to them
leaving aside the fact that you just described a very narrow subset of all commercial radios - how does this make radios not related to content discovery?
Re: discovery, I’m surprised no one has mentioned TikTok. It might be the most successful music discovery engine out there.
> 1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book
All of these things point to the fact that listening to music is about cultural participation as much as anything else. And TikTok represents a culture and many subcultures, and seeing people you already like (people you follow) appreciating a certain type of music is powerful.
Probably because it's not so much about discovery, and more about rewarding conformity. I only used the app for a scant few hours, but all I saw were musicians from large labels being echo-chambered into every video I could find. The few "diverse" acts that I came across were already huge in another country or being pushed heavily as a result of massive advertising investments. Like the other comment suggests, TikTok is as much of a discovery service as radio is.
I disagree. “75% of TikTok users in the United States said that they used the platform to discover new artists, and 67% said they were more likely to seek out a song on a streaming platform if they heard it on the app” [1]. This full article is worth reading.
“Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," re-entered the Hot 100 more than 40 years after hitting No. 1 on the chart, spurred by a viral video from user Nathan Apodaca… The album from which it hails, Rumours, also rocketed into the top 10 of the Billboard 200.” [2]
This one ^^ is particularly compelling to me. It’s easy to dismiss cases where growing artists grow faster because of tiktok. But this is clearly caused by tiktok alone. Also if you want examples of unpopular artists who grew a ton from tiktok those lists are very easy to find.
This ALONE shows how BAD discovery is on TikTok. I dont understand your point other then TikTok has alot of sheep, very little content (that is not based on viral trends), and very bad recommendation engine.
ie. If <teen boy> show <teen girl with ass hanging out>
if <teen girl> show <teen boy with tattos and shirt off>
Netflix's recommendation engine is just as bad. It cant even work out that i watch a show all the time to put it to the front of my list. I type 2 letters into the search bar, and all it does it search alphabetically give me a stupid suggestion.
> Radio is the most successful music discovery engine out there
Is it? When I grew up, all they played was top 40. Stuff more than a year or two old just disappeared. Even today, they'll run the same hit every 20 minutes. Makes me want to scream.
Going to college was a revelation. So much I'd never ever heard before.
The same thing when I started going to clubs - great music I'd never heard before.
I think it depends a lot on the radio stations that happen(ed) to be available in your listening area. When I was living in Tampa ~30 years ago, there were certainly a lot of "hot hits" type stations, but there was a great commercial AOR station I listened to more often -- and a few years later I discovered WMNF, an eclectic non-commercial community station that played virtually anything depending on which show you found.
Now, of course, my "listening area" is the whole internet. KCSN in Los Angeles is a rock-focused public radio station; KCSM up in San Mateo is a terrific Jazz station; Great Big Radio is an internet-only station that's technically oldies, but covers everything from the 1960s through the 2000s and likes to get into deep cuts. I do subscribe to a streaming music service and use it pretty frequently, but I suspect I find just as much new music through internet radio as I do through "discovery." (Although both curated playlists and algorithmic recommendations surface stuff I find interesting occasionally.)
As someone who considers them very much a music aficionado I disagree with your conclusion. According to Spotify's 2021 review, I listened ~55k minutes of music across ~3300 artists. It is impossible to think I would have found 75% of those artists had it not been for Spotify's discovery recommenders.
Release Radar was my most listened personalized playlist and it constantly introduced me to new artists in and around the genres of music I was listening to. I listen to a pretty diverse range of genres (everything from death metal, edm, hip-hop and country).
Perhaps I never grew up having to dig through piles of records, I was a child of the era of 100+ page books of CDs and the introduction of Napster but I still very much find discovery through these services to be hands down more efficient and cost effective for me. I could not afford to listen to the amount of music I consumed last year if I were purchasing records/CDs/tapes.
It might be that discovery via Spotify is polarising based on genre? Some people seem to hate it but like you, I find it very useful and constantly come across new tracks/artists I really like. Never had anywhere near that much success in the past sourcing new music, and certainly nowhere near as easily. Sometimes with a custom Discover Weekly playlist, I will favourite 80% of songs it pitches to me.
And I also agree on the efficiency. My first music purchase was a record, then tapes, then CDs and so on. Getting recommendations right where I listen to the music makes it trivial to add to my list - usually via the desktop app while working or via CarPlay while driving.
I find myself purposefully diving through Tidal's playlists and genres, like I used to flick through CDs in HMV.
The auto-discovery can be really hit or miss (mostly miss) - but so was picking CDs without listening to them. But the nature of streaming means I can flit between genres day to day, maybe I'm feeling psychedelic trance one day, the next schlager, the next prog rock. Prior to digital music I'd discover a lot within my focused genre (ambient electronic) but little else. But now I have the chance to find songs that have that similar feel for me but vary wildly in genre and style without sinking hours into music I don't enjoy.
Yes it requires more intention to discover new music than the streaming services built in recommendations but I feel like my music library has never been so varied and rich.
For me, the richest discovery is playing the music on my instrument for myself.
The discovery of music in myself through improvisation is the richest possible discovery.
Besides jamming, for electronic music I also find the joy of discovery using something like Beatport LINK with something like dJay for iPad to listen to music. It's an alternative to passively playing a playlist or playing an album.
As a musician, it's often better for me to share my music on free and non-pay or login walled services like Soundcloud and Audiomack than on Spotify... Yeah, I'm on Spotify, but invested all of last year trying to promote there and gained little traction, whereas my music stats on Audiomack and Soundcloud make leaps and bounds over my Spotify stats. In all honesty, I make a really good rate for Spotify streams and it wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly why I don't get a lot of streams on there despite conducting plentily of promotional work.
People pay for subscriptions on Spotify, Spotify also sells ad space which is profit. All artists never make a full penny per stream like we did on Mp3.com 20 YEARS AGO... It's insanity pretty much. I stopped promoting the services that don't work and only promote the ones that do, and I constantly monitor them each for positive and negative policy changes regularly. I never deleted my mp3 library, and I only buy phones that allow micro SD storage, because I'll be damned if I let a algorithm with an agenda to pick my music for me if I can help it.
My personal go-to for solo discovery online (ie not counting chatting) is the reverse directory lookup in soundcloud: the "in playlists" link (also $TRACK_URL/sets) which lists all the playlists some track appears in. There usually isn't too many and you can quickly navigate towards niche stuff that some random human deemed somehow related.
I believe Spotify's discovery algorithms have factored in other user's playlists when trying to find songs associated to other songs -- that's why (in my experience, anyway) it has been better than the usual recommendation engines.
Since Youtube changed algorithms and I moved away from college, etc. I realized all my major discovery avenues disappeared. Other people mentioned radio, and I agree -- I don't think discovery has to be engaging, it just has to be low effort and not so bad that you turn it off.
I love bandcamp and most artists I've found lately have their music there, but music discovery on bandcamp is extremely difficult. All the music I've found there is due to people linking bandcamp on other websites/mediums.
So self plug: https://bandhiking.isandrew.com/ - it's basically a bandcamp radio (if anyone's interested). There's room for improvement but it works IMO, I've found good stuff regularly using it.
Some of the best music discovery I’ve had is actually Reddit. I primarily listen to electronic and the communities are 6/5. It’s just streams of music being recommended, with occasional discussion, in tiny subreddits for all the subgenres. I’ll let you find the subreddits yourself if your interested (just search for your intended subgenre). don’t wanna spoil them :)
Those subreddits sometimes become a really small echo chamber, and it's obvious its just a minor fraction of a genres listeners. I think everynoise.com and your ears is a way better initial genre exploration tool than Reddit even for genres that have been out there for a while and are still popular and being produced.
For the genres I've been listening for a while or jamming to with my rig Reddit is usually underwhelming and I have more success by starting on everynoise.com or Beatport (which I generally dislike for discovery because their gatekeeping of genres is bullshit) and then listening to new stuff that the label for the artist I found is putting out.
Yep, some of the subreddits definitely kind of focus on one section of the genre but that’s what I kind of like. If I want to find some good new music with a specific sound, I know I can just check those communities out. When I was first discovering electronic though, all the subgenres and labels was overwhelming. Now that I have my tastes kinda figured out I now add in listening to labels I like and artists.
That everynoise site is really interesting, never heard of it before. Excited to check it out, thanks for the link!
Whenever I start feeling worn out of the music I have been listening too I spend some time just scrolling through and listening. I am not a big playlist person but rather a library person. (I use Apple Music for this reason as they emphasize libraries). When I find a song I like I just add it to my library. And Apple Music’s interface is great as I can retrieve it by either looking for the album, artists, or genre (albeit it’s classifications aren’t very good).
I can't speak for that user in particular but I use Reddit for music discovery as well. My flow is this: I'll look for stuff with the genre tags I know I like and look for new artists I don't recognize that have those tags. I'll listen to one or two songs and set their name aside if I like them and go back to browsing. After I get bored of looking for new stuff, I'll go back through and listen to the entire discography of that artist and add songs I like to my Spotify or Youtube playlists. I then move from artist to artist that I set aside earlier. After that, I'll look for any collabs they've done and check out the assisting artist or I'll check out the "people also listen to" suggestions on Spotify and start the process over but there instead of on Reddit. That cycle typically lasts about a year before I get the urge to look for new stuff again on Reddit like that.
> The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
Last.fm is really good about this. I can't stand Spotify recommendations in comparison because of this exact problem.
I'm perfectly capable of Googling "bands like X" and gleaning a surface-level idea of similar artists, which seems to be the extent of Spotify recommendations. Meanwhile, Last.fm is programmed well enough that it goes beyond the surface-level recommendations, and finds things I would never have found otherwise. I'm talking about bands and side-projects that broke up 30 years ago and only released a demo tape, but that demo tape is gold to fans of band X.
Can you expand on why you see activities 2 - 6 as music discovery?
In all those cases, I would probably be listening to known music, not discovering new music.
I for one, would probably pay the same for Spotify even if it did not offer music, but just the discovery features offered by itself and by 3rd party apps in it's ecosystem.
When using discover weekly, usually when I hear something I like, I mark it as liked which adds it to my library and then enqueue the top tracks of that artist/each artist if they are artists I never listened to before.
3rd party apps allow me to do this more often, or follow other discovery paths.
On the topic of engaging and active discovery, a good portion of my music library has been built through playing Guitar Hero, Rock Band or Clone Hero, funnily enough.
I may look into pursuing a side project next year along the lines of rhythm gaming and inspiration from current music tech: discovery might not be a strange goal to pursue in that domain. In any case, that Twitter thread couldn't have come at a better time for my own brainstorming.
I've discovered a bunch of music through Beat Saber, and Stepmania (and Mungyodance). The problem with that is there is a sort bias with the track selection. For example I enjoy the gameplay of SDVX but it's hard to find music for it that isn't fast paced Japenese electronic music.
I've never found any streaming radio or service that had a shuffle play across their entire catalog. That I would like, and it's a great way to discover music.
Not much substance in the article so allow me a bit of a rant: As someone with both Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriptions, I think the more accurate take is that discovery is not a solved problem, at least in the algorithmic sense tech companies want. Spotify’s idea of “discovery” is dedicating more and more home page real estate to bullshit podcasts I have no interest in, and showing me endless “upsell” notifications when I’ve already bought their damn product. I have “Product News” and “Spotify News and Offers” notifications off, yet I still find that whenever I open their app I need to close out of some popup telling me about some new bullshit their PM’s want to boost engagement on. They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me. I will admit their “Daily Mix”’s are decent.
Apple Music is better about keeping out of the way, but their generated playlists often feel either boring or stale; good when I want to listen to throwbacks but I can’t recall the last time I heard a new artist I really liked from one.
In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio, especially college radio. The good news is that having been a part of college radio pledge drives, I can pretty confidently say that the discovery service provided by local/college radio is indeed a viable product. Just not in the algorithmic world-scale sense tech companies want to see.
The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks.
I have no idea, but my take is that streaming services are trying to find other artists within the same genre, or using the listing patterns of other users to match you up with new music.
This makes a weird assumption that I actually like everything a band makes, which is rare, or that because I like an artists or a few songs within a given genre, then I must like all music with in that genre. Mostly I listen to music from a wide number of artists, across generes. There a musicians where I like most of their work and some where I just like the sound of one particular track.
What I want, is button, when I press that, "The Almighty Algorithm" will analyse the sound, the beats per second, the vocals, the instruments, the lyrics, anything that affect the sound and locate other songs with similar profiles. Bonus points for letting me input stuff like: higher tempo, less bagpipes, the singer has a high pitch voice which hurt my ears.
The social stuff is easy and the streaming platforms can quickly implement something similar and put you out of business. Actually analyzing the sound profiles and using that to help you create playlists and discover new artists, that not something I've seen done and I bet it's because it's will require actual work.
> Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks.
And sometimes I don't even know why I like a particular song. This is especially true when it comes to the concept of catchiness. There is certainly some music theory around hooks, chord loops, etc. but I honestly haven't found any of it anywhere near as explanatory or predictive as more well-established classical western music theory concepts like harmonic function or voice leading. So often it really just feels like "that song is super catchy just because it is."
Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks.
Spotify has the tech to do this, they've demonstrated it with a genre explorer tool, but they clearly don't use it in their radio stations and recommendations.
As several other comments have mentioned, music companies inevitably end up being redesigned to match the desires of rightsholders, and not users. The only way around this would probably be some kind of legally mandated compulsory licensing, so that any streaming service or end user can play any content if they pay the predetermined price, removing contract negotiations from the picture.
I believe we are very far from the technology necessary to really grok a person’s musical tastes. What currently probably works the best is the "people who liked x also liked y" scheme (generalized to vectors in song space or something).
However, that method has the property that the algorithm can’t judge any new music, it always requires existing ratings from members of the platform before it can recommend a song to other people.
Then there’s the additional issue that a person’s musical taste changes over time.
Yeah, and as a result it's the one music service I pay for.
It doesn't give me any control of which attributes I care about, which frustrates me to no end, but it does fairly well at turning up things I haven't heard before and like if I can give it a decent set of seed tracks.
Agreed. Pandora is the only music service I've stayed with because of its discovery system. It's not perfect, but I've found countless artists and songs over the years at Pandora that I might not have known without.
I also occasionally go back to Slacker/LiveXLive for it's fine tune controls, DJs and news. But it's discovery system isn't as good and it's had plenty of bugs (like playing wrong songs/titles). So I stick with Pandora for that radio experience tailored to me.
"The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks."
Agreed 100% on this. I find I like a certain BPM and "type" of sound to songs I often have on repeat.
Also agreed. I've had days where I was in a really productive mood and wanted some really high tempo music to go with it, and end up searching for 30 minutes and only finding things that slow me down. And other moods and modes have their own vibe, that has nothing to do with genre and a lot to do with tempo and timbre.
> What I want, is button, when I press that, "The Almighty Algorithm" will analyse the sound, the beats per second, the vocals, the instruments, the lyrics, anything that affect the sound and locate other songs with similar profiles. Bonus points for letting me input stuff like: higher tempo, less bagpipes, the singer has a high pitch voice which hurt my ears.
This might be possible in theory but part of the issue is that the algorithms input parameters are not the same from person to person. The parameters you described are mostly technical attributes of the sound, but what about cultural/political affiliation? Do you care if the lyrics are in a different language (some people do, some people don't). Do you care if there is a political or religious message (and are you particular about which religion or political tribe)? Can Spotify take that into account somehow? Maybe, but it seems very difficult to tailor that to the user.
Speaking personally, music is more than just an aural experience for me. At times it's about connecting with my social group, or cultural traditions, or a spiritual experience. At other times it's just the music. When I listen to mainstream stuff, Spotify is ok. When I get deeper into edge-case territory, Spotify doesn't really know what I'm looking for and often makes suggestions that appear to demonstrate a shallow understanding the cultural meaning of the music I'm listening to.
Do you want something that'll let you define a timespan (e.g. 2:45..3:12) and find tracks like that? I imagine that would be pretty fun from a discovery sense -- for EDM especially.
It feels like there’s a bunch of ML technology that exists that could plausibly be pieces of this solution: there are algorithms for computing embeddings, various audio processing models, recommender system networks, etc. I wonder what’s been tried in this space and how/why it’s been lacking…
So many of the things in this comment section are things that were solved by Zune very well (e.g. the social features were great, if you knew anyone else who used Zune - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Social)
Zune had the Channels concept - essentially what Spotify-owned playlists are nowadays - but they partnered with radio stations and Billboard (among others) to provide content.
Was an original Zune adopter from the earliest days (30GB Brown Fat Zune). I ran into two people on my college campus with Zune's and each time we shared a song to each other. After a month I never used the song sharing feature ever again and never really had anyone bring it up.
I really loved my Zune, the desktop software was some of the worst ever created. It helped pushed me towards eventually just getting an iPod to flash with Rockbox so I could just use common lightweight sane software on my desktop to manage the library on my devices.
Things are so much better now that I can just load up 200GB of music on my android phone, manage it via a normal file explorer on desktop, and use the VLC app to listen and create/manage playlists.
Please help if you can - I seem to remember reading that the preferred verb for the song sharing on zunes, per MS marketing, was "squirt," as in, "to squirt a song."
I doubt myself in this, of course, because it's patently idiotic. Is this anything you have the slightest recollection of?
I really didn't remember it being called that, but reading this makes me vaguely remember my assistant manager making fun of the feature name because she also had a Zune.
Great points. I'd even go a step further and suggest that "discovery" is not really a problem that can or should be solved in the manner that tech companies would like. I ran a radio show in college on my college's station, and from my experience most of that crowd is uninterested in further tech penetration of music.
I'm a bit late to the discussion but I like the way Bandcamp does discovery. They have a carousel that you can very easily listen to 20-30 songs in quick succession, and they have these curated blog posts where you can read and listen to the music on a topic.
I really get the feeling that the folks and Bandcamp are actually into music.
Everything else I've tried just seems to make it very hard to break out of the bubble they decided to put me in.
I see a lot of replies about discovery not being a solved problem here, which it isn't, but that also isn't what the OP said.
> Discovery is not a viable product
I'm parsing "viable" as "commercially viable". You may solve the problem (for some definition of "solve" and "problem"), but can you make money doing so?
I don't know, I have no experience in this field, but OP seems convinced that the answer is "no".
Radio stations solved the problem and they make money doing it, so I say yes discovery is a viable product - but not in a way tech companies have been able to automate.
I have no idea how much radio stations make, but perhaps the implication was viable [tech] product where returns likely have to be much higher to get an ROI for a venture-backed startup.
> They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me.
What discover tab are you referencing, I've never found a place in the app where you cannot directly play from and all their apps support cross device management.
Huh... so for the past couple weeks there was a top level "discover" tab on the iPhone app (so Home/Discover/Search/Your Library), and when you clicked it it would just a random song in a weird full-app video playback UI, with the only exposed controls being "go to this album" and "skip", no output device selector.
I went back to check today to confirm that even if I had an existing network device selected it'd disconnect that and only play locally, but clicking on the tab just showed an error page. I force quit the app and relaunched, and now the tab is gone entirely.
Guessing I was in some A/B experiment of a pre-release feature, it'll probably have more functionality in the full release (assuming they didn't can it)
Got my family on a family account for Apple Music a while back, then at some point picked up a personal Spotify account to test the waters for their generated playlists, support for networked devices (chromecast/smart tv's), and API's (jkbx.fm). I can't migrate my family away from Apple Music and I don't want to give up Spotify's feature set, so I keep both.
I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products. That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the Twitter thread this article was based on: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
I’m a musician and Indie Shuffle was my first “break.”
It gave about 20,000 plays which BLEW MY MIND at the time. Nothing like waking up to a huge increase
Today I’m a modest success. Several songs have 1-2m plays on Spotify and I make $800 / month from streaming. It’s just something I do in my evenings for fun.
I owe my success to outlets Indie Shuffle and SubmitHub—- I’ve found Spotify really privileges discovery for major label artists.
I appreciate the counter-take — it seems like almost every take I read on the modern music business is coming from people who don't actually know what the reality on the ground is.
And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in, making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up my whole morning, well done!
Sounds like a perfectly fine mismatch between proper bootstrapping and the mindset of growing investment fueled by some hypothetical value proposition.
Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves, focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-spotting!
What I thought "Discovery" was is finding new music given some other music preferences - like Spotify's curated playlists or Song Radios. Submithub doesn't fit that to me - it's more like a social network (and I guess you make your money the same way, via advertising).
I must admit I am a bit surprised that a social network based on music never really took off. If you really squint at it, TicToc kinda sorta is.
Instagram made photos social in a way that Facebook never really did. I think taking a photo and applying a filter as a way to express mood/personality is just an easier thing for the average person to do. It also requires almost no license. The user took the photo with their phone, no one else owns it. Even if a short snippet of a commercially created song is a perfect explanation of my current mood, I can't widely share it on a social network without license.
I think that revolution could come but it requires something fantastical. It would require a music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera. Some method of expressing mood/personality using sound that is effective.
TikTok is a social network based on seeing people in portrait mode. There are entire subsets of it where music isn't the focus at all, and the fact that so many people do exactly the same dance on exactly the same song should hint at the differentiation being the person shown. TikTok for the music industry is where the ads need to be because the youth is there, not because music is there.
Youtube is closer to being "the" social media for music: concerts are published on it (sometimes live even), special events and channels like Cercle/Colors/etc, performances of artists self-published (covers included), music videos get posted there and being a "billion view" video is still a bit of a marker, "radios" appealing to very specific descriptions of all kinds exist with 24/7 activity, multi-million views channels aggregating new artists acting as discovery (Chillcow, Koalacontrol, and thousands more), etc.
"Discovery" on youtube alone is pretty poor I'd say, but as mentioned in the tweets it's not really a viable product in itself anyway.
I disagree. I’ve personally been introduced to a lot of music through Tiktok.
I think the fact that you can click on a sound (a “sound” is the song that gets played in the background of a video) and see the top posts from other people using that sound is interesting and unlike anything else. It lets users get a profile of the type of person who typically likes a given song.
I also think that many people underestimate (or at least don’t talk about) how much of music is about cultural signaling. Tiktok serves this function well, especially for young people who want to appear ahead of the curve (god forbid someone accuses them of being “basic”), and so they want everyone to know that they’re listening to the next artist before everyone else.
Also if it even needed to be said, popularity as a sound on tiktok directly translates to plays on streaming services. Songs with very little attention will suddenly blow up to millions of plays after going big on tiktok. This, to me, clearly suggests that tiktok is more valuable to artists than just being “ad space.”
I think everyone's TicToc experience depends on how the algorithm sorts you. I know that if I open it up right now (which I won't since I should be working and the app tends to distort time and fast-forwards 2 hours of my life) I am almost certain to get a person with a guitar, banjo, piano, accordion or whatever in a 1-2 min snippet with them saying "I just wrote this little tune this morning ...". Alternatively, I almost never get any dancing at all, maybe 1 out of 100 videos. I also get a lot of music recommendations, like a "best 20 indie albums you've never heard of" compilation.
On the subject of the songs not being a differentiator, I completely disagree. The songs themselves are memes. People use them to signify the type of video you are watching (or to attempt to subvert your expectation).
As long as you keep telling TikTok that they're right in this assessment of your taste by watching the videos, as opposed to skipping them, that's exactly what you'll see.
To be fair though, if you shared your gender with tiktok, it'll have a very strong prior about this.
> music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera
The technology is kiiinda there, look at the iPad music production stack. If you have what it takes you can put up a complete track only in your iPad.
I think there's at least two big issues:
- Iterating on music until "it's good enough" is not as fast as iterating on a picture or video where you can do multiple takes and check exactly what's going on in your screen.
- Conveying your feelings with music is kinda like learning a new language, and then becoming a poet. Like for example everyone has access to sharing text now, with your friends or with the world, yet not everyone is making poems or short stories that convey their emotions effectively.
Those kind of issues are really the tip of the iceberg IMO. Writing a 140 character tweet or taking a photo with a modern mobile phone has a higher average quality with minimal effort. Yes, not every tweet is poetry but a huge volume of average tweets are consumable (if not entirely palatable).
What I mean to say is, the average person is certainly able to write a better Tweet or take a better Insta snap than that same person could reasonably create a pleasing snippet of audio worth sharing. That would be true even if they took the time and effort to learn to use even the simplest iPad music production stack.
SoundCloud and Spotify both have social networking features. SoundCloud especially you could see as akin to Flickr, where users shared content (but don't do their creating/editing)
While there isn't a social media network based on music, there are countless Discord servers, message boards, and other online communities that post onto sites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud to share their work woth each other. Given the diversity in music creation processes, related interests, openness, etc, a social media network based on music would be pretty limiting unless it catered heavily to a niche.
Yeah, I'm on a few. They mostly cater to industrial/experimental electronic, but there are a couple that talk about theory and technique that are really welcoming. If you're interested, shoot an email to info at moonmusiq.com
Historically I think licensing has been the biggest hurdle. Nowadays music is moving towards being commodified and licensing is less of an issue. Still to be determined whether or not it's possible to build a community around a fractured space, I'll report back when we launch :)
I'm surprised Spotify has never really expanded their social features, it seems like such an obvious thing to do and could give them an advantage (it already does a little)... but I guess it's an expensive advantage they don't need. It might have kept me around a bit longer.
The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate investments (bars), and then it was used to sell little blobs of plastic and cardboard with pictures on them, t-shirts, instruments and some lessons, and then maybe matchmaking at concerts and festivals. Music is the sizzle, not the steak. It's the sound of gross margin, but it's not the product. We just keep letting musicians believe it's a problem to be solved and they keep producing music more and more cheaply, while businesses find new tchotchkas to sell into the channel that a listenership creates. Digitization decoupled the attractive sounds from the merch, and now we're trying to find a way to couple them again.
Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising. Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item. Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making money with music I think. I looked into whitelablling cannabis products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in legalization legislation because it's such an obviously good idea.
There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to.
I agree with the advice, that discovery isn't a product, and the big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new artforms if that's not going to happen. Otherwise it's like trying to sell math.
Does anyone have historical sources that can back this up? Right now it reads like an extremely strained attempt to find the most cynical possible perspective without any evidence.
The idea here seems to be that until churches and bars started hiring musicians in order to attract clientele, nobody had ever tried to make money from music. And since then, no significant portion of the music industry has ever been about a pure exchange of money for music, it's always been driven by ulterior motives.
Is there any reason to believe any of this? What about the history of classical music concerts? Operas? Broadway? Buskers? Mariachi bands? I'm sure I'm missing many non-western examples.
“Court” music is about being a display of power that doesn’t threaten your neighbor into thinking they need to start building an army. That’s why the music itself epitomizes precision and control. Classic soft power.
It’s conspicuous consumption. You keep musicians on staff to demonstrate that you are so rich and powerful that you can afford to blow it on something so frivolous that it doesn’t even feed anybody, it doesn’t stick around, and you’re either there to hear it or you’re not. See Haydn for the very best example of this model.
Sheet music then becomes the “advertising” so that people can be aware that it’s happening.
However, I think sheet music eventually became (and later, records/CDs) mostly a pure exchange of money for music.
I guess what I’m trying to say is something in between: the exchange itself can be pure on both sides (creation/consumption), but music is “of” society/culture and almost always serves many other purposes in the power structure of societies.
In its very purest form, buskers have almost always been very poor.
I agree with your characterization of court music, but again I don't understand why it should represent the entire history of the music business. At the same time that European royals were commissioning symphonies as a status symbol, musicians were holding independent concerts where people paid money to hear some music and then went home.
I don't think it's really relevant that many musicians are poor. Most writers in history have been poor, but the history of the book business is still mostly about people paying money to read a book.
And I agree with what you’re saying, too. I don’t think it’s relevant to music that many musicians are poor, but I think it’s relevant to what I thought was being discussed. I thought we were talking about the music / money relationship, and the degree to which “ulterior motives” play onto the music/money transaction.
Troubadors (buskers) existed before the advent of paid church musicians, as far as I can tell.
Interestingly, at least for classical music nowadays in my limited experience, the most reliable way to get a regular gig for most ordinary musicians (who aren't going to be opera stars or something) is to work for a church still. But perhaps my instrument choices (voice and organ) have skewed this disproportionately.
I think you're right. I know a lot of classical musicians, and except at the superstar level, a pretty good generalization is that they have multiple income streams, including performing and teaching. A church gig can nicely compliment those other things. This includes music director positions. Some but not all require a level of commitment to the religion.
High quality source? No. But if you're looking at famous European musicians before the 1800s, almost all of them were employees by sort of church or powerful aristocrat.
> There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to.
Hilariously, it's because women just don't care about this. [1]
Excerpt from a study:
> Men were more strongly attracted to women with whom they shared musical tastes than to women with whom they did not. The sharing of musical tastes had only a negligible effect on women's attraction to men, however.
Many men place a huge emphasis on musical compatibility, but very few women do, and IIRC it's a fairly poor indicator for relationship compatibility. Young single men would probably be better off letting this one go.
I'm not sure if it's still true today, but it used to be the case in Mexico that playing recorded music in a business required paying considerable royalties.
This has interesting side-effect: hiring a live musician or a small band became an attractive alternative, and so the restaurants and bars are filled with live music on the weekends.
I think live music is probably something we should get back to. Musicians would obviously be on board because they get to make a few bucks, customers are happy to get some live entertainment with their drinks / meal, business owners are happy because the customers stick around longer.
In the digital era, recorded music wants to be free, but it's absolutely an inferior substitute to live performances, and I strongly feel that anything that helps musicians support themselves via performances is good for our culture.
I think you are caught in thinking the status quo of the music industry and its history determine what all "valid" potential markets for music are, according to I guess some economical or political belief you have. That Discovery isn't a product right now doesn't mean that if done correctly it can't become a product that changes the music business even just a bit, you need a stronger argument to convince me of that than just "it's not the way it is because it's not how the current business made history".
I think there's a lot of people DJing, producing or jamming that would be ok with just getting pennies from their music being streamed or downloaded or whatever. Not every artist needs or wants to live from their art. For a lot the extra money is welcome specially as an incentive to do all the mastering and release work that's involved in releasing digital files or being on a streaming platform, which is not zero.
I agree it's similar to selling math, but for some reason no one completely understands people "bond" to "brands" of music more often than to "brands" of math. From my perspective, at least until there's thousands of festivals across the world per week to share proofs and formulas and programs, I think it's deceiving to think selling music is like selling math if you uncouple the music from the merchandise.
Not to over comment on the thread, but this idea of people performing math at festivals could very conceivably happen, and the economics would be precisely same. It's just a question of the artform. Hacker conferences get pretty close to punk math, and blockchains are the repetitive noise your parents don't understand.
A bit into the handwavy, but there's two famous quotes, one from Goethe about architecture being 'petrified music,' and another about how 'nobody can dance to architecture' which were just as quirky as what I'm saying, but when you view skateboarders as, literally, dancing to architecture, with festivals everywhere around the world, the ideas of music, architecture, math, and what dancing to them all might mean suddenly becomes plausible and conceptually much closer to one another.
The economics of skateboarding (as essentially a dance form) are pretty much the same as that of music, and math. It's the dismal aspect of Economics that provides this kind of indifferent nihilism between the concepts, but when you're trying to create a product, the economics are the necessary lens. Though I will admit it's a different frame of mind.
Those are good points, but the pervasiveness of music as a means to connect socially is so out of proportion vis à vis hacker conferences that most hacker conference include one or multiple musical events, and sometimes music leading to some of the "big numbers". I think Discovery becomes a viable product when there's so much of something out there, and for math and hacker conferences it's not much of a necessity and no one with benefit from it. For music because of a matter of scale I think Discovery is ripe for innovation and there's viable products that should do well.
I wish I had more time or contacts to actually put my money where my mouth is, so unfortunately so far I just have an opinion.
Most of the money in the music industry goes to nihilists, not the musicians, so yes, you've successfully described the situation.
That's why established bands often have incorporated. They can keep some of the overhead for themselves by doing the work or paying someone a salary, which establishes a healthier power dynamic than "we'll cut you a check with whatever is left over after expenses."
Bands are poor because It's All About the Music means they get fleeced left and right. They don't call it the Music Industry because it's all roses. They call it that because something is being chewed up at one end and spat out the other. The Grist Is Made of People.
Don't conflate "music" with "music business." GP is talking about the latter.
As a musician who has toured and recorded, and someone who has worked for multiple concert promoters and streaming services, I think GP frames it extremely well. it's not a nihilistic view, simply a realistic one. If you love music, don't get involved with the music business! At some level it becomes unavoidable, but they are separable things.
GP is talking about history. It starts with "The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol," which is literally making up the history.
Pray tell, which version of music business history elides the countless musicians worked for peanuts playing -- inventing -- ragtime and jazz to fill bars and brothels; the jukeboxes run by the mob as a pivot from their gaming machines; the revival tents, be-ins, and desert festivals?
Music has always been in partnership with other passions and vices, and since the time cynics and nihilists have been able to capitalize on that relationship, they have.
There is massive difference between "business of music started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol" and what you describe. People do like to combine their fun and religion with music, but that does not imply what you say.
And as a nitpick, business of music existed long before ragtime and jazz. Both classical music and folk music (all around the world including in Africa) predates modern music. And they were often paid for performances.
I believe, but can't cite, for medium to large artists that streaming is <15% of revenue. Restated, selling merch at a show (back in the day) is so much powerful it overwhelms.
That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.
Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's, etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each. Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers, basically.
> That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.
For reference, she pulled in $100 million in 2018, the year of her last major concert tour. In 2020 she made just $23.8 million, only 10 of which was from streaming [1]. She is consistently one of the top streamed artists in the world, and was ranked as the highest paid musician in both 2018 and 2020.
So yes, touring is a huge revenue generator for music artists, even beyond just merch sales. It's even more important for artists that cannot rely on top tier streaming or physical sales numbers.
> it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists.
When the songwriting and production credits for a track look like a laundry list of names pulled from a hat, that's good evidence of Song Factory writing with little to no involvement from the performing artist. This is very common in the popular music industry but there are exceptions, such as with Taylor Swift. For her and other artists that emphasize "singer-songwriter", you are likely to see only 1 co-writer, whom also serves as producer, for several tracks.
Besides the character of the music itself, this has consequences for compensation, as there are less people to split the earnings to. Then there is masters ownership. One of the reasons Taylor eeked out the top spot for highest paid musician in 2020, is because she now owns the masters to her recent albums (which are also her most streamed). This entitles her to a significantly bigger cut. Most music artists do not own their own masters (on top of often not writing their own songs).
> it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
This is certainly still true but maybe less so than in the past. At least, artists can "get big" (be discovered) without much of a team because of the likes of streaming and TikTok. Staying big, and musically relevant, probably still does require a big team. Making a living from your music, much less becoming actually rich (and staying that way unlike the likes of M.C. Hammer and TLC), is some kind of voodoo magic.
This is patent nonsense. You think selling merchandise at the show creates more money then selling the actual tickets to the show?
That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who make music have, by far is selling people the experience of listening to that music, either in person or via recordings.
It makes more money for the artist. The promoter generally pays a fixed fee to the artist to play, rents a venue, and bears the risk on ticket sales. The band has to pay the road crew, etc. and pay for food and buses, and what have you. The label gets by far most of the money from album/streams.
The merch table is one person (maybe 2-3 for big bands) selling stuff with margins of hundreds of percent.
None of this is true. For reference I worked in this business for about 15 years and represented dozens of famous musicians you've heard of. I also was a touring musician myself in a band nobody ever heard of, and have also worked on the talent buyer/promoter side of things.
Did you know that outside of tiny bar level gigs nearly all deals for bands to play live involve a split of the actual ticket sales between artist and promoter? Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?
And so on. I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
For all it's worth, I've arranged bar level gigs where there's a ticket at the door and it's split between the bands and promoter/band, bar takes a small percentage of merch sells and band takes a small percentage of drink sales (this one is the hardest to negotiate on my experience). So you are even more in the right and the account you are replying to is even more in the wrong, from my experience.
>I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
I suspect this is 2 factors: 1) music is something people care about, therefore they have opinions on it (whether or not these are justified). And 2)
Gell-Mann Amnesia: You're familiar with music, so you quickly spot the bullshit that, in reality, suffuses almost all online discussions.
Why is it so hard to get a t-shirt out of the bands I love? I'd absolutely love to pay $15 for an album again, only this time I want a cool t-shirt instead of the CD :).
This gets me thinking of something an old friend wrote recently, contrasting music with sport in eg a bar setting. A backstreet pub can easily shell out £2200/month (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops.
A music catalog is transferred for pretty much the same fee as one football player, AFAIK.
> A backstreet pub can easily shell out £2200/month (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops.
You can't treat information products like fungible commodity goods. Thinking that way leads to all sorts of nonsensical results.
A backstreet pub isn't paying for "football" in some general sense of "video products of football matches". They are paying for *the specific currently-occurring matches that the patrons want to watch". That is a very rare product that commands a high price. If you put on "Australian footie highlights from 1987", you aren't going to have a full bar.
Sports games are almost completely non-commodity and non-fungible and the pricing reflects that.
Music is semi-fungible. Patrons have strong associations with particular songs and love to hear them. But there are generally enough songs that meet that criteria, and enough patrons that don't really care, that a bar just needs a bit mostly-interchangeable bucket of songs. The price reflects that.
Right -- this makes sense, and you put well into words some of the thoughts going through my head.
But where does this leave players vs bands'/artists' whole catalogs? A club paying for a Ronaldo/Messi/Zlatan has to make that up pretty fast (disregarding brand value/brand management), whereas a Beatles/Dylan/Rihanna catalog will keep bringing in revenue for ages. As (I believe) you hint at, music has a whole different staying value compared to (many/most?) other forms of entertainment.
How close are you to soccer fandom? As far as merch sales for a player, players might lose value quickly, but fan retention is very sticky: You aren't going to find a lot of people that suddenly root for a new team once a decade. So when in 1996 Barcelona spends about 20 million for Ronaldo de Lima, they were getting young fans that stay with them for decades, and who get their children to root for the same team, as arguing with dad about soccer every day is exhausting. Hell, having a great team also makes your school-level teams more attractive, and gives you more talent: Does Messi move to la Masia just because Barcelona paid a bunch of money, the school quality, or also because there's a great chance to face great competition in a top club?
Barcelona is still getting value from Cruyff, Maradona or Ronaldo, and will still make money from the Messi years for decades to come, even if the merch sales for his shirts drop to zero. Fandom leads to more fandom, and that comes from good results. A team like Manchester City has put top money into their team for decades, but the team's value lags a bit not because their short term results: They've been great for over a decade. It's the residual value of decades of good performance from other teams that they have to compete with.
Music is, to some degree, fungible. Sure we all have our favourite bands, but as far as a pub is concerned, there are tens of thousands of good enough bands that can provide atmosphere.
Whereas with football, supply of watchable players is highly constrained. Nobody is coming to your pub to watch the local five aside on the TV. Plus there's the gambling aspect...
Things are always changing. In the early days it wasn’t possible to record music so it made sense to monetize indirectly. When it became possible to actually record music it was hard to distribute it until radio. Later the digital revolution made recording and distributing music so easy it collapsed the market value of recordings. Today, decentralized networks are the next technology poised to shape society and it seems that those who can create digital assets are leveraged to succeed
I would exercise a little humility and allow for the possibility that you don't understand what parent is saying, before slinging obscenities.
You are absolutely right about music being fundamental to the human experience, universally. But parent isn't denying that at all.
Parent is talking about the BUSINESS of popular music -- not music full stop. The business of popular music absolutely _has_ co-opted music itself as a means of marketing other products. That's how the money is made and it's the only reason you are aware of any popular music artists at all.
Yes people listen to popular artists because the music makes them feel certain ways. But from the business' perspective that only matters insofar as it enables the business to capture the attention of the listener, to sell things. Are you aware of how many product placements litter nearly all popular songs? Why do you think country music -- which is a massive market -- is hyper-focused on getting drunk, drinking beer all day, driving pickup trucks, etc.? Do you know how much money there is in that?
I think I understand it fine. The comment said this:
> The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol
That's nonsensical. The business of music essentially started as a way to sell music. Music is staggeringly popular and people have shown a willingness to pay vast sums for it. It's a core human need.
It's like saying "the food business essentially started as a way to sell airline tickets" or something, it's just word salad.
When did this start? The first paid admission concert in history was apparently held in the 17th century at the home of a violinist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert#17th_Century. I'm no expert, but it looks a lot like people paying money to hear music without any ulterior motives from anyone involved.
“Music” has been around for a long time, likely from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The “music business”, where people can own music, the distribution and modern incarnation of “the music business”, has only been around for a a little over a century.
yeah, if you move the goalposts, then you score every time. and the original post in this thread said nothing about modernity.
but even if the original ranting comment was only talking about the modern music business, that starts with sheet music publishing in the 19th century, not this made-up nonsense about churches and bars.
and the 19th century sheet music publishing business was itself founded on hundreds of years of sheet music publishing that came before it, just at a smaller scale.
Sure, but the sheet music was a straightforward product. Certain people wanted to perform certain music, and the sheet music helped them to do it. Music has been part of religious observance since forever. It’s just inaccurate to analyze the situation as one where the sheet music business is only profitable because it’s being indirectly used to “sell preaching”.
Anyway, whatever the beginnings of the industry, there was a very large secular sheet music market shortly thereafter. I’d love to hear the cynical analysis of the madrigal industry, but I suspect the truth of it is a lot simpler: people enjoy singing songs.
From Wikipedia:
> Jacques Arcadelt (also Jacob Arcadelt; c. 1507 – 14 October 1568[1]) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music. Although he also wrote sacred vocal music, he was one of the most famous of the early composers of madrigals; his first book of madrigals, published within a decade of the appearance of the earliest examples of the form, was the most widely printed collection of madrigals of the entire era.
No clue why you're bringing up sheet music, modern music industry is recorded music, not sheet music. OP was discussing recorded music, ie "the music industry", not the "sheet music industry"
It's not entirely clear to me what the OP was talking about, as the claim in their original post is quite vague.
I just wanted to point out that people have been able to "own" music since long before it was possible to record music. So there is a long history of music being a product.
Honestly the grandparent comment reads like a bunch of learned wordbabble. It's easy to understand why parent got it wrong. I think the thrust of the violent reaction to GP is that it is clinically picking apart a thing which is fundamentally about human expression in music, which is primal and precedes capitalist notions of "selling yourself" or optimizing some crap "vertical" that could only be uttered by a business and economics graduate.
My favorite band, Crystal Castles, didn't become a global success because some brand-guy figured out how to sell weed-pops emblazoned with "CC" logos. They were playing shitty dives in Toronto and smaller venues and almost suddenly became a global success because they made something that was really fresh and much needed by the disaffected youths of the time like me.
My love for that band was never tied up in any kind of notion other than the one that spoke to my heart. Any attempt to dismantle that in verbiage is going to make me angry too.
yeah, the top comment in this thread is just utter nonsense and meaningless trash. try telling Skrillex that you can't make a living with music and all your revenue's going to come from your side hustles. side hustles are great, but revenue from live performance has gone up during the same era that revenue from recordings went down.
Skrillex is a dated example, maybe, but that fits, because this happened a while ago.
this whole discussion is just filled to the brim with people with no serious background in the topic, saying wildly inaccurate things. this is usually what happens when HN talks about any kind of show business, no offense.
I make music. What we do isn't a commodity business, it's an art we practice and explore, like math. Products are totally different. Extending your simile of music being as essential as sex, the way people make that a business is with porn and services. Music may be the porn and services of what are essentially math noises instead of sex.
I had also looked at white lablling some, er, intimate products to go with albums but was too bourgeois to pursue it. Basic idea was a crossover between music and firmware for the, um, device. Immersive experience. There is a future in which a Trent Reznor of vibrators will emerge. We will look back and laugh that people just used to put things in their ears. Insane, but this is the kind of thinking it's going to take to make music a viable living.
I could post 100 more of these of course. The product being sold here is people coming to hear and see the performance of music. It's one of the most popular things there is. Millions and millions of people spend time and money daily just to be in the proximity of people making music.
It's also art. It's also a hobby for many. It's many things. But my point that it is, all by itself, a tremendously popular product for people, seems inarguable.
I'd say the disconnect is about what a Product is, which is the eternal question on HN and in startups.
Music isn't really a product unless you are on the publishing/licensing side, and even then a license is just an insurance policy against being sued. Spotify and Apple Music sell distribution services, not music.
Further, artist compensation on streaming services is so poor that most artists lose more money from inflation against their savings in the time it takes to choose and listen to their album than the platforms pay out for listeners. This is not an economic characteristic of something that is in high demand. It's a different kind of economic good.
I agree that music is beautiful and universal. What I'm saying is, a Product is something else, and the business practically depends on musicians not understanding it because it trades in them.
Business doesn't run on truth and beauty, it's a trade in desire and money. This is even harder for writers and journalists to accept, but it's the same dynamic.
Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite different. Case in point people who are asexual.
That some people are asexual does not invalidate the immense importance of sex. Likewise that some people are apathetic towards music doesn't render music any less important. Certainly none of those people who don't care about music are spending oodles of money on merch either.
yes, however I was responding to a comment which treated it as a universal thing for everyone with phrases like "It's something our soul needs" and pointing out that not everyone feels the same way they do.
Which was in turn responding to a comment saying that music is a sideshow to selling pieces of plastic. Yes, not literally every single one of the 8 billion people on this planet will die should they go an extended period of time without music, but that's clearly not what the comment you were replying to meant. To claim the two statements are equally hyperbolic is absurd. You brought up asexuals as an example of how if you're sufficiently pedantic the need for sex is not really universal, and I was reaffirming that the comparison was apt.
As has been pointed out already, some people don't feel the need for sex or love. Also some people don't care much about music. I'm one of those people. Music doesn't generally do much of anything for me. It always feels really weird when I see people declare such strong feelings about music. I commented [1] about this a while back after someone (the person I'm replying to) pointed out that musical anhedonia is a thing.
Yeah, and to extend on this: simply because music has been used in capitalism to make other industries more profitable doesn't imply that music isn't valuable on its own. Music is life enriching for an uncountable number of people, no matter its profitability. Same with Free Software, for that matter.
But just because it's valuable doesn't mean that there are straightforward and reliable business models available for profiting from its creation/curation/maintenance/whatever.
And to come full circle back to the original topic: that capitalism itself can enhance discovery. I was introduced to Etta James's music through a Jaguar commercial. In fact, there are quite a few artists I'd never heard of before their music was featured in a commercial, or a TV show or movie.
Parent is talking about the "business of music" which is an entirely different thing.
The crux for artists that want to live from their art practice, is to know the difference, accept it, and control as much as they can of the two activities.
I don't agree. I think there's still room for "purpose specific" social media, and in the case of music that would be being able to follow people and plug into their feeds of what they are listening to and what playlists, sets or charts they put up with what tags, and let them stream. Spotify has something like this but the UI is only usable on the desktop client. You can do something like this on Youtube or Twitch and a lot of artists do. There's also sets on Soundcloud.
Kinda like what Beatport does but with a more social and better website, and without the gatekeeping and heavy editorializing. I think Last.fm was on the right track with social features but didn't get the streaming right (I think mostly because of IP issues). What some projects like everynoise.com do with Spotify tags for genres is pretty amazing but of course it's missing the social features.
> If you are building tools for DIY artists that can’t grow to support larger teams around the artist as they find success they you have painted yourself into a tiny corner.
This is a fine point, but sometimes I wish we weren't always optimizing for infinite scaling everything. Some of my favorite places are tiny corners that are intentionally tiny corners.
Data point of one: I'm not huge into social features in the first place, but I really appreciated how Rdio handled it. Easily spy on everything your friends are listening to. Homepage is a dynamic looking feed of stuff including random recent stuff your friends listened to or things they listen to a lot. I found a lot of cool music this way and the context of a friend-based recommendation, I think, was valuable to me in a way.
I was disappointed that I had to switch to Spotify. Spotify does the bare minimum here. You can only see what your friends are currently listening to. Maybe their history as well, but I don't even feel compelled to check. I hardly even notice it there in the corner of the window. And it only exists on the desktop client, last I checked.
I can't even share a song with a friend within Spotify, I have to copy a link and paste it in a chat window, or connect on Facebook (which I don't have). Why wouldn't they want to encourage intra-platform sharing? The only social feature I've found useful is building playlists.
It's baffling to me. But obviously they know what they're doing.
If one's taste is slightly off-mainstream Shazam won't find many of the tracks you aim it at, for instance older electronic music from the 80s and 90s.
The best idea I've had for the music industry goes like this:
A market place for gig tickets, with open data for artists.
That's it.
Embrace touts, allow resale, reduce fraud (counterfeit tickets)... by making tickets ephemeral, transferable, verifiable. At this point all you've got is a more legit version of what happens in the real world.
The data part... give artists and their promoters full access. The benefit is that it removes a huge part of uncertainty for the artsists and their management. They can now more accurately predict total ticket sales, comparable ticket sales, see ticket sales across other acts in the same city on the same night, etc... meaning they get to do two things: 1) They choose more appropriately sized venues (which makes the event more vibrant as it's fuller - a fuller venue makes better margins as the fixed opex is spread over higher revenue - less lost revenue too as more fans get to see a band and less money left on the table), and 2) They get to set the price of a ticket more accurately to what the market can bear (which means they get more of the ticket value and touts get less, so the artists come out better and more realistic pricing will make a better end-to-end experience for music fans).
The data part is so valuable for filling small and medium venues that it can start to break the stranglehold Ticketmaster have on venues. The tenure of most promoters is around a decade, and Ticketmaster exclusivity deals with major venues come up within a similar time period. By building a grass roots effective ticketing system built on data you have a 10 year bet on knocking out the incumbent if you can keep the promoters and artists on your side as you and they grow. The Ticketmaster stranglehold isn't impenetrable, they have venue agreements with large traditional venues - but there are a lot of alternative venues whose seat you can fill easily, i.e. theatres and cinemas.
Within a single "generation" of music (less than a decade), you should be able to take the majority of small and medium venues, most festivals, and have serious inroads into the territory of Ticketmaster.
Are there things like this? Not really. Sure things like Dice in the UK for clubbing does the resell tickets, etc as a full and complete part of the original ticketing experience, but I do not know of a single company that is really creating anything like an open and transparent dataset that the participating artists and promoters can use without fee. Songkick were going to be my bet on who could do this, but once they went down the Ticketmaster affiliate route I no longer believe this is possible.
Check out vivenu [0]. I‘m not sure what their data offering includes because I haven‘t actually tried their product, but it sounds like they are thinking in a similar direction to you.
Seems to me to be trivial to do. Maybe you could link the ticket to a NFT and put the data on the blockchain for extra hype? I could actually really dig having a wallet with some kind of digital memorabilia of tickets and concerts as well.
Event ticketing has to be one of the most appropriate use cases for blockchains that hasn't been realized. You still need a trustworthy central entity (equivalent to Ticketmaster) issuing the tokens though.
Ticketmaster owns the contracts to every major venue.
Great... there's a hell of a lot of smaller venues, festivals, and other events that can be taken whilst Ticketmaster ignores you and you add significant value. By the time you worry about Ticketmaster or they worry about you, you already have momentum from artists, promoters and fans, and due to the bad press Ticketmaster gets through their tout-resell sites you also have political pressure.
Ticketmaster is built in to this plan. Their presence makes the grassroots stuff even more compelling as you don't have to boil the ocean, you figure out how to make it work on a small venue level, city level, and go for scale in the bottom layers.
Worst comes to worst, they're forced to consider purchasing you as you take all of the oxygen out of the system that feeds artists and promoters into them.
"5. Middlemen are not inherently evil - they are desired if they can provide more value than they extract"
This reminds me of bureaucracy - people only call it bureaucracy when it fails or takes special attention or impinges on expected rights or privileges. When it works, there's not really a name for it (it's still bureaucracy)
This advice applies mostly to pop music that involves outside songwriters, marketing, and publishing music, etc. and I agree, the music industry has a tight grip on that sort of “music”. But there is plenty of room for niche products for bands that actually write their own music (ya know, real musicians not dancing, lip syncing performers). Any band can find a producer to work with without a record label and there are plenty of examples of highly successful bands releasing their own albums.
This is less about bands and more about startups building listening platforms. The article is basically saying that data about what people are listening to has almost no value past the present moment. There are already too many places to get that data and it’s basically already stale by the time you aggregate it.
Even with “indie” artists (many of whom are ironically mega-millionaires in their own right), there’s a workflow aspect to the promotion side of things. You can do it yourself, but there’s no money in streaming (artists in 2021 are influencers first and foremost who look at streaming as a way to acquire new listeners) so you gotta go through concert promoters, which usually means means hiring a manager to rep you. The money is in the live shows these days — which is why the pandemic hit musicians so hard. But the fundamental problem is still getting people to listen to your stuff, same as it ever was.
I've been working on a website/app which is designed to optimize the recording and sharing of audio files between musicians in private groups. My friends have been joking that it's an anti-social network of sorts. It's not built to facilitate any mass distribution, and has no option for a publicly subscriptable feed. It just smooths over a few of the sticking points in the record, listen, share(sometimes large file), iteration loop that many collaborative musicians find themselves working within.
The project has been a labor of love between friends and I would really love to find a few more users out there!
> 17. The music/tech graveyard is *full* of product ideas just like yours. Spending a little time learning about them and why they failed at the time is a high ROI activity.
This is my favorite. It applies to pretty much any technology or business idea.
> 8. If you are building tools for DIY artists that can’t grow to support larger teams around the artist as they find success they you have painted yourself into a tiny corner.
Depends on your own goals too. Beeing able to live from what you do while working with people who's work you like, in an environment that is not the mainstream music industry may sound dystopic, but it could totally be the other way around as well.
And even if your goal is becoming big, growing out of a certain culture can be useful as well (depending on what your app does), e.g. think about soundcloud.
Music is inherently human and more people than you think show genuine talent at their chosen musical craft.
Hype separates the cream from the milk. Cream here is a value judgment that can best be described as “not milk”, and therein lies the capriciousness of…
…marketing.
Look around your workplace. Do you see an iota of evidence to suggest that marketing is going on? Welcome to the competitive hell of anything akin to the music industry. You and I are brethren here.
Honesty, looking at A&R at least they are open about being 99% hype and 1% talent. Can SNAP say the same?
The future has got to hold more ways to relate to music than the main apps of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., which push music in a very specific, generic way. Mostly around top 40, opaque personalizations, algorithms and “algotorial”.
We’re never getting back to a place where your identity is defined by which record store you go to.
But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener?
I've always wanted a music recommendation system that worked in some sort of latent vector space. Song2Vec if you will. That way you could search for music similar to how people describe it. Something like: metal + Abba = Ghost.
I know Pandora used to (still?) was doing this, but the features were never exposed to users, and were very music theory. (Apparently I like vamping, but until I looked it up, I couldn't tell you want it was.)
These points are rather vague and seem to refer to specific things that the OP encountered in his career. I mean: what are we supposed to make of “music is not inherently social”. That sort of implies “I’ve encountered many people trying to build social features into music platforms, and these didn’t seem to provide any value to customers”.
Cause otherwise music is definitely a social thing…
And the same comment applies to nearly all the points there…
I definitely disagree with the sentiment that generally people don't care what music other people(especially their friends) enjoy. One of my favorite aspects of Spotify is the ability to understand other people better by exploring the unique blending of intellectual and empathic tastes that comes with music.
Blockchains, NFTs and anonymous p2p file transfers gonna be the music industry's final nail in the coffin and it's because of people like that author. They've resistet innovation for to long, so inevitable they're gonna pay the price one day.
> 1. Music is not “inherently social” - it is just as often anti-social
but going to a record store was/is. if you could bend your mind to think of a record store as "music tech" this might suggest a possible place for other humans within finding-music 2.0.
I made a music player that pulls data or organization purposes from Spotify but uses hidden videos from YouTube to play the actual music, bypassing the licensing issues:
i think i understand the sentiment— my fb network knows all too well what i’m listening to. OTOH i really like following threads of discovery on Bandcamp. People who’ve bought records that I really like are a great source of new music. And you can also browse BC releases by town, which I’ve found pretty fruitful.
This article is just recapitulating a series of tweets, with essentially zero value added. And, since the tweets were off-the-cuff and ambiguously worded, it's hard to say what the original author meant.
I assumed he was referring to the discovery of music, as in "coming up with a new algorithm or process that recommends music to people does not, by itself, amount to a financially sustainable product".
It reminded me of Steve Jobs' reaction to Dropbox: that the entire product was more like a feature that some other product should have. Of course, Jobs was wrong about that, and this guy may also be wrong about his intuition here, even though he is informed and experienced at his business.
I was a bit confused because the article picks those 3 items as if they're related, but they're just the first items of many from the linked tweet, and most of those aren't related to social media.
And on both of them Discovery sucks, I'm not surprised he thinks this way.
Not sure if it's a problem of their engineers or executives sucking, quite the contrary, I think it's a problem that needs to first be solved at a smaller scale before it catches up. Music streaming was also a niche thing when not many of us had a portable device that was connected to the Internet.
In the world of web 2.0, that's probably true. Paying people in hearts rarely translates to a viable business model.
In the world of Web 3.0. It might not be true. Smart contracts builds a way for creators to realize a larger share of the value they create, and for listeners who discover them early to be rewarded as well. In web 3.0, you're not rewarded with hearts, but tokens which can be traded for dollars.
You see, it'll be this really large triangle shaped thing! Every level of the triangle will make money off the levels below it. The best place to be is the top of the triangle, you'll make money off every transaction. Obviously the worst place to be is the bottom where transactions just cost you money.
It's all really exciting and has never been done before! Just buy some of this Invigeron, the reverse funnel system!
Who is going to host the actual content? This seems like a missed opportunity to create a decentralized music hosting platform, where artists get paid in proportion to bandwidth used. Something like file coin.
YouTube, Facebook, TikTok already do convert things like hearts into money. The terms by which they do are very arbitrary and seemingly opaque to me, an outsider of that. One undeniable benefit of web3 would be the possibly for immutable and transparent rules for compensation (whether those would be enacted for any given platform is unclear).
So basically the dream is decentralized "Buy me a coffee" buttons? I can self-host a WordPress site, install WooCommerce on it, and people can "heart" it using BitCoin, Stripe, or a variety of platforms. What's the advantage of web3 over that? (just trying to understand)
1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book
So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways.
That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like.
The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.