A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs.
But this "record industry is committing suicide" story that the software world likes to read about is even older than the "hollywood is committing suicide" story, since Napster was just music to start with. And yet here we are. Other than the shift in the cut (which is great!), what's going to change? There's still going to be centralization around platforms (TikTok, Spotify, radio) and a need for a partner for things like touring and marketing etc. So will the new boss look that different than the old boss?
The only way to break ground is to promote the music of others that "magically" trends on TikTok non-stop.
I joined because I wanted to figure out how it worked and luckily I have been able to mostly resist the addictiveness of it by manipulating search on YouTube to find the content deeply buried on that platform.
As a label runner myself. it quickly becomes apparent that TikTok is gamified, and it really only cares about promoted content, and everyone is at the mercy of the 5 seconds of fame rule. Even people who do go viral get exhausted by the content consumption factor of the platform, but the truth is that TikTok is just the most recent and updated iteration of the social media model that really does not work for new music discovery.
Listeners, the people that actually buy music are too used to playlist culture now, no one goes searching for music because of the sheer tediousness of the process, and when any music, even total drivel is played repetitively to people, it simply ends up selling.
These platforms are a distraction from our lack of choice and individualism, and it also highlights a time when being a successful independent entrepreneur is totally under threat because not only can you be let down by the illusion that success is possible on these platforms, you can also waste lots of money on ads that don't work for much other than generating bot stats, and years of fruitless promotional work on these platforms through the opportunity they promote as "being possible". These platform timelines are focused on single posts you make, they have no interest in allowing people to follow up on your music, and they do absolutely nothing to help listeners to find your music, the work is all on us... The process from scratch every time a new platform rises is excruciating when you don't pay a lot for shortcuts, and those "shortcuts" are what skews every stat you see on platforms.
That being said, I mostly go "viral" for the memes I post over our actual music videos... It's allowed me to polish my video production skills and I do get slightly more music sales than the old days of selling CDs out of my trunk.
> any music, even total drivel, played repetitively to people simply ends up selling.
I think there is a magic here that is under appreciated. The reality is that music often takes a few listens to appreciate, or perhaps the right mood/moment to really connect. indeed it seems to me that we learn to like that which we are exposed to, irrespective of whether someone with "taste" thinks it is drivel.
Drivel, meaning there is other stuff out there that even YOU may find to be better, but you will never hear it because of the platform and ITS priorities.
A feature for the platform and a select few artists, but not a feature for the listener.
Elitism isn’t the issue here. Limited access outside of funnels is
It's not committing suicide - it's just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them.
When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over.
We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it's something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it's extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn't recapturing that magic.
A wall of disruptive change is barreling towards the creative industry (as well as many other industries), and yet most are blissfully unaware, fighting over marginal changes to their status quo - maybe looking at demonstrations of what can be done today saying "that's neat, but it doesn't replace me" without properly looking at how quickly the other is improving.
Copyrights are about to become worthless, and so the fight over their management is going to be a short lived victory no matter who wins.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I don't believe this will happen, and unless I'm mistaken, there's absolutely 0 evidence for it. People are usually attached to the artist when it comes to music. You buy a Bowie album because it has his name on it. You learn about them, look forward to their future work, maybe go see them live, etc.
Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?
I read an article recently that claimed that for major genres most of the songs suggested by Spotify are from "fake artists". There are people making music for Spotify for a fee which allows Spotify to keep the cut that would otherwise go to a non-Spotify entry.
It seems like the formula for an acceptable song is well understood. With the necessary push provided by Spotify these songs get streams in the millions easily. Perhaps it's cheap enough to have this music produced that they don't even have to move on to machine generation.
Nobody under 40 is buying any albums, at least not enough to matter. Physical music media is skewed towards the pre-Napster demographic. Bandcamp is nice but no one's getting rich off of it.
Hatsune Miku was deliberately gamified as participatory marketing for creators, and is also representative of a specific culture.
You can't generalise to pop in general, because being a pop headliner is as much about glamour, lifestyle, fashion, and branding as it is about music.
No one wants an imaginary Bowie album, because it's a glamour-free proposition - a curiosity at best, most likely irrelevant.
People have been trying to make an Idoru for decades for now, and they always fail. You can only sell fantasy and identification when they're implicit. When you try to attach them to an artificial marketing concept it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief and make the fantasy stick.
Even when it comes to vocaloids like Miku, there's still attachment to the producer behind the song and not just Miku herself (and several producers have gone on from their vocaloid careers to launch "real" music careers).
Honestly Bowie already seemed like an "old person" act when I became a fan in the '80s. When Live Aid happened in 1985, a popular take was that it was a bunch of old has-beens trying to revive their careers. Eg. Bowie, McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Elton John.
until it's new again, because young people of today are going to become old too and their kids are going to think tik tok hits are old, but will remember when their grandparents took them for a walk in the park listening to David Bowie.
My god everything about this eventuality just sounds absolutely awful. Just more and more recycling of the same meme-tastic trash (which isn't that far off from the current state of pop music), writ even more large and just plain worse.
I'd like to think the future is the opposite -- artists/bands managing themselves as disparate entities, forming around small labels or even their own labels, and having someone in charge to bring the resources they need to bear for touring or performance related stuff so that they can focus on their music.
There is no eventuality. Relax. Punks are punks because they can’t not exist. You just can’t comprehend what they’re doing next. Neither can I if it makes you feel any better.
More than 20 years ago MP3.com tried to educate and support the independent artist. Some would get popular on the platform and eventually get signed and remove their content from the platform - a contract with a label was and is a huge draw, even if it doesn't provide the support and compensation they expect.
On the flip side, Eve Selis is an example of an artist who broke on the scene during that time and maintained control over her art https://www.eveselis.com/
I agree that it would be great if more artists followed that path.
In the future, artists and bands will be obsolete, there will just be music. To some extent this already happens, where tracks get copied, passed around and re-mixed so much that no one knows who did them.
The recording industry is notorious for pay for play schemes.
The Internet leveled the playing field for many years.
The industry has found that social media's dominance allows them the opportunity to distract independent artists from releasing their own quality music and also distract the public from hearing indie music through the illusion that social media helps them to be seen more.
The real question that anyone who works on these platforms needs to ask themself is "Is the platform really helping me?"
The only way they help people now is if you choose promoted ads, and it takes a ton of money for an unaffiliated indie label to break into their main feed on each single post, and that's true for any of the platforms that facilitate sponsored ads.
> We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it's something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it's extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn't recapturing that magic.
As long as it's generating everything on past data it won't. New stuff is interesting because it doesn't sound like old stuff, and usually that takes over and further mutates. I'm not a fan of trap, but it wouldn't have existed if everything was generated by the current gen of software. It moves fast towards an optimum of the current generation, but we're not at actual AI, so I don't think what you describe will happen (at least yet).
> When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over.
Bands have been creating music like that since forever. Most of small bands are like this.
What worries me is that the copyright industry, being wealthy and politically connected, is not going to go down without a fight.
I'd imagine trying to ever-broaden the concept of "derivative works", so your "completely new that sounds like Bowie" falls within their catchment.
Or aggressive license mandates on the data set used to train your ML model, so you aren't legally allowed to use it to produce competitive products in the first place. (In that scenario, I can imagine a run on used-CD stores as people rush to get unencumbered source material for that purpose).
On the other hand, it definitely feels like chasing local maxima. Yeah, they can try to fence in "the best song David Bowie never wrote", but that will just drive experimentation to unowned corners of the market. The AI-driven music industry might be a pivot on the scale of going from, say, Mozart to EDM in a matter of years.
It will be possible for computers to generate the content but will they be able to generate the culture that surrounds content.
I like your analogy of the tidal wave but without computers being able to generate the culture I don't see it coming.
Take football [or soccer]. Whole sports seasons can be simulated and are in games like Championship Manager. But these have never changed the collective & cultural shared experiences of real world sports.
> When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over.
In what way?
This is already a thing in shoes, clothes, handbags, watches... Yet the original brands thrive. I'd counter that listening to "cheap knockoff" music will have a similar appeal (or lack thereof).
When software can convincingly create new songs the risk will be so low that it will open up the scene for more experimentation and diversity. People tend to risk averse, AI doesn't care.
Perhaps, but presumably people will still be the ones choosing whether to release or promote a given work generated by an AI, and by your reasoning they are the ones who are risk averse.
I don’t imagine many people subscribing to an AI who can generate and release countless songs on it’s own without some sort of filter to discern desirable content from undesirable.
Barring some large development, having a human to curate the generated material will be a requirement for success, or else drown your audience in a torrent of unchecked content.
Hollywood isn't circling the drain? The only way for them to turn a profit is sequels and remakes. The industry that was created by intrigue will be killed by executives trying to make a marvel cinematic universe
Its only dragging on because record labels have some of these mega mainstream artists by the balls. As contracts die, as we see more independents rise to the top mainstream record labels will die. It's just going to be slow like cable companies. Inevitable but undoubtedly.
That video is advertising a digital distribution service which is owned by a well known record label exec.
The sales figures are quite exaggerated... 99% of artists never sell anywhere near the volume that Drake does.
I think it's important for artists to call out and quit pushing the mostly false profit models that the industry keeps pushing to put artists on a pedestal and to keep artists worshiping the big music industry machine.
If Russ was making $1m a week, he would not be doing self-produced promotional videos and tiktok posts about how to succeed in music. Even $1m a week for a well known music artist is not realistic in a good economy when Spotify only pays a fraction of a penny per play.
but also independent labels have much less negotiating power and human power to check for infringements or unauthorized reproduction, let alone legal authority.
All in all a good deal for them it's peanuts for a mainstream label.
Being a musician and audio engineer right now for 30 years, I see all this and I simply shake my head. I've long given up the hopes of monetary success for my music. One thing that remains is the energy exchange between an artist and the audience in a live setting. If you love music and you are not an emotional robot you know what I am talking about. Software can't replicate that and the artistry in the performer knows how to heighten and transmit content in that moment. This act of creating and adapting to the feedback and pushing energy back and forth is the only reason I'm still playing music. Computers don't do that. Tik tok doesn't do that in 30 seconds. Pop music has been reduced to the equivalent of taking a shit and a lot of people don't know it.
I love music and as far as I know, I'm not a robot. However, I really dislike live events.
Of courses, there are a lot if different set up, but we're talking small gigs in a local place.
I can't describe it other than "sensors overloads" (maybe I am a robot...). Too loud (the sound, but also the crowd). Too many peoples, too crowded. The smell of cheap beer, sweat, smoke... It's simply too much for me. I feel the urge to go far from that place, as quickly as possible.
I know your point was more about "a simple thing to support and enjoy your local artists", but live events are'nt for everybody sadly.
> Pop music has been reduced to the equivalent of taking a shit and a lot of people don't know it.
This made me laugh pretty hard for a few minutes, I had tears in my eyes. Thank you.
Your humour is of course all the more pithy for exactly capturing the situation. Further, it applies everywhere that industrial-scale (internet-scale?) culture exists. Music, art, film, tv-shows, news, writing. We min-max everything at the altar of the algorithm, because... "reach". Or something. Money. I don't know. Whatever. It's hard to care about taking a shit.
Not quite - Nyquist-Shannon's theorem states the original signal can be reconstructed, but it usually isn't in reproduction. Digital playback does not reproduce the full original signal - it plays it back on whatever output device it has, which does not generally recreate the original waveform.
That theorem also has some technical constraints that actual noise does not match, such as band limited and Fourier transforms that are zero outside some bound. Actual music does not match those. It can be approximated with those.
For example, suppose you have a pure sine wave, sample it with enough density to make it mathematically reproducible, then play back those quantized samples on a piezo making square waves - it sounds pretty good (and can be indistinguishable to most ears), but it is not the same waveform.
Agreed - and after quantization nothing reproduces the signal before quantization. So claiming Nyquist-Shannon proves the OP wrong is incorrect.
>It's then passed through an ADC and stored as a sine wave.
After an ADC it is not stored as a sine wave. It's stored as quantized values, thus the 'D' in Analog-to-Digital-Converter.
>cause no one is mastering inaudible square waves on a reel for kitsch value
Pretty much all audio processing is now done digitally, which is the same as square waves - each jump in discrete digital value is a step function. When you push it through properly engineered output devices the squareness is smoothed somewhat, but still has frequency ringing because it is square edged.
Take a good speaker, take something that can grab audio spectrum far beyond audible, and look at the output. There is stuff far outside human hearing coming from the speaker because of these square waves. Naively, this is because the Fourier transform of the square waves have high frequency ringing, and this is because the playback has sharp edges. (See this [1] for some related info for example).
Also Nyquist-Shannon is about frequencies, not about amplitudes, which are also quantized. Physical devices making sound have a (up to quantum level) continuum of possible amplitudes. Quantization necessarily loses this forever. For example, take A0, the lowest standard piano note, freq ~27.5. Sample a pure sine wave at
60 hz, in 8 bit audio. Now record this tone going from no sound up to very loud, very smoothly, over some time. The 8-bit audio will necessarily have less smoothness to it, since it is 8 bit audio. It perfectly matched your Nyquist-Shannon claim, yet it fails to reproduce what you hear. Take 16 bit audio - better. Take 32-bit or floating point audio, better again. And so on.
I agree that really well engineered systems can push the errors outside human hearing, but to claim they reproduce the same signals is incorrect.
The gist of this is: to get the most accurate reproduction of the original, merely sampling at 2x the top human freq is no where near state of the art.
An counter-intuitive example: to get the best quality and most accurate output, one needs to add noise to the input. The reason is that due to quantization, if some input signal is between possible quantized output values, adding noise (usually Gaussian, of std dev ~sqrt(step size)) makes that signal trigger both high and low quantized values in proportion to the intermediate value, making the output playback the step square waves as close to approximating the original as possible. The entire field is full of stuff like this.
For reference, I've worked on stuff like this on and off for decades, having written libraries used by others, designed high end audio simulation software (think raytracer for audio in physical settings to help design stadiums), written articles, and produced hardware in a company I own. I am quite familiar with all sorts of audio processing.
> which is the same as square waves ... There is stuff far outside human hearing coming from the speaker because of these square waves.
Maybe back in the 1980s on some of the early consumer digital equipment; but those problems were solved in the early 1990s by oversampling in the DAC, and then using some basic analog filtering far above the human hearing range.
IE, a consumer DAC will oversample a 44.1khz signal to (example) 705.6khz in the digital domain; and then use a very gentle analog lowpass filter to deal with the ultrasonic distortion. At that point the difference between the original analog signal and the one coming from the DAC is approximately as accurate as if there was no DAC in the first place. (Granted, some people can hear up to 27khz, which is why some people like 96khz sampling rates.)
>but those problems were solved in the early 1990s by oversampling in the DAC, and then using some basic analog filtering far above the human hearing range.
You're writing about the sampling end. I said the physical speaker creates high frequencies on playback based on material properties of the device - and I gave a decent reference where you can read the discussion on it.
No amount of filtering at the sampling end will remove physically created noise due to the physical playback membrane that moves air to create sound waves.
I am fully aware of using bandpass filters during sampling. I use them all the time to remove things I don't need before doing things like wavelet transforms to pull music information out of the result. And I often design things up front based on the physical playback mechanism if I know it ahead of time. Or if the hardware (such as embedded devices) will only sample at certain rates, or certain bit depths. Knowing as much about the entire audio path up front helps design each and every piece of the complete signal path.
Here's a simple example: basic speakers are an electromagnet coil - apply voltage V and the membrane jumps to a position. Different values for V make different positions.
Quantized playback, going through an DAC, will create distinct voltage levels. 8 bits will give 256 such levels. 16 bits, 65536 levels.
When that hits a speaker, the speaker membrane jumps to that level. There is some noise with inertia and momentum and point to point, but the end effect is the same - the speaker trying to make a square wave edge. There is no uniformly smooth movement from position to position - only jumps.
This can be seen by putting a mirror on the speaker, and bouncing a laser off it to a large wall, and record the wall in high speed - you see jumpy movement. Fiddle sometime with a pure tone sent at various bit depths to a speaker and watch the laser.
Now, these movements create frequencies in output not in the original analog signal, not in the digital signal, but purely as a physical artifact. And they depend on the playback device - all sorts of work and research is spent on speaker tech, materials, reproducible construction, and on and on, to make the output physical waveform as uniform and smooth as possible over all the possible input voltage jumps and frequencies desired. But all are imperfect, similarly to how all physical lenses (well, except 1-1 and flips) must distort images. It is all about the tradeoffs.
Up to the Nyquist limit, a digital signal will completely recreate the original signal, with no square wave steps. Digitisation does not result in square wave output anywhere in the output chain.
Chris Montgomery (of Ogg / Speech / xiph.org & RedHat) did a series of videos going into this in considerable depth. I encourage you to watch them.
I am fully aware of those videos and claims. Did you read my posts or the links? What I posted goes vastly beyond what Chris Montgomery wrote, and far beyond his claims.
Again, in different words:
Nyquist assumes infinitely precise samples. It's math, not computer sampling. This never happens, since samples are quantized. Having samples at the proper number of Hz is useless unless enough precision is there, and non-infinite precision implies the original signal is never reconstructable. We're dealing with computers, not the real numbers.
Take a pure sine wave. Sample it mathematically. Quantize those values. Now what sin value reproduces those quantized values? None. Never. They are rational numbers - it is mathematically impossible to fit a single sine wave to them, since sine is a transcendental function. End of story.
Sine is a transcendental function, so rational inputs (other than 0 in the case of sin) do not (except for input 0 for sin) give rational output. So you cannot sample it to perfection with a digital device. You can approximate it. That approximation matters. Digital sampling takes rational input deltas (sampling rate) and necessarily obtains imperfect samples, since you quantized the actual value of a sine wave. So Nyquist fails.
Yes, for a bandlimited signal of a given frequency, Nyquist lets you reconstruct that frequency given infinite precision. This NEVER happens in practice, since it assumes infinitely precise samples. Montgomery ignores this (and a host of other issues - he's at level 2 of a 100 level tower. People at level 0 see his videos and assume there are only 2 levels to the tower). Bitdepth matters. Nyquist does nothing about amplitude quantization, which is needed. It ignores the path to reconstruction - Nyquist only applies to a perfect (not floating point or integer) reconstruction of the signal. Nyquist does not deal with the fact that the quantized values, when pushed to any physical device used to reconstruct audio, is more like stairsteps than pure sine waves.
Most physical devices performing playback are more stairstep than smooth sine values, so they are not reconstructing the input signal - another issue that matters. Input signals are (nearly, up to quantum level) infinitely precise in amplitudes - output devices tend to be more quantized.
Please read the thread I wrote and think through it. I posted a link to a good discussion, I posted a simple experiment or two you can do, I posted (here) a simple mathematical exercise showing that Nyquist fails for this.
1. Montgomery talks about quantization noise. He doesn’t assume infinite precision.
2. DAC output is not stairstep. There’s an analog reconstruction filter that filters out the ultrasonic components, thereby getting back the original smooth waveform. You should read up on DAC design.
>Montgomery talks about quantization noise. He doesn’t assume infinite precision.
In [0], at time 23:50, he states that there is only one band limited signal that passes through each sample point - this requires infinite precision for reasons I explained elsewhere. It's a theoretical idealization that makes math easier, just like frictionless physics, using the ideal gas law, approximating sin(x) by x for small x, and so on. It's nice, but it's not what happens in practice.
> DAC output is not stairstep. There’s an analog reconstruction filter that filters out the ultrasonic components, thereby getting back the original smooth waveform. You should read up on DAC design.
I wrote that the physical playback device, such as a speaker, adds ultrasonic noise due to simple physics. If this were not the case, there'd be very little need for such variety in speaker costs - they'd all just magically reproduce the perfect waveform. But they don't.
As to DACs, they most certainly do not work as you claim - and it's demonstrably impossible as I explained since sine is a transcendental function, and you lost information needed since you don't have infinite precision samples.
Let's pick a common DAC, say an Analog Devices AD5780, datasheet here [1]. Page 18 has the circuit diagram for - a resistor bank. That's a stairstep (minus some physical noise at the transitions). If you look over the previous pages (Vout is the out signal you want to look at), it clearly outputs a fixed, discrete voltage for a fixed input. Every common chip does this.
Care to point to a chip that guarantees "getting back the original smooth waveform"? I'd love to see the datasheet on such a device.
One can design or buy DACs for $500, $1000, and more, but these are not what most people use. And even these exist in such variety because, as you guessed it, they cannot reproduce perfectly original waveforms, otherwise there'd be no need for such cost or variety. They all make tradeoffs and assumptions to cater to specific needs. Sure, they are very good, but they don't reproduce "the original smooth waveform".
As to analog filters providing magic, they too are not what you think - they're making assumptions and deviate from perfection with tradeoffs. I'd guess Analog Devices engineers can say it better than I : "A reconstruction filter is used at the output of the DAC to attenuate image frequencies. However, a physical filter cannot be implemented with ideal stop band rejection extending out to infinite frequency. This is due to component parasitic effects as well as the physical limitations of printed circuit board layout" [2].
The perfect filter for the output is a sinc (yes, with a 'c'). Anything else simply is not the output you desire. But the problem with sinc is it has infinite support, so is not usable in practice. Filtering on a DAC is therefore a finite support approximation to the sinc filter, and introduces error. Read here [3] for more, or look at a textbook on it. [3] also explains quite clearly that in reality none of this ends up exact as you claim.
Your claims are idealizations that are not met in reality.
"You should read up on DAC design". Indeed.
So, have the spec sheet for this perfect reconstruction DAC you claim exists? I'd like to see one.
1. Noone said that the anti-imaging filter was literally built into the DAC package.
2. The analog reconstruction filter doesn’t need ideal stopband rejection. An oversampling DAC [0] pushes the image frequencies far beyond the passband, so a gentle analog filter is sufficient to suppress it to the noise floor.
3. Noone said anything about mathematically perfect reproduction. Of course there is quantization noise. Of course there is clock jitter. And so on. But the cumulative effect of these is still way below the detectability threshold of the human ear. And the noise floor of a digital system is still way lower than what’s achievable with an analog one.
You: "Noone said anything about mathematically perfect reproduction."
Also you: "thereby getting back the original smooth waveform".
I don't think you're using the word "original" correctly.
And now we agree - the reproduction is not perfect. That is exactly what I wrote to begin with.
>Noone said that the anti-imaging filter was literally built into the DAC package.
That's right - I did not write that, so don't imply I did. I demonstrated that the DAC chip does not do it, then demonstrated that any possible outside filter cannot do it. This is counter to your claim, but matches what I originally wrote.
>And the noise floor of a digital system is still way lower than what’s achievable with an analog one.
Not true - both can be run easily down to thermal background radiation noise floor, then both need things like liquid cooling and other techniques if you want to go below (physics experiments run into this stuff and have to push both digital and analog signal noise floors vastly below probably any audio systems).
There is no inherent noise floor for either system.
> There is no inherent noise floor for either system.
This is silly. Every system has a current noise floor based on whatever the thermodynamics of the system are. If you can push the artifacts of your output below that then they will be indistinguishable from the noise. That’s the point.
>This is silly. Every system has a current noise floor based on whatever the thermodynamics of the system are.
Each fixed system has a noise floor, but there is no noise floor forced on all systems. You can design a system to have as low of a noise floor as you desire, digital or analog. Physics experiments routinely do it to detect extremely rare events.
As to thermo, it's almost like you ignored that I already wrote this, which I repeat: "both can be run easily down to thermal background radiation noise floor, then both need things like liquid cooling and other techniques if you want to go below". In common audio, thermal noise is often the biggest component of the noise floor in a system.
Hence the point to cool them. There is no floor except zero if you want to engineer such a system. And it works for analog and digital.
>If you can push the artifacts of your output below that then they will be indistinguishable from the noise.
Nope, you can signal below the noise floor using many techniques, such as spread spectrum techniques. This is used routinely for military and other covert operations. As usual, this is even Wikipedia level knowledge: "Signals that are below the noise floor can be detected by using different techniques of spread spectrum communications, where signal of a particular information bandwidth is deliberately spread in the frequency domain resulting in a signal with a wider occupied bandwidth." [1]
Heck, even everyday GPS signals are vastly below the noise floor, yet we use those signals all the time with cheap hardware. "The strength of received GPS signal transmitted from a satellite to the ground users is about −157 dBm below the noise floor of −138.5 dBm" [2]. This is all common knowledge among people doing even basic signal processing. Tons of everyday tech signals below their respective noise floors. It's not a rare thing to do.
You make many claims that are not true.
So, as to your claim that "the noise floor of a digital system is still way lower than what’s achievable with an analog one" - have a citation in a paper stating this? Have a theorem in a textbook? I'd like to see why you make this claim.
You are very insistent on proving yourself right by changing the topic to one where your assertions are correct instead of dealing with the discussion that everyone else was having. It’s a neat rhetorical trick, but kind of annoying in a context where everyone else is just trying to have a constructive discussion.
In this context, we were talking about digital audio & the perception thereof by human listeners. Spread spectrum signal processing techniques are not relevant. Driving the noise floor down to the quantum limit by using liquid helium & a bunch of other abstruse techniques is not relevant. The fact that GPS signals are below the noise floor in their radio spectrum is, once again, not relevant.
Do you argue like this in all your interactions with other people?
>we were talking about digital audio & the perception thereof by human listeners
Actually, this thread was on sampling theory and whether or not Nyquist perfectly recreated original signals. The only mention of anything about human perception in the chain you're replying to is me writing that good engineering can push errors outside human hearing, while pointing out that it is not the original signal. All the other posts in the thread you claim is about human perception are not about human perception. They're about signal reconstruction with one mention of how that applies to hearing.
>Do you argue like this in all your interactions with other people?
No, most of my friends don't make incorrect claims then double down on them when better information is pointed out. They also don't tend to claim an entire conversation is about a different topic than it was.
You: "Up to the Nyquist limit, a digital signal will completely recreate the original signal". No, as explained.
You: "Digitisation does not result in square wave output anywhere in the output chain" - again false, even for audio, as explained above. Thinking that output is a nice set of pure sine waves making the original band limited (which is also an approximation) leads people to flawed thinking. Realizing the how and why of what actually comes out is useful.
You imply pushing things below a noise floor makes them indistinguishable from noise - this isn't true in general, and is not even true in audio. There are even audio products that use signaling below the noise floor. Repeated misunderstanding of what a noise floor is (and isn't) is extremely useful, even in audio. The other examples were to make it clear there is useful knowledge here.
Understanding these nuances is useful for even audio to understand that reconstruction is always a design tradeoff on where you want to put the errors - and that you never are reconstructing the original signal.
>For example, suppose you have a pure sine wave, sample it with enough density to make it mathematically reproducible, then play back those quantized samples on a piezo making square waves - it sounds pretty good (and can be indistinguishable to most ears), but it is not the same waveform.
I'm pro analog, but the above is a common misconception, usually caused by the bad "popular science" articles on digital reproduction and sampling, which show quantization as little pixelated waveforms etc.
The waveform produced from a sampled digital signal recreates the original perfectly (for the target frequency), you can verify that on an oscilloscope.
I just went through this - you cannot. Sine is transcendental. For no rational inputs (other than 0) is the output rational. Sampling at discrete timesteps and quantizing is giving you not samples of a sine wave, but samples close to a sine wave. The reconstruction is not the original sine wave - it's no longer meeting Nyquist theorem requirements.
The oscilloscope can detect that the pattern of inputs has a frequency, but it's necessarily an approximation at this point. An oscilloscope adds enough noise and error from it's own workings that on a screen, to your eye, for certain sampling parameters, it looks close. But that is not the original signal.
Take a signal, sample it, DAC it, and try using that signal to cancel the original, amplify the result, and run that through an oscilloscope. If the signal were reconstructed, you should be able to get zero.
You don't. Now you see the differences in the reconstructed signal and the original.
The "cold and thin" vs warm and thick lies on the nonlinearities, the subtle saturation you get on tape/vinyl, the patina, even the tactility. The ease of skipping makes it even worse.
And that's before we've got to the cultural changes in attitudes towards music between the vinyl/tape and the cd/streaming eras (where music, which was king, is now just another passtime for teens), nor the changes in musical content.
Our own senses deceive us <<constantly>>. We have a literal blind spot in the middle of our eyes yet we aren't even aware of it unless pointed out through precisely designed experiments...
I'm not sure what this means. There is an incredible amount of music created digitally and transmitted digitally that is anything but cold and thin, whatever that means. If my ear can't tell the difference, there is no emotional or practical difference as a listener. (I've been playing acoustic guitar for 30 years and enjoy almost all genres of music if relevant)
Many audiophiles scoff at "digital" music, i.e. audio that is amplified with silicon transistors.
Modern transistors are very fast, so noise that gets through the filters typically sounded like sharp pops and hisses. With older (and slower to respond) analog technologies, unwanted noise gets smoothed into more pleasing hums and modulations.
These days, there are excellent affordable digital options like the O2 amp. But it would be a boring world if we were all the same.
If you're not passing your scratched to shit vinyl through a $20,000 tube amp and a Denon AKDL1 link cable you're not hearing the sound as the artist intended it.
If you have decent tech for both (digital & analog), it depends more on how much folding, spindling, and mutilating...er, um, I mean mixing & equalizing & processing & optimizing & shit...is inflicted upon the actual sound before it's actually recorded.
Last I heard (been some years now), record companies have preferred to do lots of inflicting upon the sound, before letting it near any digital format that ordinary folks can buy.
A record player or tape deck can have the same level of audience-artist interaction as TikTok unless you're DJ'ing. The fast forward function is simply a lot slower.
It’s a musical genre, a sound, it has many definitions depending on context. It isn’t just a literal abbreviation of the word “popular”, not since about the 1950s anyway.
No that's exactly what it is. It used to be if it was on the radio, it was pop. Now I guess it would be if it goes viral on Tiktok or trending on streaming platforms.
But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed. Because pop isn't a genre.
> But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed.
This is impossible for any musical genre that isn't effectively dead. Genres change over time as artists experiment. Hip hop today isn't hip hop from the 90s, but both are hip hop. Rock in the 90s was different from rock in the 60s, and both are different from you'll see released by rock bands in 2022.
Pop isn't just a genre, it has tons of subgenres - bubblegum pop, synth pop, dance pop, hyperpop, K-pop, J-pop - that have distinct differences. There's crossover with other genres sometimes (which is also true of every other genre), but not all popular music is pop, and not all pop is popular.
It's not a traditional genre as much as a characterization, but it definitely has hallmarks that you can identify without reference to its popularity. From Wikipedia:
> Identifying factors usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to.
BTW, Wikipedia also draws a distinction between "pop music" and "popular music", where the latter is defined as you describe.
Roots in blues, and its composition is based on blues paradigms like the pentatonic scale and writing structure, 4/4 or 3/4 time signature. Instrumentation has but is not limited to, at least one electric guitar, bass, drum kit and a vocalist. Song structure will usually adhere to a verse chorus verse chorus bridge trope.
I'm not sure I agree with this definition - I was a teenager in the 80's when radio dominated the music industry, and they played a lot of stuff that wasn't "pop music".
John Peel's show on Radio 1 in the UK was practically the definition of counter-culture music at the time, yet that was the mainstream music radio station.
We don’t need another semantic battle over who gets to gatekeep what defines a genre. It’s all subjective but you can also get the gist on the general case pretty easily.
When I read this, I was trying to map "record labels" and "music" onto "big 5 publishers" and "books."
The Big 5 are not quite there yet, but you can almost feel it gestating in the minds of those executives: "publish your book yourself, and if it's a hit, then we'll reprint it and do your next one."
In the other article by Ted Gioia (the talk with Rick Beato), Ted said, back in the old days, half the people in the record business were Mafia, and Rick said "literally Mafia." I don't think ethical standards in the music industry have risen materially since then.
Ricks youtube video with Brian May was so good I sent it to friends.
Try to find him doing one of your favorite songs if you want to hear stuff like "here they go from an F sharp into a diminished 7th and that shouldn't work but they make it work." I know nothing about music but I love to hear master craftsmen, no matter the craft, talk about their trade and not dumb it down.
You might like McCartney 321 on Hulu. He basically sits at a sound board with Rick Rubin isolating tracks and talking about how the songs came together.
I agree a lot with that. I see advice from famous writers saying how you need to do your own marketing even if published by famous firms. Go to events, podcasts, interviews.
I created a “Substack for fiction” because I wanted to publish myself without having to beg for attention of a few gatekeepers.
My #1 favorite thing to do at Google was hosting authors (search "bob's author talks" on YouTube, although it didn't work for me just now). The thing about those talks is: they were almost 100% authors with a publisher behind them. The publisher would pay for their book tours. A self-published author might manage to give a talk at Google or the 92nd Street Y in NYC, but it would be tough.
They can also get your book reviewed in the few publications that still review books, and they can send their catalogs to bookstores. But yeah, they take more of the money than a self-publishing arrangement will take.
A popular “musician” is just a front person for an entire organization of producers, videographers, lawyers, promoters, that can get you into venues, choreographers etc.
It still takes a lot to produce a hit and the money is still made from concerts
I can imagine a lot more stories like the one of Billie Eilish and Finneas producing her first album at home...
> This is no humblebrag bedroom studio that turns out to have been professionally outfitted. It’s just a regular bedroom, with a bed against one wall, where Eilish sat to record her vocals, facing a desk and bookshelves and O’Connell’s modest production setup: Apple Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface and a pair of Yamaha HS5 nearfields with an H8S subwoofer
On social media, the common story is bedroom producer because it is so easy for a major entity to promote anyone they want to stardom with a solid budget behind them.
Many of the most popular influencers on social media are corporately backed with songwriters and million dollar production units behind the bedroom cameras. You can usually only tell this when you search BMI and see how many songwriters and engineers names are listed on hit songs.
The hit making "bedroom producer" with 50k+ followers is now mostly smoke and mirrors...
In the indie video game world, you can work on your game for a few years, then once its done, tested and polished, a publisher will want 30% for doing a few months of organizing the release. They value their time at perhaps 1000 times more valuable that your own. Its outrageous.
They spend 1,000 times more than you to build out a network. 30% is lower than what Walmart would charge you if you were lucky enough to get listed. Most people raise prices to cover these and advertising costs. If you tried to replicate that network the time/effort would outweigh the costs.
Spending years on an indie game was never going to be that profitable. I hope you build the game for other reasons aside from profits.
err.. no they don't. An indie publisher is typically one or two marketing dudes sitting in an office somewhere and pretty good at writing press releases. Walmart is a massive retail chain with.. like.. millions of employees and like.. thousands of brick and mortar stores.
Oh, perhaps you thought I was talking about the platforms like Apple, Google, Steam and the like. I don't begrudge them their 30%
What he said in the interview was that back in the day the criminals that ran the industry actually liked music.
Now it's owned by Chinese technology companies, hedge funds, and regional telephone monopoly conglomerates and run by musically deaf accountants that only care about next quarters numbers.
Related tangent: VCs are trending in the same direction. Even YC increasingly wants to “see more” all the time before funding. That’s what they tell founders who are rejected in the interview phase. Come back with users, revenue — proof of a market. The more traction, the higher the chances you’ll get in next time. Simultaneously, the more traction you have, the less incentive to give YC 7%.
It seems they’re trading one type of risk for another: the risk that promising founders with little traction will fail vs. the risk that promising founders with traction will not apply again.
It doesn’t seem at all clear which type of risk is “riskier”.
Edit: An additional, obvious type of risk: Promising founders who are running out of personal runway will get a job and not apply again.
I think the larger and larger costs means they they don't want to take on unnecessary risks.
The expectation of return is higher than ever, thus, as VC managing other people's money, they have no choice but to comply. Fund what already has an a market and traction.
So, like you said, VC are digging their own grave, but I reckon they know it and can't do a damned thing about it.
While I agree that legacy media is very slowly killing itself, I'm very much less optimistic about it, because I don't buy into that brave new world of independent artists. The author totally ignores their dependency on the platforms they release their art on.
Those platforms more often than not demand constant care and effort in order to build and maintain an audience the artists can live off. Gone are the days where a band retreated into hiding to work on a new album while the label had their backs. If you stop feeding whatever opaque algorithm the platform runs on, you'll just slowly disappear. Worst case is that artists are forced to release nonsense because it's faster to produce.
Of course, that exact same problem always existed. But I think it's not hard to see how algorithm-driven platforms push this trend to the extreme.
And good luck appealing to Google when some bot decides to demonetize your videos.
It is a lot more complex than it seems from the outside.
If you want to play a live show somewhere big (reach the most fans, sell merch and earn the big bucks), Live Nation owns the venue. Live Nation is Clear Channel and Ticket Master. Live Nation also owns radio, where your show would be advertised.
If you're a popular enough artist you can still get to big venues, even on important dates.
Vulfpeck, an independent funk band, played a sold out show at Madison Square Garden with no label and no manager and that was in 2019. Things are slowly changing.
Competitor to what, Live Nation? It is a wide range of different businesses. There is nothing to compete with since you're competing with everything. Any time something infringes on one of their areas, they just buy it or put it out of business. Them being a global company makes it impossible to even get started.
Case in point, check out Insomniac...
Insomniac produces some of the most innovative, immersive music festivals and events in the world. Enhanced by state-of-the-art lighting, pyrotechnics and sound design, large-scale art installations, theatrical performers and next generation special effects, our events captivate the senses and inspire a unique level of fan interaction. The quality of the Headliner experience is our top priority.
Insomniac produces 10,000 concerts, club nights and festivals for seven million attendees annually across the globe. Since its inception, Insomniac's events have taken place in 13 countries across five continents. The company's premiere annual event, Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas, is the world’s largest dance music festival and attracts more than 525,000 fans over three days. The company was founded by Pasquale Rotella and has been based in Los Angeles since it was formed in 1993.
Little do they tell you... "In 2013, Insomniac entered into a creative partnership with Live Nation."
If your record label isn't in cahoots with these guys, you aren't playing anywhere public. There is nothing that YouTube and TikTok can do to help you there...
Almost as a rule, in the US at least, large multi-purpose venues sign exclusive contracts with their ticketing provider. That means that all events, including any concerts that come through the building, are ticketed by the venue's chosen ticketing provider.
While we're probably better known as a consumer app for buying tickets, SeatGeek also builds the full set of software you need to run a major venue. Everything from issuing and managing season tickets for the resident pro sports team, to working with promoters in selling tickets to their national tours and hosting the big, high-demand concert on-sales that accompany them.
A big component of our path into the market is that it's often the resident pro sports team that operates the venue and makes the ticketing decision. They tend to be very focused on the fan experience, particularly for season ticket holders, and that's our strong suit.
I'm pretty intimately familiar with the whole industry. I once owned a small (~2k person) club / live music / multiuse venue in San Francisco as well as built a ticketing SaSS for USCF (us cycling federation) sanctioned events.
From the club days, I got subtly screwed by Clear Channel on an event once and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. From the cycling ticket stuff, I got to deal with another type of promoter and that was horrible in a lot of ways too. Both businesses eventually failed from external factors.
Very cool (well, not the getting screwed part). Most of my experience so far is on the sports side, with music exposure being more indirect.
It's amazing how many ticketing systems of various forms have been built over the years. It seems like one of those things that should be simple, but there are just so many ways to slice it.
The UX for setting up events and selling tickets was some of the most complicated stuff I've ever built. The logic is extremely domain specific and difficult to implement. Good work.
I realize that your primary target is major venues, but do you have any plans for expanding to 200-500 cap venues? A management solution is desperately needed in that space!
I'm guessing you mean music venues? The short answer is yes, eventually.
The slightly longer answer is that we'll probably be the strongest option for smaller venues that want to do more complex stuff. To the extent that there's always some tradeoff between simplicity and power, we're likely to continue to lean pretty heavily on the power side for our core ticketing system.
Heh, I may get overly excited to tell people that we're building a Ticketmaster/Live Nation competitor... The sentiment that one is sorely needed is so common, and yet so few people know we're doing it (the StubHub comparison is more typical)
The entity you’re trying to compete against has enough money & reach to have your body dissolved in acid & dumped in the Mariana Trench within a few hours if they so feel. The incentive to do so as well.
If you’re not already part of the family, your chances of successfully competing against is nil
Upfront funding to get you going. Recording, traveling, promoting all costs money.
We're getting better with cheaper tools, and cheaper promotion platforms (tiktok and all), but still there is a need for capital
>> The singer Halsey put up a TikTok last week complaining about her label’s obsession with TikTok. “I have a song I love I wanna release ASAP,” she told fans on the platform, “but my record label won’t let me. I’ve been in this industry for eight years and I’ve sold over 165 million records, and my record company is saying that I can’t release it unless they can fake a viral moment on TikTok.”
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The article is talking about how Record Labels are no longer doing upfront funding. The artist has to become a viral sensation on TikTok __BEFORE__ the record labels put up the money for them.
That doesn't make sense. Halsey is already signed. She doesn't need the capital or really even the label any more. But at one point she did - so she signed away those rights and the record label is holding it over her right now.
I hate to parse words but the article isn't about artists. It's about pop stars. Corporate puppets. Literally, tools of the trade.
Who gets the massive streams for the next release? It doesn't matter to label. That's the nature of pop music. There's always the next big thing right behind the current big thing, which pushed out what is not the last big thing.
You realize you can't just show up to a big venue with your gear and start playing right? It's like wondering why famousactor$ doesn't just make his own movies. Behind every artist there's like 1000 people behind the scenes making it all work.
It's neat that your song went viral on TikTok, but that didn't get you any dosh.
So, your band just went mega-viral and you need to do a tour. How do you get Ticketmaster to call you back so you can book venues bigger than 100 people?
"I just want to release songs" is great. Just release songs. Easy.
Ah, but I see you want to release songs and actually not starve while doing so. That's a completely different problem.
The label pays (via cash, favors, festival tickets, etc) for Spotify / radio stations / ads / tv-shows etc etc to play your song.
Discoverability is a huge issue, more songs get made every year.
How do you recon the ”Hot new artists” list on Spotify is created? There’s a ton of deals, payments and polics behind it - and getting placed on a list can make/break a career.
I mean, it even goes the other way: I recently talked to someone who works for an "influencer agency", not sure what the proper term is.
They sign up YouTube creators who have done everything themselves and became quite successful on their own. But they apparenlty see value in the agency managing their ad contracts, advising with video production, doing promotion, finding new topics to cover, and give them a good cut of their revenue.
Sure, they probably don't sign over the rights to their content (or do they?), but it's a similar arrangement I think.
Yes, a team of professional composers who call themselves "producers" who will "make suggestions" for how to change your songs from having potential, to being actually high quality music.
Even though TikTok is a new platform the phenomena this article describe isn't new. It can also be attributed to other publisher industries than music, i.e. book publishing.
Imagine you where a startup and you go to a VC. The VC tells you that they want to invest. However, they want full ownership of your IP, they want their investment money repaid by taking 100% of your startup's earnings before the company can use any profits (read; It must be entered as an expense in the accounts), and you are not allowed to take out any personal salery until they have their money back. After they have gotten their initial investment money repaid, they want 85% of all profits forever. In return they will maybe try - and this is important - they will MAYBE try to help you succeed. Basically you must accept that you need to do all the lifting, not only the heavy lifting but all lifting.
Would you take their investment money? Probably not. These terms are ridiculous. But artists, writers and other creative producers of their own content have had to live with these kind of terms since forever. The reason has been that the publishers controll the market. They own or control the distribution, and they have the market budgets and connections (often even ownership) to get access to media, whether it is the radio or TV shows that promote your content through talk shows and airplay, or it is the magazines that write about you and your product. Almost no content on the commercial media platforms are there by chance or because an editor found them interesting. It's a market in play.
We might think (and maybe hope) that social media and different self publishing platforms will change this, but the market and industry has gone from too little distribution to too much distribution. There is so much content put out into the market every day that it it is next to impossible to get enough attention to your product. On top of this the attention span on platforms like TikTok is very short. Warhols' 15 minutes is today 15 seconds.
I do not believe we will see the end of publishers like record labels. We will see a shift in their role, and maybe in power distribution among the different players in the market. However, so far it seems like it is the media companies that take all the profit nowadays. Spotify is an excellent example of this, but also "older platforms" like YouTube.
>But artists, writers and other creative producers of their own content have had to live with these kind of terms since forever. The reason has been that the publishers control the market.
People accept these terms but others do not. Independent artists and collectives exist. Publishers control the fame and stardom market. They do not control the entire creative market.
This is a much observed secular trend as
Ted Gioia points out, tech platforms are disintermediators, Ben Thompson has been writing about it for ages. Platforms give creators the possibility to directly interact with consumers and it's the traditional distributors who are getting canned.
In some cases this has arguably significant downsides, say in the news industry where traditional outlets have many social functions that platform owners don't feel obligated to provide, but honestly record labels with their at times mafia like behavior shaking young artists down have it coming.
My guess is that this has to do with volume. If you are a platform and you take a piece of every single artist's income then you're going to make a lot more money than the individual artists.
An import distinction to make is that this is about the (major) record labels in pop music. The vast majority of (independent) record labels are small companies, that focus on the music. They won't make you dirty rich or famous, but if your music is good they will publish and make your music available to their respective scene.It is not an easy path, it requires a lot of commitment and you have to very talented, but you can still become a professional artist that way.
If it is just about being famous and a commercial success, well then those 'artists' and record labels get what they deserve with this tiktok bs.
This article mentions why this model (and your article) is quickly becoming outdated:
> record labels who sign TikTok stars initially demanded complete ownership of all the master recordings, and tried to keep 85% of future revenues. [Musicians] wouldn’t even collect the paltry 15% until they paid off their advance.
> but TikTok influencers now have so many labels chasing after them, they can play them off against each other [...] labels are now offering a 50/50 sharing arrangement, while also agreeing to return ownership of the masters to the artists at some later date
do you think people really care about TikTok artists?
one example i’m familiar with are the Island Boys
they’ve got their 15 minutes of fame, but no more than that
TikTok audience is practically trained to receive a new dose of serotonin on every swipe and if they’re seeing the same person again, that ain’t gonna do it
K-pop, like pop is only popular because it’s forcefully shoved down your throat by marketeers who’s goal is to recoup the investments for the hit factory
obsessive teens is merely the result of marketing efforts
this is what happens when capitalism takes over culture
A crap product isn't an inevitable result of capitalism and is not limited to capitalism. Plenty of independent artists work within the capitalist system. They tend to be more working class than *stars* though.
The only objection I have with this article is the implied notion that record labels going out of business because they are no longer needed would be a bad thing. Not that I like the idea of TikTok being their de facto successor, but the music industry has a dark history of abusing young artists in various ways that it has never really faced up to.
These tiktok people should just do youtube math videos and do podcasts in the style of lex fridman. I am not joking...there is so much ad rev from those niches. Insanely high CPM + product placement for VPNs. 3 blue 1 brown videos get as many view as even pop culture/mainstream stuff.
I think I'm just an old guy at this point who doesn't get it but what is so different between tik tok, youtube, bandcamp etc? Can't you view popularity metrics on all of these platforms? Why are they so focused on this one platform?
Because TikTok is mainly (not "only", just "mainly") about people watching short-form content like stupid dancing/music memes, "edgy" political commentary, "challenges" and other low-quality garbage content consumed primarily by teens since humans left trees. And teens are the primary target audience for a certain segment of the music industry.
TikTok is another level of content recommendation that's unmatched by other platforms. Partially due to the short form content that allows TikTok to learn preferences quickly.
TikTok has session times almost as long as Facebook which means users are watching a lot of videos. I imagine this allows users to be targeted very effectively and that's why TikTok is talked about a lot as a platform that makes random stuff go viral quickly.
Why do we need record labels today, exactly? We don't have to spend tons of money on recording studios and equipment, on producing master record, on replication, logistic from factories to music shops. Music is just to be recorded on $100 mic, mixed on $1000 laptop and uploaded to several streaming services, that's all.
I suspect the problem with music (and writing, and art in general, really) is that there are way more talented musicians than there is demand for music. A few get lucky and hit the big time, and everybody fights over how to get a piece of the money generated. The great majority of musicians will never be able to make a living at it.
there is an alternative, speaking as someone who purchases piles of music in lossless format from bandcamp and similar sites, from musicians who could not five a f*ck about tiktok or other lame surveillance capitalism platforms.
It sounds like there's an ML based way to get rid of A&R reps and that labels would be interested in it. If someone rolls with this and makes A&R obsolete, you've likely done a good thing for the music industry.
A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs.
But this "record industry is committing suicide" story that the software world likes to read about is even older than the "hollywood is committing suicide" story, since Napster was just music to start with. And yet here we are. Other than the shift in the cut (which is great!), what's going to change? There's still going to be centralization around platforms (TikTok, Spotify, radio) and a need for a partner for things like touring and marketing etc. So will the new boss look that different than the old boss?