I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
The algorithm won’t boost anything trying to rage against the machine. Gotta make generic bullshit to get clicks. Only way to make money these days is to get clicks
The “algorithm” is not some conspiranoic mastermind, it just serves whatever retains the most attention and generates clicks for advertisers. It’s users who don’t want to listen to <insert your favorite rebel> because they prefer bland pop or whatever kids listen to these days.
Algorithms are definitely biased to push whatever agenda they want.
That’s what I said. The agenda they want just happens to be “money”, not whatever political conspiracy every political group comes up with.
Jesus Christ you people will bitch about anything.
Please explain to me how an algorithm is worse than having to bribe execs to get on the radio and wait for the song to be played. And then if lucky it’ll get played 40 times in repeat.
I’m sure this will be a coherent answer 🙄.
You’re exactly right.
WTF algorithm was there to serve us on demand copying mix and demo tapes? We had to touch physical media to get the songs. It took effort, sometimes $5 in gas money, a stack of blank tapes at home, and working two-deck stereo.
Not just for Rage-type alt music and punk, but the entire early hip-hop and rap scenes were almost exclusively bootlegged and home-made.
This isn’t about “kids today have it so easy” - this is about good songs overcoming massive headwinds to get popular and simply heard. Music discovery was word of mouth, rumors, and who had what on hand. The thrill of the hunt got you amazing results.
Right now there’s probably someone making killer music and posting to YT or peertube with like 3 views because everyone just accepts the algo slop and no one looks for the gems.
Respectfully, i think this is the wrong conclusion. There are more sophisticated listeners today than there have ever been and sub-genre communities are great at spotting new gems. But while the number of listeners grew linearly, the number of bands has grown exponentially, making discoverability very difficult to achieve. That’s not anyone’s fault unless you consider musicians are at fault for creating so many good bands.
Absolutely fair point, and I agree with you to some degree. I imagine that it’s somewhere in the middle, where bands have flooded the space so that if no technical means exists for discovery, we’ve traded off friction points. Instead of the 90’s version where people would drive 40 minutes to the cool reord store in the next town over, now discerning listeners looking for gems have to wade through more and more bands they don’t like. It’s no one’s fault, it’s just how it is.
Oh hey look, it’s me!
Are you looking for the gems? Or making the gems? Either way, you’re doing the Lord’s work.
Making them! https://jimmyhalliday.bandcamp.com/
Holy shit, your band is fucking fire!
Edit: I listened to your whole album and it’s great. Reminds me of the early 2000s Fat Wreck Chords era when punk was honest and real, but also fun. Like some NoFX/MXPX stuff plus shades of this band named King Kong but louder. Thanks for linking to it!
Then you might be surprised to learn that there is no band, just me! I played and sang all the parts except for drums, those I made with Hydrogen. I did all of that using mostly open-source tools, all in my living room!
Nobody tell this guy about mps3 🤣
None of that went away. Music discovery is easier than ever. Sharing music is a link and you’re done. Either you’ve forgotten or are too young to remember the same artists played over and over again.
However you got here, your understanding of the music industry pre internet is rose tinted at best.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when MP3s were new. If it wasn’t for a HD crash in 2003, I would still have MP3s from the 90s.
Plus, I was agreeing with you. WTF?
I’m not talking about sharing in particular, I’m talking about friction involved in discovery. You have to know someone to share the link, even today. So someone is out there spending 10 hours a day listening to random stuff on YT just to get something to share, not waiting around for the algorithm to give them music.
So you’re saying that no one listens to music that isn’t spoon-fed to them?
My friend, algos won’t show me Swedish power metal, I gotta go find it. No one waited for Rage to come on the radio, you sought it out at the record store or from friends that had copied demo tapes and mix tapes.
Any algorithm that won’t let someone discover Sabaton, is a defective algorithm.
No idea about today, but Pandora used to be cool for this in the “Music Genome Project” days.
Ahhh, yes Pandora. The Good Ol’ Days.
And I’m the only algorithm I need for finding Swedish power metal, because I put in the hours to find what I like. But, admittedly, my taste in music is generously called “eclectic” by some, and “trash” by my loved ones, so there’s no algorithm that’s ever even believed I was a real person and not just 3 raccoons in a trench coat.
Lolwut.
Artists like Bob Vylan, Lambrini Girls, Narcissist Cookbook, Cheap Perfume, The Oozes, Problem Patterns and even Lil Darkie and many more are ones I’d never have found without Spotify suggestions. That and discovering some classics like Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, Against Me!, Crass, ZSK would never have happened without algo suggestions.
Generic bullshit doesn’t even get clicks, the most outraging things get clicks, protest songs and politically charged shit does, just like the above, it just happens to be leftist music. Also check out Refused.
It’s crazy we live in a time where there is music that isn’t some poetic wishy washy love song top 40 studio bullshit which is all you would’ve known about before, but there’s music that actually references material current events that happen, and then there’s old classics that are so much easier to find thanks to discoverability via streaming.
There’s obviously a problem with the inherent wealth transfer where both indie musicians and listeners pay Spotify, and now they want to cut out the middleman (the musician) entirely, but we absolutely must not go back to monoculture offline bs mandated by some fat cat studio exec Epstein list member looking ass.
I am pretty old and I barely knew the top 40 wishy washy back then… If you are interested in different it was there, streaming helps some, and true a lot is at your finger tips, but most people will still drop into a top 40.
Spotify doesn’t even have much of the music I listen to, I find it mostly useless so there is that.
I agree, but that’s on the users and their choices. Most people just dgaf about music anymore, it’s been “surpassed” by tiktoks in their mind. Video killed the radio star etc etc.
The paternalistic studio system limited both discoverability and the potential creativity and integrity of artists, and I’m glad it’s gone, most music I listen to either would not have existed, or I would’ve never found it without streaming.
It’s funny, I find a good chunk of music I listen to is just plain unavailable anywhere else for purchase, piracy or streaming.
While I agree with you overall, this just isn’t true.
We had university radio which would play whatever the DJ was into, because it wasn’t programmed.
We had local record stores, which while stocked a lot of top 40, would also bring in albums from small and indie bands that would never get played on radio. They would play it in the store, and have listening stations with headphones so you could listen to an album before you bought it, because you would not have heard it on the radio.
We had clubs that would book bands from everywhere. The club I hung out at had a band every night of the week, and no matter when you went, you would hear someone new.
The music was out there. You just had to get your ass out of the house to find it.
Edit: Also, top 40 stations played what was selling. They were not the problem, it was the stations that were not top 40 that were playing the pablum for the masses, and when it would sell, then it would appear on a top 40 station. By definition, a top 40 station played the 40 biggest selling singles of the previous week. They didn’t pick what was sold.
I often heard great bands show up in top 40 because they somehow managed to break through to the masses. I remember when Pink Floyd released an album in the 90s, and the first single on the album got played on the top 40 station because it was selling. This being a time when groups like Ace of Bass, Salt-n-Pepa and Boyz II Men were popular and what a lot of people were listening to. Right there nestled in the hip-hop and dance music was Pink Floyd. Again, because it was selling.
Edit 2: I picked Pink Floyd because it stood out. At that time, in the 90s, it was not a band that young people listened to much of unless they were really into prog rock, classic rock or blazed all the time.
Keyword being “local”. We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
None of it was about the music, and of course it wasn’t - it was a place for cliques to flex fashion.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - I’m happy for you, really, truly, and I’d like to hear more stories, but most of us didn’t, at least not those of us born after '97.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, there’s no one you gotta know, there’s no place you have to know to go to, there’s no subcultures you gotta be part of, there’s nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
You’re completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether you’re in Pakistan or one of those places ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, there’s no way in hell I would’ve known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldn’t have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, it’s more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.
It doesn’t if you don’t use services and algorithyms… But damn crap like Spotify is popular. I would never, but it’s like they hand it out when you turn 5 and say this is the default!