Sell Features, Not Songs
from the no-scarcity-of-music-innovation dept
The recording is old news. Last century. Dead. The Access versus Ownership debate should have finished 10 years ago, but we’re still bickering. Access models (eg. streaming) are not supposed to replace Ownership models. They’re supposed to power a new reality, a new age for the Music business, in which the record industry possibly has no place.
“The Music industry” has become synonymous for the recording industry, just as it was synonymous for sheet music publishers prior to the rise of the recording companies. With new technology, come new companies, and the old companies move into the background. The new Music industry will likely not consist of those that depend on the recording (eg. major labels, or even Spotify), but those that apply technology to change what it means to listen to or interact with Music, just as the recording did in the 20th century.
Even the creative process will have to change.
Interactivity
Prior to the invention of the record, Music was far more participative than it has become throughout the age of mass media and mass consumption. Back then, if you wanted to hear your favourite song, you better know how to play an instrument, or have a member of the household who sings well, or you’re simply not going to hear it. That sounds extremely restrictive given our current reality, but it also gave Music certain characteristics that made it richer:
- Music was participative
- Music was mostly a social experience
- Music was more intimate
- Music sounded a little bit different every time
- Music belonged to everyone
I believe these are natural characteristics of Music, that got temporarily pushed into the background in the age of Mass Media and Western individualism. Entertainment and Culture became passive, and the ownership of Culture became less ambiguous, economically. A Creating Class arose, and a Consuming Class. The companies selling the output of the Creating Class benefited from the passiveness of the Consuming Class, because you couldn’t consume high margin products while you create.
The KLF’s Bill Drummond about Recorded Music
The KLF’s Bill Drummond about what the recording took away from Music. From 1:23. Quote below.
“As the technology to record music evolved through the twentieth century, it sucked in and seduced every form of music around the world. They all wanted to become recorded music. They all wanted to become this thing that could be bought and sold. And that narrowed the parameters of what music could do and be. And it took away from music a big part of what can make music powerful, which is about music being about time, place, and occasion.”
Brian Eno about Recorded Music
Ambient-pioneer and creator of the famous Windows 95 start-up sound Brian Eno said of Music in 1996:
“Until 100 years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable and even classical scoring couldn’t guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again. [?] I think it’s possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: “You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?”“
Introducing Interactivity
The recording is not the end of the line for Music. Every medium is a transition to the next medium.
some people call recorded music “dead music”
The Media evolved and spawned Computers, the Internet, Video Games. The latter a highly Interactive example of Culture that went on to give birth to MMORPGs, where large Communities of players Interact and define their own Meaning, participatively. A particularly good example of the aforementioned elements coming together is Minecraft, a world-creating game where players work together to build whatever they can dream of. Deadmau5 uses this to enter a digital world of fan art and interact with his fanbase. Imagine what that’s going to look like with the unstoppable momentum Virtual Reality currently seems to have. The Consuming Class has become the Creating Class: Consumption and Creation are becoming, in part, synonymous.
Why am I not being offered more ways to interact with Music?
Look at the gaming industry. It’s a 1,000 times easier to get someone to pay to unlock a ‘special ability’ than it is to sell them a piece of content.
Intimacy and Immediacy
The old Music industry is not interested in creating Intimacy. It’s hard to scale. The dominance of the recording industry’s model depends on hundreds of thousands of well-timed sales, and a long-tail that provides income until 70 years after the death of the Creator.
Yet the fact that we carry computers in our pockets that are more powerful than the PCs on our desks a few years ago, and always connected to the Internet, offers amazing opportunities for Intimacy and Immediacy, ones that fans are happy to pay for. It means that Kevin Kelly’s theory of a 1,000 True Fans will become increasingly easy to apply for a growing number of Creators.
The rise of Intimacy and Immediacy will benefit those Creators who work with small teams, who are open about their creative process, and involve their fanbase early on in this process. This enables them to secure funds through crowdfunding, as opposed to trying to secure investment from large corporations, whether recording companies or brands.
One can create dynamics of social competition within a fanbase. Who can recruit the most new fans, or active members? Who are the most valuable contributors to the Creator’s wiki? Who spend the most money on merch and who have the most complete collection? The ones that rank highest, get access to perks. A weekly 1 hour video chat with the top 10, weekly 10 minute preview of what you’re working on for the top 50, 20% discount on merchandise for the top 200, etc.
An app that has a great idea for how to get people to actively discover new Music, engage with it, and feel part of the artist’s success is Tradiio. It gamifies Music discovery and lets users invest virtual coins in songs they believe in. This helps artists rise to prominence on the platform and earn rewards. If this platform evolves from a reward-based game, to a real economy where users can purchase coins and artists can cash out, it would be a good example of the type of company the new Music industry will be made up of. Just to mention some other exemplary companies for music’s future: look at Smule and Sonic Emotion.
More on Games
The Gaming industry got into the same mess, at the same time, that the Music industry got into, brought about by the fact that what they thought was their product could suddenly be communicated through networks at zero cost. A whole new Gaming industry emerged with the arrival of connected devices: smartphones. Instead of charging money for the game, they made the game free to play and highly social, and instead charged for a limited set of actions.
Music needs a new format that’s feature-oriented, rather than content-focused. The content remains central to the experience, but the interaction around the content is what brings in the money. Likewise, playback of recorded music will remain important in the future, but perhaps not as the part of the industry that rakes in the most important part of Creators’ incomes.
Examples
There are countless examples of companies pioneering the future of Music. From aforementioned Tradiio, to ones started by game developers, Music business serial entrepreneurs, and artists themselves. First let’s start with an example from another part of the entertainment industry.
Example: Affectiva & Portal Entertainment
The former is an emotion analysis startup spun out of MIT Media Lab in 2009. The latter is a studio which produces ‘movies’ for interactive devices. According to a recent article on Wired, using Affectiva‘s software, Portal Entertainment is creating a horror series that’s “exactly as scary as you want it to be”:
“The software will read your emotional reactions to the show in real time. Should your mouth turn down a second too long or your eyes squeeze shut in fright, the plot will speed along. But if they grow large and hold your interest, the program will draw out the suspense.”
Imagine applying that to music??Some companies are already closing in on that.
Example: Inception, by Hans Zimmer and RjDj
Music producer and film composer Hans Zimmer collaborated on an app for the Inception movie, with RjDj, a company that specializes in Context Aware Music and Augmented music, founded by one of the co-founders of last.fm, Michael Breidenbruecker. Hans Zimmer on the project:
“There’s a thing I’ve been searching for and I’ve been working on forever now, is a way to get beyond recorded music. To get beyond ‘you just download a piece of music and it’s just always the same’.”
The application they made draws information from the world around the user, and transforms it into fantastic music. It seems as if you’re being immersed in dreamlike worlds, as happens in the movie.
They continued their collaboration and made another app for The Dark Knight Rises. RjDj also created a Reactive Music game called Dimensions, which owes its name to the trippy effects of the Augmented Music that make it feel like you’ve just crossed into another dimension. The game is free-to-play, and offers in-app purchases to unlock new experiences or further augment existing ones.
I asked two of the people behind RjDj whether people are ready for adaptive music. This is what they had to say.
Michael Breidenbruecker:
“I think many of them are ready. Apps like Inception or Dark Night Rises show that people are really into this sonic experience. The problem is how this is presented packaged. I can tell you from experience that not many people hear the difference between 5 hours of generative music and 5 hours recorded music. So really… no one cares if your music changes all the time through an algorithm and never sounds the same or if [it] is a preproduced track. Music has to have a reason why it is dynamic and not linear… that’s why we sync it to real life.”
Robert Thomas:
“I think Inception especially proved that if the experience is delivered in a way that makes sense, perhaps within a bigger conceptual framework, then millions of people can understand it and really like it.
As for people understanding the depths and details of how reactive music changes. It is very very easy to lose a huge part of the audience here. I think its fair to say that only musicologists and very serious music listeners could pick out the ways in which detailed generative music is changing for instance. Making a reactive music experience meaningful requires that the listener can tangibly feel that the change in the music is linked to his / her activity or life in some direct and hopefully emotionally powerful way.
Often making linear music is about manipulating the emotional state of the listener into particular states of mind over time for dramatic effect. Reactive music poses a different set of possibilities – what if the music is manipulated by them / their emotional state? As a composer this is totally different – its like using a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun – you can make your music hit exactly the right spot for the moment.“
Adaptive soundtracks are actually quite common in games, where the Music transforms depending on the player’s absolute and relative position (it’s called Dynamic Music). Some developers are chucking all the other game elements aside to focus fully on that.
Example: Proteus
Proteus has been described as a non-game. The game (or ‘game’) was developed by one developer and one sound designer, and places you on a mystical island. There’s nothing there to kill, no need to score points, and you can’t die. All you have to do is to wander around the island to discover new areas and to enjoy the way objects around you influence the soundtrack. This is the literal embodiment of the phrase ‘soundscape’. The changing seasons, different weather conditions, time of day, and varying ecosystems all have an impact on the Music.
I asked David Kanaga, the game’s sound designer, whether this is something anyone could do, in order to understand whether this could become a more mainstream medium for Music:
“Yes, anyone could do it. It’s maybe even more natural than writing static music in a way. That said, very few people are doing it, and maybe it takes years of UNLEARNING, which maybe means everything needs to be played again, to stop fixating on what’s successful and beautiful in recorded music, in Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, to find the play aspect of those and to move on, to stop admiring recordings.. improvise only, this is the tactic that i’ve been practicing myself to try this unlearning.. no serious learning is needed, really, but the UNLEARNING is totally necessary.”
Example: Biophilia, by Bj?rk
In recent years many artists have taken to releasing albums as apps. Bj?rk had a particularly interesting take on it, releasing her album as a 3 dimensional galaxy that can be navigated and interacted with. The app even became part of MoMa?s collection.
Through the use of in-app purchases, the user can unlock new parts of the galaxy, which provide new Music to Interact with.
Example: Don’t Be Scared LP, by DJ Vadim
Ninja Tune veteran DJ Vadim released an ‘immersive album’, which allows users to interact with different elements of the song, recomposing it according to their own wishes. What better way to create a sense of Intimacy between your fans and your Music.
Example: Central Park (Listen to the Light), by BLUEBRAIN
Then there’s Bluebrain, a musical duo that produced their own apps, location-aware albums, one of which can only be used in New York’s Central Park. In a way it’s similar to Proteus, except in this case, the soundscape is mapped to physical locations rather than virtual.
Example: Weav
Recently a new music startup by one of the creators of Google Maps started making waves: Weav. Weav’s aim is to simply make music elastic. Unlike Spotify’s new feature which picks songs that match your tempo while running, songs on Weav’s platform will actually adjust to your pace. The team created tools for musicians to create dynamic music: you don’t just write the song, you also program rules for it to recompose itself and adjust to different tempos. Co-founder Lars Rasmussen:
“We believe that as our lives become increasingly digital, and as our increasingly powerful mobile devices play greater and greater roles in our lives, having a song that can change and adapt — in real time — to what you are doing will become increasingly important. And delightful. This is why we built Weav.”
Conclusion
If you’re waiting for disruption in the music industry, don’t look at the big platforms like iTunes or Spotify. They belong in the Age of the Recording.
Look at platforms that offer actual Interactivity, Immediacy, Intimacy, and Involvement. Now more than ever can Creators help give shape to future formats of Music, and to new ways to connect the listener to the Music.
Imagine Music in the Age of the Internet of Things.
Music may be static, but it doesn’t have to be. And the relation between Creator and Fan certainly shouldn’t be.
Filed Under: business models, connections, culture, fans, features, music, music industry, recording industry, streaming
Comments on “Sell Features, Not Songs”
Stop telling people what to do. Thanks
Re: Re:
Stop telling people what to do. Thanks
Where exactly is Bas doing that? Did you read beyond the title?
If you don’t want to listen to the suggestions of someone with a lot of knowledge about the music industry and where it’s headed that’s your prerogative.
If I was a professional musician, I would definitely pay attention to what Bas has to say, but that’s just me.
Re: Re: Re:
Of course he doesn’t want Bas to tell people what to do. The last thing the gatekeepers and other advocates of how the industry has traditionally function is grunt workers who know how to bypass the middlemen.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Bah, should read “The last thing the gatekeepers and other advocates of how the industry has traditionally functioned want is grunt workers who know how to bypass the middlemen”.
Re: Re:
Don’t tell me what to do.
Re: Does this advice cut both ways?
I’m going to assume that your meaning is “Don’t you dare tell Creators of Songs (writers and musicians, and disturbingly, publishers) what to do! It’s their God-Given Right to Charge You an Agreed-Upon Price for their Most Sacred Creation of Music!”
That seems a little short-sighted, and given the sketchy history of popular music distribution channels (payola scandals, price fixing cartels, funding state-level copyright violation investigations, UCC-2B), one has to view it as a little hypocritical. You’re telling all the Non-Rightsholders to go pound sand, the Creation Class will take care of all that, you don’t need to bother your purty little heads with the messy details! But we see, from recent history, that the same Rightsholders fix prices, raise barriers to entry in the martket, and rip off the actual artists and musicians in favor of giving lawyers and executives money, hookers and blow.
So, does it cut both ways? That is, I won’t bother buying your bullshit popular music if you keep your filthy, white-out covered lawyer hands off of my open source software?
I bet it doesn’t.
Re: Re:
When your business model degenerates into taxing people for doing something that costs very little, like streaming or downloading bits, it is time to re-examine how you make money.
Re: Re:
Support people not laws
The Song is paramount
Prior to recording Music didn’t belong to everyone, sheet music was a huge industry. Hit songs originated from the music halls and emanated outward to peoples parlours. This ephemeral music has not been lost though, people still gather at parties and sing around a guitar or piano. Granted not nearly as often as at the turn of the last centuary, but it’s far from lost.
What recorded music gave us was the sound of an orchestra in our home, or trumpets and choirs. It gave us a musical experience that is richer in a lot of ways than Nana clunking away on the piano.
What was central in both cases, though, was the song. The song is what you listen to again and again. It doesn’t have to be the same every time, live version, cover version, guitar at a party version – the song, as they say, remains the same.
As exciting as a new interactive music may be, it will never replace the song. Chill out rooms and sunday morning comedowns may never be the same again, but where else do people listen to 5 hours of music.
It comes as no surprise that “not many people hear the difference between 5 hours of generative music and 5 hours recorded music”. How many times would you have to listen to a 5 hour piece of ‘linear’ music before you could memorise the structure of it? Many times. So how would you ever know that one 5 hour piece was human or algorithm, so long as the algorithm isn’t unnaturally clunky.
Re: The Song is paramount
yes, but since the invention of recording, you cannot do so in a public place without paying a collection society. Further they generally take the attitude that any public performance of music, even CC and public domain songs, still requires them to be paid.
Re: The Song is paramount
Hey Anonymous, I agree!
The song is important. However, the song itself can become slightly adaptive also. I don’t mean to say music will become a randomly generated soundscape… There will still be songs, there will be recomposition rules. Songs can be 99% every time you hear them, and many listeners might not even notice the slight variations based on whatever factors.
What I mean to say is: you’re right, and I think these concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Yeah!!!
Anything that helps to destroy the music industry as it is today and the players that have not only stolen from the consumers but have sold their souls for money , the greed has created an environment where music is no longer as personal any more but a quick fix and then forgotten one hit wonders are created on demand by the studios who know exactly what the consumer will buy.
But they don’t want to sell the same content all the time as then people will grow restless and might look for their music fix elsewhere so they tweak the recipe they have created, change the words and alter the rhythm very carefully trying to keep it as close to the one recipe that sells. Whereas music is supposed to be about learning and growth. Taylor Swift is a perfect example, so many songs about her ex boyfriends ex friends etc because that sells, I would not be surprised if she starts creating albums that are about her successful relationships and those that she has lost that she has real feelings about.
Musicians have sold their souls and are no longer creating art but creating the same things over and over and over again and the consumers are sucked in to paying over and over for the same thing, or very close to the same thing.
Re: Yeah!!!
An automated algorithm that creates music will NOT destroy the music industry. It will create one without stars and performers as we know them, but it won’t kill the music industry.
Nor will it stop musicians sitting at pianos with a notebook from writing songs – wether or not you value that as worthwhile.
Re: Re: Yeah!!!
The only reason that the studios have been flooding youtube with their content is because they know if they don’t then other content creators will continue to do it free of copyright and their content would start to take over the supposed top 40 charts, actually you might have seen how studios are embracing youtube, even going so far as to allow some new musicians to enter the american idols contest. They can ignore youtube and its free access to content but it would just have meant their death came much faster than it is coming.
Sadly youtube allowed the studios to use youtube as advertising media, which the studios will stop doing as soon as they have made it hard for normal content creators to release their content there free for everyone.
Why All The Caps?
Is that just what this Creator Person does?
Wonderful Idea!
I think I speak for everyone when I say that I totally can’t wait for the opportunity to purchase my first in-song, downloadable-content drum solo.
Baby…bathwater…?
I get it. I agree. But.
The non-ephemerality of music is also an *enormous* feature.
I love live music. I love new music. But, one of my favourite albums is one my 60’s mum was playing to me when I was a *toddler*.
Surprisingly, these songs sound different when the band performs them now! Assuming you could persuade them to do so, the astonishingly talented singer has anyway retired; his voice has gone.
I want *that* recording.
Re: Baby…bathwater…?
They’ll live side by side, so sure. I just expect the music format for default consumption to shift to adaptive (songs can even be 99.5% the same).
But yeah, static recordings have a place.
Sheet music didn’t go anywhere either.
Go fuck yourself Bas Grasmayer
This article does make a good point that the recording industry has made music and the music industry far less than in can and should be by focusing on only one type of music making for making profits and so made the definition of legitimate music and legitimate musician limiting and suffocating to many types of music and musicians that did not fit that model.
So tell me Bas why should we replace the limiting model of recorded music with the limiting model of neurobeats? Because the tittle of this article is misleading as you are not interested in all the various ways features can be made around music production and listening.
For music production you offer only one feature: the gamifying of an artists fandom so that the same bullshit skinnerbox strategy that is used for free to play mobile trash games is adapted to be used on a musicians fandom so that the profits of producing music can be maximized. This is just the new spin on the record industries model of maximizing profits which itself was a new spin on the sheet music industries model of maximizing profits.
How does this expand what commercial music can be if you are just poring the definition of it from one culture of gatekeeping and containment to another?
What about live concerts over Twitch or other streaming services where people pay for the artists performance and interaction in real time?
Or how about the various music artists that are independent workers and provide making music on demand the same way some some fanart and deviantart artists provide their work for making on demand posters, images and comics?
For music listening you also offer only one feature: music that adapts and adjusts to the listeners state of being. Tell me if most people can’t tell the difference between 5 hours of recorded music and 5 hours of adaptive music why does adaptive music have more value over recorded music?
Also since the music is adaptive how does it adapt to the listener?
Does the listener set the mood he/she/zie/their/it want the music to take them to?
Or does the manufacturer of the music design the way the music adapts to any user by using the cloud?
And if it is the designer who decides which adaptations the music does and doesn’t use what are the safeguards against abuse of that power other than the author would not abuse his/her/zis/theirs/it’s own art for financial and other gains?
How is the buzz surrounding neurobeats in the early parts of this century different from the buzz surrounding music records in the early parts of the last century?
Of and “Age of the Internet of Things” is just the new version of that old buzzword “The Information Superhighway”.
Re: Go fuck yourself Bas Grasmayer
No need to get your blood pressure up. Nobody cares what Bas or any other tech douche’s opinions on the music industry are.
Tech has run the music world for 15 years now. And look at what it got us.
Re: Re: Go fuck yourself Bas Grasmayer
It got Cary Sherman and Mitch Bainwol richer than ever before. What’s your point?
Re: Re: Go fuck yourself Bas Grasmayer
“And look at what it got us.”
Yes, it got us a wider variety of better music than I have ever seen before in my life.
Re: Go fuck yourself Bas Grasmayer
Hey, you have some good questions, and I want to address them, despite the unnecessary expletive in your subject line.
This is not necessarily about neurobeats. Those form a small part of this, and a part which is pretty difficult to monetise for mosts artists for the time being.
I am very interested in that. That’s what I do on a day-to-day basis. I just wanted to put the perspective a little bit further. What music will be 20-40 years from now, starts today.
Great. Because that worked. They found something which was better than what was there before, and they found a way to massively grow their industry.
Earlier in your comment you mention I suggest only one feature: this is false. I get what you mean, but that’s not what a feature is. There are many features mentioned, but indeed one paradigm: offer users an experience that’s better than free by selling features. Give them a real reason to pay. We have computers in our pockets more powerful than the computers on our desks 5 years ago. That’s radical. We need to utilise this opportunity.
Great business models, that I expect to stay around and live alongside adaptive music.
That’s not 1 feature – that could be a huge range of features with a massive amount of different applications (I don’t mean ‘apps’). Also, this is not about adjusting to the listener’s state of being necessarily: it can adjust to weather, to distance from destination, to amount and type of ambient noise, it can be interactive so people can play around with it, etc.
The point about not being able to tell the difference that Michael Breidenbruecker was making, doesn’t mean that people don’t have a better experience – it means people don’t know if they’ve been listening to adaptive or recorded, and nothing more. His point also serves as a direction for anyone thinking of producing music in this direction: you have to find a reason for your music to be adaptive. I think that’s very important.
Features! Those first free questions: that’s where you’re uncovering the many potential features around this type of music. You can get creative with it – there’s no 1 way to do it.
As for the last part: contracts. Although I consider the designer and composer to be the same person. The composer will need to work with teams, possibly. And teams are governed by the same thing bands and their management are governed by, so once more: contracts.
This is an interesting question, mostly because it reveals you have complicated concerns about today’s music industry and the future thereof. I would love to hear your perspective on it.
Just sell me a file
Ugh… Just sell me a flac or mp3 file regardless of where I happen to live in the world. I don’t want this interactive “app” rubbish. I just want to buy a DRM free file.
where's the artist
yes music becomes less static. this is why so many people are doing music using Ableton Live, Garageband, using iPads. and yes, a lot of these people can not play an instrument. a lot of HipHop is made by sampling stuff to an MPC/sampler. the art of sampling, remixing.
you also have generative music. will become bigger as well in the future.
but there’s also this thing called The Artist. and that will never go away because we want to have people who give us something we consider as perfect. which should be treated as-if. weather it’s a book or a piece of music.
I can create cool sounding loops and you might be able to create some interesting tracks out of them just by dragging those into Garageband or Ableton Live. but I can also play something on my guitar. or sample things and play for it for hours and hours. put the time into it almost nobody will ever put into to.
art is never the easiest way out. that’s why we need art. as-if.
What concepts! At last a nice "thoughty" piece! ... That leaves one uneasy like walking past the "special ed" room.
And the comments adding on taking to next level! What a great demonstration of why this does not and will never work!
Oy. It’s long, give ya that.
I’ll take you seriously for a minute and ‘splain: your notions are at best doomed because kids today don’t want to put out ANY effort. YOU are living in the past, surely from a different culture that bears NO relation to today. Music is not a consuming interest, it’s just background noise competing with more than one television and incoherent persons yelling and ‘splosions during texts and voice on phones.
What’s stopping people from making their own music right now? — No one wants to put in the years of work! — You’re just promising a bigger version of those toy guitars that run through some riffs with just a swipe.
PS: intentionally late because to not be yet again target for Techdirt’s fanboy-trolls to ad hom that would simulate interest in your text.
PPS: after seeing you so eager for comments that you snark back at an AC, I READ through a SECOND time SLOW, and find you’re not only wronger, but “stream of consciousness” babbling about the wonders to come for Consumers. Anyone can do that.
Later yet: The Creator / Consumer gap looks bad after mention of live music. You focus on prying money away from Consumers rather than inspiring them to be Artists.
Not directly connected: the most frightening people around are those who see only good coming from “The Internet Of Things” and its total surveillance.
Re: What concepts! At last a nice "thoughty" piece! ... That leaves one uneasy like walking past the "special ed" room.
DMCA voted, you lying sack of shit.
Re: What concepts! At last a nice "thoughty" piece! ... That leaves one uneasy like walking past the "special ed" room.
…”stream of consciousness” babbling…
Wait. Did you seriously just criticize someone else for a putting out a “babbling stream of consciousness”? Hilarious.
Since Pirate Mike spammed this over to SuprBay and it actually got TWO replies...
…from 52 current views (two of which are mine), gives us a chance to compare the views of a real live pirate to Techdirt fanboys whose #1 concern is helping Masnick (here, by NOT commenting on this woozy dreck).
https://pirates-forum.org/Thread-Sell-Features-Not-Songs
connor17 Moderator Last Active: Today Threads: 24 Posts: 492
If everything is art then nothing is art. Music video games are just that, games.
“Prior to the invention of the record, Music was far more participative”
Prior to records (and the radio), 99% of the population didn’t have access to music.
“I believe these are natural characteristics of Music, that got temporarily pushed into the background in the age of Mass Media”
Hipster bullshit.
“Brian Eno, ambient-pioneer and creator of the famous Windows 95 start-up sound “
LOL
“You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?”
And then what about movies? and books? You mean people read Anna Karerina over and over again? What retards!!!
Every medium is a transition to the next medium”
LOL
“A particularly good example of the aforementioned elements coming together is Minecraft”
LOL
“One can create dynamics of social competition within a fanbase”
That’s one of the most retarded things I’ve heard lately.
“Look at the gaming industry”
No thanks. In the good old days you could hear hours and hours of music using the FM radio, mostly live concerts broadcasts, so every concert was different, nothing “static” there. Now you can do that with hundreds of radios across the world. People playing with the smartphone are not creating shit, they are just playing with the smatphone.
I see your Bjork and raise one Beethoven: [something embedded]
Heh, heh. Clearly, “connor17” is MUCH closer to my views than to those of the fanboys in this walled garden.
What concepts! At last a nice "thoughty" piece! ... That leaves one uneasy like walking past the "special ed" room.
And the comments adding on taking to next level! What a great demonstration of why this does not and will never work!
Oy. It’s long, give ya that.
I’ll take you seriously for a minute and ‘splain: your notions are at best doomed because kids today don’t want to put out ANY effort. YOU are living in the past, surely from a different culture that bears NO relation to today. Music is not a consuming interest, it’s just background noise competing with more than one television and incoherent persons yelling and ‘splosions during texts and voice on phones.
What’s stopping people from making their own music right now? — No one wants to put in the years of work! — You’re just promising a bigger version of those toy guitars that run through some riffs with just a swipe.
PS: intentionally late because to not be yet again target for Techdirt’s fanboy-trolls to ad hom that would simulate interest in your text.
PPS: after seeing you so eager for comments that you snark back at an AC, I READ through a SECOND time SLOW, and find you’re not only wronger, but “stream of consciousness” babbling about the wonders to come for Consumers. Anyone can do that.
Later yet: The Creator / Consumer gap looks bad after mention of live music. You focus on prying money away from Consumers rather than inspiring them to be Artists.
Not directly connected: the most frightening people around are those who see only good coming from “The Internet Of Things” and its total surveillance.
What concepts! At last a nice "thoughty" piece! ... That leaves one uneasy like walking past the "special ed" room.
And the comments adding on taking to next level! What a great demonstration of why this does not and will never work!
Oy. It’s long, give ya that.
I’ll take you seriously for a minute and ‘splain: your notions are at best doomed because kids today don’t want to put out ANY effort. YOU are living in the past, surely from a different culture that bears NO relation to today. Music is not a consuming interest, it’s just background noise competing with more than one television and incoherent persons yelling and ‘splosions during texts and voice on phones.
What’s stopping people from making their own music right now? — No one wants to put in the years of work! — You’re just promising a bigger version of those toy guitars that run through some riffs with just a swipe.
PS: intentionally late because to not be yet again target for Techdirt’s fanboy-trolls to ad hom that would simulate interest in your text.
PPS: after seeing you so eager for comments that you snark back at an AC, I READ through a SECOND time SLOW, and find you’re not only wronger, but “stream of consciousness” babbling about the wonders to come for Consumers. Anyone can do that.
Later yet: The Creator / Consumer gap looks bad after mention of live music. You focus on prying money away from Consumers rather than inspiring them to be Artists.
Not directly connected: the most frightening people around are those who see only good coming from “The Internet Of Things” and its total surveillance.
Re: What concepts! At last a nice "thoughty" piece! ... That leaves one uneasy like walking past the "special ed" room.
Fuck off, spambot.