[baandam]

I we have already seen this play out in music though.

Computers let anyone record music when it use to cost thousands of dollars to record music.

The results have been a disaster outside the top 1% of music makers. Such a dramatic change that anyone under 30 doesn't even know what has been lost at this point. Music as a whole is laughably less creative as "popular" / pop music established total dominance. The money all flows upward that use to be much more dispersed.

[rcarr]

I used to feel the same way but I eventually came to realise that there’s tons of good music being created, it’s the social aspect of music that has been destroyed.

Individual algorithm recommendations have subsumed sub cultures. Music used to be part of both your individual and group identity, it would influence what your wore, what you read, what you thought, who you hanged out with and what bars you visited. Technology has eroded the music press and sky high rents and fitness culture (not as many people drinking) means lots of gig venues and bars have closed down. These were the glue that built the subcultures up. You used to have the mainstream plus a few sub cultures that would evolve each decade e.g mods, rockers, hippies, metal heads, punks, new wave, hair metal, brit pop, emos, indie rockers etc. All of these ended up getting absorbed into the long tail so you now have the main stream and then everything else, with nothing in the everything else category really able to attract enough people to it in order to form era defining subculture like the days of old.

Combined with the sheer amount of music being created, all of this makes it harder to find music you actually want to hear. Your friends are all listening to different stuff so you don’t get many good in person recommendations anymore and what’s left of the music media are struggling to stay afloat and resorting to all kinds of stuff like NME doing movie reviews. The algorithms are hit and miss and search engines are getting worse and worse. So you become more and more at the mercy of chance, hoping that somewhere you stumble upon a review or a blog post, a subreddit or a song that somehow leads you to some good new music. But the reward to effort ratio often makes it harder to justify the time investment. And however good the music is, it’s not as enjoyable when you don’t have a group of people to share it with.

[rcarr]

Coincidentally, just came across this which is a nice take:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/dec/05/has-spotify-re...

[keiferski]

I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of niche music makers and a ton of ways to find them...infinitely more than there were a few decades ago. You just have to go looking for them. Which frankly isn't even that difficult with YouTube and SoundCloud. Maybe the musicians aren't making millions, but the creativity is definitely there.

[CuriouslyC]

Sorry but no, this is completely the wrong take. Popular music is less diverse today for the same reason that half the movies released now are Marvel - art is more commoditized, and businesses are more data driven, with the shift towards more public companies also playing a role, as they can't take as many risks as private companies.

What cheap music production tools have done is allow niche subcultures to create music that actually sounds good. Punk, metal and early hip hop all grew from people sharing rare tapes that were poorly produced and sounded like shit, but were a breath of creative fresh air. Now people's unusual creative divergences are stream-able and have production quality close to that of stuff on major labels.

[pixl97]

This seems like a failure in statistics.

Lets say in 1 year 10 songs are created and 2 of them are 'creative'. You'd think that 20% of music is creative.

Now lets say we have the production explosion and now in 1 year 100 songs are created and 4 of them are creative. You would think creativity has fallen off a cliff when it has really doubled.

In addition trying to compare with the previous payola ridden system were winners and losers systematically chosen by a wealthy cabal seems rather asinine. It only worked because there was a limited number of radio stations mostly. Even if production costs stayed high, distribution costs dropping would have changed the model dramatically anyway.