[nluken]

I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these platforms are neither neutral nor meritocracies and don't care about the content that they host. Sounds obvious, yes, but reading about the concrete consequences of this fact, namely the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively, definitely got me to reexamine how I was using Spotify and consuming music in general. It really drove home the fact that some people treat art as a fungible object, and that these folks are the people deciding what music we're hearing unless we really make an effort to seek it out on our own.

Is the model profitable? For some. Good for society? Perhaps not.

EDIT: also want to concur with others here that the problem here isn't necessarily AI but how we're selecting what music we're listening to. In the book, Pelly specifically identifies channels like Chilled Cow as being part of the watering down of this genre, since they have a similar incentive to play music at as low a cost to the channel as possible versus playing the best music available to them.

[bane]

The "post-radio" world is a weird one. An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide. Sure songs would get overplayed, but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes.

As much as I love the fact that teens these days are growing up with the same songs I grew up with as a teen, I also view it as a problem. The shared cultural experience that radio generated was powerful.

We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste. An algorithm might find similar songs based on musical features, but the same sounding song over and over is boring. AI just makes more boring songs because it's largely looking to replicate popular song features as well. This can be passable for purely background music meant to fill space with non-distracting sound, but is terrible for active listening.

Radio was good at mixing in variety within the confines of the genre and audience expectations. Heck, many channels use to program to support the mood during the commute and work hours, and outside of those main audience times would allow the DJs to get a little wild sometimes. Growing up the only place you could catch early EDM was on weekend late-night broadcasts on the local alt-rock station.

It's not like radio of a sort does still exist - just download the GNOME Shortwave client and you can drown in channels there. It's just not powered by the marketing that supports Spotify.

edit - I think it's interesting that the comments I'm seeing below this so far are talking about recent radio. I should have been more clear. In the U.S. markets at least Radio "died" during a great consolidation wave in the earl 2000s when Clearchannel and a few other media companies slurped up all the local channels, switched their formats and started playing consolidated playlists.

It really did used to be the case that your local station DJs were local brands, each with their own curation of songs. Some stations would even have local music festivals and were big promoters of local talent. I spent many evenings calling up the local station to request songs to be slipped into the playlist, sometimes to promote somebody I knew and get them some airtime.

[Gud]

I couldn't disagree more.

Most radio stations only played the most blandest junk music, even from great artists. Seems they would rotate the top 3 songs even from the absolute most popular musicians. I must have heard Fear of the Dark by Iron Maiden >500 times on the rock stations in Stockholm. The Prowler? 0. Maybe some 3am DJ could play some cool songs on occasion, like you said.

There was always very little variety.

[Retric]

Always extends before you were born and things used to be different. Even fairly recently the exceptions were awesome. Over 25 years ago a friend setup a fairly expensive satellite dish system specifically to be able to listen to WFMU. It’s a NYC station he loved that was being rebroadcast for people who left the area.

The station wasn’t something I was particularly into but nobody is doing that to listen to Clearchannel crap.

[yellowapple]

Most, but not all. There are still stations out there bucking those trends.

A local example is "Easy 104.1" here in Reno. I stumbled on it by complete accident about a month ago, and after said month's worth of daily listening I haven't heard a single song played twice. Everything from funk to R&B to alternative rock to adult contemporary to new wave and everything in between, from the 1960's to the 2000's. Songs I've never heard before, songs I've last heard years ago, songs that I last heard yesterday. Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers' Dance" came on today and that's a song that'd been playing in my head for multiple decades with no idea whatsoever what it's called or any of the words in it (eliminating any possibility of looking it up); now I've finally found it thanks to some random radio station that plays everything that the other stations don't. And if that ain't enough, the "commercial breaks" usually are just one commercial - or hell, often half of a commercial.

[Projectiboga]

Before the mid 1980s radio was much different. Basically MTV started the era of music industry consolidation and the Billboard charts getting corrupted. Before the mid 80s there was more regional music and the charts pulled from most cities. Then they switched to just 8 or 12 markets and incorporated other factors that allowed for a #1 based on Corporate influence.

[vrighter]

To be honest, I only ever turn the radio in my car on once a month or so, specifically because of this reason. You listen for one hour, you're all set for the month. You've heard everything that channel will play all month long. On repeat, with ads every 2 or 3 songs.

[devilbunny]

Since you are, I assume, Swedish, this has essentially no relevance to your life, but if you get bored, and you have some way to access it, Mississippi Public Broadcasting made a movie ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31805076/ ) about an FM station that broadcast from 1968-81 in the modest-sized market of Jackson, Mississippi (uh, about 250-300k people at the time).

Because of the way a lot of stuff around broadcasting works, a small-ish life insurance company ended up with a 100 kW FM station (along with their existing TV and AM stations), a lawsuit challenging their AM, FM, and TV licenses over their (implicitly and explicitly racist) behavior, and as a result, a bunch of very diverse DJ's, mostly in their 20s, with almost no oversight.

When the station was sold, the new owners immediately switched to country, which AFAIK it still is. The fact that local bands at the time wrote songs about it should give you a hint. Yes, the movie is a big late-Boomer/early-GenX reminiscence-fest, but there's a lot of interesting detail there. The DJ's partnered up with producers, bringing big shows to a relatively small city. Some started a record store. One ended up in charge of organizing group tours to concerts in near-ish cities (still 3 hours away in any direction) because, as he put it in the movie, he had a better weed connection than anyone else at the station and so could actually bring enough for everyone.

[iancmceachern]

I couldn't disagree more.

It sounds like you were listening to top 40 stations exclusively.

Gotta check out the good stuff, stations like KBCO in Colorado or any of the more local, music focused stations

[davidalayachew]

But then it is no longer an apples to apples comparison. This is Spotify. Spotify is the embodiment of the top radio stations idea.

By that metric, Spotify is actually doing better than they did, if memory serves.

[iancmceachern]

Spotify is both in one.

The modern equivalent would be a curated stream, station, etc.

[butlike]

Primetime was very different than late night

[dingnuts]

yeah it's a hilarious complaint seeing as most radio stations have been a playlist on shuffle with algorithmically determined tracks and no real DJ for over twenty years. It's not different at all from most terrestrial radio. (shout-out to KEXP and KUTX for bucking the trend)

[svnt]

GP is talking about more than 20 years ago, I think.

You could time-travel into the future by moving your radii from somewhere else to a musical cultural center like New York or Seattle. People would pay for subscription services to listen to radio stations from those areas.

[mrgoldenbrown]

Some of us on HN are old enough to have grown up on radio more than 20 years ago. It's not ancient history, it's within our lifetime. We experienced the consolidation and genericization you are complaining about personally as we saw our favorite local stations get ruined.

[vohk]

What's really unfortunate is how archaic licensing models makes this nearly impossible to even attempt to address.

Historically radio worked because their was actually money in the advertising, but also because radio was inherently regional. You could license content at a rate that made sense for your station's reach.

Now it's trivial to broadcast over the web to a huge audience but the floor has fallen out on monetization. Podcasts and streaming both work because they don't rely on licensed content, but music can't make the jump.

[RiverCrochet]

> An algorithm selecting songs for streaming audio just isn't the same as the kind of curated-for-genre/channel experience that radio used to provide.

Ad-supported radio eventually guarantees that only genres with desired-by-advertiser demographics exist on the radio. So it's hard to say if any curation radio was ever doing was out of love for music, or the genre, or simply to keep a certain timeslot valuable.

I will say up until about 1997 I feel things were meeting in the middle fairly well. Radio was cool up until then. In the early 90's at least where I was from there were 8 or 9 radio stations of various genres, so lots to hear.

> We're lost somewhat in quantity now and there's really nobody who's helping form and shape taste

This is what freedom looks like. But not everyone wants it. AI will be the thing to keep them happy and contained at some point and that is the prize for not caring. These same types of people would not have cared about the difference between Queen and Nickelback and probably have barely really listed to any song on the radio other than a few lyrics that resonate with them.

[piltdownman]

>but radio also did a pretty good job of keeping that absolute tripe off the air. Good radio stations would also surface good local bands and cater to regional tastes.

If ever there was a more censorious medium, I have yet to see it. Not only content dictating _what_ could be played, it dictated _how_ it could be played. This wasn't just about contemporary HipHop and vulgarity - even instrumental songs like Nick Wrays' 1958 song "Rumble" were banned from radio play.

The list of songs banned by the BBC is a fantastic read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_banned_by_the_BB...

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Songs banned by the BBC were banned by the management heirarchy.

Songs played by the BBC were, for the most part, chosen by the DJs (particularly true after 19:00.

[touristtam]

Internet radio still exists like actual radio streaming online and online only radio (such as radio paradise). With the latter you often can find community around then, voting on what comes next and the financement model are very varied. I know I rather spent the equivalent of a Spotify subscription as donation to independent radio instead of suffering the crass absurdity of an algorithm ala Facebook.

[goosejuice]

Do you have any proof that radio DJs are less prevalent now than in the past? I'm having trouble finding evidence of that.

[miah_]

Clearchannel (which became IheartRadio) owns most radio stations (>850) in the US. They fired hundreds of DJ's in ~2011.

https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...

When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

In the early 80's living in Brooklyn, I would tune into WKTU at 6:00PM every night just to hear

"Hello. This is Rosko. WKTU, New York." And then he'd segue into "Always and Forever" by Heatwave.

It was so scripted that at one point I started listening closely to see if it was recorded, but there were enough intonation and pacing changes that it was obvious he was doing it live.

Haven't lived in NYC in over 30 years but I miss that station.

[musicale]

I guess Clearchannel/IheartRadio is sort of a private equity "success" story because it is still operating.

[goosejuice]

Sure but there's so many internet and college radio stations out there. Even with mainstream consolidation I would find it surprising that there are less overall now than ever before.

I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.

[Retric]

Internet DJ’s can’t feed off each other to produce regional music. It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.

College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s.

40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.

I'm not interested in regional music or a regional scene.

The music on any given SomaFM station is not "a sea of mediocrity". It's generally excellent genre-specific stuff (old and new), and I love it (if I'm somewhat into the genre).

I can appreciate that others may not, but please don't over-generalize or assert that your preferences are the only ones out there.

[goosejuice]

So the problem is globalization? What do you mean by regional music?

Genres span borders now. Look at the Midwest emo / mathrock scene and how it made its way to Japan and Taiwan.

We can romanticise the old days of radio but local scenes aren't dead and these little genres are still going and new ones are popping up.

[svnt]

There are 33k broadcast stations in the USA [0], and 11k people employed as disc jockeys [1]

There were 12k broadcast stations in the 1980s [2]

Given we can assume little to no automation, or at least a DJ human making sure the equipment didn’t break, and 8 hour shifts, that suggests 36k people were employed as radio DJs in the 1980s if we only count their time on air, assuming a 24 hour broadcast. If we include their other duties, probably the total DJ time resource required would increase, and so would the number of employed DJs.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-24-1034A1.pdf

https://www.zippia.com/disc-jockey-jobs/demographics/

https://usinfo.org/enus/media/overview/press11.html?utm_sour...

[bane]

Nice analysis, but maybe still missing some things. e.g. it's not clear that "DJ" here is professional radio-DJs vs dancehall/wedding etc. which tend to be small single-person businesses in an entirely different function.

A good radio-DJ might be hired to fill a key block of time in a major metro. They may select to play a local band's new song during evening rush hour and suddenly 3 million new people know about it instantly moving them up the charts. They were just as much a part of the tastemaking stream as the labels and often provided interesting color commentary, local community info, places for meet and greets, upcoming concert info, and so on.

I live in a top-10 metro in the U.S. and I think it's very telling that the FM dial mostly plays pre-2000 music, with very little commentary by DJs if any between commercial breaks. They may as well just be a streaming internet feed pumped through an antenna. Some stations just play the same songs I remember from middle/high school decades ago and they aren't even advertising themselves as "classic" or "nostalgia" in any way.

Once the big consolidation events happened, it seems like the ability for popular music to really get ahold of the zeitgeist died with it and now tastemaking seems to be almost as much a function of push by labels and artists/influencers than a pull-and-present by people sitting in curation seats.

Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.

[svnt]

Yes, I agree with your statements. This was a quick attempt to roughly bound the problem. Comment I responded to was surprised that the field had shrunk, I feel this clearly shows it has shrunk at least by a factor of three, but yes, probably more anecdotally as I also live in a large metro area and the only live radio DJs are very niche or very syndicated.

[goosejuice]

> Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.

Man, I read stuff like this and it's just so far out of touch it blows my mind. Let me introduce you to the internet. You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.

[bane]

Right, but you aren't really acknowledging four realities:

1 - 90% of everything is crap.

2 - > if you actually make an effort so now I have to be the curator! But I don't have time to sift through the 90% of crap. That's the point somebody else used to get paid to separate the creme from the top. You may have and unlimited amount of low value time to dedicate to listening to thousands of artists and tens of thousands of songs, but I certainly don't.

3 - even among curators, 90% of them aren't any good at it either, which is why, even if you shared your personal playlist of your very carefully curated list of songs that you spent 2000 hours last year carefully putting together, I'm more than likely to not like it myself. Being able to find good music, and then find an audience for your curation that is able to connect millions of people to those previous unknown is also a skill.

> You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort. 4 - then where are your multiple times a year new breakthrough artists that show up out of nowhere, dominate the charts for two weeks then are subsumed by newer geniuses? The charts are slammed full of artists who've been top of their game for 10-20 even 30 years now. It's the same old artists over and over, but that pales in comparison to the before times when you'd get something new and big and hit big every week.

I'm looking right now at the U.S. top-40 pop charts and there is on it this week -- no shit get this: Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Charli XCX, Akon, Alphaville, Kendrick Lamar, Ariana Grande, and a few more that, let's face it have careers that are nearing drinking age in the U.S. Great artists all, but that used to be the age music shifted up-frequency to the oldies channel in the past.

If you disappeared from the planet in 2005 and showed back up today, you'd feel that the list was familiar. Where are your endless parade of geniuses on the top-40? We could have tight-beamed these old artists' entire discographies to Alpha Centauri and Back and they'd still be relevant and dominating the charts.

[goosejuice]

Excellent work. Doesn't touch on the great change that the internet brought, which admittedly isn't clear from my original question :(

Wonder if those Zippia estimates include internet radio. Imagine it misses quite a bit given how difficult it would be to break down streamers on every platform.

[svnt]

If you are including streamers writ large, I would argue we are no longer really talking about the same thing. If we are talking about just internet radio, I would bet any paid, full time DJs there are intended to be included in the Zippia number.

There were essentially no video game DJs in the 1980s, though, so maybe what we seek from what media is just as responsible for the shift.

[goosejuice]

The original comment was referring to human tastemakers in contrast to algorithmically generated playlists.

It's this segment that I would have high doubts to have decreased even with the prevalence of infinite playlists.

Edit: Basically I don't agree with the premise that the way we consume music today is any less local or curated. There's just been a shift in the way we consume.

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively

I disagree with this assertion and find it cynical. The golden age of radio was a far more 'aesthetic flattening' experience. And yet we wax nostalgic about it all the time. I think there are good things that come about from less than ideal situations. Back then there were next to zero ways for your art to get noticed, but on the flip side the shared experience of having only a handful of 'hit' songs still had its merits.

These days distribution costs have all but disappeared, so the barriers to being heard are far lower than ever before. Yes greasy corps like Spotify will continue trying to take their cut from every angle possible even if it dilutes the pool, but that's nothing new. So instead of making no money and being heard by no one, bands continue making no money but people actually have a chance of discovering their music. SoundCloud, YouTube, streaming services... it has never been easier to find and listen to music.

Consequently have we ever had a time of more diverse musical tastes? I don't think so.

[bazmattaz]

I understand it’s trendy these days to shit on Spotify but when I read about this practice it kind of seems like a non-story. Spotify are adding low cost tracks to their curated playlists (which are usually quite boring) to save themselves some money. If you don’t like this practice just don’t listen to their curated playlists. There are so many better user generated playlists out there.

[dehrmann]

Something I've mulled over in the past is what a market-driven pricing model for streams would look like. Newer songs are generally worth more than older songs, and lean-in listening costs more because the user actually wants to hear a specific song, while in lean-back listening, anything with a similar vibe works.

It's probably a good thing it's hard to pull off because you'd see Taylor Swift streams going for 10 cents and aspiring artists paying you $0.0001 to listen to their work in the background.

[bazmattaz]

Sure that would be nice but how do you know what music is lean in/back music?

[dehrmann]

Active song selection and playlist engagement.

[currymj]

the curated playlists used to be incredibly good.

the initial release of Discover Weekly 10 years ago gave everyone such uncanny recommendations that it was a cultural event, people were talking about it, it was written up in major newspapers. Apple Music had just released a few months before and was a serious threat to Spotify, so Discover Weekly changed the trajectory of the company.

It was also technologically interesting because it was one of the first times that a recommender system incorporated deep learning (on the actual song audio) in addition to collaborative filtering.

It was really amazing! Now instead, they are shoveling whatever garbage costs them the least. Depressing.

[bazmattaz]

In the book though she doesn’t talk about discovery weekly being tainted by these low budget tracks. It’s only the curated playlists

[DiscourseFan]

I have gotten to the point where I only listen to music now at live performances. Expensive, yes, but streaming music has made it dull and meaningless. I went to so many great underground shows in college and music was something I could feel. Now its just noise.

[izacus]

I'd still like to hear how is that exactly different or worse than the old "publisher" model, where everything is gatekept by publishing megacorporations and they decided what the taste of the decade was.

And by "they", it was a few executives in those corporations - it was never a meritocracy and those people never cared about music they peddled either.

So what exactly did it change here except the fact that now we're not at a mercy of a megapublisher to actually ship tapes/CDs across the world to hear a smaller artist?

[svnt]

Influential DJs in influential markets could discover a band or even a group of bands and drag attention other DJs would follow.

Maybe I am out of touch but that dynamic seems fairly lost, and we only temporarily discarded the mega publisher dynamic, which seems to have returned.

[dhosek]

Umm, gonna hard disagree. At least before the consolidation of media (whether publishers or record labels), the people who ran publishing houses and record labels did it because they loved books or music as appropriate. Publishing was never a big money maker and book and record stores fall into a weird part of capitalism where they don’t make a lot of money and they have a much larger number of distinct products than most other businesses do. I would guess that the local Target has fewer SKUs on the shelves than a modest-sized bookstore.

Note that Barnes & Noble has been successful since its last change of ownership because the CEO cares about books, not because he’s trying to squeeze every penny possible out of it.

[izacus]

There isn't a single story of a successful band that wouldn't hinge on having a big publisher exec approve them and work with them to change their music for acceptance. I think you're heavily rewriting history here.

[dhosek]

Off the top of my head, how about the Beatles?

[izacus]

What about them? One of their biggest early issues was EMI as a publisher not doing enough to promote their songs. Sounds familiar?

[dhosek]

I’ve not heard this claim, but even accepting that, it does not support your assertion, “There isn't a single story of a successful band that wouldn't hinge on having a big publisher exec approve them and work with them to change their music for acceptance.”

[goosejuice]

I will read that but...

I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million.

If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this.

Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.

[insane_dreamer]

People are also free not to have a FB account. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't criticize the problems that FB has created, amplified or perpetuated through its practices.

[goosejuice]

I would defend the right to criticize. My point is that artists and consumers have a choice.

Maybe there's a significant percentage of Spotify customers that give two shits about the art and just want to play some background music. That's ok. There's also artists that can thank Spotify for new fans and new listeners that can thank Spotify for new artists to listen to.

This moral outrage over Spotify tends to overlook that there are tradeoffs and every market has these problems. Blaming Spotify for killing a genre is crazy dumb to me. I'm not going to stop listening to lo-fi hip-hop cause Spotify has ghost artists and AI music on it. These bedroom artists have done what would have been impossible 40 years ago and the fans they've gained aren't going to go away. That's a testament to streaming platforms.

[trinsic2]

Did you know the musicians get paid very little for there music on Spotify? Look I understand the support from music listeners, but Spotifiy as a service really harms musicians. Its really shortsighted to only look at part of the equation.

[goosejuice]

Doesn't count downstream revenue. Do you see live music? Buy physical music? I do. Many of those artists gain their audience via streaming.

Just in the last 6 months I found two local bands in my backyard (it's a big city) through Spotify related atists. I streamed some of their music but also bought vinyl and saw them live and I will continue to do so.

These are small label artists and this is how they actually make it big enough to do it full time. I don't understand why people overlook this.

[dkarl]

It's an evergreen moral panic.

Historically, we retrospectively recognize the seminal importance of scenes that had virtually zero participants, and rather than regretting that those scenes were so tiny and demonizing the distribution networks that served less-seminal music to the vast majority of listeners, we romanticize the marginality of those scenes.

But when we see the same thing playing out contemporaneously, with creative niche music reaching tiny numbers of listeners and not getting traction via the distribution networks that serve the vast mainstream, we treat it as a crisis.

[myaccountonhn]

I’ve moved away from Spotify, and it’s actually quite hard to buy music. Bandcamp has a lot of indie music but not so much for the genres I like. There’s Apple Music but I don’t have Apple devices and Amazon music doesn’t work in my country.

[goosejuice]

What genres? A lot of labels bundle digital with physical copies. Most/all new vinyl I've bought recently did this. Some like ninja tune have digital only options.

I'm willing to bet if you email the artist they will be happy to point you where to purchase their music digitally.

[myaccountonhn]

I could try emailing them or the labels, but the genres I listen to are mostly Latin American

[Gud]

Agreed. it's not like we have to choose. I find Spotify to be pretty good if you want to listen to the rock classics and adjacent music(b-sides).

If you want to discover new music, YouTube Music and SoundCloud seem superior.