No matter how much things change or technology changes, it’s not so different from what rock bands have always been trying to do. Music is still exploring the same spectrum of what it is to be human. People are always going to be trying to find new ways to talk about love... Music is still doing that. | | | | Hairy metal: Van Halen at Pinkpop Festival, Netherlands, May 26, 1980.
(Rob Verhorst/Redfern/Getty Images) | | | | | | “No matter how much things change or technology changes, it’s not so different from what rock bands have always been trying to do. Music is still exploring the same spectrum of what it is to be human. People are always going to be trying to find new ways to talk about love... Music is still doing that.”
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| | rantnrave:// In case it isn't completely, absolutely, totally clear, the streaming music business is the music business. It's how artists and labels distribute music and how fans listen to it. Period. Stop. End of conversation. On-demand. Radio. Video. TAYLOR SWIFT. DRAG CITY. Save for a DEF LEPPARD here and a TOOL there, there's pretty much nothing left not to stream. But how do we decide what we stream? How do we quantify it? How do we talk about it? What—besides the fact that a great deal of it is by DRAKE or RIHANNA or TWENTY ONE PILOTS—do we know about the true meaning of what we stream? In an essay arguing that pop charts should discount streaming data from playlists and radio in favor of "the ones where the fan actually chose to listen to that track themselves," KOBALT's DAVID EMERY suggests there's something uniquely ephemeral, even "fake," about some big streaming hits. Fans are "listening to the playlist, not the tracks," he writes. There's a strong whiff of anti-poptimism in the argument, a suggestion that fans listening to the singles on today's hit parade aren't as engaged as fans poring obsessively over their most treasured albums. An age-old, troubling whiff. But the idea that should we think about engagement as much as we think about raw numbers will resonate with anyone who's spent any time in online marketing, and shouldn't be automatically discounted. And then there's the strange, and new to me, allegation that SPOTIFY is paying producers upfront to record songs under fake names for popular instrumental playlists and keeping the royalties for itself. It appears at the end of a longread listicle by VULTURE's ADAM K. RAYMOND chronicling the various ways artists big and small are trying to game streaming services. Some are silly, some clever, some aggravating, and some feed into a not-uncommon belief that streaming services are influencing not only how music is heard but how it's made. Read it while pondering this: Is it bad if Spotify is "concocting artists who don't really exist"? Or is that one of the ways pop has always been made? Is it strange that the existence of Spotify is responsible for the existence of a song about RADNOR TOWNSHIP, PENNSYLVANIA? Or do you think that's a little awesome? Do you understand the concept of streaming equivalent album units? Do you care? Will you one day? Do you work for BILLBOARD or the RIAA? What's the last time you downloaded or bought anything?... Related unrelated question: Is it a little presumptuous and more than a little weird to be presenting platinum albums to artists before their albums are released? Asking for a friend who owns a major streaming service... CHANCE THE RAPPER's TINY DESK concert, June 5, 2017... NIRVANA's RADIO SHACK concert, Jan. 24, 1988... What it's like to be FRANK OCEAN's mom... KESHA's first single in four years apparently dropping today. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| You can’t sell out shows based on big streaming numbers alone. These numbers represent attention and revenue, which is great, but the engagement is transitory. | | |
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| On a website like Spotify with more than 100 million active daily users, there are plenty of ways to game the system, be it for attention, or, if the streams pile up enough, profit. | | |
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| It was a time when promoters were telling women in music: “You can’t put two women on the same bill. People won’t come.” | | |
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| Can the king of teens thrive into his twenties? All the other rules are being broken, so why not? | | |
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| The biggest mistake most people make when trying to win a pissing match is believing a pissing match can be won. | | |
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| Rihanna just ended the longest woman-less drought on the chart since 1972, but what got us to this point in the first place? | | |
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| An action film as jam-packed with musical easter eggs as car chases deserves a dissection from its maker. | | |
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| Chance The Rapper, fresh from a 23,000-strong, sold-out show the night before, brought a thoughtful and fresh take to his Tiny Desk concert. | | |
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| Pandora's Tim Westergren has left the company. A look back at his accomplishments and where he may be headed next. | | |
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| From Lil Uzi Vert to Future, rap's biggest stars are singing about depression and loneliness-and we're singing along. | | |
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| A look at India’s “painfully-slow-to-emerge” digital music market | | |
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| A quarter century after their first 12" and 15 years since the death of James Stinson, the legacy of Drexciya is more enduring than ever. | | |
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| With streaming offering over 100M tracks available, a question: how on Earth do you sift through all this music, without losing your soul? | | |
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| “From the Outside,” by Hey Violet, is one of this year’s best pop albums. And Terror Jr sounds like the band’s irresponsible older sister. | | |
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| Welcome to opera in the 21st century. | | |
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| Songwriter Michael McDonald discusses the ever-changing work of making music, how all of life is an ongoing process of trying to look at things in the right way, and why creativity doesn't have an expiration date. | | |
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| It has been two years since Native Instruments announced their open multi-track audio format: Stem.mp4. Since that time, the format has shown steady but slow growth and adoption. So what needs to happen to take Stems to the next level? | | |
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| 'Country music' most certainly has a definition because it means something to millions of people. They identify with it. It's their culture. It's what gives them meaning and fulfillment. And if lost, and even worse, impugned and dragged through the mud as being irrelevant, uncool, or unwilling to evolve, it leaves them empty feeling and hollow. | | |
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| Author of "Meet Me In The Bathroom" on NYC music scene, The Strokes’ influence on mainstream culture and previous life teaching 2nd grade. | | |
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| "We lose 20 percent of our audience with every record, but we gain new people along the way," says frontman Buzz Osborne of his group's relentlessly uncompromising, ever-evolving sound. | | |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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