I think it's a little sad that you can't write some great software that solves a problem for people and get paid for it anymore. Or at least not as easily as in the past.
The changing business model has a lot of negative externalities, too. Like the temptation to monetize user data instead of monetizing the value of the software directly, and the temptation to push the line on privacy.
> I think it's a little sad that you can't write some great software that solves a problem for people and get paid for it anymore. Or at least not as easily as in the past.
I think that you're ignoring the fact that you were actually getting paid for solving their problem, not for great software per-se.
Just because the constraints on different parts of the value chain have changed, altering where the convenient bottlenecks are for extracting payments, doesn't make the past environment any better overall, just different.
But I think that's because open-source software development companies are the exception rather than the norm. No one expects you to open-source your software and then hope someone hires you for your services or buys one of your t-shirts. It's still the norm in our industry to write something and sell copies of it.
Plus, software pays more. Software developers generally don't get squeezed. Musicians, on the other hand, never seem to catch a break.
EDIT: Or, even better, it's the norm to sell a monthly right to use what we wrote.
Also, freemium games have business models very similar to music. Yeah, there are some successful freemium games out there, but in general it's pretty brutal and depressing.
Basically, in software, you can choose to open-source your software as marketing if you want, but proprietary is still a sustainable business model. The claim here (which I am in no position to evaluate) is that for music, you no longer really have any choice: selling music itself is no longer a sustainable business model; you can only give it away in hopes that you can sell something else as a result.
> Software developers generally don't get squeezed
Where I live, they do...go live in one of the countries where software gets outsourced. People are paid < $200 monthly here.
Software developers have skills that are easily transferable than musicians. If software developers stop learning, they will quickly be devalued with legacy maintenance as an exception. We used to value musicians more because of supply and distribution problems. It was an artificially constrained labor market. Now it is not. That's why they aren't getting paid the same. Similar to how writing html and css would get you a good paying job, not now though. Musicians need to change and adapt. They need to pick up more transferable skills.
* infinitely reproducible for near zero marginal cost
* subject to changing tastes and style
* easily obtainable through illegal means
This is especially true for games. Many software companies seem to have solved this dilemma by becoming surveillance or advertising companies that happen to make software. Games have solved it by peddling an increasing quantity of paid, high-margin add-on content and integrating gambling mechanics into their products. I hope the solution musicians come up with isn't as slimy as these.
Edit: I also find that most people treat most music as a commodity much of the time. Why else would random feeds of related music be so popular?
If you stop playing the huge AAA games and start playing smaller ones, you see another solution: lower prices for games that can be finished in an amount of time that fits into the busy life of an adult, and very often a grant from a national art fund.
Not for American games, of course, we basically destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts, thanks a lot guys.
And the King, having vanquished his foe at great cost, surveyed the empty field and muttered: "It matters not, for in the end the claw chooses who will go and who will stay".
I think you will find many here who would argue that code can be art, too.
The thing that people don't realize is that it is in fact quite comparable: the binary that one works with to hear a song is not intrinsically worth any more than the same bytes that produce a software application. I'm a musician who now primarily makes music with code. [0] I've decided therefore to always make my music available for free, without exception. We all agree software can and often should be free - music, to me, is exactly the same way.
Musician and software developer here, and I'm calling BS on that. Here's a transcript of a talk I gave last year on "code as art" (apologies if this sounds like self-promo). You can skip the first half and scroll down to where it says "Which leads me back to code as an artform". There are a lot of ways to demonstrate that code IS art, and this was just a quick 5-minute overview of the subject. Cheers! https://www.johnluxford.com/blog/code-as-art
As an acquaintance of mine put it the other day on this exact topic (who happens to be a writer/graphic artist/programmer):
"First STEM says that the humanities are worthless. Then they say how, really, STEM should get all that glory too because, really, it's the same thing -- but better."
Or this quote:
"Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk."
I forgot about Hackers and Painters! Pretty sure there's a copy on a bookshelf here somewhere...
Interesting quotes. Reminded me of a conversation I had with some local artists a while back who were staunchly in favour of their kids going into STEM because the humanities don't have a direct application to industry any more. They didn't want their kids wasting money on exploratory education, or in pursuit of the arts which they saw as a dead-end. I found that really sad, but it stemmed from an acute awareness of the direction industries like music are going.
Historically, the sciences emerged as areas of philosophy, but they've since become detached from those roots. Those roots have a grounding effect, a sense of the greater context of human life, that's missing in the culture around STEM today. I see echoes of that in the rationalizations made by Spotify's CEO: Who cares if the album is dead? Get with the new program, whatever the cost; it was inevitable anyway.
It is funny, all of those descriptors for STEM and detatchment seem to apply to the dying institutions which call themselves humanities far more than STEM. Now the fundamentals still exist strongly, there is plenty of phislophizing and art creation. But not through them.
Philosophy as a grounding context of human life? Talk about historical revisionism. Philosophy has long been about getting beyond the dreary context of human life into grand abstract universals. Even the ones which had pretenses otherwise like Marx-Engle's descendants or primitivists still engaged in the same thing. Revolutions were lead by college students instead of factory workers and farmers based upon theories that find validating observations not just inapplicable but rude and offensive to even propose. That they define themselves as fundamentally not scientists is the biggest tell to the ailment.
The Non-empiricists got left behind long ago, unchanging and then insist that the world has lost touch and not them. The split from philosophy and natural philosophy and from natural philosophy to science was from an inability to accept that they must acknowledge the world as it is, even if they wish to change it.
By doing so the old institutions and concepts refused to change and are "undead" - not truly gone but not growing or adapting to their environment like a living thing. To paraphrase from the Sixth Sense they're dead and don't know it. Now like Bruce Willis thet are wondering why their spouse silently refuses to speak to them at the dinner table and never listens to a word they say.
Harshly yes, you should get with the program because not doing so in some way (even if it is defiantly crafting their own path which may or may not fail) is denying reality.
Even the grouping of STEM together is a bad-taste-in-your-mouth industrial crime against human culture. The real acronym should just be M. (S, T, and E are just bastardized ways to get paid fat bucks for doing simpler versions of M.)
That essay was hilarious. The bit about how painters have figured out the most efficient and lucrative way to sit around staring at naked woman all day is a perfect example of the self-deprecating braggadocio that every man who writes a blog seems to be trying to achieve.
I'm often amazed by the negative attitude towards humanities and artists seen in this community. It it not that people hate art or culture, they just really hate the humanities department, art students and artists! (But at the same time they want to be recognized as great artists for writing a neat one-liner in Perl.)
Good response. It's simultaneously true that coding (and engineering and science and maths) is more artistic than generally accepted and that "art" in the conventional sense has more in common with those disciplines generally considered to be it's polar opposite.
There is an art to building software, no doubt, in terms of it being a craft. But I think you've misspoken about functional things being artistically beautiful. What you really should mean is that functional things can be aesthetically beautiful, which is true and different.
Art is primarily defined by expression and exploration, particularly revolving around human emotions. Software products, in the end, do not fit this category. There is a vast difference.
Edit: I defined it elsewhere a bit smoother. I define art as the exploration of emotional expression. Art products are the end result of that exploration. Live acts or art or performances could be viewed as a sort of merger between the two, either as a reenactment of the exploration or as a new exploration happening in the moment.
Software can be art in itself. Consider quines [1]. (Programs that, when run, produce themselves) They serve no real world purpose, and I consider them beautiful. Kind of like the restrictive format of a haiku. (Edit: Or perhaps tesselations, e.g. Escher's work [3])
I particularly enjoy what this artist(?) has done with their 128 language uroborus quine. [2]
Edit 2: I expect the objection will be that this is not functional, or a "product", however the uroboros quine does have practical uses. E.g. as a system stress test. If it were marketed as a stress test, its artistic value would still be apparent to a programmer examining its structure.
The statement of saying someone else's view of art is objectively incorrect or silly is in itself silly. I like your proposed definition of art, but as you know everyone is free to have their own conceptions.
I can agree with that to a degree. Of course, the gut reaction to any statement is typically the more emotional one. :)
However, I find that they didn't really make a statement about how they view art, although elaboration would help. I think people are confusing things being artistic versus being aesthetic. When people say "code absolutely can be art", I find it's too generic that it does indeed become a silly statement. It dilutes what art is and is overly biased to code, especially since it's likely to be coming from a software developer.
What I really think someone means by "code can be art" is that "code can be aesthetically pleasing", the latter of which I agree with. There's also a difference between "<some thing> as an art" as in doing the thing can be an art or craft and also calling the thing art.
The 80s underground scene had many zines that were programs.. the art would be part content part reader/application. The best part were the crazy menus.
The problem now is an application must look like all other applications or you would see more creativity. Making parts of the app 60% visible so the background came through had a cool visual effect.
Can you elaborate on what you're referring to or talking about?
Of course there are loads of software that people use in art. But in the end, those are still solving a problem and are not art. Examples are TouchDesigner, Processing, Logic, Studio One, Pure Data, vvvv, and much more. These software products are not art themselves but are rather solutions to problems to allow artists to create art easier. They are not art products, in my opinion, since they aren't the result of an exploration of expression.
Where the line is blurred for me is in live coding artistic performances. The software there is considered part of the art, as part of the performance. But even then, the software is a tool. If a person uses a hammer in a live art piece, is the hammer now suddenly art? No, I wouldn't think so. It's a tool serving as a utility or maybe medium. It isn't art itself. The art is the performance.
Of course there are always exceptions which cannot be captured in every argument. Something that blurs the line is something like DIN . But see, in such a software product, we begin to see expression and not just a thing solving a problem or being a tool. Similarly with Orca (although I wish they would change the name so as to not interfere with actual orcas which some populations are in danger of going extinct).
A tremendously important example is videogames which as well as being a multi-billion dollar industry akin to music are also a major medium of individual self expression.
In the broader set you have interactive fiction and a whole slew of art that shares a lot in common with time-based art. Demoscene is a good example of the latter.
Games certainly can be art! But I don't see how that conflicts with what I said or serves as a counterexample. Games are not just software products. They are the culmination of work by artists, designers, writers, and engineers. The end product is often an artistic piece, and a rather interesting one. Games being art doesn't suddenly mean software products are art. The software itself helps drive the art but is not the art itself. I feel a good way to think about it is that software and code running the game is not art in the same way that the paint in a painting is not art.
My favorite game designer is Fumito Ueda. His games of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian are prime examples of games can be art.
Videogames are software products though so are a prime example of software products that are art. To quote your own recent definition of software:
"I have always viewed hard, firm, and soft as a description of the ware's malleability. Hardware is not easily changed or updateable, if at all. Firmware is typically code deployed to stay in hardware like an EEPROM, flash, or FPGA, where it can be changed but not necessarily dynamically or easily. Software is able to be easily molded and changed."
And whilst videogames do require traditional artists so do the construction of other mundane software products. Also invoking other disciplines rather ignores a lot of the work that goes into the gameplay itself which is entirely software driven.
Not to mention the other examples you studiously avoided.
> Videogames are software products though so are a prime example of software products that are art.
Did you think about or read what I described? Because I specifically addressed how I think video games being art does not make software products and code art. You aren't elaborating and then just restating an opinion I've already discussed.
If video games being art means that software products and/or code is art, then you need to consider that the material (paint, metal, etc.) used in paintings and sculptures is art as well and all the other repercussions of such a conclusion. No one would argue that. The paint in paintings is part of the medium and brushes and other such things are part of the tools of the process. In the case of video games, the software is a kind of both tool and medium of how that art is created and experienced. No one is saying software can't be a medium for art, but it isn't the art itself. And again, like I've already said, I don't think video games can simply be defined as software products. Other things called software products, like mobile apps, also have artists and designers, but there the situation is even more removed from art because the app is not expressing anything but is rather solving a problem, providing a service, or giving functionality.
> To quote your own recent definition of software
That quote has nothing to do with this discussion, so I'm not really sure why you're pulling it here. It was from a completely different post, and a non-native English speaker had remarked about how they had thought that the firm in firmware meant something else. I wasn't defining software but rather discussing how hard, firm, and soft in hardware, firmware, and software could be thought of.
> Not to mention the other examples you studiously avoided.
I didn't avoid anything. I didn't feel I had anything to say that adds to the discussion without repeating what I already said. Yes, they're examples. And?
I didn't say that. And just repeatedly stating something doesn't make it true, especially if others disagree and you refuse to elaborate, discuss, or explain.
Plus the implication that music might not be a tool for a specific purpose (which it is also absolutely in some contexts).
The thing is that "music", is not "one thing". It all depends on the purpose, if there is one, and on the intention of the composer and of the players and of the audience.
Here, Spotify's CEO adresses a very specific market in the music industry, not "musicians" per se.
This is a tired argument that lacks much nuance.
Ill believe this when people regularly gather in the thousands to see a brilliant coder at work or view amazing code in a gallery.
Are there not thousands of conferences each year? People giving talks at meet-ups, the yearly Apple developer conference draws thousands of people. All events that people sign up for voluntarily to listen to someone else talk about code.
As for viewing it; there are also many places where people participate in coding competitions or code golfs, where others judge and appreciate the code.
Is that really so different from going to a concert or an art gallery?
Code can be describe with aesthetic qualities like clean, beautiful, shitty, complex, delicate, etc. Just like music. Art is just a representation of human creativeness and imagination which is what software is.
There is no art anymore, only products. Once you optimize for monetary compensation via popular consumption, all creative endeavours are seen as and become products.
Your sentence, while it reasonate with me, is seen today as naive and non realistic.
My immediate question to that CEO would be, "OK, so what is it you're marketing?"
In the case of open-source software, they're probably marketing consulting, books, training. (I think conferences would likely be part of the marketing.)
And that, folks, is how we end up with those crapulacious open-source software tools (libraries, whatever) that are deliberately incomprehensible to anybody outside the producer bubble. e.g. Bouncy Castle: Utterly shite API to the point of unusable, despite the undoubtedly well done implementation underneath; completely absent documentation in any useful/usable form. Everything around it is just, "Buy our books, come on our courses if you want to use this library." The code itself is obfuscatory. Not a design document or user-guide in sight.
(Other examples abound. I just pick on the one that burned me the worst.)
So, back to music. How is this a good result for the "market"?
We end up with a flume of mediocre-to-crap music (but frequently! as if that's a good thing all by itself) all in the name of marketing,... what precisely? Where's the passion gone? Where's the art? Where's the music I'll listen to over and over again for decades?
I would disagree. I would instead phrase it as "addressing a need", and with that phrasing, I don't see a clear distinction between software and music.
That is really diluting the difference between art and software, so much so that it's almost comical.
I define art as the exploration of emotional expression, and software simply does not fit into that category except in the cases of using software as a tool or mechanism in the exploration.
The "need" in creating art is often described by artists in that the act of creation is fulfilling an internal need. Writers, musicians, etc. often describe their works as pouring out of them, almost by necessity. This is rarely the case for software and engineering products which seek to fulfill an external need. Software, like engineering, seeks to solve problems. Art can but does not in general.
I personally find it mindblowing and a bit disturbing that I see people in this thread equating software to art. It's a bit disrespectful and elitist to claim that they're the same. Artist make pennies and are being forced by market dynamics to change their expression to merely survive. Meanwhile, software engineers make six figures and retire early playing a game of connect the dots. It's flippant to those artists who struggle for years and years in the hopes of even a modicum of support or recognition and live on pennies.
Who retires first debate: the famous musician or famous programmer is still unsettled.
Classically an artist put themselves in difficult situations in order to grow as a person so the art can say more. Don't be angry at others making money because an artist has choosen a different path.
I define art to be the exploration of emotional expression. If you disagree with that definition, that's fine, as the debate as to "what is art?" is certainly a valid one. But please note the discussion context. The original comments I've replied to are "software is equivalent to art", and I disagreed. There are vast differences. My assumption is that it is people involved in software making this claim, and that is where the elitism comes from.
> Software is the product of expression.
What emotional content are you expressing when you write software? When someone writes a book or music or paints a painting or live performs an art piece, they are expressing emotional content, feelings, stories, etc. Please view my other responses, as I don't want to repeat myself here, but art is different than "<thing> as an art", which relates to art as in craft, and it's also different from things being aesthetically pleasing.
If we're going to dilute the term of what art is so much, then it's pointless to just stop at "software is art", as we should then just say "everything is art" and stop using the word.
> They both can evoke emotion while experiencing.
That's a poor definition. If something simply evokes emotion, that doesn't make it art. Literally everything evokes emotions in humans.
> Who retires first debate: the famous musician or famous programmer is still unsettled.
It's usually not best to discuss edge cases and is better to stick with the general population. Your general software developer is going to be many times well off than your general artist.
> Classically an artist put themselves in difficult situations in order to grow as a person so the art can say more. Don't be angry at others making money because an artist has choosen a different path.
You're implying that artists intentionally suffer? Some artists may, but I think it's more the case that most artists are not given a choice, which was basically the original discussion here. The discussion started off as musicians are now having to compromise and shift from creating music as their end product to simply using music as part of the marketing component of a brand, image, lifestyle, etc. And no one said to be mad at people making money. But the people sitting in one of the most well-paid positions in history, i.e. software developers, shouldn't be making loose allusions to what they do is the same as people living in poverty and the lower class struggling for society to recognize as what they do as useful.
You can also phrase brain surgery and movie watching as "modifying the inner thought processes of the subject", and as such there isn't a clear distinction.
One is art, the other is trade.
One can of course make art one's means of substinance, and one can master one's trade artfully.
What if they said, "Our product isn't our software, our product is our marketing"? This makes more sense because there can me many products offering the same service, but the one with the best marketing can win, even if it's not the best software.
> If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way?
Yes, absolutely, 100%! By all means care about image and marketing, but if your actual product isn't good (software, music, or anything else), then who cares?
For software, actual usefulness. A word processor that's trending on Twitter but which makes it hard to actually edit documents is not useful. A graphics driver that actually renders my screen is useful even if nobody's ever heard of it (although I grant that below a certain size maintenance issues might come up).
For music... I'm far less qualified to say, but there's still a notion of (subjective) quality, which is only loosely correlated to marketing. I suppose we could say "good" music is that music which people enjoy, which still is driven by the actual music and not marketing.
My (implicit) point was that software can be optimized for one factor, which is usefulness. By evaluating usefulness, we can evaluate whether a piece of software is "good" or not.
However, use-value makes for a very poor metric for evaluating music (I am ignoring arguments about the "usefulness" of music when it's played on a factory floor, making workers slightly more productive). So what must we use to evaluate its "good"-ness? Anything you propose here will have certain people agree, and others disagree, e.g. one set of people say good music must make you dance, and another set will say good music must make you feel relaxed (the opposite of dance).
When aggregated, these individual differences will cancel out. So the average most marketable music must, therefore, be as bland as water.
I am speaking of the usefulness of software in a much more general sense - does it work?
Adobe Photoshop and GIMP are two competing softwares for a specific task - editing photos. Not everyone needs to edit photos. Those who do are voting with their money, because Adobe Photoshop worked faster and more easily at the same task than GIMP. (This can change, with the recent subscription-model only Adobe is pushing that is irritating its core users, but that's a different topic)
Let's return to dance music. Let's say we create a category on spotify and call it - "does it make you dance"? Well, for a swath of youth, EDM makes them dance. But for a swath of Latin-speaking users, bachata music makes them dance. Let's say they are of equal number in the population. You can see here that even averaging based on the category of "does it make you dance" will produce some rather unfortunate results (a combination of half-EDM-half-bachata that will fail to tug at the heartstrings of anyone at all, but might be vaguely palatable vaguely dance-y playing in the background of a grocery store). However, this kind of music - the one that can vaguely capture both audiences - is exactly the one that will get the most people to listen to it, and based on Spotify's model of quantity over quality, it is the one that will get most rewarded.
But some open source software is marketing, is it not? The big open source frameworks released by tech companies come to mind. These projects shape the industry and advance the company's recruitment goals. Bootstrap. React. TensorFlow. Kubernetes. WebKit.
If that CEO was in charge of Redhat, sure. Or maybe one of those open source SaaS companies, but many of them are realizing that maybe giving away the software was also a product decision that is now harming the bottom line.
Isn't is? open-source company typically don't sell 'software'.
They sell 'support' ans 'service'. And even microsoft, a typical software company do this now
I see your point. But I still think that if the CEO said "software is our marketing- our real product is our influence", I'd still find that depressing.
I agree with you on DLC. I'd rather just pay $100 upfront (or whatever it needs to cost) to get a finished product.
on the other hand, I think F2P monetized with cosmetic items is a pretty good model for a multiplayer game. anyone with a computer can enjoy the game, and the people who care the most (or have the most disposable income) support ongoing development without messing with the balance.
I think it could be depressing if we think of "your product" as "the most important part of what you do". But we could also think of it as "the thing that you need to make money from". If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!
> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed, rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance"
> If the music itself isn't the thing that you need to make money from, then instead of charging a bunch for it, now you want to spread it as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. That's a good thing!
It is, but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases. More production doesn't equal to more novelty.
> but only if the music gets better in the process. Unlikely to happen if you rush for faster releases
Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better.
There's a story about a ceramics professor that would divide his class in two at the beginning of the semester. He would grade one group by the quality of their best piece at the end of the semester and the other group by the weight of all the pieces produced during the whole semester. The professor said that invariably, the best pieces were produced by the people in the group that was graded by the weight of their pieces. His hypothesis was that people graded by the weight would produce a lot more pieces, so in the process they would also get really good at making the pieces, whereas the people graded by their best piece would just spend too much time on their pieces trying to make them perfect and wouldn't get enough practice to actually become better at making them.
I really like this anecdote, I find it very prescriptive for life, but I don’t think it applies. Professional musicians aren’t learning how to make music like the students of the ceramics class, they are mostly fully developed artists with their own artistic style and voice. I think that constantly producing art leads an artist to become a slave to his prior work, a sort of creative fatigue. In order to foster development of an artist’s voice, they need space to get away from that style and explore other styles and forms of art.
Not a popular opinion here, but I really don’t think that coding is very comparable to pure art like music or painting, and I think that a lot of these ideas come from that place(that coding is art). Coding is art like electrical work is art—there is certainly a distinction between work crafted by a master and something muddled together by an amateur, but at the end of the day it’s functional. In these trades it’s perfectly okay to have creative fatigue as long as all the parts are good. If you have great variable names, nice modular form, terse functions, excellent descriptive comments, etc, its actually better if you have a monolithic unchanging form. Pure art, that is art meant to be consumed in the form its created, by contrast, brings with it all kinds of aesthetic values that are put by the way side in coding, and novelty and creativity are front and center.
> Actually, if you are constantly working at it, you'll probably get really good at it and the quality will get better and better.
That's true for engineering, but for music it only goes so far. A lot of musicians working this way will, after a while, find a formula that repeatedly sells, but loose a lot of originality in the process.
You don't necessarily have to "rush" for faster releases, you just have to think about releasing in a different way.
Think of it like a software roadmap: Is it better to wait 6 months and release a bucket of features twice a year, or to release features gradually throughout the year and measure their effectiveness? Some might say that releasing features gradually is "rushing things out", while others might say that it's the only way to ship non-broken software that people actually want to use.
That's one of the aspects of the new economy... only a very small minority of artists can literally go dark for 3-4 years to write something that will rise to the top instantly.
Not if you’re coerced into having to produce a piece of music every month/couple of months to keep the machine running.
That’s just producing a commodity.
Some groups have got it together and are able to fund years of quiet work before releases, but no matter how much I enjoy creating I would hate to be so bound as outlined above.
I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work.
In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.
After hearing this story for years and finally trying to source it, as far as I can tell it's not entirely clear this experiment was ever actually run -- and in fact is sourced in the link behind your link as a "parable."
I can imagine it's true that churning out quantity is its own education but I can also imagine there's a plateau past which deliberate practice and polish matter quite a bit.
You’re right. It’s not new. Not for pop music anyway.
I’d argue that it’s worse, though. Shorter cycles are even less healthy.
And just because it’s been done before(-ish) and other endeavours run in this timeline doesn’t make it good or beneficial to anything but those who aspire to only make money off of it.
The fact is, good music doesn’t require business to be good music. And the business doesn’t necessarily require the music to be good—it just requires that it directly or indirectly generates revenue. From the perspective of commerce the rest is incidental.
Encouraging the commercial perspective over something more balanced is a net negative for culture and society. At least I think so.
It’s still possible to batch composition and production with this release model. The lead time saved from releasing digital only can be used to polish the earlier tracks in the schedule.
I dunno. I've known a few people who dreamed of being in a band, and they weren't excited about the part where they sit at a desk revising lyrics; they were excited to perform their songs, to get up in front of a crowd and have everyone hear them.
It’s not tho! It means tighter release cycles which means a tighter feedback loop which means bands can find their sound faster and grow their backing faster.
Some of Steve Albini's interviews are really on point with regards to this stuff. Really worth listening to if nothing more than to provide contrast to comments like the one above (which seem pretty reductive and flippant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRAc3hx5pok
That's not depressing. That's one part of the "music industry". It's a huge sales channel, per se.
Now, being a musician or an artist, you decide what you do with it. If you consider that what matters is your sales and nothing else, Spotify's stance might apply to you. But you might have different point of view as well, still make music, and still live from it, perhaps.
It's a bit disrespectful to reply to someone saying something's depressing by bluntly saying it's not. It's not up to you to judge what they find depressing.
I also find it depressing. It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology. We see it everywhere from the STEM myth to arts educational programs and artists struggling just to survive. Even earning my living in science and technology, I personally have grown to believe art is far more important for human progress and development than science and technology. It's a real problem that we blindly let markets decide what is important because it is in fact humanity's lack of progress emotionally, which is unfortunately tied strongly to our biology, but our insane progress in technology that causes almost all of our problems.
Huh? Someone's saying "that's depressing" is a statement. It's not "I find this depressing" or "I'm depressed by that". It's not disrespect, it's bringing a different perspective that does not see the depression there.
I don't find this depressing. I don't even find this societal at all. What would be depressing would be to take Spotify's view of "what music should be" or "how musicians should work/behave" for a relevant, world-wide truth. When it is only a very specific, skewed and biased take by someone's who's got a direct interest into making people believe that it is the only way to go.
That many people go this way does not mean they are right, neither they are winning.
I think I vaguely agree with much of what you said, but just want to point this one out.
> It's a societal problem that we do not value art in the same way that we value science and technology.
Want to give a couple of examples against this:
- some of the most valuable software out there is free and open source. The authors of said software don’t get compensated anywhere near the softwares value. Coz everyone uses it for free.
- I very much value the games I play on my iPhone, but I have never paid any money for them.
- I will buy Opeth t-shirts, and Akerfeld custom guitars, but I’m never going to give Spotify as much money.
So, I don’t think your claim is so clear cut as you state it.
If you instrumentalize music to maximise your influencer career with the content of the music as an afterthought what you get isn't art but a mediocre commodity.
It's like Ricky Gervais remark at the Globes, the actors aren't actually actors any more, it's a competition for the best looking, most ripped steroid junkie.
Man, that's depressing.