you obviously meant a lot more by "linear programming" than the mere words' definitions.
> Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time.
Not "obviously." How many listeners are tuned into Spotify's most popular playlists at the same time, and not interacting with them at all? Versus the number of listeners of a local radio station? I would bet the first >> the second.
As for whether royalties were enough to sustain a rock act then or now: I really don't know. They said that a modern recording budget is comically small compared to what it would have been in the 90's, so clearly the money has changed.
However, I didn't get from that video any claim that royalties used to be enough. What I got was that the artists are getting screwed by a lot of BS charges. And, of course, that corporate ownership of radio is bad, which I would hope very few HN'ers would argue with.
As for "You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it": I actually spent a lot of time at YouTube in my time at Google. "The lean-back experience" was something they really lusted after, and that wa the term they used for it. In fact, if I play one music video on YT, it usually seems to segue into another. So I don't think the broad mass of music listeners is quite as on-demand in their actual behavior as you think.
The point of the video is that structural factors in the music industry destroyed ("killed", such that it was "dead" by 2012) rock music. So that's what we're resolving: is the video's argument credible? And it is not.
I'm the one who introduced the term "linear radio" to this conversation; Beato doesn't use it. So, what matters isn't the precise definition of the word, but the concept. You'd like to call a Spotify playlist "linear". Ok, fine. That doesn't change my argument! The shared, scheduled, broadcast delivery system for music died because people drastically prefer the option of listening to whatever they'd like; for instance, they'd rather avail themselves of one of the 18.7 million Apple Music and Spotify playlists they now have access to than turn an FM knob to one of 3-4 corporate radio stations that play 4 songs in a row before running 45 seconds of commercials. That latter delivery system is what Beato laments, and whose loss he credits with ending rock music.
Note that part of my argument is that I don't grant his premise that rock music ended, or that the shift in attention from rock to hip-hop had anything to do with this stuff.
I have no doubt that corporate rock screwed people over in all sorts of ways (Lowery doesn't so much, though! Go track his article down, it's interesting, he makes a case for the corporate rock structure subsidizing a lot of work that couldn't have happened otherwise, and unit sales numbers just don't work out to numbers that can support the marginal rock band). The problem is: Beato isn't making his central case, that producers renting amps and drum kits out to signed bands due to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is why we didn't get 3 more Verve albums.
OK, you can define it yourself; it's your term. Clearly listeners do have way more choice than they used to, in music and in video.
I'm not sure I'd even agree that the 1996 act "killed" rock. I don't think you would argue that the enshittification of radio (my term /s) helped anything, though.
Rock isn't dead, either. A few questions related to that, though, are:
"is swing dead?"
"is ragtime dead?"
"is bebop dead?"
For all of those, the art form developed about as far as it could, and tastes changed. If I listen to modern rock, I don't hear much that surprises me, and as Sting said in his Beato interview, if I don't hear something surprising pretty quickly, that's it for that song. Most of what I hear, I think, "yeah, I've heard stuff like that before."
Actually, I think the death of radio very plausibly improved rock music! In the mid-90s, Q101 determined a lot of what I was listening to. By 2002, it was Pitchfork† (for better or worse, not a week in my life goes by where at some point I do not hear the words "I am Ringo, elephant of Beatles worship" in my head). I probably got more good bands from Soma.fm Indie Pop Rocks, which I only followed for like 3 months, than I got in a decade of listening to the radio.
Kurt Cobain wrote "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" because of the dynamic Beato is euologizing here. Long before Clear Channel, Modern Rock radio was mostly about sanding down the edges of acts and finding ways to make success repeatable; it took the Meat Puppets that wrote "Oh, Me" and made them write "Backwater"; took Pearl Jam and ground it into the Stone Temple Pilots, and finally into Candlebox. The Candlebox discography doesn't lie: it happened to us before the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Watch the video again. Beato really does blame the decline of rock on labels no longer paying to make more of the tracks on an album good. Come on, that is a genuinely weird thing to say, isn't it?
† I am aware of the arc of quality that Pitchfork traversed since the early 2000s.
> Spotify playlists are not linear programming, obviously. Linear programming implies that the whole audience is listening to the same thing at the same time.
Not "obviously." How many listeners are tuned into Spotify's most popular playlists at the same time, and not interacting with them at all? Versus the number of listeners of a local radio station? I would bet the first >> the second.
As for whether royalties were enough to sustain a rock act then or now: I really don't know. They said that a modern recording budget is comically small compared to what it would have been in the 90's, so clearly the money has changed.
However, I didn't get from that video any claim that royalties used to be enough. What I got was that the artists are getting screwed by a lot of BS charges. And, of course, that corporate ownership of radio is bad, which I would hope very few HN'ers would argue with.
As for "You would need to provide extraordinary evidence to support it": I actually spent a lot of time at YouTube in my time at Google. "The lean-back experience" was something they really lusted after, and that wa the term they used for it. In fact, if I play one music video on YT, it usually seems to segue into another. So I don't think the broad mass of music listeners is quite as on-demand in their actual behavior as you think.