John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Over 120,000 pieces of music are being released per day now. That's more than in the ...
Over 120,000 pieces of music are being released per day now. That's more than in the whole *year* of 1989. Over 75 million people are creating music and putting it online. Music production has been democratized.
The old dream of getting signed by a record label, having them support you while your band becomes big, and then having them rip you off for the rest of your life because you didn't consult a lawyer and you signed a shitty contract - that dream is dead.
Instead, most musicians freely give their work to streaming services. The CEO of Spotify got a lot of hate for saying “content” now costs “close to zero” to make. That doesn't feel right if you're a starving musician trying to buy equipment, pay for transportation to gigs, and so on! But as musicians flood the market with “content”, its economic value is falling (on average).
In short: music is now so easy to record that about 75 million people now *pay* to create, record and distribute their own music.
Of course, most of this music is crap. I know: I've made some. Visit my SoundCloud! But people have been playing out-of-tune fiddles round campfires for centuries and enjoying it. This is like that.
Next, AI threatens to churn out even more music than humans can create.
But is this really music? In his three-movement piece 4'22'', John Cage may have been arguing that anything, even silence, counts as music if you listen to it as such. Here Andy Edwards takes stock of that and suggests a new twist: if sounds are slapped together out of factory presets or using AI, maybe that's not music - even if sounds like music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx8eXt-OODk
The old dream of getting signed by a record label, having them support you while your band becomes big, and then having them rip you off for the rest of your life because you didn't consult a lawyer and you signed a shitty contract - that dream is dead.
Instead, most musicians freely give their work to streaming services. The CEO of Spotify got a lot of hate for saying “content” now costs “close to zero” to make. That doesn't feel right if you're a starving musician trying to buy equipment, pay for transportation to gigs, and so on! But as musicians flood the market with “content”, its economic value is falling (on average).
In short: music is now so easy to record that about 75 million people now *pay* to create, record and distribute their own music.
Of course, most of this music is crap. I know: I've made some. Visit my SoundCloud! But people have been playing out-of-tune fiddles round campfires for centuries and enjoying it. This is like that.
Next, AI threatens to churn out even more music than humans can create.
But is this really music? In his three-movement piece 4'22'', John Cage may have been arguing that anything, even silence, counts as music if you listen to it as such. Here Andy Edwards takes stock of that and suggests a new twist: if sounds are slapped together out of factory presets or using AI, maybe that's not music - even if sounds like music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx8eXt-OODk