Rick Beato making clear what is happening on the music scene just as Cory Doctorow or Adam Conover talk about the Internet. Please remember to use frontends like Grayjay, NewPipe, Freetube or invidio.us to watch videos like these.
Beato is a great musician, and some of his interviews are pretty cool. I think he’s off base on this, hwoever.
Enshittification is how platforms die. To go back to the original article/post by Cory Doctorow that coined the phrase:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Beato isn’t wrong that the music industry is well into the cycle of enshittification, he just doesn’t identify the actual reasons why. The music industry abused its artists for decades in a way that initially benefitted music consumers, but then the studios/labels/publishers cranked up the prices on consumers too, and then the industry started devouring a lot of the publishers and studios and labels themselves as Spotify and Amazon and others started eating their lunch.
I do think there is a link between music industry enshittification and some negative trends in music. Cory Doctorow and his co-author Rebecca Giblin point out in their book Chokepoint Capitalism that platforms like Spotify prioritize mass production of cheap-to-license “background” music that all blends together in a mush, because they prioritize total volume of listening rather than any particular listening experience.
Please remember to use frontends like Grayjay, NewPipe, Freetube or invidio.us to watch videos like these.
Why not post a link to one of those platforms?
Kindof makes me think, there should be a canonical YouTube link that is not youtube.com, that could be use to refer to yt videos without the risk of accidentally clicking it and ending up in yt.
Almost all my favorite music was made before I was born. The rest was made mostly before the year 2000. And music has mostly been generic forgettable schlock since then. Rick’s analysis is spot on.
And music has mostly been generic forgettable schlock since then.
Mainstream* music.
Plenty of amazing artists out there who are not part of the music business machine.
I disagree with the sentiment that the music scene is getting worse, we are getting more content than ever but it’s also much more discoverable, searchable and groupable.
I was just at an insane EDM festival the other day and all artists there were up and coming 25-30 y/o, people who are touring Europe doing gigs all over the place. They were selected because they are amazing DJ’s with their own style, playlist and original songs.
Finding music, an artist or even an album you enjoy is just as hard as it used to be, but go into a local record shop, a local venue and ask them what bands you should check out, you’ll see the same spirit people had 20-30 years ago going to gigs.
You know what I think Mr Beato? I think you are heavily out of touch with the modern music scene.
How much of the music at that EDM festival you went to will you listen to again? Will you buy any of their records? Or maybe just add a few of their tracks to a playlist on Spotify such that you may hear that music a couple more times in the future?
I may be making assumptions about you, but I think Rick’s point about new music becoming “disposable” because there’s just so much of it coming out remains valid. There’s still new songs coming out that transcend this, but the musicians making this music are finding it harder and harder to build up a following, get exposure, and convince record labels to invest in them, when these labels can invest way less, produce a shitton of disposable music and get a better (short-term) ROI.
Old-man-yelling-at-cloud energy.
That’s kinda how I feel about all of his videos. He’s a great illustration of latching on to the music of your formative years and firmly stating that everything after that is crap.
In present day, you’ve got to sift through a lot of crap to find the good new stuff.
What this guy doesn’t ever address is that has always been true.
My daughter always said I was lucky to grow up in the eighties because we had the best music. To this I responded that I only played her the good stuff. All the really crappy stuff, of which there was a LOT, kinda got filtered out of collective memory.
I’m into a few different genres of music - rock, metal, jazz, Afro Cuban, other shit that i can’t categorize (like all of john zorn’s shit). There’s so much good shit out there, so much modern and novel stuff, really musical and complex.
How’s this putz gonna tell me that Vijay Iyer or Tyshawn Sorey or Matthew Shipp are crap? Or the Reznor/Ross stuff? Or Nas’ tremendous burst of creativity over the past 6 years?
Edit: honorable mention to ghostface killah’s latest shit. The “guns” part of set the tone is dope af. 2nd half is weak, tho. Looking forward to supreme clientele 2. Wu Tang is forever.
Bookmarking this comment so I can look up the artists later! Always looking for new music.
I think part of his these-although he doesn’t address it directly- is that even though there is still good music coming out it’s likely going to get drowned out by the flood of mediocrity because it’s all coming out so fast.
It’s amazing to watch millennials become grandpa Simpson.
In my day music was actually good!
This is honestly pathetic, handle your mid life crisis’s better
Who else would rather spend 5 minutes reading than 12 minutes watching? Can I get a transcript?
I don’t see that button on YouTube (Firefox android). Am I blind? Is it on some other front end?
