It’s not really a problem of the charts though. From now on, every time you hear a new band or piece of music you won’t know whether it was made by a human or if it’s AI.
Musicians, whose lives have been made ever harder since streaming, are going to be pushed out by this technology.
Their only source of income will be live gigs.
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not really. you can buy music from a band you know to be real.they just have to make a name for themselves first
anyways…nothing wrong with live gigs being the best intro into the music world, thats how it was for ever in the past, its authentic and adds alot, or should i say thins out alot of the shite
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I try to buy the CD from bands that I hear and like. They will often be back bedroom operations and the CD is often the largest profit item that they sell.
In fact any official “merch” will support an artist, whether a musician, podcaster, or independent animator. Just don’t buy the knock off stuff. So that T-shirt, keyring, or mousemat is helping them keep going.
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The charts died when Top Of The Pops went off air. It was starting to become a nonsense anyway, but physical sales are much more expensive to manipulate than free streams.
I wouldn’t be so blasé about this. Yes, live gigs are a fantastic way to experience music, probably the best way, but the market for small scale concerts is limited, and if this is the only source of income for musicians, many will struggle.
We have grown up with the traditional tour/single/album routine, but that is more or less obsolete nowadays. Today’s audiences consume music in very different ways, and for those who’ve grown up in the digital era, the idea of a completely artificial ‘artist’ is far less unacceptable than it is for older generations. The whole K-pop scene is already almost there.
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It’s great that you’re still buying CDs RW, but I’m afraid you’re in a rapidly vanishing demographic.
The vast majority of people buying music are doing it through streaming services and most of them don’t consider the well being of the creators at all.
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Smaller artists/bands already make only pennies from spotify, it doesn’t change a thing financially. It just functions as a marketing tool/presence.
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Having to compete with artificial ‘artists’ which have no overheads is bound to affect musicians income, which is, as you say, at the lower level hardly huge in the first place. Not all musicians are in bands either, in fact, bands are already a disappearing phenomenon. All kinds of musicians, singers, instrumentalists, composers etc will be affected. There are other income streams like tv/movie soundtracks and incidental music, which are helpful for musicians. It’s likely that they will almost completely disappear.
Really, only live performances will remain, and I’m hopeful that there will be a revival of interest in seeing all kinds of musicians playing live.
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Guess what, smaller electronic or hip hop artists or singer/songwriters etc don’t make any income from streaming either, live shows/sets/DJ sets and people buying records (or direct) and merch is where virtually all of the money is.
Money from film/tv only affects a tiny minority of smaller musicians.
The reality is that a large percentage of music listeners who only consume streaming (often playlists), don’t buy records or go to shows are basically already lost to the majority of the music community from a financial pov.
Maybe I should add that when I say ‘smaller’ I mean 99 point something of artists.
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I reckon that as things seem to be going the only live music you are likely to see in the future is some pod cast?, if that’s what they are called, of a band sitting in a field/flat or puddle somewhere.
Except of course some corpses would once had a top 200 hit back in the days.
Sad isn’t it, computation is choking out life everywhere.
I hope this last play for AI etc backfires and people realise and pull back.
BTW there aint no AI its all just algorithm. Its still a (more complex) calculator.
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The people are getting what they want. You want immediate access to gazillions of hours of music for a few bucks a month - drown in AI shit. And you will like it.
On the bright side, in my favourite small record store the majority of customers are surprisingly young btw, actually go proper crate digging too. Sure, some might just be hipsters, but maybe some of them actually value music.
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the melbourne music scene is incredibly healthy with two major community radio stations and plenty of live venues…
i know the ‘struggling artist’ is a romantic image, but there are plenty of ways to make money in the music industry, most not so lucrative, but alot of things are just hobbies in life, think about how many of us play football for fun… sometimes i think musicians lean into having no money a bit too much…
cue discussions about creatives being styfulled by that pesky thing called ‘a job’
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I’ve loved that song for nearly fifty years.
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That article rather rang true. I remember during the 1970s, when I was first discovering music, that The Beatles were almost regarded as “yesterday’s news”. We had the Red and Blue albums, which I listened to endlessly, but some of the Beatles’ output was quite hard to come by. And this is given that we were living in Liverpool and our local record shop was even run by the Epstein family.
Funnily enough, when I first had to wear glasses, we could only afford NHS frames, which I hated. The only metal framed ones were the round ones which the optician sold to me on the basis that they were like the ones John Lennon had. They actually became quite fashionable again after he was murdered.
In the 1980s it seemed to be the received wisdom that McCartney was a talentless soppy hack. I can only assume that this was from people who had never listed to his albums. The common jibe was “Frog Chorus”, which was actually a perfectly charming little side project. If you knew his work, then it was obvious that Give My Regards To Broadstreet was an obvious misstep, but his other work had real depth, even if it was derided at the time.
When I was learning to play guitar, the Beatles were one of the first set of songs that I learned to play. I bought the Beatles’ songbook from Rushworths, but seeing the simplified chords and arrangements was frustrating. I could hear Harrison’s guitar work and desperately tried to recreate it. Once you start listening closer to it, you realise just how complex it is: McCartney’s bass lines are a composition all on their own, and Ringo’s drumming is simple but perfectly fills the spaces in the songs. Add to that Lennon’s poetic wit and Harrison’s ear for a hook and it’s a perfect combination.
The Beatles now seem to be held in the same esteem as great classical composers. Certainly up with songwriting teams like Rodgers & Hammerstein, Bacharach & David etc… The Beatles had a cameo appearance in an episode of Doctor Who in 1965, and one of the characters, who was meant to be from the far future, mentioned that she “never realised that The Beatles were Classical music.” She may have had a point.
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