Thought Provoking Article: "The coming implosion of the record business…"

[Archimago]

Wow, this part of the article really stuck out to me:

Quote

5. A surprising number of artists sitting at home during the quarantine recorded multiple recordings since March 2020. To try to supplement battered incomes, these artists are releasing projects at a record pace this past Summer, this Fall and stretching into 2022. There is a literal tidal wave of new music coming out. According to Spotify, consumers who had to manage 60,000 new albums a week being posted on Spotify pre-COVID are now seeing close to 100,000 new albums a week going up this Fall.

 

From a supply-demand perspective, isn't this simply also an excess of supply? I mean, how many of those 60-100 thousand albums/week is actually "needed" or of "value" in this world? We're oversaturated with entertainment media these days between movies, TV shows, music, video games, YouTube, social media, etc... Vast majority of those albums obviously will not make much (if any) money!

 

Nonetheless, clearly, there are many things unfair about the streaming model nicely highlighted in the article.

 

With modern technology, recording, producing, editing audio these days isn't difficult and there's a lot of talent around to compete for a set number of $$$ the public is willing to spend!

[Archimago]

10 minutes ago, hopkins said:

 

The fact that it's easier to put out stuff means there's a lot more "crap" out there, but hopefully also some things of value. 

 

Yes, agree. However, with less filtering of what's "good" and what's "crap", it could also make it tough to allow good artists to be recognized. Imagine how many person-hours it would take to sift through 60,000+ albums a week! Literally looking for needles in haystacks. With work, family life, enjoying other entertainment, I doubt I would be able to fairly sample 60,000 albums in a lifetime, much less the idea that this volume comes out weekly.

 

Even worse if there's actually a brilliant song or two that deserves to be heard in what's otherwise an OK album easily dismissed.

 

Oversaturation.

[Archimago]

On 9/25/2021 at 2:03 PM, NOMBEDES said:

 

 

Are we missing the point that many of these 100000 "music albums" are computer generated and are not actually human produced music?  I would hope that there would be some humans involved beyond pushing a button on a random discarded bit coin mining computer.

 

Would love to see if there's a study on just how many albums of this nature. Could actually be an interesting project to say grab at random 200 of the albums released last week and count the number from totally unknown artists or appear to be algorithmically generated "music".