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.
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.
With the entire world having access to internet by now, isn’t it only logical there’s a massive increase in quantity of music being available? One figurative spotlight for a factor of thousands more possible successful artists. But at the same time the internet provides significantly more ways to discover and get people togheter.
“Harder” for the average artist is not how I would describe it, I think being a successful artist requires a different skillset then it used to. You have to be more tech/web literate or know someone who is to start. But it’s still a grind, just like it used to be.
The internet does provide a way to instant fame. I’ve seen Youtube sets of people DJ’ing in their bedroom get noticed and overnight they are playing for hundreds of people. Yet again for the average artist it’s a grind for years.
For context, I do collect vinyl so spend way to much on records, obviously not the average music listener. Sidenote: genres could be fluctuating in popularity, making it easier for some and harder for others.
Yeah you know, I dunno about that Rick beato guy. I’m not sure about him. (beato)
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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.
Paradoxically, I kinda prefer YouTube links because then I can configure my client to use whichever proxy/frontend I wanna use
Exactly! It is so much more user friendly to post the original and let individuals set their browser/device to open it wherever is preferred.
Oh absolutely!
My point is that it’s easy for anyone to click the link and be taken to YouTube by accident.
But yeah. Given that YouTube is the source, I guess it makes sense to use the actual yt link.
That makes sense.
Becuase it is off-topic and I don’t know exactly what platform readers are using
Got it.
Who else would rather spend 5 minutes reading than 12 minutes watching? Can I get a transcript?
Yes
I don’t see that button on YouTube (Firefox android). Am I blind? Is it on some other front end?
Ah, it might be be a YouTube Premium feature. My bad!
Go to any youtube subtitle download site
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.
What this guy doesn’t ever address is that has always been true.
This is commonly known as Sturgeon’s Law.
90% of everything is crap. There were a ton of bands contemporary to the Beatles. Most of them aren’t well remembered.
I looked him up. He’s an old session musician. Those guys get particularly bitter about modern studio production.
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.
Also check Nate Smith.
There is and always will be amazing music. I grew up with classic rock and classic country. Now I’m listening to Tierra Whack. I’m a 46 year old white dude. I am sooooo not her demographic but fuck it good music is good music.
I thought this was going to be about the declining working conditions and prospects for musicians. Good music is still getting made, and the music industry is making more money than ever - it’s just going to fewer and fewer people
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.
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.
Agreed, there are gems to be found. That’s why I said mostly.
Except that mainstream music is not “mostly”. Even in the 80s, 0.1% of the music produced globally was played 99% of the time on the radio.
But I understand what you’re saying.
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Wait, you’re saying your favorite music is from when you were young?! No way! That certainly has not always happened to the majority of people since time began!
/s
Snark aside, this is what happens to the majority of people as they get older.
Is there a lot of garbage out there these days? Absolutely. But this is in large part due to the fact that there simply is a lot more music coming out now than ever before because of how easy it’s become for anyone to make and distribute their own songs. Yet is there also a lot of great music out there these days? Absolutely. And it’s due to the exact same reason
I’m with you on the fact that incredible music is still being made. It’s not that hard to find, either. Bandcamp collates music on blogs for all types of taste, for instance. And there’s all kinds of ways to play off what we already know we like to gradually discover new artists - and expand our tastes.
It’s weird to me that people settle on a certain collection of music and then just stop. It’s even odder when they then complain that nothing else is as good.
I said my favorite music was made before I was born. It wasn’t “the stuff that came out when I was growing up is my favorite” which is what people keep replying with.
No, we’re talking about the music that YOU LISTENED TO when you’re young. And young in this trope means music you listened to before you were in your like 30s to 40s.
That was a long jump.
What do you mean?
You made up a lot of stuff in your head about me to get to your conclusion.
Like what? That you were younger 20 years ago? That’s literally the only thing i ‘assumed’ about you
Old people hating new music. I’ve never ever heard that before. Definitely Spotifys fault.
“Almost all my favorite music was made before I was born.”
I was a young person hating new music. RIF.
Sure, fair enough, but it’s just another variation on everyone else is wrong. The video is actually bitching about metrics. Music is easier to find than ever and the artists were never paid except at the top. You are always going to have folks chasing mass market appeal.
There’s no such thing as ‘everyone else is wrong’ when it comes to taste in art. I was just providing my viewpoint that was in agreement with Rick’s. I don’t think he even discussed compensation to artists in this video, he’s just talking about how much people value music today vs in years past.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying mechanical music. I love some of it, in fact I’m currently on a big psytrance kick. But I agree with him that most of it coming out in the last 20 years is garbage. And it’s perfectly ok to disagree with that. I never said people suck if they like modern stuff. I just think it’s mostly shit. :)
Edit: fact is, most of the music coming out at ANY time is garbage, and always has been - we only remember the good stuff from the past because everybody forgot about all the other trash
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There is a incredible amount of variety in modern music, you just have to look for yourself, and not just eat whatever is fed to you.
My only gripe with modern music, is that almost all live concerts seem to be single-artist now. I don’t know if this is an effect of hiphop becoming the biggest genre, but I miss seeing an entire band on stage, not just a rapper and/or a DJ. They are definitely still there, but much less than even 10 years ago.
There is still great music and it is still a great time to consume music. But Beato is right that trap beats, quantized drums, and autotune all suck ass.
Rick often goes off on these angry-boomer tangents. I give them a miss.
I used to like Beatos videos. But honestly if anyone knows about enshittification it’s him. He has done some killer interviews the past year, no one can that away from him. But my God his other stuff has just gone down a cliff. I think it was the debut of his website that made him greedy.
Examples of his decline?
Compare his older videos to his more recent ones?
I stopped watching a little while after his website debut. I didn’t make a list, sorry.
I ain’t watching a bunch of videos of a topic that doesn’t interest me just to notice a decline in content.
That’s why I asked.
Two videos one good and one bad would be enough.
I ain’t watching a bunch of his videos when I decided a year ago it wasn’t worth it, just to link them to you.
I don’t care at all, past what I’ve already said.
If it doesn’t interest you, and I have no interest in it, why TF would you think I should do anything?
Well, that would have been unreasonable of my part, bro.
Sorry, maybe I was unnecessarily rude.
Let’s say I can pick his latest video as an example of bad stuff. Can you link a video you consider good?
I appreciate the honesty. Maybe tomorrow I’ll check out some stuff. But really I think his good stuff recently has been his Nirvana interviews, Soundgarden interviews, and the interview with the STP guitarist who I feel bad about not remembering his name right now. If you can stand listening to Billy Corgan that’s worth a listen too. Personally that’s a tough one to sit through though.
Older stuff, again just off the top of my tired head, I liked the video he did about voice modulation. He’s got a good one about how everything is recorded into perfect time signatures using software.
Edit. He was a producer. So a lot of the topics about the technical side of music is pretty good. He just tends to blow up his own head though, that’s all.
Thanks! I’ll check out the voice modulation video, then compare it to his recent stuff.
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No thanks. I will use my YouTube Premium account.
It’s your choice to pay with both money and your data. The sad thing is it has repercusions on the rest of humanity but it’s so long term and big scale that it is hard to grasp.
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
Did you watch the video? Because that’s not really what he was saying. He was talking about how we consume music and how the studios and basically capitalism have “streamlined” and bastardized what is meant to be art. He’s talking almost exclusively about how capitalism has robbed us of human connection, how vampiric companies stopped paying to make things that cost more using human musicians in order to sterilize the music for broader appeal and to maximize profits.
Is that…something you disagree with? This is enshittification. Right here. This is a 100% match for the community you’re in. Don’t like that concept? Don’t interact with this community, basically.
To the consumption part, I have given more money directly to more artists via discovering them on Spotify then attending their shows and buying their merch than I ever even came close to back in the record buying days when record companies were screwing their artists anyway.
I know quite a few bands personally who will never attain Taylor Swift levels of wealth, but they’ve got a business model of touring and merch down to a science that affords them a nice living doing what they love. This also includes tons of accessibility and fan interaction that very much didn’t use to be a thing.
The savvy DIYers are sidestepping the entire record company schematic and using streaming services as effectively free marketing.
If you think you are helping artists by listening to them on spotify, you might be wrong. Check out Cory Doctorow on Spotify
Did you read my comment at all?
Haha seems I did not comprehend it. Thanks.
Okay, I watched the whole video and I have to disagree. The first half of the video is about how music is too easy to create, and only part of it is really about how corporations are using their catalogue to train AI, which I agree is scummy. However, the rest is about how the barrier of entry is lower, and he doesn’t really articulate why that’s a bad thing. Yeah you can make really sterile stuff at a fast rate, but you can also put work in and create something unique even with cheap tools. It kinda feels like saying every artist who uses MSPaint just copies and pastes Clipart, ignoring the few who make visually stunning pixel art. If anything, we’ve trended a bitaway of the stranglehold of companies in the last decade due to independent creation being much more viable.
He also says that modern music is subject to trends, which I think is a weird distinction to make. Old music is full of trends, because people would try to replicate what was popular on the radio. How many parents tried to make the next Jackson 5? I’m sure some followers of trends put out great stuff, but a lot of it was trash, same as ever.
Likewise, I find the second part overly steeped in “wrong generation kids these days” emotion. If he made more of a point of how streaming services rake artists over the coals, or the value of listening to full albums from artists you want to support, or about how cheap streaming services cannot financially support the large number of artists they carry, then I would agree. But he makes a big point of saving up and buying an album with his allowance which is purely a nostalgic feeling that is still felt by kids today. I also feel that we’re just a lot more cautious of integrating artists into our personality just due to the fear of them turning out to be terrible people.
So, enshitification of streaming services? Yes. Enshitification of the entire industry? Not so much. Also nothing is going to make him sound more out of touch than calling phones “thought deletion devices.”
Same shit new day. Radio, tape decks, electronic generated music, Napster. They all are just spins on “music is shitty or dead and not worthwhile”. It’s been going on for ages.
There has always been shit, and there has always been indie and lesser known potentially more interesting music you have to look for.
No. You’re missing the point of what was said. It’s not “new technology will destroy integrity.” All of the tech he’s talking about he talks about from experience. He’s discussing how companies are bastardizing technological advancements for profit. And selling the soul of what’s meant to be human expression for a more guaranteed return. This isn’t an old guy vs the youth thing. It’s a music guy speaking on what is happening with late stage capitalism in the music industry.
Now, a legitimate criticism is his whole thing about how it was better to have to work for money to save up to buy records. I mean, sure, there is a marked difference in the way people consume music nowadays and it has (again, thanks to capitalism) morphed into what is most likely to catch people’s attention, what can be the most TikTok friendly, etc.
It’s the focus on catchy singles in an attention economy instead of cohesive albums. But the upside that he missed to both of these is that while, yes, the democratization of pro-quality tools does make music easier to make and thus is done to homogenize a lot of music—but this can also be a good thing. In commercial music, it’s a big downside because pop music is now basically engineered to be as earwormy as possible. But it’s also a huge upside because now anyone, regardless of privilege, can create. That does flood us all with endless subpar bullshit, but it also allows small artists to be heard without some corporate fuckin record label holding those keys. He doesn’t go into that, and he overlooks the upsides to this. But the video was “what’s wrong with music,” so maybe he’d agree, but he doesn’t mention it and that’s a big failure on his part.
No, I’m not. It’s a new form of an old argument. The same crap about singles was said about the radio and singles.
Did you just call Baby Boomer Rick Beato a Millennial
