The streaming era of music production

[reeloy]

…well…ep was nothing but a marketing term for a “small” album…a marketing definition in a market that simply does’nt EXIST anymore…

we’re in the streaming era…if u pitch a sonic piece of work these days, major or independant, it’s ALL about a focus track…and in best case, this focus track, once called a single, is part of some bigger sonic storytelling, some collection of tracks that come along brandnew from artist xyz…

the days where u work on an album for quite a while and then u promote it for another while with tour are long gone…the album promotes the tour nowadays…and ur lucky if the world really digs more than just ur focus track…formerly known as “single”…

in the streaming era…u better release something at least twice a year…
and if ur a serious artist, of course u still wanna say more than just a focus track, aka single
so don’t bother…and release a little collection of songs/tracks…tell a story…have some concept frame work around that…and hell yeah…call it an album…because that’s what it is…

my next album will contain four tracks…the follow up will contain five…
ep’s…?..nope…that’s all yesterdays parties and totally last century…whatever the riaa liked to think…back in the days of physical products…

[phaelam]

AGREE!
but, not everyone follows that ‘template’ tho …

all end

[many other examples…wont bother getting into posting them tho. you can find em part of the journey]

[Hitachii]

Lots of thoughts reading this. Insane to think that a little over a century ago, hearing music could only happen in person. What a trip if you didn’t own an instrument to walk into a room where someone was beating the drums. All your friends were there, and the performers got to show off their new songs to a whole audience who are clapping and dancing. Just enveloped in this experience centered around music.

I think what we perceive (and I agree) to be the decline of music is that our association of it and its constituent parts is so much different now. More or less everything above has been gradually dissociated from experiencing music. It’s neither here nor there, but it does kind of suck for the artist.

Unsurprisingly music appears to be the least important aspect of Spotify’s business model. I’m talking in terms of quality and respect for the artists and medium. It’s pretty clear that they want to command how artists operate in order to be popular (read: viable revenue streams).

[Stone262]

I’m not sure it’s just streaming that’s the culprit. Some people genuinely prefer mixtapes, playlists and top hits compilations, and I would say the type of audience/demographic that was buying that stuff in the 90s and 00s are suited down to the ground with music on Spotify and YouTube.

As an album lover, I use Spotify for basically just that. It’s either checking out new stuff which I eventually buy or about 70% of the time it’s just a convenient way to listen to music I’ve already bought on CD on the go. I guess the artist gets a few more cents out of me than they would have otherwise if I’d ripped the CD to my phone. To me, the subscription fee is less painful than having to manually move music to my phone.

The other thing is the environmental factors involved with listening to albums that make it harder. My older eyes struggle reading the spines when browsing for something to listen to, most of my listening used to be while cooking or washing up, but with open plan houses there’s now a TV in the kitchen area and a dishwasher means you’re not standing in one place for an album’s duration every evening.

Not to mention how hard it can be to sit in place for an hour and do almost nothing to soak in an album without being distracted by chores that need doing.

[reeloy]

…no matter what u call it, end of all days…

we can also say…ok the traditional album length is dead…
the mini album, formerly known as the ep, is THE actual framework for a collection of an artist’s piece of overall sonic work…

and the term ALBUM is way more common than ep…so ep’s are the new albums…
or let’s come up with a new term for some sort of collection of track/songs…

at least we can all agree, no sonic artists want to release an endless row of unrelated, random, out of the blue, left alone focus tracks…singles…right?

the artist exclusive playlist/collection, thoughtful released, with some conceptional carefully crafted pieces of sounddesign, containing some kind of overall vibe, concept, title and cover by an sonic act remains THE artform and favourable way we love to express ourselves…
to all of UZ…
for all out there…

noboby has that attention span left to follow a collection row, a playlist, that lasts for almost an hour or even way more…

while the oldest rule will never loose it’s guaranteed effect…repetition makes the hit…
if the listener had a great time, following ur sonic journey…and it lasted “only” for half an hour, well, then…good thing for everbody involved…press play it again, sam…

whatsoever still, it remains a great thing to dive into the sonic mindset of another sonic artist…spending quality time with all he/she/they came up with recently…a piece of art, a statement in sounddesign and vibes, that takes us via our ears and thoughts by the hand to abduct us, as the listener, to some other places we have’nt seen before…

so…anything between 3 up to 7 or 8 tracks max can spent that feeling…
no one needs to bother to work on double lp’s anymore…
release little doses/smaller personal playlists/sensefully curated collections of ur kind of sonic grain…beyond that one focus track ur using to pitch the whole damn thing…

the game remains the same…the art of mixtapes…end of all days…
what’s the perfect opener…the sonic door to open up…some kind of prolog…where to rise the tension…where to crack it…where to shock…where to calm the fuk down…where and when to create euphoria…and what might be the perfect ending…
epilog…and…
fade out…

[LyingDalai]

@ist

digging up Pitchfork […] and some under the radar blogs, go to Soulseek to get their entire collection, and follow their label for discovering similar artists

My own path as well.
Today, this forum provides a good source of discoveries, and I keep downloading random stuff with soulseek (e.g. if I see that someone hosts two obscure records I am currently downloading, I’ll dig in their collection).

I really enjoy listening to whole albums, that’s the way IMO.
I hated Top50 back in the 80’s, with albums that would be some weak material around a strong track.
Much preferred well conceived albums that need some focused attention (oh, Doolittle how I was glad you nailed 80’s coffin).
Can’t bear Spotify or Deezer neither. I understand that it is convenient for some, but it’s a plague IMO as long as it’s not correctly letting artists live from their craft. Plus you have to do the effort of digging yourself, or you are very likely to be influenced by the majors and the social media.

I put a large part of my money in records, preferably through bandcamp as it’s of course both convenient and respecful for the artists. Plus it’s where the experimental stuff is
Bandcamp all the way!

[captain8]

not surprised by the way of the album, look what happened to real groups/ bands… a lot of music today is a parade of featured artist (depending on what you listen to) but it’s often looking like everything is just one big group of features, no real identities, just a love-fest for producers

[Octagonist]

@rex_mundii

Personally I kinda like the specs the RIAA uses for EPs. 3 to 5 tracks or under 30 minutes. Enough time to build something coherent but no room for filler.

I wonder if there’s a better ontology. Perhaps this:

• (EP | LP) : technical formats which have mechanical consequences (like the number of vinyl discs you have to include in the package, or the available bandwidth for the audio)
• (album) : the collection of music as the experience of creating or listening to it

[chaocrator]

„proper“ albums require much longer production cycle than modern music can afford.
singles/EPs are just optimal these days.

[LyingDalai]

@chaocrator

„proper“ albums require much longer production cycle than modern streaming platforms can afford.
singles/EPs are just optimal these days.

fixed

[Bwax]

I still love to listen to full albums at work, where I am forced to sit around for 8+ hours. I have the time, so why not do a deep dive? At home, I’m too busy to sit around and listen to a full album. Too much to do around the house after working all day, haha.

Spotify is just too damn convenient to use on my work computer. One browser tab with access to a ton of music. It’s not like I’m going to have access to vinyl or CD’s, or load up my work computer with 3,000 mp3’s. I feel guilty about using Spotify, but… it is what it is.

As an artist, I am thinking more and more about just making “EP’s” or whatever you want to call them, with about 4-6 songs. I get bogged down with the heavy lifting of polishing 10-12 tracks over 2-3 years. I think smaller batches of music might keep things more fresh.

In the age of major artists releasing singles only, I think I would miss the little in-between songs and B-sides that turn out to be real gems.

I do hope there will always be artists who release full albums, or at least an “EP” with more experimental songs or supporting mood-setting songs that expand the story that the main “single” has introduced.

[ghostbuddy]

Everythings been in decline ever since it started. The whole universe basically.

This talk of “oh it’s all singles now, everything gone to shit etc.” is kind of funny to me. Maybe you don’t remember the 90s, the last era of the album and big record labels but mainstream music was just as single driven back then. Singles were played on MTV and radio, both of which were HUGE and IMO comparable to streaming now. Of course there were the albums being sold that doesn’t exist anymore, but I don’t think most bands or artists, at least the commercial ones necessarily put much effort into their albums. They were just a collection of singles and non-singles, often way too long and with 50% filler tracks.

I don’t even know when the golden age of music was. Was in in the 80s, when recording hardware got cheap enough for DIY bands and labels to release non-commercial music for the first time in history but the mainstream was just as if not more commercial than it is now? Was it in the 70s, when the gatekeepers had a stranglehold on music and you couldn’t get an album done without a record label A&R on your side? Was it before that, when albums weren’t even a thing and everyone was just making singles? Was it before that, when most musicians never got to make a recording and playing live was the most common way of hearing music? Or is it now, where anyone with a little bit of money and time to learn can make, at least from a technical point of view, half decent music and release it for everyone to hear?

[sabana]

I was just talking as an owner of a Record Shop back in the 80’s.

[ghostbuddy]

Only the first sentence was a reply to you!

[Octagonist]

@Bwax

As an artist, I am thinking more and more about just making “EP’s” or whatever you want to call them, with about 4-6 songs. I get bogged down with the heavy lifting of polishing 10-12 tracks over 2-3 years. I think smaller batches of music might keep things more fresh.

Even as an artist, modern life has shortened your attention span.

I don’t mean this as an attack, only an interesting observation. We’ve all been sped up, our attention cut short, distractions and multi-threaded lives made into the norm.

I blame capitalism…

[sabana]

Yes i agree. Why stop at the end of Vinyl. Classical Music had a peak period and been in decline since.

[ghostbuddy]

@Octagonist

We’ve all been sped up, our attention cut short, distractions and multi-threaded lives made into the norm.

Yet at the same time culture has slowed down. In the 70s and 80s, musical trends lasted for a few years and the next generation of listeners would had drastically different taste. The next big thing was constantly brewing and the cycle was quite short. Now, the cycle is something like 10 years, and the new trends are just old trends recycled and sold to us by the capitalist entertainment industry over and over again. We cycle the 70s, the 80s, the 90s and I guess now the noughties without any truly new and innovative reaching any significant commercial status anymore. It’s the same with movies and all pop culture, incidentally.

Late 70s / early 80s post punk & early synthesizer music was the last modernist movement in music.

[Bwax]

@Octagonist

Even as an artist, modern life has shortened your attention span.

To a degree, certainly. But it’s also just getting older (late forties), with more responsibilities, less free time, and plain old being tired, haha.

Also, I think 4-6 songs made over a shorter period of time can feel more cohesive than a long album made over 2-3 years when interests, tastes, techniques, instruments/gear/software, etc. change and result in songs that might not feel as if they belong together anymore.

[FreddyUnreal]

The Ramones disagree.

[ghostbuddy]

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