> There is literally volumes of the absolute best music being made on YouTube, but it never sees the light of day... I have to regularly go through hurdles to find it in places where artists themselves share it, and it's depressing to see them with only 50 views in many cases, completely ignored by algos.
This is my experience too. And I think "algos" are doing music-lovers a disservice…
Technology has the potential to democratise music making. You can produce music on any computer. If you make electronic music you need nothing else. If you play physical instruments you need a bit, but not much more, gear to get the sound into the computer to produce tracks which you can publish online.
So, if you want to make music, you can – no one can stop you! And you can put it online and anyone can access it, in theory, but making it discoverable by an audience is a completely different matter.
The streaming services do not need new and innovative music made with passion by god and everybody. They need the old hits, which people look for, and small amount of "new hits" to push on people to make everything feel fresh.
I want to say that there could be a different streaming service, which better serves the audience and makers, but I am not sure exactly what that means.
> There is literally volumes of the absolute best music being made on YouTube, but it never sees the light of day...
For many (most?) people, the most important role of music is participating in a shared culture. You want to be able to sing along with the same songs as your friends, to get the references made in conversation, to share moments together with a soundtrack in the background.
To the extent there is absolute quality for music, it is secondary to what people want. The thing where most everyone in a group listens to the same stuff on repeat is an important feature of the process.
If you go back to the 70s and 80s which, I'd argue, were peak decades for the sheer volume of music talent there was a social dimension which died with web 2.0 and that was shared music culture provided by radio and TV. In the UK programmes such as Top Of The Pops, The Old Grey Whistle Test, The Tube, the John Peel Show were part of this shared culture which was the backdrop of everyone's social life. Youtube and Spotify wiped this out.
For me the discovery functionality of Spotify and 3rd party discovery tools work perfectly. I keep discovering new music, the algorithm has learned my tastes pretty well, yet there are still tools if I want to go beyond that.
just some examples, in Asia put your MV on YouTube is a very basically way to publish it. people who use this way from personal singers to K-pop companies.
At least on Spotify, ‘the algo’ has put me on artists that have less than a thousand monthly listeners. I don’t know how much more obscure you want it..
This is my experience too. And I think "algos" are doing music-lovers a disservice…
Technology has the potential to democratise music making. You can produce music on any computer. If you make electronic music you need nothing else. If you play physical instruments you need a bit, but not much more, gear to get the sound into the computer to produce tracks which you can publish online.
So, if you want to make music, you can – no one can stop you! And you can put it online and anyone can access it, in theory, but making it discoverable by an audience is a completely different matter.
The streaming services do not need new and innovative music made with passion by god and everybody. They need the old hits, which people look for, and small amount of "new hits" to push on people to make everything feel fresh.
I want to say that there could be a different streaming service, which better serves the audience and makers, but I am not sure exactly what that means.