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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I think a key sentence is: “The inevitable result is that, a decade later, most consumers don’t think music is worth much.” This makes me think of the ways in which a baby’s cognitive abilities develop as they physically interact with the world. Crawling leads to math, right? So I’m wondering how much of my allegiance to the music of my youth is related to my relationship with the tangible—with the album, 8-track, cassette, and CD. And how much of my disinterest in most new music is related to the ephemeral nature of Internet streaming. I spend a lot of time in bookstores taking chances on physical books, hoping they’ll be good. And, yes, one great book is worth buying one hundred mediocre ones. I used to make those same gambles in record stores. But I don’t do that anymore.

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miles makes music's avatar

Hi Ted, thanks for your piece, excellent as always. One tangent I think is worth exploring is between the tension of Spotify being a "new technology" and your very prescient point here:

> A crappy interface with mediocre audio quality that provides almost no information on musicians will inevitably lead to declining fan loyalty...

I would argue that music streaming applications (but I'll pick on Spotify in particular) are nowhere near their potential, even given existing technology. For instance, Spotify has yet to integrate a label page feature that doesn't involve knowing a hidden, arcane search parameter, even though I regularly see serious music listeners beg for it. The technical effort here is negligible, and would please their core audience immensely. Similarly, for all the supposed bells and whistles that recommendation algorithms offer from the form perspective (for instance, Spotify's music is catalogued by BPM, instrumentation, vocal style, "danciness" and other such parameters that they aggregated via acquisition of Echo Nest's data scientists), there's little to no cultural analysis going on on their end. After all, genre is only a loose proxy for culture or politics—in the algorithm's view of things, these are simply collapsed along aesthetic lines. Similarly, I can't search music by thematic content, which as a curator, is another vital ask. The resulting question is "Who is this platform really for?" and inevitably the answer is not serious music listeners but instead people who require endless, indistinguishable, background music. Assuming we also solve the task of paying artists, I imagine a streaming platform of the future that creates relationships along more than just matters of auditory analysis; including geographic, historical, and cultural axes would turn any application into a part of the music-making-and-understanding ecosystem, instead of a mere spreadsheet.

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