
How streaming is changing songs - tosh
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20836846/charli-xcx-new-album-streaming-spotify-dani-deahl-future-of-music
======
jurip
I'm basically streaming-only these days but I still find "singles only"
artists tiresome to deal with. Maybe it's a shortcoming of Apple Music, but if
I want to listen to an artist, I usually try to pick an album so there's
something playing for at least the next half an hour without me managing my up
next list.

For some artists there may be an "essentials" playlist or something, which
helps, but that already requires a certain level of popularity. If there's
nothing like that and no albums, I need to open a single, pick one track to
play (because four remixes of the same song one after another isn't my idea of
a good time), then the same thing for the next single, etc. Usually I just
give up and go find something with less clicking.

~~~
winternett
Most people don't see that behind the scenes payola dictates everything you
see on charts now...

Artists pay to promote their posts on Social media, so only the rich or well
funded rise to the top.

Artists remix the same tracks over and over because they know doing the same
track over and over means they can hopefully capitalize on profits already
made rather than creating anything new, which takes more time and costs more.

Albums used to be high on filler, I think most people forget how only 2/16
songs made it to radio, while 10 of those tracks were often skipped, while you
paid for all of them. now if you buy a single, you're only paying for what's
good, even though $1-$2 is still quite high for a single music track if you
ask me...

Music artists have always been hosed by the industry, good music is always
suppressed by gatekeepers that want to influence what everyone gets to hear,
but that one little band you like can greatly benefit, and will likely live
longer together, by you telling people about them... Stop relying on other
people to tell you what's good and let's let the listeners dictate what the
charts say...

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dangus
Remember singles? On records, CDs, and tapes? And then on iTunes? I’m not
really sure there’s that much of a change here. A lot of artists have been
always been releasing music this way, haven’t they?

The content of the article is an interview with a single artist, who just
released an album.

It reeks of promotional material - and The Verge doesn’t have a great track
record of being an expert on anything.

~~~
jakobegger
Neir the end of the interview, she mentions some specific formulaic tricks to
reduce skip rate. She says it's all about grabbing people in the first five
seconds, putting all the good parts in the beginning of the song, avoid "weird
self-indulgent intros", etc. Those are things that sound pretty specific to
streaming.

Also, she talks about how artists stop focussing on albums (it's no longer
single -> single -> album -> promo tour), and just release new music all the
time (single -> single -> single -> ...)

~~~
cm2187
And make shorter songs. Which is my main surprise. I thought that by freeing
themselves from radio playlists (where the radio station mandates short songs)
and the physical capacity of a CD, artists would get to make songs of any
length, including longer. I am not sure I understand why streaming calls for
short songs.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Perhaps compensation is higher for those with shorter songs, possibly due to
being paid per play of the song?

~~~
Insanity
This seems plausible. Recommendation Algorithms definitely could play a role
as well. I believe that at some point YouTube started recommending videos
based on "time watched" so videos slowly got longer over time, as those videos
tended to be promoted more.

(Or vice versa, that they became shorter because the algorithm preferred
that.)

~~~
dep_b
Wasn't that like 10 minutes after which all videos became 10 minutes to
explain what could be told in 30 seconds?

~~~
Liquid_Fire
I believe the 10 minute mark has to do with being able to insert additional
ads into the video, so if your video is close to 10 minutes it pays off to
"round it up".

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exDM69
I predict that streaming, listener analytics and metrics will have a much
bigger effect on music production by removing the human producers for mass
consumption pop music in the next two decades. The writing is on the wall.

We're already at a point where the producers (who compose the songs and
usually even create the audio using computer software) spend a lot of time
analyzing the metrics they get from Spotify et al. They look for stats on how
many seconds someone listens to a track before skipping to the next one, do
they turn the volume up or down, which songs are paired to the same playlists,
etc etc.

When reading interviews of musicians, they frequently bring this up and
usually not in a positive light. You can also hear the results if you're
exposed to modern pop music - when there's a hit single, there will be quite a
few copycats that will shamelessly borrow the elements of the hit. This is not
a new thing but the degree to which it's occuring is.

Now what's good at looking at metrics, doing tiny adjustments and gradient
descending towards some local optimum and cheaper than hiring a musician? A
machine learning algorithm of course.

While it's not common yet, there have been some fairly impressive
demonstrations I've heard. Computer-generated music notation is easy to
generate (read: number of bits in the output is rather low) and has been
experimented with for a long time.

But this can go even a step further, rather than producing sheet music, an
algorithm can generate the _audio_ directly. As in the PCM audio waveforms (or
maybe spectrograms, frequency domain might be easier for algorithms). I recall
hearing AI-generated classical music audio (found through HN) which sounded
fairly convincing to me (albeit with a white-ish noise on the background).

If you're a professional pop music producer, make the most out of your career
while you can. You're closer to being replaced by robots than you think.

I'm not suggesting that human musicians will go away any time soon, I'm sure
people will enjoy playing instruments with their own hands in the future. But
the kind of producers that create music with a computer mimicking popular
songs and tracking analytics from listeners will be, if not replaced, at least
heavily assisted by algorithms more and more in the near future.

~~~
filleokus
I agree with your main points, even though I'm unsure of the time scale.

However:

> But this can go even a step further, rather than producing sheet music, an
> algorithm can generate the audio directly.

Even if this is a cool idea, I don't think it ever will be deployed large
scale. Good quality beats/samples and increasingly even software instruments
are becoming cheap. Working with raw audio seem like the wrong abstraction
layer for music, almost like working with pixels instead of characters to
synthesise text. While limiting - working with raw audio can possibly create
completely new sounds - it will probably always be cheaper and yield better
results to work with some representation of the music instead.

~~~
svantana
The big advantage of using raw audio is that there's an abundance of data (all
the music that's ever been released pretty easily scraped from the internet),
whereas "semantic" data is rare, expensive and of lower quality (as in: not as
good/catchy). The best solution is probably to extract the semantic
representation from raw/pcm form. (Incidentally, I'm working on this very
problem. Anyone interested, feel free to contact me)

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z_open
It's nice they have this freedom, but for a while now, it's been harder and
harder to find a truly coherent album. Something that you can leave on and
feels like a single piece of work.

~~~
kokowawa393
I guess the album is dead

~~~
lost_in_sauce
Major label guy here. Not quite. While this isn’t as important for a lot of
artists, on the top (like megastar-level: Drake, Post Malone, etc.), it’s
still a huge money maker. More tracks means more streams which means more
revenue. The waterfall is effective, but the album is still important.
Especially in the release week.

~~~
dmix
What about cohesion in the album? I guess that prog-rock/indie/hiphop themed
albums thing isn't very common in general these days, I'd be surprised to see
one today from any new artist.

The intros and skits would never fit into streaming properly, especially with
the ranking algorithms. Nothing worse than getting some random intro skit come
up on a recommended playlist!

Spotify should run some detection algorithms on songs to not recommend the
intros/skits, or the uploader can explicitly mark them for exclusion, which
would help boost their singles and not push unhelpful songs

I'm a big fan of artists releasing each song as it's made, with each having
cover art and maybe a backup song. They . can still package them up in a full
album for charting and full album sales.

~~~
mason55
Spotify uses peoples manual playlists to drive some recommendations. If two
songs are on a playlist together they’re probably similar. In the same way, if
a song isn’t on any playlists, like you’d expect a skit not to be, then they
don’t recommend it.

Free human curation of stuff that goes well on playlists.

------
wyclif
The most corrosive part of this that affects the quality of the music is this:

 _...songs are becoming shorter, and artists are front-loading all the catchy
bits to keep a song’s skip rate as low as possible_

As music consumers become more single-oriented and running an attention
deficit, everthing is getting hook fronted in the first 30 seconds of the song
to keep people from skipping. Now, that might be interesting for a while if it
makes artists experiment with verse-chorus-verse pop song structure but I'll
bet the long term effect will be a race to the bottom in terms of lack of
complexity and a lot of pop music is going to sound samey very fast.

~~~
gherkinnn
Nothing new. Korn mentions just that in their “Y’all want a single” [0] - back
in 2003.

The text at 2:32 says “90% of singles get to the ’hook’ within 30 seconds”.
Then: “98% of #1 hits are less than 3:30 long” and “does this sound like a
formula to you?”

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyFlW_bOg-Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyFlW_bOg-Q)

~~~
Juliate
And what's funny, is that originally, this 3/4 minutes formula is likely more
tied to physical constraints than marketing/human psychology:
[https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/6003271/why-are-
songs-3-minute...](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/6003271/why-are-
songs-3-minutes-long)

Which reminds a bit of
[http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html](http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html)
as well.

~~~
KineticLensman
> Which reminds a bit of
> [http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html](http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html)
> as well.

TL;DR - the legend that the width of the shuttle SRBs is derived from a design
decision about cart width that goes back to the Romans.

But it's actually a bit more complicated than that...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-
gauge_railway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-gauge_railway)

~~~
Juliate
Excellent, thanks for the link!

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ozzmotik
oh i guess i sorta took this for granted, this is how I've been releasing
music for the last decade or so. just make a song, upload it, and then compile
conceptually related songs into an album later when enough material has been
accrued. granted, I've only released about 7 albums so far but I have 8 more
planned to be released in the near future when I can get around to making
album art for all of them

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Grue3
Well, Melanie Martinez has just released an entire concept album (and a movie
based on this album) with no singles all at once. There will always be artists
who care about their art and not streaming numbers.

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tonetheman
I love this line

> Plus, she says, streaming means listeners get to pick who’s worth hearing.
> “It’s not a bunch of white males at radio stations and record labels
> deciding what the general public should listen to.”

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svantana
This article is mostly about the release schedule of music (TLDR: one song at
a time, once every few months), saying very little about how the actual music
has changed. For more on this, music journo Liz Pelly has written a lot about
what she calls "Spotify-core", a new-ish genre of music which works as both
background and foreground music.
[https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-
pelly](https://thebaffler.com/downstream/streambait-pop-pelly)

~~~
robotron
My circle of experimental music artists were doing this in the
early/mid-2000s.We weren't streaming so much as releasing MP3s as they were
done.

I expect (somewhat) that song length may also morph, if it hasn't already.
There's no need to be concerned about how much time fits on physical media.
There are just attention spans.

