I feel global political oppression or global wars usually produce great music but Macklemore might be the peak.
Nothing against him, some of his songs are good, but I expected real rage inducing stuff with everything going on. Or is this just the state of music as a whole?
Lolwut.
Artists like Bob Vylan, Lambrini Girls, Narcissist Cookbook, Cheap Perfume, The Oozes, Problem Patterns and even Lil Darkie and many more are ones I’d never have found without Spotify suggestions. That and discovering some classics like Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, Dead Kennedys, Against Me!, Crass, ZSK would never have happened without algo suggestions.
Generic bullshit doesn’t even get clicks, the most outraging things get clicks, protest songs and politically charged shit does, just like the above, it just happens to be leftist music. Also check out Refused.
It’s crazy we live in a time where there is music that isn’t some poetic wishy washy love song top 40 studio bullshit which is all you would’ve known about before, but there’s music that actually references material current events that happen, and then there’s old classics that are so much easier to find thanks to discoverability via streaming.
There’s obviously a problem with the inherent wealth transfer where both indie musicians and listeners pay Spotify, and now they want to cut out the middleman (the musician) entirely, but we absolutely must not go back to monoculture offline bs mandated by some fat cat studio exec Epstein list member looking ass.
Edit: I posted in another comment, but if anyone is interested in leftist, political, anti-capitalist and progressive music more generally I maintain a playlist here and I’d love suggestions: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5rYZABdJf5H8XmliZ9ZTIW?pi=KIskSDh8T--mY
While I agree with you overall, this just isn’t true.
We had university radio which would play whatever the DJ was into, because it wasn’t programmed.
We had local record stores, which while stocked a lot of top 40, would also bring in albums from small and indie bands that would never get played on radio. They would play it in the store, and have listening stations with headphones so you could listen to an album before you bought it, because you would not have heard it on the radio.
We had clubs that would book bands from everywhere. The club I hung out at had a band every night of the week, and no matter when you went, you would hear someone new.
The music was out there. You just had to get your ass out of the house to find it.
Edit: Also, top 40 stations played what was selling. They were not the problem, it was the stations that were not top 40 that were playing the pablum for the masses, and when it would sell, then it would appear on a top 40 station. By definition, a top 40 station played the 40 biggest selling singles of the previous week. They didn’t pick what was sold.
I often heard great bands show up in top 40 because they somehow managed to break through to the masses. I remember when Pink Floyd released an album in the 90s, and the first single on the album got played on the top 40 station because it was selling. This being a time when groups like Ace of Bass, Salt-n-Pepa and Boyz II Men were popular and what a lot of people were listening to. Right there nestled in the hip-hop and dance music was Pink Floyd. Again, because it was selling.
Edit 2: I picked Pink Floyd because it stood out. At that time, in the 90s, it was not a band that young people listened to much of unless they were really into prog rock, classic rock or blazed all the time.
Keyword being “local”. We had no record stores. Which ones were there stocked mostly overpriced Beatles represses. They still do to this day.
We too, and the DJ had dogshit taste and played random generic autotune rap.
Ah yes, the small and indie bands that could afford to checks notes - press on actual honest to god vinyl.
No, you had clubs. We had fuckall and a half and what was there was for the bourgeoisie cisheteronormative folks to listen to bland dance music in and fry out their brains on molly that was 90% caffeine and 10% undiscovered synthetic that will kill you.
None of it was about the music, and of course it wasn’t - it was a place for cliques to flex fashion.
If you lived in some kind of fantastical Life Is Strange-esque world - I’m happy for you, really, truly, and I’d like to hear more stories, but most of us didn’t, at least not those of us born after '97.
Nowadays discovering music is really quite a lot simpler, there’s no one you gotta know, there’s no place you have to know to go to, there’s no subcultures you gotta be part of, there’s nowhere you have to be to know specific artists.
You’re completely unbound by your immediate geography, whether you’re in Pakistan or one of those places ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ was about or a dense European city, all you need is an internet connection, which even in extreme poverty is much more affordable than going much of anywhere IRL.
Even if I lived in ye olden times, there’s no way in hell I would’ve known about even bands from the time like Cleaners from Venus or like 13th Floor Elevators, and in my own time I wouldn’t have known about Sweet Trip or Cats Millionaire, and I love how much there is and how much more is left to discover, all without needing to be part of something or being somewhere, it’s more democratic, and more fitting for a global world.
You’re making a lot of bold assumptions, none of which are true.
So you had them, and they were shitty. Not quite the same thing as not having them. Did you ever ask if they could special order? The store I used to go to carried music zines that catered to a variety of tastes, and they would talk about any number of new albums and bands that were doing the rounds. If a band we saw live had a new release listed in one of them, we would go to the store and order it.
So they had a single DJ that worked 24/7? And since you mention autotune, which doesn’t become prominent until the 2000s, you clearly have no clue, because it was already possible to discover new music then without having to hunt it down.
There was, let me check notes… cassettes. Bands used to record music in their living room with a cheap 4 track, and put them on cassette.
And we had these really cool dual cassette radios, which you could one button copy to a blank cassette. So many of my music collection that I bought from bands I saw came from the band using one of these to copy their tapes.
https://u-mercari-images.mercdn.net/photos/m83247247555_1.jpg
I had probably a half dozen carrying cases full of albums of various music.
Just because you lived in a shitty place, doesn’t mean your experience was universal. The city I lived in was so small, we had a single bar that catered to everything outside of mainstream. Gay, goth, punk and metalheads… all in the same place. It was not uncommon to hear a Sepultra song, followed by Bauhaus or the Pet Shop Boys or Skinny Puppy.
In 1997, I was downloading music from the Internet from IRC. From album releases to bootlegs some guy at a show made holding up a tape recorder. You could also take CDs out from libraries and rip them to mp3 for long term storage. I would keep CDs full of mps, that I would then burn to CDs (because MP3 players didn’t exist yet) so we could listen to them. If you were lucky, you would get 128kbit, 44khz, but we would settle for 64kbit or 96 if it was what we could get.
If you were born after 1997 and you couldn’t find music you liked, that was a you problem. It was out there if you went looking for it.
And if you were born after 1997, that’s been true your entire life. As long as the Internet has existed, there have been people putting music outside of the mainstream online. I used to DJ for an Internet radio station. We started in 2001 (and is still going), and went out of our way to discover new music. The founder was a musician himself, and wanted to spotlight lesser known music. We played anything from any drama, and had a robust request engine that people used to request music. We pre-recorded podcasts for play so long ago, it pre-dated the term podcast.
It’s awesome you mention Cleaners from Venus, because they distributed their music on cassettes by mail order from listings in zines and word of mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_culture
I’m not really going to respond to all that because I’d just be restating the same thing over and over. I’ll focus on one point:
Yes I’m more than aware of how Cleaners of Venus distributed their music.
That’s my entire point - they’re a very much niche band essentially unknown in their time - and I would have never, in a million years - known about their distribution method, or known of them at all, if it wasn’t on Wikipedia and on the internet and their music wasn’t easily torrented or streamed.
Even if they were less niche, and sold their records in stores: stores are very very expensive, anything meatspace is very very expensive due to rent costs of the actual precious physical space, they have to make their stock count, and that means catering to the mass market.
If such stores even exist - which they essentially don’t and when they did they were few and far between and not exactly record stores - more something like HMV, they catered to the mass market first because they are giant mega corps and dgaf about anything but the bottom line.
The internet - anyone could post anything there. Any music, any news about any new music, and anyone could access it from anywhere.
So If you literally believe that finding music is easier via counting on random zines and special orders in magical vinyl record stores that exist as far as I’m concerned - in fiction only, and when most countries in the world didn’t even have such a concept, than via the internet which is available everywhere at all times to everyone globally, you’re insane and I can’t help you.
That is an insane, obviously incorrect position to hold and if you can’t see that, you can’t be made to see it with any arguments anyone could present.
I think that must be it because you made another truly psychotic claim here:
Cleaners from Venus have 261k monthly listeners on Spotify. That means they’d need 216,000 cassettes. They’d also need the logistics and distribution to ship them all over the world to simply even come close to the reach they have now, to even be hypothetically obtainable.
Of course it’s not universal. But it is more universal, because most of the world are not in one of like, three-ish Western European countries and the 10 or so sane cities in the United States. I’m sorry that causes your narrative of the world and how things used to be and/or are to be incorrect, but it’s the simple truth.
What was universal? Top 40 hits played on TV and Radio. That was pretty much everywhere. That is - until the internet and now you could be a Wavves fan in Russia, and I’m sorry the thought is so offensive to you.
Did you completely miss the point that I was talking about pre-internet days? In my first response to you, I literally talked about an album release in the 90s.
Maybe your entire experience in life isn’t as old as the pants I’m wearing right now, but the world existed before you did.
Yes you demented moron I think I am aware that the world existed before the internet and before I did, especially since I mention music that was made before I was born? Stop huffing the asbestos for a moment and read and re-read my post until you understand it, you absolute cretin.
Ad hominems. The last gasp from the confused or clueless who just can’t admit when they are wrong.
Did you have anything of substance at all to add? I assume not, since several posts now not doing so.
I am pretty old and I barely knew the top 40 wishy washy back then… If you are interested in different it was there, streaming helps some, and true a lot is at your finger tips, but most people will still drop into a top 40.
Spotify doesn’t even have much of the music I listen to, I find it mostly useless so there is that.
I agree, but that’s on the users and their choices. Most people just dgaf about music anymore, it’s been “surpassed” by tiktoks in their mind. Video killed the radio star etc etc.
The paternalistic studio system limited both discoverability and the potential creativity and integrity of artists, and I’m glad it’s gone, most music I listen to either would not have existed, or I would’ve never found it without streaming.
It’s funny, I find a good chunk of music I listen to is just plain unavailable anywhere else for purchase, piracy or streaming.