Music streaming

[topleybird]

That is an ongoing concern of mine

[teh b0lly!!1]

Originally Posted by topleybird

I have seen the argument, particularly about movies but it applies to music as well, that there used to be a thrill and some clout, as the kids say, about tracking down a difficult to find, VHS-only copy of some cult film from India that you finally found in a Japanese porno tape catalog you had to have a friend translate, and you ended up paying like $350 for the tape for some reason and it arrived eight months later in a box so beat to shit you had like a 30% chance of being able to play the tape, and if you did you'd see that it was like a tape of a tape of a tape of a live broadcast and you couldn't see or understand shit anyway

But you had it, you found it, and no one else did

And now you just torrent it as easily as you would the new Star Wars, because everything is available everywhere

I can see that being a bummer, of course, those were fun times, but it would be pretty bizarre, and against the spirit of the internet, if we didn't put an end to that and make sharing things infinitely easier, so it's pretty pointless to say this new era shouldn't have happened

Like, you know what I miss sometimes? Figuring out exactly how long a blank tape was, because it was never quite the number they gave on the package, and then picking songs for my mixtape that would best fill that time, figuring out how many seconds of blank space to put between them, etc., etc. so there weren't like three minutes of dead air at the end of each side. Probably most kids didn't bother doing this, but I thought it made things more fun

Do I think we should go back to that, though? Are you fucking kidding me? I recently sent my friend a Spotify playlist of shit from around the world that I never would have heard of a couple decades back, because they wouldn't have sold it in Newbury Comics or put it on the local college radio station. And it was easy as hell and I could send him twenty more mixes like that in the time it would have taken me to do one tape. Plus he's overseas and do you know what postal rates are like these days, sunny Jim? Miss me with that

Good points.

It's hard to pin this down into any single one argument, because it's honestly a conversation about myriad things at once. It's not just about music sharing, but about the internet and its implications on all of us, and the actual world that we live in morphing into something else entirely because of it.

The spirit of limitless sharing of any media, and the luxury of discovering obscure rabbitholes you never would never have been able to arrive at otherwise, in itself of course is special and amazing.

I guess my real gripe is more about the internet as a lifestyle, and how - if you allow it - it can and absolutely will devalue almost anything you consume through it. Humans have limited bandwidth, and the constant stream of distraction and endless selection that the internet provides can easily render things a lot less meaningful and special. Especially music. Digesting a record is an entirely different experience in pre and post-internet times.

Plus that point you touched on (nicely) - when you had to actually put in the effort to attain something you cared about, it dug deeper you into it, and it ended up having a greater personal significance. You had to make a certain sacrifice, and that made it far more meaningful than simply uh, just clicking on it. Also, Shitty VHS, warbling mix tapes - in an isolated environment, without immediate possibility to download endless other perfect copies, those archaic mediums had something oddly personal about them. Your copy was fucked up and warped, but in one particular way that only you really knew.

Yes, I fully recognize that some of this is just romanticization of days long gone. Nostalgia is always stupid and useless unless you're the one who feels it.

I guess I'm also lamenting how the internet shifted before our eyes from this semi-private haven only people in the know ever really bothered to access (1999), to this wild, uber ugly neo-neighborhood festering with ads incessantly trying to sell you shit anywhere you turn, and endless cookie permission requests forever promising you that UR PRIVACY IS OUR TOP PRIORRITY, and entire communities dedicated to outrage porn, yadda yadda yadda. Somewhere along the line the internet became something I'm really not on board with almost at all, and almost exclusively butt my head into to get what I need and GTFO.

Spotify (and netflix and tons of other stuff, for that matter), justifiably or not, tie into that sort of lifestyle for me; that added irrelevant noise, and over-abundance that takes away focus; a now streamlined ubiquity of distracting, gluttonous approach to being a viewer/listener that places limitless selection over actually fully truly absorbing and plunging into any one thing.

Instead of coming on board with all those supercalifragilisticexpialidocious easy services that take you down their particular curated road, I just enjoy doing my own exploration instead, and basically using the internet like it's 1999 with better download speeds. I'm still here, aren't I?

[topleybird]

I do think it really sucks that a streaming service like Netflix will dump, without exaggeration, like thirty "Netflix original" movies and series on its platform every month, throw a trailer up on YouTube for each, and that's it -- things they know might be big will get more of a push, and will show up on the, what would you call it, "front page" when you first sign in, but otherwise that shit just sinks to the bottom of the ocean without any marketing or any chance of it becoming popular and is never heard from again

Everything is treated as disposable and it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy

And on the audience side, the corollary to that is, even if something proves to be an enormous hit, it sticks in the collective consciousness for like a week tops before everybody stops discussing it and moves on to the next piece of content

Art has definitely become devalued

[topleybird]

On the nostalgia note, I did find it pretty hard to finally delete my Mashed Potatoes RealAudio files, years after they were rendered unplayable by the collapse of that platform

[Joey Goldberg]

RealAudio kinda sucked back in its "heyday" too tho didn't it

i do kinda low-key kinda miss "Wimamp skins" tho, even if only as a concept

[Joey Goldberg]

pretty sure my last skin was a Chocolate Starfish & the Hotdog Flavored Water theme and you know what music just hasn't been quite as good since

[Joey Goldberg]

i'd make a formal request to Spotify to employ a skin feature of their own but, you know, they've got about a hundred other things to get to before that so i guess i'll just print out the Chocolate Starfish artwork & tape it to my phone & computer screen in the meantime

[Ram27]

Originally Posted by topleybird

I do think it really sucks that a streaming service like Netflix will dump, without exaggeration, like thirty "Netflix original" movies and series on its platform every month, throw a trailer up on YouTube for each, and that's it -- things they know might be big will get more of a push, and will show up on the, what would you call it, "front page" when you first sign in, but otherwise that shit just sinks to the bottom of the ocean without any marketing or any chance of it becoming popular and is never heard from again

Everything is treated as disposable and it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy

And on the audience side, the corollary to that is, even if something proves to be an enormous hit, it sticks in the collective consciousness for like a week tops before everybody stops discussing it and moves on to the next piece of content

Art has definitely become devalued

absolutely. i hate how the netflix paradigm caters towards 'binge watching' as well. i cannot process that much new plot and story and character development for hours on end. that's like cramming for an exam; no idea how people do it.

when shows are on 'standard' TV, one new episode a week, you can actually speculate and anticipate and discuss and overall have more fun than some wankoff 'i watched a whole season in 1 night!'

[FoolofaTook]

I binged all three seasons of Avatar in like literally two days and it was a spectacular wankaton.


You guys need to open your minds. "Devalues art" lolololol GET FUCKED>

[Cool As Ice Cream]

LOL TRUE TRUE FOOLFA

[FoolofaTook]

I can just imagine a couple of Sumerian yokels loosing their shit

OMG OMG reading an ENTIRE PAPYRUS SCROLL it's like taking in ten CUNIFORM CLAY TABLETS AT ONCE



OH NO MY ART IS DEVALUED



AHAHA GET FUCKED!!!

[FoolofaTook]

in other news I just learned how to scan qr codes with my mom's phone

[Joey Goldberg]

brief thread summary

[Raskolnikov]

I could have sworn I piped in on this thread back in it's heyday, but guess not.

I have recently caved and pay for the Amazon streaming service. Mainly went with that one because it runs higher stream quality than the other guys do, and the price is right about the same point. But the app freaking sucks, so I might just cave and go for the Apple Music route.

I will always prefer physical media, but my issue is portability. Nothing busts my chops more than wanting to listen to an album, thinking you can, and then you're out somewhere remotely away from cell towers and it starts taking a shit on ya.

I like to ride my bike, and often am out there for hours on end. Today I threw on two albums that I had on my iPhone - both added from my anally retentively organized iTunes library, ripped from CDs in lossless. (I know, bluetooth degrades it, plus on a bike, can you really hear the difference? No, probably not, but might as well have them at max resolution)

Anyways: I decided to toss on the new self-titled My Morning Jacket record. Which is great, by the way. I get to a great downhill section of my ride, the part I had been riding towards for hours: fire up "Complex". It's playing fine, then just decides to go hard stop outta nowhere. I fumble for the headphone remote button, hit play, and it does nothing. Again. It then restarts for some reason. I wasn't in the middle of nowhere or anything... just a few miles out of town.

That's my main beef with it: you depend on it. It works great. Then, like all tech, right when you need/want it the worst, it just doesn't.

CD ripped down to ALAC all damn day for the stuff that you really want to have.