The enshittification of music, by Rick Beato
The enshittification of music, by Rick Beato
Rick Beato making clear what is happening on the music scene just as Cory Doctorow or Adam Conover talk about the Internet. Please remember to use frontends like Grayjay, NewPipe, Freetube or invidio.us to watch videos like these.
I disagree with the sentiment that the music scene is getting worse, we are getting more content than ever but it's also much more discoverable, searchable and groupable.
I was just at an insane EDM festival the other day and all artists there were up and coming 25-30 y/o, people who are touring Europe doing gigs all over the place. They were selected because they are amazing DJ's with their own style, playlist and original songs.
Finding music, an artist or even an album you enjoy is just as hard as it used to be, but go into a local record shop, a local venue and ask them what bands you should check out, you'll see the same spirit people had 20-30 years ago going to gigs.
You know what I think Mr Beato? I think you are heavily out of touch with the modern music scene.
How much of the music at that EDM festival you went to will you listen to again? Will you buy any of their records? Or maybe just add a few of their tracks to a playlist on Spotify such that you may hear that music a couple more times in the future?
I may be making assumptions about you, but I think Rick's point about new music becoming "disposable" because there's just so much of it coming out remains valid. There's still new songs coming out that transcend this, but the musicians making this music are finding it harder and harder to build up a following, get exposure, and convince record labels to invest in them, when these labels can invest way less, produce a shitton of disposable music and get a better (short-term) ROI.
With the entire world having access to internet by now, isn't it only logical there's a massive increase in quantity of music being available? One figurative spotlight for a factor of thousands more possible successful artists. But at the same time the internet provides significantly more ways to discover and get people togheter.
"Harder" for the average artist is not how I would describe it, I think being a successful artist requires a different skillset then it used to. You have to be more tech/web literate or know someone who is to start. But it's still a grind, just like it used to be.
The internet does provide a way to instant fame. I've seen Youtube sets of people DJ'ing in their bedroom get noticed and overnight they are playing for hundreds of people. Yet again for the average artist it's a grind for years.
For context, I do collect vinyl so spend way to much on records, obviously not the average music listener. Sidenote: genres could be fluctuating in popularity, making it easier for some and harder for others.
Yeah you know, I dunno about that Rick beato guy. I’m not sure about him. (beato)
Old-man-yelling-at-cloud energy.
That's kinda how I feel about all of his videos. He's a great illustration of latching on to the music of your formative years and firmly stating that everything after that is crap.
In present day, you've got to sift through a lot of crap to find the good new stuff.
What this guy doesn't ever address is that has always been true.
My daughter always said I was lucky to grow up in the eighties because we had the best music. To this I responded that I only played her the good stuff. All the really crappy stuff, of which there was a LOT, kinda got filtered out of collective memory.
I’m into a few different genres of music - rock, metal, jazz, Afro Cuban, other shit that i can’t categorize (like all of john zorn’s shit). There’s so much good shit out there, so much modern and novel stuff, really musical and complex.
How’s this putz gonna tell me that Vijay Iyer or Tyshawn Sorey or Matthew Shipp are crap? Or the Reznor/Ross stuff? Or Nas’ tremendous burst of creativity over the past 6 years?
Edit: honorable mention to ghostface killah’s latest shit. The “guns” part of set the tone is dope af. 2nd half is weak, tho. Looking forward to supreme clientele 2. Wu Tang is forever.
There is and always will be amazing music. I grew up with classic rock and classic country. Now I'm listening to Tierra Whack. I'm a 46 year old white dude. I am sooooo not her demographic but fuck it good music is good music.
Almost all my favorite music was made before I was born. The rest was made mostly before the year 2000. And music has mostly been generic forgettable schlock since then. Rick’s analysis is spot on.
It's amazing to watch millennials become grandpa Simpson.
In my day music was actually good!
This is honestly pathetic, handle your mid life crisis's better
Did you watch the video? Because that’s not really what he was saying. He was talking about how we consume music and how the studios and basically capitalism have “streamlined” and bastardized what is meant to be art. He’s talking almost exclusively about how capitalism has robbed us of human connection, how vampiric companies stopped paying to make things that cost more using human musicians in order to sterilize the music for broader appeal and to maximize profits.
Is that…something you disagree with? This is enshittification. Right here. This is a 100% match for the community you’re in. Don’t like that concept? Don’t interact with this community, basically.
To the consumption part, I have given more money directly to more artists via discovering them on Spotify then attending their shows and buying their merch than I ever even came close to back in the record buying days when record companies were screwing their artists anyway.
I know quite a few bands personally who will never attain Taylor Swift levels of wealth, but they've got a business model of touring and merch down to a science that affords them a nice living doing what they love. This also includes tons of accessibility and fan interaction that very much didn't use to be a thing.
The savvy DIYers are sidestepping the entire record company schematic and using streaming services as effectively free marketing.
Okay, I watched the whole video and I have to disagree. The first half of the video is about how music is too easy to create, and only part of it is really about how corporations are using their catalogue to train AI, which I agree is scummy. However, the rest is about how the barrier of entry is lower, and he doesn't really articulate why that's a bad thing. Yeah you can make really sterile stuff at a fast rate, but you can also put work in and create something unique even with cheap tools. It kinda feels like saying every artist who uses MSPaint just copies and pastes Clipart, ignoring the few who make visually stunning pixel art. If anything, we've trended a bitaway of the stranglehold of companies in the last decade due to independent creation being much more viable.
He also says that modern music is subject to trends, which I think is a weird distinction to make. Old music is full of trends, because people would try to replicate what was popular on the radio. How many parents tried to make the next Jackson 5? I'm sure some followers of trends put out great stuff, but a lot of it was trash, same as ever.
Likewise, I find the second part overly steeped in "wrong generation kids these days" emotion. If he made more of a point of how streaming services rake artists over the coals, or the value of listening to full albums from artists you want to support, or about how cheap streaming services cannot financially support the large number of artists they carry, then I would agree. But he makes a big point of saving up and buying an album with his allowance which is purely a nostalgic feeling that is still felt by kids today. I also feel that we're just a lot more cautious of integrating artists into our personality just due to the fear of them turning out to be terrible people.
So, enshitification of streaming services? Yes. Enshitification of the entire industry? Not so much. Also nothing is going to make him sound more out of touch than calling phones "thought deletion devices."
Same shit new day. Radio, tape decks, electronic generated music, Napster. They all are just spins on "music is shitty or dead and not worthwhile". It's been going on for ages.
There has always been shit, and there has always been indie and lesser known potentially more interesting music you have to look for.
Did you just call Baby Boomer Rick Beato a Millennial
Rick often goes off on these angry-boomer tangents. I give them a miss.
Beato is a great musician, and some of his interviews are pretty cool. I think he's off base on this, hwoever.
Enshittification is how platforms die. To go back to the original article/post by Cory Doctorow that coined the phrase:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Beato isn't wrong that the music industry is well into the cycle of enshittification, he just doesn't identify the actual reasons why. The music industry abused its artists for decades in a way that initially benefitted music consumers, but then the studios/labels/publishers cranked up the prices on consumers too, and then the industry started devouring a lot of the publishers and studios and labels themselves as Spotify and Amazon and others started eating their lunch.
I do think there is a link between music industry enshittification and some negative trends in music. Cory Doctorow and his co-author Rebecca Giblin point out in their book Chokepoint Capitalism that platforms like Spotify prioritize mass production of cheap-to-license "background" music that all blends together in a mush, because they prioritize total volume of listening rather than any particular listening experience.
I used to like Beatos videos. But honestly if anyone knows about enshittification it's him. He has done some killer interviews the past year, no one can that away from him. But my God his other stuff has just gone down a cliff. I think it was the debut of his website that made him greedy.
I thought this was going to be about the declining working conditions and prospects for musicians. Good music is still getting made, and the music industry is making more money than ever - it's just going to fewer and fewer people
Please remember to use frontends like Grayjay, NewPipe, Freetube or invidio.us to watch videos like these.
No thanks. I will use my YouTube Premium account.
It's your choice to pay with both money and your data. The sad thing is it has repercusions on the rest of humanity but it's so long term and big scale that it is hard to grasp.
There is a incredible amount of variety in modern music, you just have to look for yourself, and not just eat whatever is fed to you.
My only gripe with modern music, is that almost all live concerts seem to be single-artist now. I don't know if this is an effect of hiphop becoming the biggest genre, but I miss seeing an entire band on stage, not just a rapper and/or a DJ. They are definitely still there, but much less than even 10 years ago.
There is still great music and it is still a great time to consume music. But Beato is right that trap beats, quantized drums, and autotune all suck ass.
