Used to be that bands released albums, and some of the singles off of those albums would become hits. The others would be forgotten attempts at making the playlist. B sides, the industry called them.
Bands would really go to work in the studio to craft an album, because you had to put your best stuff out there. How many people were going to buy your stuff or be interested if what you put out was mediocre? You only had a few shots at stardom.
Music was a VERY competitive business. Airplay made or broke you. Lots of people I was around wanted to be in a band but the reality of it was music was a low paying grind for most bands and years could go by before, or if ever, you broke through to the big time. Music was a dream, a high school, early college days dream. And then you got a job, got married and maybe had kids, and then it was over.
Had to pay the bills.
Has this changed? Is the music business now any different from back then? I turned to Spotify to find out.
Spotify is like a monstrous record label. It hits you, the consumer, with a wall of musical choices. New material is added regularly. 'Creative talent' abounds. But, unless you're listening to this kind of mainly current stuff and not, like I do, listening to old favorite music from the past, approaching the Spotify playlist is rather daunting. Because, each song is three minutes, more or less, right? Since I don't know hardly any of these artists, I have to sample each song to find out if it gets a thumbs up or not and that takes time. Back in the day, talent scouts would haunt the clubs and search for new talent. If they thought you had the right stuff they might sign you to a record contract. But nowadays, you don't need to be discovered by a label to get your stuff out there. There are 'distributors of content', more or less. As an artist, you sign with them, they take a cut, and you use their platform to reach the masses. The consumers job is finding out if what is offered suits them. In other words, the sifting hasn't been done.
Drudgery, this is! Hours could pass in this way, merely sifting, without any truly worthwhile results.
I just checked the 'new releases' category on Spotify. Insane! Albums upon albums to sift through. Who are these people? I haven't a clue, most of them. I suspect that if I took on the task of sifting through the entire new release playlist that by the time I got done.... .....there would be another one to sift through! Am I a music enjoyer, or a sifter?
Caleb Woods- Unsplash.com
Far as I can tell, there is nobody who's opinion I trust that is pre-listening to this stuff. It's not on the radio, and if it is, it's a one shot and rather obscure event because the dj's at the station are faced with the same task as me, sifting through the massive new releases database. And as we all know, musical tastes vary from person to person, so could there be people out there that are music recommenders, you know, sifters, that have done the work for me?
So I went to 'music recommendations' and there are, sort of, 'services' out there. One is called Pitchfork. I tried that and nope, not the same musical tastes as me.
But, from just doing a little bit of further research, I found out that this animal called Spotify has a playlist 30 million songs deep. 20,000 songs are added DAILY, and of the 30 million songs currently on the site, four MILLION of those have never been played once!
Let's see here- suppose I was crazy enough to try and take on listening to the four million songs that have never been played once on Spotify. How long would that take?
Four million times three minutes equals 12,000,000 minutes.
12,000,000 minutes divided by 60 equals 200,000 hours.
200,000 hours divided by 24 equals 8,333 days
8,333 days divided by 365 equals 22.83 years.
OMG!