Just gonna plug my super-awesome Web 1.0 thread here.

I don't blame them, cause in this current economy (at least in the U.S.) working any job isn't dignified, you're gonna have to shell out to make any money.

Wow, this really took off.

I saw some Spotify takes, so I guess I'll provide my stance. I don't have any problem with the concept of streaming services, I do almost all of my music listening on Spotify. I think it's awesome that music can be easily available to everyone. My problem is with how little artists make from these services. I'm sure Spotify makes enough from ad revenue and premium subscribers, so artists shouldn't get less than a cent for each stream.

tidal has this feature of "Up to 10% of your subscription is directed to the artists you listen to the most", but it only applies to the 20€ per month subscription, and of course "up to 10%" can mean anything between 0 and 10, but i wish that sort of thing was standard practice among streamers. if tidal had that thing on the regular 10€ per month plan, i'd switch over from spotify immediately

I'm gen z and I'm not gonna do another "le wrong generation" thing but I do think internet addiction is a real problem that rewires a lot of people's brains these days. It also dulls your emotions, so much so that when you're off of it you don't have much choice but to resensitize yourself to thoughts and feelings that have been pushed to the background. Sometimes I see toddlers and babies with smartphones almost 24/7 and I can't help but wonder how that shit will affect them. Also social media like Instagram and Twitter are psychic vampires IMO (very certain they're deliberately designed to rile people up). As someone whose focus was incredibly dependent on them, I've just lost my tolerance. There's a limit to how much information I can take.

One thing I also have some concern for is forums like these becoming like big social media sites due to influx of users whose main "feed" is Twitter or something. I've definitely been guilty of being pointlessly riled up out of righteous anger here before. Also this forum was just nicer when I joined tbh.

I call BS on Tidal but they're better than Spotify a smidge. Hence why Bandcamp was/is important. They're making changes to their app and presentation and fingers crossed it's for the better.

So I did some quick math, cause you people keep complaining on and on how little these streaming services pay the artists and I don't get it. Tell me what I don't understand.

Spotify: 406 million users, and let's say they are all premium and they all pay 5 euros per month, even though it varies across the countries, but I pay 5 euros so I'll stick to that. So Spotify gets around 2 billion euros a month income. And they pay 0.005 euros per stream.

So now if every user streams a single song a day, Spotify has to cash out ~2 million euros a day. But lets say we all stream at least 50 songs daily (and I guess if it's even a 5 seconds preview it counts as a stream), so that would be ~100 million euros a day, or ~3 billion euros a month.

Now I imagine they're offsetting that 1 billion by selling ad space, and we need to calculate difference in premimum prices across different countries, but it seems to me like it's pretty tight as it is, and I can't imagine how it would be viable for them to pay artists much more than 0.005 euros. Yea, it seems such a small sum, and it's easy to go "Evil corporation exploiting my precious artist" but that's per stream. You want more streams/money - make better music that would appeal to wider audiences or just look elsewhere. I googled most streamed artists on spotify, and The Weeknd with his 79.6 million monthly listeners gets ~400k dollars a month. 400.000$ per month basically doing nothing and you think Spotify is fucking him over somehow? Of course he's closely followed by Justing Bieber, Ed Sheeran and the likes, but like I don't know if/why you people expect some obscure metal bands who get 1000 streams a month to be swimming in cash from Spotify or to pay them like a dollar per stream? Sure, that would be nice for the artists, but I imagine you'd have to pay much, much higher price for premium, ad free service for Spotify to stay afloat, and I don't think many (if any) of you would agree to that.

This assumes that quality is the only metric that matters here - like anything not popular must be shitty or something. Ludicrous.

There's never gonna be a truly honest way to get every musician what they deserve, between shitty record label stuff of old and now streaming services paying fractions of a cent while raking in billions. But it's pretty easy to just say the best thing to do is support the artists anyway and buy directly from them whenever you can. I dunno. Business is always going to fuck people over but it seems super shitty to take the tone you're doing here.

Bandcamp has somehow managed to get the artists more money than the piddling amount some do. And here's some comparisons of how much artists make on varying sites.... https://producerhive.com/music-marketin ... breakdown/

So it always could be better. Even obscure metal bands, if they're regularly doing albums and touring and stuff, deserve to be compensated in some equivalent measure to the work they do. It's all tough but there's no reason to accept the corporate line on all this.

Well what else matters other than quality? It's just that yours and The Weeknd's fans opinions on what's quality differs. And far from it that I think not popular = shitty, since I'm into some really unpopular shit.

And trust me, my tone is pretty neutral, as in I accept that I've given this a thought like 20 minutes ago and could be wrong, but I just think it balances out in the end - people who are really into music and care about artists (which is usually obscure or "unpopular" stuff) will go out of their way to support them, whereas people who don't care that much stream Weeknd on Spotify. I just don't think obscure metal bands should expect to live off of Spotify streams.

I was genuinely curious up there.

I think I shared this video back in the Spotify thread, but the gist of it is that if an artist doesn't make a fair cut off of Spotify, it's the record label or streaming upload aggregate's fault.

I think The Weeknd is fine, but I also like plenty of great underground lesser known musicians that weren't successful for whatever reason, money, too niche a sound, wrong place wrong time, etc - it's just not a meritocracy when it comes to making money and being commercially well known. So many great artists don't really get the same platform as the big names is all.

They shouldn't expect to be able to get rich off spotify streams, but they should be able to be better off than they are.

Just grab some popcorn and enjoy reading it.

Ok here are my two cents on the matter.

As a kid who basically grew up watching all these social media apps in their infant state - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram etc. - I loved them as a teenager. I liked Facebook groups, because they had the instant communication but the feel of a forum. I loved Youtube back in the day. It was the shit man. It had genuine people that made great videos with passion. Youtube has been being constantly downgraded by its creators since the ad-apocalypse.

The thing that bothers me is how little shite people give for their privacy anymore. They literally share personal information like were they go everyday to grab their coffee, their full name, their relationships etc. Back then I was told to not mention anything about me on the nets not even my age. I do not understand how everything has been turned upside down on that perspective and that it is almost mandatory to have people know who you are and what do you do and how to basically sell yourself for attention.

This goes hand in hand with big tech data theft. Google Chrome is the worst excuse of a spyware browser, Mozilla has fallen out of grace a lot lately; the ad tracking and data transfering has gotten out of hand.

Full agree. It's partly why I'd rather use DuckDuckGo instead.

And, fwiw, it's "Adpocalypse", not ad-apocalypse.

I use the Brave browser which is the best for "normies" like me. It blocks trackers, has intergrated ad blocker, can block fingerprinting, scripts and it also has its own Tor mode. Duckduckgo is also great.

I find this excessive tendency these days of people to use other people's pain and struggles as an excuse to elevate themselves and appear more sympathetic only for what appears to be their own ego, I've seen enough bullshit on Facebook of people just using the horror in this world to talk down to other people, like no fuck you, If people like that would mind their own fucking business In the first place the world would probably be better

That's really the main problem nowadays, everyone is an extreme egomaniac, everybody wants their insecurities and distorted perceptions to be validated in some way, of course without really ever appearing to do anything to fix them, but who knows that's just what it looks like from my perspective.

Tired of stupid useless pseudo intellectual assholes playing that tired and lame ass "let's have a serious discussion about this" card, usually see it when a woman accuses someone of rape hilariously enough, I don't like people that act like I need to respect every opinion, some opinions are worthless and people that express them are worthless.

Life is humorless anymore, everybody on the internet takes themselves way too fucking seriously, even this place is a little more serious than it used to be, i kinda wish more people trolled here tbh, not with white power and genuine hatred, because who the fuck needs that, it's garbage, but I like watching people rile each other up on the internet, social media and forums in general aren't supposed to be these beacons of high intellect lol and I hate when people act like it.

Oh yeah, and memes aren't funny anymore, they're too lame, they're long-winded, and most egregiously, they're always trying to prove some lame ass point anymore, memes are supposed to be inherently stupid I think, it's supposed to be dumb, and immature, not cutesy and clever, or thought provoking lol fuck that shit.

Now that I've stooped low enough to lament over the downfall of memes, I'll sink back into my useless pathetic life

I use it for scrobbling and only scrobbling now. I ended up using my phone for scrobbling because the client applications I used (Nightingale, a fork of Songbird) just wasn't scrobbling, plus the scrobble apps provided by last.fm weren't doing anything.

Oh right, and Tik-Tok. I hate that and cancel culture, now THAT is getting out of hand. Oh so Actor Joe or Comedian Jane said or wrote some off-color comment 10 years ago that was fine and you want to make their life miserable because if offends you but not 95%+ of the rest of people? It's the fucking past, leave that shit be and move on. It's usually the teen and twenties crowd doing this and mostly people who don't follow/or are a fan of theirs.

I would love to send you a mirror.

Damn, my first hotmail account is getting close to 25 years old now

Nah, I think you've been looking at the wrong memes. Meme culture has gotten even more broken and deranged in the last few years. Lemme give you a sample.

Yes they are.

^in comparison, at least, to Reddit and social media.

I also remember getting on the internet, back in the early 2000s, and having adults tell me that anyone wanting my information was probably a child molester, terrorist, or criminal cartel. My parents refused to order anything on the internet, and would call the company they were ordering from, while on lunch hour, at work, to make an order.

Now, they watch a bunch of TV on the internet, and YouTube clickbait. I ended up getting over my YouTube addiction in 2017, and deleted my only social media account, a decade ago.

Everything is high intellect compared to Reddit.

As a Reddit user myself, even I can say for certain that there's a lot of crap on Reddit. There's some good subs and posts there, but a lot of them don't even make sense half the time!

A recurring theme is "redditors read the titles, not the articles". Doesn't help with the current media environment that is click-driven and pushes outlets into having editorialized or sensationalized titles.

It's also at least as bad as Facebook, if not worse, as an echo chamber. Quite troubling when someone posts a comment that is clearly the result of paranoia or other mental illnes and redditors just reinforce a dangerous sentiment.

Mostly all the things that are worse now than years ago is because of corporatization and capitalist greed - the actual on-the-ground qualities of music, art, etc is not changed.

Love Reddit for following hobby stuff but yeah, it is pretty fucking terrible in the echo chamber department. In that way it has seriously reinforced my policy to not have meaningful discussions about serious topics with anyone I'm not seeing face to face. Lots of people there are just as fucking crazy as any other boomer goober on Facebook.

Well...that's a really interesting topic.

I think that the rapid advancement of technology in recent years is a double edged sword.

Regarding the music industry, these days it's much easier for new artists to reach an audience because there is no more dependency on MTV/radio stations, there are no gate keepers.
You just write and produce your song, and in a few clicks its out there for the whole world to hear (and see).

But, there's also way more competition than before, how can you make yourself stand out in the horde of thousands of artists that strive to get the same fortune and fame that you want?
How can you make yourself stand out in the endless youtube clips/spotify playlists/facebook ads out there?
Do people care for albums these days? Will people listen to your 12 tracks 45 minutes albums at all or is it just a waste of time and you better concentrate on releasing singles once a month?


What's the value of a product you can achieve immediately for free in a single mouse click?
How many people dedicate time to solely listen to music and reading the lyrics, without doing anything else at the background?
What's the purpose of music these days anyway?

Long gone are the days that people went to tower records, bought a cd, went home and did nothing but listen to the music while browsing the booklet, reading the lyrics (even credits at same cases) and just immerse themselves on the record.

The whole process of consuming music these days is extremely easy, immediate and eventually...of much lesser importance than before.

What about the artists?
Isn't it ridiculous that on average (very general average) an artist have an income of 1000 usd for 1,000,000 streams?!
Back in the days when people had to purchase cds, 1,000,000 streams is like have 10,000 people buying your cd, listening to each of the 10 tracks for 10 times...those 10k people each payed something like 10usd...so in total those 1,000,000 streams could be 100,000 usd instead of 1k usd.

This is very, very sad.

Lets talk about dating: why on earth should men approach girls in the real world, if it's way easier to download apps and interact with dozens of beautiful girls simultaneously?
How can you even interact with females these days, when they just stare like zombies straight into to their smartphone and have 0 contact with their outside environment?
Next time you drive the train, bus, or just walk in the street....try to count how many people are just unaware of their surroundings and are just soaked into their screens, you will be amazed.

Netflix: people these days can binge watch a show for the whole weekend and when it ends, there's a "long" 10 seconds period of "wow, that was great!....what's next?" before binging the next show.

I could go on for hours, but I'll just say this: yes, in general technology makes our live easier and more comfortable.
But, it also make us very FOMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out and superficial.

In short, we are basically fucked but it's way too comfortable to give up on it.
I think it's healthier to accept the fact that humanity, society and our world is constantly changing (mainly due to technology) and it's better to keep up with times, rather than get lost in time.
You can't make the time go back, so it's better to move on forward.

My girlfriend said that if we ever break up she will never date again because she absolutely refuses to use online dating websites/apps. I'm pretty much in that same boat.

I think people being "soaked into their screens" is more of a way to not bother anyone and keep themselves entertained (especially on public transport like trains and buses). Not that there's a lot to see outside of a train most of the time. I do agree with you that it's a double-edged sword, as you mentioned in your post.

I actually think kids (15-25) today are much more emotionally mature then past generations.

From my experience they are more diverse more pro-LGBTQ+ more aware, etc....

One thing I have noticed is that they eschew dating apps like bumble which I think is interesting. It must be because they see the affects on their bachelor uncles and weirdo male relatives.

Young kids today are in general better physical shape.

The reason behind that is not a good one. It's the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Social media has a huge problem with the type of body image that it pushes. You go on something like Snapchat or Instagram, you're gonna get bombarded by selfies that contain either scantily-clad women who look like they survive on carrot sticks and cardboard, or ridiculously ripped dudes flexing in the gym or in the mirror. I'm mainly talking about the dudes here, because with the recent rise of "alpha male" videos on Youtube and Tiktok and their popularity, of course young men want to imitate that for the sake of popularity, especially if they're insecure about their body image already. And the people who post it do it with a mask of "if I can do this you can too and it's never too late to hit the gym!"-sort of "inspirational" bullshit, when 90% of the time they probably just got lucky with their body because not everyone has the body type for that.

This is a very thought-provoking opinion piece on the subject: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/ope ... 538894.php

There's a surge in the amount of young men who are getting into body building and taking potentially drastic steps to get there. Some buddies of mine recently got into body building and one of them has gotten incredibly arrogant about it, to the point where he actually shames people for not wanting to pursue bodybuilding, and he exercises to the point where his entire body hurts on purpose. It's ridiculously unhealthy, not only because the people who get into exercising do it with the sole goal of getting ripped by any means necessary, but because Western beauty standards and what social media pushes are not realistic body images and it is not within everyone's capability to attain such a physique. So you get people with eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and lack of will to accept their perfectly average physiques.

Much of the nostalgia for the past just comes from one's own personal longing for times when they themselves were more innocent or a child. There's always good stuff going on now.

Back in the day you were out there alone, you needed a few coins and a working phone box that wasn't occupied to speak to someone about the oh so highly offensive stuff you actually experienced/witnessed, not consumed third hand in your Twitter bubble. There were no cameras, people could punch you irl. You actually had to learn how to get on with and how to tolerate people with different opinions, you couldn't just block them or report them to a moderator or some department at school. You had to enter highly elitist record stores if you wanted to check out good music. Metal was king and the soundtrack.

Try if you are fit for the 80s/early 90s by turning off the internet and phone for a month. Get yourself a battery powered tape player and a chopper bike, switch to used porn magazines found in dumpsters or in bushes (if you really must), play Pacman or Pong or some ancient racing game or nothing, meet people who actually fought in and endured WWII (guess that will be harder these days), decorate your bedroom with Conan the Barbarian and First Blood posters, grow a mullet and rock a Canadian tuxedo, no numetal allowed, only date girls that either look like Madonna, female Robert Smiths or who love Guns'n'Roses and Bon Jovi.

Now this is something I wish would come back. No, I'm not talking about tolerating bigots or anything like that, but instead not making snap judgments about people based on a few words online. You can know someone for a while and think he's a really nice guy, and then when it turns out he has a political opinion you don't like, what do you do? End the friendship immediately? It's very poignant of you to say that there's no block button in real life.

I'm 22 so I fit right in the middle of that kinda thing, but idk If I exactly agree, I think a lot of the more "progressive or liberal" people I've met that are my age are kinda excessively baby like, and can't take the slightest amount of criticism about themselves, and I find it irritating, im not painting a whole brush I said progressive cuz that's the most basic I can sum up the type of people I'm talking about, but idk I kinda am somewhat thankful I am around people that will tell me the way I feel is sometimes wrong because sometimes my feelings are wrong and idiotic, and it just seems to me people my age want every insecurity validated, and I don't like that approach, because I feel like people won't ever realize they have bad thinking patterns unless you tell them

I used to have a friend who I constantly had to walk around eggshells all the fucking time because honestly he was just kind of a fucking bitch about everything, and yeah whatever it seems telling someone they're too fucking sensitive about everything is wrong and I don't fucking get it, I understand people have insecurities and fears, but come on, this fucking guy made it so I couldn't ever express myself because he had to be a fucking cunt about everything, I don't wanna deal with people like that

Rant over I just find most people I deal with my age just aren't very open about things, and I'm the type of person who's an open fucking book lol

I see where you're coming from. Handling insecurity is a skill, and there's a lot of ineptitude going around. I've always had self-esteem problems, but I learned to stop bitching about myself a long time ago.

Oh me too I basically have a deep hatred for myself, but ehh I'm recently off drugs so the clearer I get the more I can embrace my flaws, and the only time someone can piss me off saying something about Me is if it's wrong, If someone can accurately tell me things I actually do that piss them off I listen I wanna know what people think and I'd rather someone hurt me with the truth about myself than lie and pretend it doesn't bother them just for the sake of my ego

That's basically how it is. You just embrace your flaws, or at least find a way to be comfortable with them. Something about today's social environment seems to have made that harder. I don't know what the cause is though, maybe social media? Drug use? Whatever it is, shit's going downhill real fast. Depression and suicide rates are still increasing.

Idk I run the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, but seriously I grow tired of people's fixation on mass acceptance of everything these days, It always seems so fake and disingenuous to me, I find it to be a very pathetic way to bully other people with false morality, It just strikes me people look to external solutions to feel validation anymore and that's just not how it works. I just live my life and let everyone live there's and I'll complain if someone is being stupid but I can't change them and feel no obligation to worry about if they don't like me telling them what I think

Social media and the internet are largely to blame, I think. Humans didn't evolve to be connected to so many people at the same time, or to be constantly exposed to every tragic event and new political movement. There's so much pressure to care about everything and everyone all the time, and to be available online every hour you're awake. It really gets overwhelming, and this generation is the first to grow up completely immersed in it.

Drugs have honestly been an escape from it for me, although becoming reliant on them as a coping mechanism comes with... its own problems.