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Too Much Music (streaming options)

kfbkfb said:
The frustrating thing about music is that now there's too much of it...
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What he's talking about is the total lack of marketing and promotion for new music. Artists and labels are just putting their new music on Spotify and hoping people will discover it. That's not how it works. Back in the day, you had marketing and promotion organizing campaigns to bring music to the attention of the public. Brian Epstein campaigning to have his new band The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, for example. Just making music available doesn't get people to listen to it. It never has. They need to be directed to it, and given a reason to want to listen.

All of the classic rock and familiar hits benefited from that organized marketing & promotion. That's why people know who Charlie Watts was when he died last week. Everyone knows who The Rolling Stones are. I'm sure there was a huge increase in listening to their music last week.
 
I agree with Mr. Tedder.

I pulled up my Spotify "Discover Weekly" playlist, which is branded as "new music and deep cuts picked for you". Here's the first few artists on my list today: Mickey Gilley, Jim Croce, George Winston, Juice Newton, Chet Atkins, and Iain Matthews.
Gilley is 85 and retired, Croce is dead (for decades), Winston is a jazz pianist, Newton is retired, Atkins is dead, and Matthews had only one top 20 hit in the US, 42 years ago.

It's accurate that most of what I'm seeing on this playlist is new to me. But very little of it appears to be new to the world.

I'd say that promoting records is now very different than it was. If a promoter in the 70s could convince the PDs of a handful of major stations to play their record, and the audience didn't reject it, they were on their way to a hit. Today, you have to promote directly to the consumer.
 
From my years as a radio station program director or music director, you had reps from all the labels that mattered, les maybe one or two, that actually called and asked you to listen to certain songs where they needed an 'add'. The labels pushed a few songs at a time trying to coordinate enough station to give it a try at once so the song would hopefully hit the chart if not worthy of mention as one of the most added songs. Most stations I worked were Gavin reporting stations and usually one or two others. For sure, an add in Gavin was more important of all the publications where we reported. There was music service too. A light week was about 100 new songs to listen to.

That does not exist today.
 
b-turner said:
That does not exist today.
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Gavin doesn't exist, but Billboard still does. Mediabase provided the data for the R&R charts, and Mediabase still exists today. It provides the charts used by AllAccess, USA Today, and a few other publications.

The problem is those charts mainly deal with broadcast radio. Billboard's Hot 100 incorporates streaming and sales. Mediabase includes certain channels on Sirius. But this thread is about independent streaming, rather than following curated music programming. When people control their own playlist, they pick what they know. It's not affected by charts or promotion departments.
 
TheBigA said:
What he's talking about is the total lack of marketing and promotion for new music. Artists and labels are just putting their new music on Spotify and hoping people will discover it. That's not how it works. Back in the day, you had marketing and promotion organizing campaigns to bring music to the attention of the public. Brian Epstein campaigning to have his new band The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, for example. Just making music available doesn't get people to listen to it. It never has. They need to be directed to it, and given a reason to want to listen.

All of the classic rock and familiar hits benefited from that organized marketing & promotion. That's why people know who Charlie Watts was when he died last week. Everyone knows who The Rolling Stones are. I'm sure there was a huge increase in listening to their music last week.
Click to expand...
I even gave Charlie's jazz and standards work a spin or two.
 
Funny enough, today I open spotify and the first thing I see is an ad banner for One Republic's new album, "Deluxe."
 
PTBoardOp94 said:
I pulled up my Spotify "Discover Weekly" playlist, which is branded as "new music and deep cuts picked for you". Here's the first few artists on my list today: Mickey Gilley, Jim Croce, George Winston, Juice Newton, Chet Atkins, and Iain Matthews.
Gilley is 85 and retired, Croce is dead (for decades), Winston is a jazz pianist, Newton is retired, Atkins is dead, and Matthews had only one top 20 hit in the US, 42 years ago.

It's accurate that most of what I'm seeing on this playlist is new to me. But very little of it appears to be new to the world.
Click to expand...
Discovery Weekly is stuff that you haven't listened to (on Spotify at least) that's similar to what you have been listening to. Apparently, Spotify's algorithm believes you're in the mood for older-style music. As a result of this, my Discovery Weekly is mostly old music while my 21 year old daughter's is mostly new music.

Release Radar is the playlist that's supposed to focus on new releases. However, it's also based on your previous listening. If you listen to a lot of older music, you get newer music that's similar in style, plus a lot of re-releases of older records.

To me, that's a problem with Spotify in that it's harder to find new music or music different than what I've been playing.
 
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