# What will be the future of music?



## ein fisch (Aug 28, 2018)

I didnt live in the generation where you couldnt simply go to youtube and listen to your favorite tracks. But im sure some of the users here know that it was more effort once to listen to music (buying CD's or vynils)

Im really interested in general music history and also read some articles, and after some thinking i came to the point that the music industry is an absolute mess nowadays. Or am i wrong? Theres youtube where you can stream music for free, tons of illegal mp3 download services, theres software piracy and torrenting. In filmmusic i found pages which offer short music pieces for low prices which any lazy director could use in a movie (thus he wont pay an actual composer). I can imagine that many filmmakers take advantage of this.

What do you think will the future look like? In terms of illegal activity online, will there be more laws to prevent that? And will filmcomposers still find jobs even if theyre not as big as john williams, hz, horner etc? Or am i extremely pessimistic and there is something that could bring more jobs in the future - in terms of music?

Since i do just "know by reading" i would really love to hear opinions or storys from people here who know what theyre talking about, in terms of what WAS going on, what IS going on and what WILL be going on

Fisch


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## germancomponist (Aug 28, 2018)




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## ein fisch (Aug 28, 2018)

germancomponist said:


>



Well i guess they just know how to sell shit, could also call that some kind of talent. But the people involved in a #1 production that dont even get mentioned (the ones who do the actual work in the sounddesign) have alot of talent imo


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## chocobitz825 (Aug 28, 2018)

I think we'll see the industry shrink for numerous reasons. First let's be honest, particularly since mainstream music became a thing with records and the radio, people have often participated for the sake of fame. Talent has never been the primary deciding factor in any business based on music, because more than ability, marketability was everything. For a time we had a nice period where some people who were talented were also marketable, but that was always contrasted by famous people who looked great doing mediocre work. Since we're seeing a decentralization of media from the internet age, its less likely that people will be able to get as famous through music, thus taking away one of the primary reasons people participate. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that every person makes music for that reason, but a fair portion of the most well known and influential names to the public was motivated by a love for music, fame and the prospect of making a great living off of it. Making a living off of music is already hard.

I think what we might see, is while you can't make as much money or get as famous with music as before, we'll soon find that we have greater independent ability to create and distribute music, while also doing it in a way that puts our creative ideas above marketability. 

This isn't new. I think people just have grown accustomed to this idea of mainstream music media, that honestly is only as old as records and radio. Before that, some songs managed to become popular and were performed by people around the world, even though they'd never heard the original creator or artist who played it. We're likely to see an age again where songs become very popular, even though the original creator/artist isn't.


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## d.healey (Aug 28, 2018)

It's easier than ever to access music for free - I think that's a good thing for the majority of people, although not for those who want to make a living from selling music.


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## DSmolken (Aug 29, 2018)

chocobitz825 said:


> Since we're seeing a decentralization of media from the internet age, its less likely that people will be able to get as famous through music, thus taking away one of the primary reasons people participate.


I haven't thought about that, but it is a good point. Is music still a good way for teenagers to impress girls? Cause when that stops, well, it's over.


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## chocobitz825 (Aug 29, 2018)

DSmolken said:


> I haven't thought about that, but it is a good point. Is music still a good way for teenagers to impress girls? Cause when that stops, well, it's over.



countless youtube videos imply that it still is. However, that seems to be shifting mostly toward singers. I'm finding that the digital age has drawn people toward beat making rather than playing real instruments. I anticipate that in time rock bands will be seen as "old fashioned" as jazz bands or classical.


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## Parsifal666 (Aug 29, 2018)

I don't want to get too Hegelian here, but history has a way of showing certain trends; for instance, in the arts there are periods of lowest common denominator-pandering and then a renaissance of erudition. Look at the periods of heavy polyphony vs. more utilitarian-oriented counterpoint; in rock there was the Progressive/jamming of early to mid 70s which gave way to Punk; the wildly excessive and overproduced Hair Metal shredding giving way to Grunge. There are plenty of other examples.

Just an idea. We're certainly more LCD pandering than so many other times in Occidental history. It wouldn't surprise me if a composer showed up whom changed the game entirely. I simply feel that person doesn't exist now (or else we'd know it).

I try to balance Jay's somewhat cynical (though more than valid) views on the subject with a more optimistic viewpoint.


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## Jaap (Aug 29, 2018)

I think it is a discussion that has been present in all generations before us and was asked many times and will be likely as much being asked by the generations to come.

Every generation is being faced with changes and those coming from the generation earlier or which are on the edge of being pushed to that generation will find that challenging. I think it is in the human nature to embrace the things we like, we know, we can rely on. We tend to give those things the label "as it should be" or "normal". Anything that will change this is potentially scary and makes our view on the future, and how we will be present in that, unstable.
And that is a good thing. That is what I think is, the basic foundation of our evolution. Different generations "clash" with eachother. One is defending or standing up for the ones he/she likes and think is the best and the other jumps on the barricades to change it all. It is an everlasting process and the ones shaping the future of our industry today will be as scared 20 years later when another generation does the same thing.

Almost nothing is permanent, the only constant thing is actually change. We can be scared of it, but we can also embrace it. It would be a damn boring world if we would have the same setup for a few thousand years 
And we are humans, and we tend to find ways that will work for us (for the good and the bad)


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## charlieclouser (Aug 29, 2018)

I feel like I've come through three separate eras of the music industry.

- The analog oligarchy. I caught the tail end of the analog era. I learned recording engineering and synthesizer programming on analog tape and analog synths before there was such things as MIDI, computer sequencers, etc. Making music in those days was expensive, time-consuming, and required a variety of trained professionals in the room, each a specialist in their narrowly focused area. A good analogy for making records in that era would be a major surgery - you need a surgeon, a surgical assistant, an anesthesiologist, and a few surgical nurses - and none of them are "in training" to take over the next higher position. The anesthesiologist is not angling to take over the surgeon's job on the next outing, and so forth. That type of recording situation only exists today at the highest levels, like making a U2 record or recording a Harry Gregson-Williams score, but it used to be the case that *every* record was made like that simply because there was no other way. This had the effect of weeding out the posers and losers - there were a lot of warm bodies in the room that had all been down the road before, so it was difficult for unqualified, untalented people to get very far - not to mention that the whole operation was very expensive, and somebody had to put up the cash - so that's another factor that weeded out any "hackers who did not pack the gear to serve in my beloved corps". I was trained as a recording engineer in that era, which meant being able to align tape machines, make cables and effect minor repairs, and build a high-pass filter on the spot out of spare resistors and capacitors from the parts drawer, operating solely from memory. I also made records in that era, and it was not a quick process and it was expensive and a bit of a rarefied atmosphere if you were one of the lucky ones to actually see the inside of The Record Plant. The records I think of from this era are ones like Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, etc. - big studios, big gear, big sound. By the time anyone would risk the time and expense to make a record, it was usually the case that the artists had talent, skills, and ideas - the holy trinity. I think the Eurythmics first album was about when we turned the corner to the next era:

- The digital rebellion. When digital technology exploded in the 1980's and 1990's, we got things like DAT and ADAT machines, digital reverbs, MIDI synths, samplers, and computer sequencers. Now you could do elaborate pre-production (as opposed to rehearsal of live players), and even make entire records with very little human intervention or musical talent. If you could spend enough time hand-typing notes into an event list and precisely editing the note velocities, you could get some pretty amazing results even if you couldn't play for shite. But it was still kind of expensive and not at all a mass-market kind of thing. The tools were not cheap, and there were no YouTube tutorials on how to make it all work - so it still took time to build your skills and get good results; but the writing was on the wall - ideas and skill had started to overtake raw talent as prerequisites for entry. Now, any two of the three components of the holy trinity could get you pretty close to a good result. This is sort of like when the Cuban rebels took over the country - they were uncouth and unpolished, but they had ideas - and somehow they were now in the driver's seat. The old guard was aghast, convinced that these unshaven thugs would surely crash the bus into a tree immediately - and many did - but the old oligarchy had been deposed; the Rothschilds and Hapsburgs were no longer in total control of every element of the "means of production". However, since they were smart cookies, the Hapsburgs used their decades of business acumen to retreat from the studios to the boardrooms, and we started to see people like Jimmy Iovine become record executives negotiating deals instead of spending long nights in the studio working with artists. This let them maintain a large element of control of an industry that was starting to slip from their grasp, although in this pre-streaming era they still controlled the means of *delivery*, if not the means of *production* itself. So we started to see semi-DIY records make a real dent - and I was involved in a few of them as well. As the recording technology got better and cheaper, and the birth of file-sharing loomed on the horizon, the weather was ideal for the next perfect storm:

- Internet anarchy. When somebody first showed me Napster and LimeWire I knew the jig was up for the type of career I had spent decades preparing for. It was definitely a "cold shiver up my spine" moment to boot up Napster and browse the shared mp3 folders of zillions of broke-ass file-sharers across the globe. For me there was no question - "I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot — like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius!" At that moment I was making a record with the band Helmet, and we had spent only a week recording drums and basic tracks at Cello (now East-West) studios and quickly returned to my home studio to spend two months overdubbing and completing the record - but even that approach ate up a lot of cash and time and I knew that the file-sharing economy (or lack thereof) could not sustain even that economical approach except for established, "legacy" artists. At least I had the foresight to see that I needed to look for an area of the industry where people still paid for music, and the royalty stream was still intact - for the moment anyway. For me the only intact avenue was scoring. Who cares if nobody buys records? The big tv networks still paid composer royalties and the checks from BMI were still being churned out. So I exited the record side of things instantly and completely - and what do I see when I take a peek at the industry I came up in? Legacy artists - the ones who built their repertoire, career, and fanbase on the back of big record-industry budgets and support - are still able to operate more or less as before, although most of their revenue comes from $120 concert tickets and $40 t-shirts. New artists are forced to record with a Blue USB mic and a MacBook, and take on all of the duties that were formerly left up to the record companies. Self-promotion and self-marketing on their Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Patreon pages, making their own videos and marketing materials using logos their bought on Fiverr - this stuff takes no money but it takes massive amounts of time and attention. Time and brainpower that used to be spent on improving the craft of music is now spent on starting from square one as a marketing and graphic design professional - and how can they hope to produce results that can compare to the great album covers of yore when they've just got their first copy of Adobe Creative Cloud? Do you think a beginner can create album cover art like Hipgnosis' amazing artwork on "Dark Side of the Moon", "Wish You Were Here" or "Presence"? No chance. Now everything looks like a Vice video or a Wordpress site - and that's not surprising since everyone's a beginner - the specialists have been relegated to the dustbin of history in all but the top one percent of the industry. The democratization provided by the technological revolution has allowed the unwashed masses to seize the means of production *and* distribution, and to what end? 

It turns out that they did, in fact, crash the bus into a tree.

(part two in next post)


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## charlieclouser (Aug 29, 2018)

Whenever I think of these sea changes in the industry I'm reminded of the ending of "No Country For Old Men" - two of Ellis's lines come to mind:

"All the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from ya, more's going out the door. After a while you just got to try and get a tourniquet on it."

and:

"You can't stop what's comin'. That's vanity."

So what does all this mean for the future? No matter what era we're talking about, I've always tried to identify people who are happy, successful, and secure - and try to identify what aspects of their path I can emulate, appropriate, and approximate. Even if I would have been happy and successful making indie metal records, I wouldn't have been financially secure, that much was obvious - so that approach would have been... not ideal. I've seen producers who I looked up to back in the day who are now, twenty years later, scrambling to figure out where (and if) they can fit in to the modern musical economy. Many have bailed out of the "industry" entirely. 

For the moment, the revenue stream that flows from being the composer of music for theatrical films and "big four" network tv is more or less intact - but I have a sneaking suspicion that this won't survive in the same form as I've come to know over the past fifteen years. Cable / Netflix / Amazon / Hulu are trying their best to upset the BMI / ASCAP apple carts, and they may just succeed at that, what with the creep of direct licensing, buy-outs, and production music libraries. I think this will have much the same effect that the "Internet Anarchy" era of the record industry had - the means of production and distribution have been seized from the oligarchs of old and are now in the hands of the young Turks. Personally, I think this has had the effect of "flattening" the curve - since there are so many methods of distribution, many of which have lower and fewer barriers to entry, it's entirely possible (and likely) that the product is of greatly reduced quality. Because of the sheer quantity of product that's needed to fill the gaping maw of so many streaming platforms, and the necessarily lower budgets allotted to fill that maw, we wind up with "meh" productions made by people with far less experience, talent, and skill than was required in the oligarch era. In the good old days, when productions were expensive, they had to be *good* to make the cut - now they just have to *exist*.

So what does the future hold? An increase in quantity with a corresponding decrease in quality. So... stay nimble, stay light, be able to accelerate quickly and change course with ease. Be more like a Mazda Miata and less like an eighteen-wheeler. 

Check out these two amazing and tragic threads on Gearslutz about the construction, opening, success, and eventual failure of two fantastic, spare-no-expense studio builds:

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/pho...cts/341598-bridge-recording-studio-build.html

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/pho...-studio-new-orleans-construction-journal.html

Those are the kind of facilities I wanted to work in, wanted to build, wanted to *own*, when I first started - but it's obvious that this way of thinking is.... not optimum in this third era, and really only compatible with eras one and two. The Bridge lasted almost exactly ten years, from the start of initial construction to the closing of the doors, and The Parlor lasted for about seven years. But go through those threads, look at all the pictures, savor the enthusiasm, and marvel at the tragedy - and if you take one lesson from them it should be:

Stay nimble.

Good fucking luck.


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## chrisr (Aug 29, 2018)

Sobering. Thanks as ever.


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Aug 29, 2018)

The future of music composing will involve the use of A.I. assistants. My assistant will compose sketches for me, and I’ll steer the process until I get the music I want. It will have analysed every piece of music I’ve ever written, and be able to imitate my style, or surprise me. It will also create any instrument/orchestra, in real time, using advanced additive and modeling techniques.
PS: it will be officially called Logic XX, but I will call it Emagic, for fun.


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## chocobitz825 (Aug 29, 2018)

This is one of those things I refuse to fight. I will not battle with nostalgia. Every generation tries to find the winds coming and it’s pointless. We could say that music today is worse than yesteryear but it’s also different. Melodically simple sure, but when was sound design ever as unique as it is now? 


We miss the days of vinyl and proper studio recordings, but what did the classical world think when music went away from the concert halls and into the studios, live houses and arenas? What did opera think of the artists who could get off using a microphone instead of filling a hall with their voice alone? Guitarists grooving must have seemed like blasphemy to classically trained professionals who knew they were to be conducted and were supposed to follow the music as written.


Every generation changes and as much as we love yesterday, if we had stayed there forever all the good things would be done until the only thing left to do is straight up copy what already is. 


I won’t say the future of music is better, but it is different. To the people experiencing in real time for the first time, it will someday be their classic nostalgia that is ripped away by time.


So let’s look at the bright side. Without a system to dictate was is popular, anything can have the equal opportunity to be successful with the right equation. We should take this chance to be bold and try new things!


The future is whatever we make it. Whether we like it or not though, it’s coming.


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## ein fisch (Aug 29, 2018)

DSmolken said:


> I haven't thought about that, but it is a good point. Is music still a good way for teenagers to impress girls? Cause when that stops, well, it's over.


Playing river flows in you on the piano always worked. But i dont call that professional music making


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## SergeD (Aug 29, 2018)

Future... what do you mean?

In the video "Fill you oven with a bun", is it what I think it is?


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## Parsifal666 (Aug 29, 2018)

SergeD said:


> Future... what do you mean?
> 
> In the video "Fill you oven with a bun", is it what I think it is?



Actually I think the video on how to make music with absolutely no talent is far more indicative of these times. Anyone can make a loop, it's second grade stuff now...if that.


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## LamaRose (Aug 29, 2018)

Wind and songbirds, God willing... oh, and some meows... and a troubled stream


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## Quasar (Aug 29, 2018)

The inventions of the phonograph and the radio created roughly one century of a centralized popular music recording "business" in which a few people got rich by being musical "stars" and the role of the average person was that of paying consumer. 

This was a historical anomaly. In some ways, 21st century digital tech may be bringing back aspects of more decentralized and diverse traditional cultural norms, though it is obviously different too, different in ways that cannot be yet known, but will be for future historians to evaluate and interpret.


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## Saxer (Aug 29, 2018)

I think music production will be less important. Too much is produced all the time and nobody listen to it. Music is consumed as a side product like electric light and water from the tap. It's simply there.

But we shouldn't forget that people want to *make* music. It doesn't matter if it can be sold. And it will be more important in the future. The more jobs are replaced by industrial automation the more time people will have to do something. And just consuming isn't very satisfying. Consuming music done by pros is actually just a side effect coming from aristocrats centuries ago who raised their status by wasting money. Commercial mass music isn't very old and maybe just a passing era. But making music has always been a part of human lives.

It's interesting to see how commercial music is going to lose niveau but at the same time the skill level of young musicians rises extremely. Young student orchestras are playing on a level of pro radio orchestras a few decades ago. Especially the classic and jazz world (which has no meaning in the commercial world) is populated with highly motivated and educated musicians.
I could imagine that making music is more interesting in the future than consuming. And people who want to play music need compositions and arrangements. There will always be a future for composers.


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## paularthur (Aug 29, 2018)

It seems that music and the arts, in general, is returning to a renaissance era business model = artist receiving patronage from their admirers... The difference being with the advent of social media, soundcloud and sites like bandcamp, patreon, indiegog; patronage has gone from a family of means discovering and sponsoring an individual to a legion of loyal fans.. This may not produce stars en masse but it will provide a comfortable and more creative environment for artists to be themselves + the name your price/donate campaigns really do provide a comfortable alternative for fans who can't/won't spend money they may or may not have or pirating. 
It's very interesting to see where this meets film/TV because there's so many interesting projects going up monthly on youtube... I often frequent channels like Dust, Film Riot, Epic Music World and discover new composers, filmmakers, graphic designers, you probably wouldn't be surprised to see that some of the frequent contributors here have composed for indie (youtube only) films...


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## Loïc D (Aug 29, 2018)

> What will be the future of music?



Music follows pretty much the trends of the society.
I see 2 trends :
- Back to nature (care for Earth, ppl leaving cities, care for others, etc.)
- Anxiety (global warming, Trump, Brexit, decay of Europe, terrorism)

So to sum it up : what will be the future of music ?

Folk grime


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## YaniDee (Aug 29, 2018)

The one thing that lasts in music is melody...Greensleeves is still around, 500 years later, because you can still sing it or whistle it as you walk. The Blue Danube.heck you can put it over anything and it works!
Human beings are impressed by the skills of other humans. You can get your sequencer to play 64th note runs all day, but a guy playing pentatonic blues with feeling, reaches us more deeply.


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## Paul Grymaud (Aug 29, 2018)

*The reign of Light Metal ?
*


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## germancomponist (Aug 29, 2018)

A good analysis of the future of music, @Saxer.


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## germancomponist (Aug 29, 2018)

What we should by no means underestimate is the power of the media companies that also own the music companies. Everything is increasingly being controlled and optimized for political correctness .... that also applies to composers. If you have critical system criticism in your music, then you will be boycotted in the future.


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## C M Dess (Aug 29, 2018)

Here's the biggest issues of the music industry. I dunno what it means for it's future.

A. The simple probability is that there will be more content monitoring from corporations and copyright enforcement internet legislation.
B. Music will continue to be devalued while drugs are legalized to make people happy instead.
C. Music will continue to become more obnoxious to cater to rightfully angry youth.

1. There's no transparency. Where there is transparency you're totally fuuuuucked. :D
2. There's a few hundred PRO's but no one knows really how the money is split because of reason 1 above.
3. It never works like it seems.
4. There's money laundering in all businesses (duality).
5. There's drug cartels and hidden fronts in most businesses, music business no exception.
6. There's too much power in the non-talent business peoples hands.
7. The market is split between a deep saturation of content from hobbiest, prosumers and Indies OR a totally controlled big company side. The big company gets the lions share of all money and owns most of both sides of the market and especially the airwaves.
8. All the contracts are bad because the talent sacrifices everything while the big companies take the least risk.
9. All the contracts are bad because the big companies forge antitrust deals with other big companies, you provide the source material for next to nothing and they have no requirement to pay you back and you can't change the deal.
10 .There's no oversight that I know of, if there is it's crap.
11. AI is going to skew taste and the listening experience, there may even be an AI genre set besides being used in songs as a tool. AI can create music on the fly so it can be an entirely different song each time or subtly different, there can be mechanisms for users to dial in the amounts of things they'd like the AI to do, so listening can become more interactive and individualized.
12. Listeners do not elect the best music, advertising does.
13. Copyright may get settled and profits shared with artists but it may still be smaller because there are so many more artists.
14. It's really impossible to tell what streams are real or not and there's ways around everything.
15. Music is still being bit degraded but that should be easy to change soon.
16. There's a large number of "partial" composers who are bleeding out the income streams, making life difficult for those who wish to create full-time. If you have 1 million people taking from the sides of a shared pie it only leaves crumbs for everyone. Also they make crap music because music is a full-time job.
17. The net makes people think everyone should do music to sell crap to prosumers, further flooding the market.
18. There's no standard business model but there is a standard rat race model.
19. There's many side effects to over-saturation of music but it also creates a desensitization. The style of music made from computers uses techniques which reinforce the desensitization.
20. Every market seems to collapse a bit faster than the previous market. Each derivative market is less attached to actual music making and more to some other experience.
21. The PROs adding more members each year is not good, yet they boast it to rub your insignificance in your face.
22. Most successful artists are not what they seem.
23. Musical accomplishment doesn't translate to ordinary world. Oh you're a composer, spent 12 years in California, 600 tracks, thousands of placements, multi-genre?? My nephew sings at church choir...so fuck you.
24. It takes you 20 years of experiences, brutal pains of sacrifice and broken bones with no gains to get your foot slightly in the door. Others get instant access with no skills needed at all and given the red carpet treatment. "Others" can mean a spectrum of idiots. There's more idiots than those who earned it. Such promotions of others only occur when you are at your lowest naturally.
25. No brotherhood/camaraderie because everyone's decimated and obliterated, funny cause music is kinda all about that....instead dog eat dog cause tough times. Those who help you times 1 helps themselve times 1,000 and don't actually help you at all.
26. There's also the music making part which kinda sucks a lot of the time.
27. The new music doesn't seem that great but you'll have to make it for sake of commercialism.
28. People are listening and using more music than ever whereas artists are eating out of dog food cans supplied by their mother.
29. The tale is wagging the dog. All the external interference forces are in control of the music industry and minimal input from composers. They have taken concepts of profit from all the other industries and glued them in Frankenstein fashion to artists shackled fingers/voices.
30. The pie is also shared with the parasitic business sector of the business (nonmusical), for some reason that sector gets the money that should first go to the artist then be split up later to the business sector.
31. Holograms performing various types of shows, potentially in your house.
32. Pornhub concerts....not sure what that will entail LOL.

The people that said all the world should be run like a business are parasites taking all the worlds wealth for themselves and tricking people into playing a game built for them and their higher ups.


In summary:
Music industry needs a space force. Who's got 20 billion which will mostly go to the shadow brokers (by mostly I mean all of it).

His Magnificence of Most Highest, the President of Obsolescence,
CMDess


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## SergeD (Aug 29, 2018)

Musicians that compose something like this



do not care about future, c'est la vie.


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## dgburns (Aug 29, 2018)

I have no idea.


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## stacever (Sep 15, 2018)

Quasar said:


> The inventions of the phonograph and the radio created roughly one century of a centralized popular music recording "business" in which a few people got rich by being musical "stars" and the role of the average person was that of paying consumer.
> 
> This was a historical anomaly. In some ways, 21st century digital tech may be bringing back aspects of more decentralized and diverse traditional cultural norms, though it is obviously different too, different in ways that cannot be yet known, but will be for future historians to evaluate and interpret.



As an average person I miss that period. In that historical anomaly few reach people were able to put big budgets into artists and their production. Today even mainstream stars and most niche talented artists look kinda cheaply manufactured with over-polished sound and videos full of computer graphics. Talent+big budget is better than just talent. With big budget talent could become a history, without budget talent is suitable only for few appearances on talent show and a bunch of videos on youtube.


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## Quasar (Sep 15, 2018)

stacever said:


> As an average person I miss that period. In that historical anomaly few reach people were able to put big budgets into artists and their production. Today even mainstream stars and most niche talented artists look kinda cheaply manufactured with over-polished sound and videos full of computer graphics. Talent+big budget is better than just talent. With big budget talent could become a history, without budget talent is suitable only for few appearances on talent show and a bunch of videos on youtube.



No doubt that talent + big budget, as you put it, resulted in profound influences on culture: Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix (just to name a few examples) had a global reach that would be difficult/impossible to achieve today with the much more diffuse dissemination mechanisms. Though there remain a few corporate-sponsored mega-stars making money via vast commercial promotion, their social impact doesn't begin to compare. In a global village all markets are niche markets, and nothing approaches the level of having a universally shared impact.


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## Beluga (Sep 15, 2018)

I noticed a recent trend of going back to vinyl record production especially in post folk punk.


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## JEPA (Sep 15, 2018)

if we don't care about our planet, there won't be a "future of music". If wars (humans auto destruction), over consume of resources, Amazon Forest dying, other forests dying at hand of greed politicians for bio-diesel, carbon, water, food, food for animals for food for humans, diamonds-gold-silver exploitation letting rivers die because of mercury, there will not be a future for music. Oceans full of plastic garbage... I hope there will be a future for music, but we have to take part as humans on the solution of other problems too. We have to conserve our creative music bubble, but we have to be able to see other dimensions in this existence. I know, dedicate time for music making is very "time consuming" but if we keep going like music robots sometime in the future there will be no life and no music. The future of music depends on how we live as humans in relation with the nature and our world. I hope the best!


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## LamaRose (Sep 15, 2018)

@JEPA you beat me to it... and i'm afraid we've already passed the rubicon of return


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## chocobitz825 (Sep 15, 2018)

It's interesting to read a few apocalyptic predictions of the business and music as an art form and industry. There's an odd takeaway that I get from this though. Technology has given pretty much every person a mini computer in their pocket and with those, simple ways to "create" music. Maybe not on the professional level, or the academic level, but merely as an expression of musical ideas. This means that, more than any other time in history, we have more music creators than ever. Billions of people who now have a tool with which to create music, which would have been much harder in the days when you needed money for instruments, and lessons to get into the craft. We also have an international network in which to share our musical ideas. You don't have to go through a publisher to get your work put to sheet and sold worldwide, and even now you don't need a label. You have the free ability to put your music online and instantly share it with people. You don't have to be rich or connected to have an orchestra on your song if you can afford and compose the orchestra yourself via virtual instruments. In that way, we've sidestepped part of the significant budget issues that go in with creating songs themselves. 

In many ways, I think we take for granted how much technology has changed music. Maybe not everyone sees it as a positive, but its impact is undeniable, and it's not just digital technology that we have to consider. Being able to mass print and distribute sheet music, or create audio recordings to record, or stream music over the airwaves are all forms of technology changing the game in ways previous generations probably thought were destructive to the art. yet here we are speaking fondly of those technological advancements, and denouncing the future ones.

If there is anything that hurts music, IMO, its that we overestimate its importance to the average person. While it is probably a considerable part of our worlds as artists and professionals, the average person does not value it as much, and without corporations promoting it as the biggest thing to be experienced, people are returning to a time when music was not an all-consuming presence in their world. If anything, the only reason music became so crucial to our generations, is because marketing made it into an incredibly glitzy, profitable, and easy to idolize model of business. 

I maintain that for creators, we live in one of the most unique times in history and much good can still come from technological change, but we do have to realize the world in which we live and create, has changed a lot from what we were used to.


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## charlieclouser (Sep 15, 2018)

chocobitz825 said:


> If there is anything that hurts music, IMO, its that we overestimate its importance to the average person. While it is probably a considerable part of our worlds as artists and professionals, the average person does not value it as much, and without corporations promoting it as the biggest thing to be experienced, people are returning to a time when music was not an all-consuming presence in their world. If anything, the only reason music became so crucial to our generations, is because marketing made it into an incredibly glitzy, profitable, and easy to idolize model of business.



This is spot on. At some music creator's event at which I was speaking, I drew raised eyebrows when I said something like, "Let's not take all of this too seriously here people... I mean, all we're doing is creating the background music for a little light entertainment. It's not like we're curing cancer or solving world hunger or anything."

That was not what a room full of music creators, aspiring film composers, and related folks expected (or wanted) to hear.

But it's the truth as I see it. The "civilians" don't really care all that much. You might say, "But there's whole sub-reddits with tons of heated arguments and praise about the music for video game X and movie Y." 

Yeah... and there's also a sub-reddit for pictures of power washing your driveway, and one that's only pictures of cats standing up (which is awesome by the way).

You might say, "But the Game Of Thrones concert series sells out every time!" 

Yeah... and so does the furry convention.

So if you go out into the internet looking for evidence that music is important to people, you'll be able to find it easily - but not as easily as finding pictures of power washing driveways (or furries). But in your daily travels, interfacing with real people doing real things in their normal lives, the amount of time, money, and effort they're willing to spend to acquire and consume music is vanishingly small. Young people whose cultural / personal identities are not yet fully formed latch onto music trends more easily; forming and joining cliques based on what kind of music / movies / tv series / video games they like helps them to bond with other like-minded yutes and form an identity of sorts, and this has always been the case. The metalheads versus the preps versus the stoners, etc. Those yutes and their thirst for something different to what their parents listen to on the drive to soccer practice, their search for an identity that's different and distinct from their parent's, drives the trends toward shiny pop and xanax rap. Not surprising at all. But as people's identities take shape they have less need for the identity-identifying crutch of being into band X or video game Y - and as they age out of the trendy phase - they wind up listening to dad-rock on Jack-FM, or nineties hiphop on 93.5 KDAY (which is my jam!), often the same music they were listening to during their identity-forming years. 

And that's okay. 

Maybe not the ideal situation for us; we probably all wish that everybody was a voracious consumer like we are, always searching for new songs, new sounds, something new to love until the next great thing comes along. And, sure, those folks exist, but are in the minority for sure.

With all the time and effort we invest in becoming skilled / practiced / successful, there is a transaction implied. We put in the blood, sweat, and tears, and we expect "the industry" and "the fans" to repay us with success / fame / money. But we need to be careful and cautious about how much we expect our efforts to bear fruit and eventually repay us - how much we feel that music *owes* us. 

Because that's a debt which is almost never repaid in full.


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## gregh (Sep 15, 2018)

Saxer is "on the money" here I think. In many ways music has become far less important than before - whether one talks about the 50s, 60's 70s or now. Pink Floyd never played any music that synchronised labour to increase crop yields, or signalled and sustained the seasonal influx of mullet and the time at which they could be fished (or not). No band ever did. In the last few years music has encouraged group identity and affiliation - as it always has - but to no great moment as the dissolution or formation of youth groups is of no importance to survival - it is just a mechanism through which targets of consumption can be identified. But it used to be far more than that.
What people get annoyed about is that it seems harder now than ever to make money producing music, which is a function of Capitalism and the technologies used to support Capitalism. But Capitalism itself denatures all meaning and replaces it with consumption - whether that is religious experience, social cohesion, self-worth and so on. The decline in the value of the musical experience, its replacement by the superficial consumption of vast quantities of music as a form of distraction, is akin to the replacement of the experience of the sacred with televangelism.

This is an example where music is profoundly important to the people involved (highly recommended film)


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## DSmolken (Sep 16, 2018)

gregh said:


> Saxer is "on the money" here I think. In many ways music has become far less important than before - whether one talks about the 50s, 60's 70s or now. Pink Floyd never played any music that synchronised labour to increase crop yields, or signalled and sustained the seasonal influx of mullet and the time at which they could be fished (or not). No band ever did.


Now that you say that, our 50s music was pretty close - largely about increasing the speed of construction of urban housing, as my grandparents' generation moved to the cities. That got me thinking... maybe this golden era of recorded music was really only a few countries, with most of the rest of the world getting only a little bit of it late, or not at all? And maybe that's why I'm not as attached to it as some.

When I think of 50s music here, it really was all very ideological and designed to positively impact the morale of workers. Then things loosened up, but in the 60s a chunk of our early rock seems to have been practically co-written with government censors to make sure it had a positive impact on the young people - encouraging kids to smile more, to not put off studying for high school exit exams etc. And even in the 70s, a guy who wanted to have a career in cheesy pop music couldn't get records pressed because that was all government controlled and the government wanted to support highbrow culture, so he had to find a workaround in the form of flexi-type postcards. 80s, we had martial law.

It wasn't just our side of the Iron Curtain, either. I made that free drum kit trying to copy the sound of a 1970s Korean album which certainly sounded very low-budget compared to the American recordings of the time.

But the first Western song I have clear memories of hearing on the radio when it was new was "Just A Friend" by Biz Markie, so maybe I just missed out on too much to appreciate things like Steely Dan enough to miss them.


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## gregh (Sep 16, 2018)

DSmolken said:


> Now that you say that, our 50s music was pretty close - largely about increasing the speed of construction of urban housing, as my grandparents' generation moved to the cities. That got me thinking... maybe this golden era of recorded music was really only a few countries, with most of the rest of the world getting only a little bit of it late, or not at all? And maybe that's why I'm not as attached to it as some.
> 
> When I think of 50s music here, it really was all very ideological and designed to positively impact the morale of workers. Then things loosened up, but in the 60s a chunk of our early rock seems to have been practically co-written with government censors to make sure it had a positive impact on the young people - encouraging kids to smile more, to not put off studying for high school exit exams etc. And even in the 70s, a guy who wanted to have a career in cheesy pop music couldn't get records pressed because that was all government controlled and the government wanted to support highbrow culture, so he had to find a workaround in the form of flexi-type postcards. 80s, we had martial law.
> 
> ...


Interesting to hear that - I think we (In Australia but probably outside the USA in general) hear so much from the USA that their experience becomes our (false) memory. China, Africa and so on are far bigger and have completely different experiences.

But even in the USA art as propaganda (Modernism) was promoted heavily by funding through the CIA and others as part of the propaganda to position the USA as "the future". There are other examples (TV/Film) where commerical and political pressure was placed on countries to effectively destroy their home grown industries and accept US media domination. Australia is an example of that


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## chocobitz825 (Sep 16, 2018)

charlieclouser said:


> With all the time and effort we invest in becoming skilled / practiced / successful, there is a transaction implied. We put in the blood, sweat, and tears, and we expect "the industry" and "the fans" to repay us with success / fame / money. But we need to be careful and cautious about how much we expect our efforts to bear fruit and eventually repay us - how much we feel that music *owes* us.
> 
> Because that's a debt which is almost never repaid in full.



Something my students are never happy to hear, but its so true. You're doing art for free with no expectations or you're doing the business of art. Very different experiences.


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## gregh (Sep 16, 2018)

chocobitz825 said:


> Something my students are never happy to hear, but its so true. You're doing art for free with no expectations or you're doing the business of art. Very different experiences.


Visual art is a bit different - or at lest in Australia it is. I know quite a few visual artists who do alright financially making work they feel is important. They also do the business side, but not to the extent of making work they wouldn't make if they were wealthy anyway


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## GtrString (Sep 16, 2018)

The future of music will be more music.

I agree with the trend comment. Music tells the stories of cultures. That will never get old, and constantly change, as long as there are people.


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## Michelob (Sep 16, 2018)

About AI and music... If AI can replace human creativity in music, then maybe we all write reproducible shit, and our egos tell us we're damn good. I hope a computer will never be able to compose as Mahler (I mean transmit emotions like him, because his musical complexity is probably not that important here), because if so, it would mean that human being can be described with equations.

Then, if so, humanity will have to deal with bigger problems than just music industry... or in the opposite will be freed from its vanity


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## Josh Richman (Sep 16, 2018)

AI should be a real concern, but there is likely nothing you can about it. The real issue with AI is that the threadhold for it being a serious problem is much closer than people think or effectively regulate. It’s really machine learning but you will see it in the most profitable industries first. Medical, Defense, Fin-tech, etc...

In regards to music, AI only has to be indistinguishable from a human to an average listener, to severely disrupt the industry.

The average listener isn’t that discerning to begin with. How often can people tell between samples and live musicians? This the crux of the problem, one must be able recognize a distinction in order to value it.


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## C M Dess (Sep 16, 2018)

Bigger casting couch.


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## jneebz (Sep 16, 2018)

charlieclouser said:


> With all the time and effort we invest in becoming skilled / practiced / successful, there is a transaction implied. We put in the blood, sweat, and tears, and we expect "the industry" and "the fans" to repay us with success / fame / money. But we need to be careful and cautious about how much we expect our efforts to bear fruit and eventually repay us - how much we feel that music *owes* us.
> 
> Because that's a debt which is almost never repaid in full.


Wow. YES. And I'm afraid this asymmetry leads to many broken dreams and empty wallets. It almost ruined my life. 

But I feel I've found a decent balance between my day job (30 hours/week as a physical therapist) and music business (also about 30 hours/week). I have an "income wheel" spinning from the day job that allows me more flexibility in my music biz (don't have to take EVERY bottom-of-the-barrel-time-sucking-life-draining-shit-paying gig) and with less stress, I feel like I'm more creative and just overall more healthy. I know it's not for everyone, but for me, this is a million times more sustainable (physically, financially, emotionally) and satisfying than trying to "make it" as a full-time composer. And don't get me wrong, for those of you who manage to survive and thrive full-time in this industry, I have deep respect and admiration.


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## dgburns (Sep 16, 2018)

charlieclouser said:


> This is spot on. At some music creator's event at which I was speaking, I drew raised eyebrows when I said something like, "Let's not take all of this too seriously here people... I mean, all we're doing is creating the background music for a little light entertainment. It's not like we're curing cancer or solving world hunger or anything."
> 
> Because that's a debt which is almost never repaid in full.



I got to a point where the joy comes from being part of a team that together creates media. It sometimes sucks to realize we are a support element, but while the general public may not appreciate the efforts, the team sure does.

I’ve gotten into the groove of frontloading a show as early as possible, feeding the video editor music as early as possible in a bid to be part of the conversation while the rough edits are taking shape. I’ve noticed that editors make space and leverage the music knowing it might make it to final. Even if I change or finesse it later, the music’s role as a part of the scene got established and the stakeholders all got used to it being there. And it wasn’t temp.

To the future of music, I’m encouraged by the recent rulings in Europe regarding copyrighted music on Youtube and Facebook. I get the feeling IP and copyright are starting to come into the conversation. I’m hopefull that the next gen will operate in a more fair environment.


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## YaniDee (Sep 16, 2018)

The future of music..there will be less and less "artists" and more & more sell-outs pushing buttons..Cynical, yes, but listen to someone like Mahler, and then a "million dollar selling" rap song using 2 notes.


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## chocobitz825 (Sep 17, 2018)

YaniDee said:


> The future of music..there will be less and less "artists" and more & more sell-outs pushing buttons..Cynical, yes, but listen to someone like Mahler, and then a "million dollar selling" rap song using 2 notes.



Isn't Mahler a prime example of how fickle opinions of music are over the generations? Wasn't he banned and neglected up until the mid-1940's? 

I have no particular love for mumble rap, but that's not necessarily the entirety of modern music. Where modern pop music may lack the expected use of music theory, it does have areas of creativity that are only possible in this age due to technology. Rhythmically, some forms of music are becoming more complex than previous generations, and through technology sound design as a musical instrument/element has made the sonic possibilities of music far more unique. It's not all bad. I mean even in our work of scoring music, we now use so much more than just traditional instruments. We aren't limited to only what can be achieved by natural instruments, and I think most people tend to find that a positive in the current environment. 

I guess I wonder, where is this line that people are afraid to cross that symbolizes technology is killing art when we've continued to cross so many lines and push on? Maybe there is a way for talented creative minds to use AI to push music to an even higher level.


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## Montisquirrel (Sep 17, 2018)

In 30 years, when we will say "the old days have been so much better", we are talking about today.


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## Desire Inspires (Sep 17, 2018)

Take your music money and invest it in land and real estate.


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