which phenomenally popular american entertainment institution would you most like to see come to a sudden end by 2023

Good riddance to the monoculture.

xp re: Whiney's post, I thought the other points he had were most important

Also: There's also the infamous "digital watermark" Universal Classics (DG and Decca) put on their digital releases until a few years ago.
― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:14 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s what i was referring to! did they correct this across the board

i don't really agree with whiney's other points about why streaming is bad though, "pays people dogshit" is the only real complaint i have about it.

― ufo, Saturday, October 16, 2021

really?

"made songs and albums ephemeral and made narratives disappear and ruined physical media and made everything an exhausting game of 24-hour lifespans and made sound quality shitty, and destroyed the monoculture"

i don’t really think it made narratives disappear

Also: There's also the infamous "digital watermark" Universal Classics (DG and Decca) put on their digital releases until a few years ago.
― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:14 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s what i was referring to! did they correct this across the board

“made sound quality shitty” reminds me of ppl complaining about radio

yes that’s exactly what i imagine would happen in this thought experiment no one was participating in

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 8:06 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was just replying to you saying an end to capitalism is unenvisionable without an end to music streaming. personally, i can envision one without the other. they don’t seem that related

i didn’t say such a thing!

streaming does seem to make all songs and albums ephemeral

NFL: definitely; brain damage for the participants (and the fans, ha ha), plus it's owned/run by psychotic bigots, plus there's the whole economy of stadiums
Marvel Cinematic Universe: definitely; has poisoned the brains of an entire generation (though this goes hand in hand with social media, TBF)
Broadway Musical Theater: definitely; since I live in the NY media market I see a seemingly endless amount of media coverage of this shit, including local news stories, it's a nightmare
True Crime Podcasts: have never listened, never will, so...don't care
Streaming Music: I don't use it that much, but I do use it for research (Spotify, occasionally YouTube), and it helps me to share music with people who might buy it - as far as "destroyed the monoculture," good fucking riddance
Streaming Video: I don't expect to ever go to a movie theater again, so if I want to see a movie it's gonna be on Amazon Prime or Hulu or HBO Max

maybe i misunderstood

obv there’s a level on which “streaming music” is unenvisionable without capitalism so’

isn’t there a stanislaw lem short story where he invents music streaming?

i'm young enough that i was only ever buying cds in my teens and i don't miss physical media at all. most of the other complaints (e.g. death of the monoculture) seem more attributable to the internet than streaming directly & often somewhat predate streaming's prominence? would also completely disagree with 'making narratives disappear', don't really understand the sound quality complaint either, both spotify & apple music are high enough bitrate to be basically indistinguishable from cd quality and even spotify's free tier is surprisingly difficult to notice issues with. it's obviously good to have flacs available but they're not at all necessary for most purposes.

my actual pick is social media bc the mild fondness i have for twitter is drastically outweighed by the incredible harm fb does

lol could be

i wasn’t making a bigger point other than “the technologies that we know of prob wouldn’t exist without capitalism so me blaming capitalism for an issue with a technology is sort of a catch-22” etc.

did i malaprop catch-22 there, i haven’t read the book

xp

monoculture didn’t even die, look at the fucking articles

it's diminished though so i can at least understand what people mean when they complain about 'death of the monoculture'

also wouldn’t monoculture dying be

a good thing

or at least not an unequivocally bad thing

yet literally everywhere you go, ppl are talking about the same shit everywhere

The monoculture is dead, you have the option of being a MCU fan or a Synderverse fan.

adele album’s gonna save the monoculture

i'm far too young to be able to know exactly how things were pre-internet but yeah it doesn't exactly seem like the diminishing of the monoculture was close to a bad thing

The non-royalty streaming music complaints come down to the misery of choice - not having the curated new release rack of a good record shop (or even MP3 blog) and being able to afford one album a week to keep you from being overwhelmed.

Streaming video (and the blockbuster reign over theaters) has a similar problem. The 'golden age of TV' could be the golden age because there was one great show for everyone to watch and talk about every week and now it's a hassle trying to keep up with individual series and what service they're on.

i think whiney’s point was that it makes it harder to be a music critic when there are no narratives and no monoculture. streaming “hollowed out the middle class” of music critics

man the thing that depressed me most about getting hired as a music critic was being required to write about the big names all the time, fuck that

I read that as hollowed out the middle class of musicians.

burden of choice is a myth imo. having choices is nice

The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

narratives… still exist, idk, though i think as a failed critic who doesn’t want to write about most narratives i feel like i’m the wrong person to take this temperature

streaming “hollowed out the middle class” of music critics

― flopson, Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:51 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also, i gotta say, something has been happening at the publications themselves that caused this at least as much as if not more than streaming music

Having access to (almost) all of history's music is great but it does devalue the finds and make the average listener work less hard at appreciating an album when they have nothing invested in it/it's easier to move on.

Being, generationally, on the cusp between "you get to listen to what the one good record store in town stocks and maybe two hours a week of decent college radio" and shifting into that universal access was great, being on either side of that divide permanently would have been much worse.

not having the curated new release rack of a good record shop (or even MP3 blog) and being able to afford one album a week to keep you from being overwhelmed.

i don’t relate to this at all. when i bought cds and records, the number of albums I bought were limited by my being poor, and were far below an amount that would have “overwhelmed” me. it was even below the amount that satisfied me. i think that feeling is mostly misplaced nostalgia. now i use streaming for most listening, i still don’t feel overwhelmed. i just listen to the music i feel like at the given moment

but there just doesn't seem to be much passion about anything anymore

xp Right, free streaming is the 'be overwhelmed' part there because you're no longer limited by the supply chain or poverty. This makes cycles shorter (for individuals and culturally, I thinks humans derived a lot of meaning from cycle syncing with others), which arguably makes music cheaper emotionally.

but… why would i want to be limited by the supply chain or poverty

You probably wouldn't? The idea is that the current situation has drawbacks just like the old. Unlimited choice is not an unfettered good.

i get the logic of abundance devaluing music on an abstract level but in my experience it was the opposite. the limewire/napster and especially soulseek era really cracked the wide world of music open for me when i was young in a way that made me value it more. when i discovered ilx i think at 17-18, i would download the albums being discussed on all the active ilm threads and have my mind blown

No ILX option?

Xp I still do

easily the NFL

but it depends on how exactly it would end, and i cannot predict where its fans/bettors would redirect their energy

xxxp I'm from an earlier period. I just remember being restricted in the 80s by student poverty, eagerly listening to KUSF and trying to choose between LPs by US bands I loved and bands from the UK that were intriguing to me. That made the whole experience of discovery exciting

again, i was hoping streaming music would end artificial scarcity

discovery is still exciting to me having nearly the entire history of music readily available idk

For sure. Everyday.

there is always going to be scarcity in streaming as far as a lot music is concerned - modern classical (cage, feldman, rzewski, pisaro, so many others), experimental, erstwhile electroacoustic music, japanese deconstructed blues etc

easily the NFL

but it depends on how exactly it would end, and i cannot predict where its fans/bettors would redirect their energy

― mookieproof, Sunday, October 17, 2021 2:24 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, like, for the amount of violent energy it generates it seems at least a little contained?

re: music, not having to work to discover it anymore and having everything at my fingertips has made it all seem slightly less interesting somehow

the music that i’m into that has retained some aspect of scarcity is house/techno. where like, i’m constantly listening to mixes and trying to find a track but there’s no track list, or it’s a white-label or vinyl-only release, or more often it’s unreleased or just secret. i can see it being fun for some types of ppl, the challenge to ID a track. but it kinda annoys and discourages me, and i resign myself to ‘oh well i should just appreciate the ephemeral connection between me and this song and not covet it’. also it takes a lot longer for that stuff to end up on streaming (and plenty of it never shows up) so i still occasionally buy or slsk stuff

secrets are cool i just hate when they cost money

I sat in the front row with my 11-year old niece at a Broadway performance of Mamma Mia. One of the performers coasted on his knees up to the front of the stage and sang directly to her at one point, so I can't hate Broadway Musical Theater