- One popular metric for measuring artist engagement on Spotify is the ratio of followers to monthly listeners, which ideally should fall between 15% and 20% by music-industry standards. Lo-fi hip-hop doesn’t even come close. For instance, Moods, a producer who has released music independently and through Chillhop Records, has 1.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify but only around 29,000 followers — a conversion rate of 2.2%. Similarly, Brenky, a producer who released nine lo-fi hip-hop albums over the last three years, has 1.2 million monthly listeners but only around 4,000 followers — a conversion rate of just 0.3%.
In which Gen Z discovers muzak The economics are precisely muzak. Muzak was invented so that businesses could pay a gatekeeper a pittance in order to have background music. The mechanical royalties of originals were such that enforcers could drive around and say "if you keep playing the radio we'll sue on behalf of ASCAP" and strong-arm the local haberdasher into a cheap rendition of Burt Bacharach. It all went to shit when nobody was paying anything anymore, at which point every local haberdasher plugged in their iPod or their Pandora but now, even the pittance Pandora collects is too much so what we're left with is DIY muzak streams of guys tweedling in Traktor or whatever making zero point nothing.
I honestly believe the calculation went like this: "How many CDs did people buy per year before MP3 was invented?" "About 700 million." "So, like, three each?" "More or less." "At like sixteen bucks a pop." "I know, right?" "That's 48 bucks a year. So... we license everything they would have gotten off of Napster and charge 'em $4 a month. They're legal, we take 80 percent of it and the artists and labels take whatever we give them because something is better than nothing." "Make it $4.99 it sounds rounder. And we'll double it when they graduate."
Classic willingness-to-pay pricing. David Byrne points out in his book that the money's all gone, and will probably never come back, just at the time when the marginal costs of making music have dropped to near zero. It's just such a shame that it's so obviously gone now.
- Mick Jagger It just now occurred to me that 1968 was when The Beatles created Apple Records. 1997 was when the Freunhaufer codec was leaked, allowing everyone to encode their music as MP3. "He gave away our business model. We were completely not amused. We tried to hunt him down. We told everybody, 'This is stolen software so don't distribute it,' but still the business model to have expensive encoders and cheap decoders [was] done. From that time on, we reduced the cost for encoders. There was a company, Music Match, which allowed people early on to take a CD's music, read it into the computer and then have their own music jukebox on that. And they were legal, they paid for the patent fees so that was fine. "When we found out that people used our technology to do unauthorized distribution of music over the Net — that was not our intention, very clearly. I have to say, I don't say that everything the music industry does is correct or good, but still I think we should have respect for the work of the artists and everybody involved and it's only fair that they get paid for it. "It was in '97 when I got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore. But even then I still sometimes have the feeling like is this all a dream or is it real, so it's clearly beyond the dreams of earlier times."“… it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records. But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.”
There were more and more people using this technology to store music on their hard discs. The idea was [originally] that encoders would be much more expensive. ... In, I think it was '97, some Australian student bought professional grade — from our point of view — encoding software for MP3 from a small company in Germany. He paid with a stolen credit card number from Taiwan. He looked at the software, found that we had used some Microsoft internal application programming interface ... racked everything up into an archive and wired some Swedish side, [and] put that to a U.S. university FTP site together with a read-me file saying, 'This is freeware thanks to Fraunhofer.'
Ok, funny thing. I'm part of a facebook group "lofi family" in which various lofi producers hang and network and shamelessly plug their stuff etc. I make music that kinda-sometimes-sorta counts as lofi hip-hop, so I keep that group in the pocket for when I want to shamelessly plug my own stuff. Side note: a post to an interest group like these can easily be 100x more effective than a paid ad from Facebook. Spotify does an annual roundup for artists where they post your stats for the year, so inevitably all these kinds of groups get a thread or ten where people chime-in with their stats. A surprising number of people in the lofi group post numbers that are pretty insane, like a million streams or something close. Sure, part of this is probably classic Instagram-style posturing, but I also believe it. Some of the people posting those numbers may in fact be the "big names" in the genre right now, but could you think of any recognizable artist name in the genre? Every artist that inevitably comes up had their popularity 20-30 years ago. Lofi is a pretty faceless genre at the moment, but super ubiquitous.
As a listener I do not see a distinction between ambient electronic music and chillhop. People have been using music as a tool to help focus for a long time, I don't really see anything to get upset about.
Sorry, this comment is in regards to the new yorker article that was linked in the article you posted :https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/against-chill-apathetic-music-to-make-spreadsheets-toAs a listener I do not see a distinction between ambient electronic music and chillhop. People have been using music as a tool to help focus for a long time, I don't really see anything to get upset about.