> "But where I'm at now, in my mind," Flegel said, "you just need some regulars. Some people who've got your back, are into what you're doing."
This reminds me of "1,000 true fans" [0]. A concept I've always liked and been drawn to. The internet has made that more possible than ever with things like Patreon. There are a couple podcasts in way behind on that I still pay for simply because I like the hosts and want to support them, I'd love to see more of that.
Americans spend on average about $3,500 annually on entertainment. If we benchmark success of the “true fan” model at $100k, that’s a $100 annual bar to be a true fan, which means the average American could be a true fan for a reasonable number of artists.
What “reasonable” means determines the answer to the second question, but since we’re basically talking about the cost of a streaming service, 4 seems like a reasonable number that maps closely to today’s consumer behavior in that similar space.
That’s about 1.2 billion aggregate “fanhoods”, which leaves room for 1.2 million artists if fans are distributed uniformly.
But that’s extremely unlikely. Typically, this kind of interest and attention follows a power law curve, so the real number would be much, much lower. Hundreds, most likely.
I would be shocked if the answer to this is not tied up in Dunbar numbers. But whether it’s proportional or cumulative I cannot say.
Could a person who is a true fan of World War I era postage stamp lore and still retain a full complement of social links or is there a quick point where the obsessions subtract from the total number of human contacts a person can sustain? Or is it like Sherlock Holmes whom Doyle made afraid of useless knowledge for fear of crowding out “important” things like the scent of every brand of smoking tobacco and the color and texture of every muddy spot in the United Kingsom?
I have the feeling that we have now so much more music than ever before, the speed people diverse into their unique directions will happen faster than before.
When kids can already listen to everything through smartphones, there is less and less need to listen to one of the few radio stations playing the same everytime.
Human authenticity doesn’t easily boil down to being “content” so there’s likely to be major issues resulting from your definitions.
Humans are also easily found, being human and authentic, in the real world. The online one is destined to become an AI nightmare of human-free generative “content” from this point onwards.
Maybe in public spaces, but in private online spaces human creativity is alive and well.
Game devs are deving games.
Music makers make music.
Artists still sell commissions.
Hell, even in some more AI focused discord servers I’m in, I see people doing cool things with AI images and more traditional image bashing and masking afterwards.
What’s going on is that the creators of these big public platforms finally found a “holy grail” use case for the ~20 years of human communication and behavioral data they’ve been collecting.
> Human authenticity doesn’t easily boil down to being “content” so there’s likely to be major issues resulting from your definitions.
I didn't claim human authenticity is equal to content creation. I meant that with the further rise of 'AI nightmare human free generative content' as you perfectly describe it, there will be a backlash where people seek out more authentic experiences.
You can already see this as a reaction to social media where people gravitate towards private group chats and discord servers.
> Humans are also easily found, being human and authentic, in the real world
I think you underestimate how much of our lives our influenced by the online world. Digital media saturates our lives.
That said, I would love to imagine people gravitating towards local community as a reaction of the death of the internet. I'm actually in the process of starting an LPFM radio station.
> The online one is destined to become an AI nightmare of human-free generative “content” from this point onwards.
> "Diamond Jubilee" is not available on Spotify/Apple/Bandcamp etc. Digital WAV album files only available to DL via this website.
It's curious they exclude their music from Bandcamp, which is very different among those other platforms listed and indie-friendly (not to mention far more attractive for customers who want to buy and own lossless music). Yet they then link their entire album for free on Youtube.
Bandcamp was acquired by Epic Games in 2022 and then by Songtradr in 2023. Its ownership and management has become less different from those other platforms, and it's no longer seen as indie-friendly by people who pay attention to these things.
And yet they still regularly hold Bandcamp Fridays (0% commission) and haven't shown any signs of reducing or locking down functionality. The acquisitions are certainly worrying in theory, and it's worth keeping a close eye on their operations, but for practical purposes they're still one of the best distribution venues for artists in terms of 'bang for buck' (buck being your fans' attention).
It’s a bit different, but Indian extreme metal label Transcending Obscurity has had several bands release two days early on bandcamp (I know for sure about Vorga [0] and Replicant [1]), and indie black metal band Adon [2] simply decided to stay bandcamp exclusive for a week before releasing on streaming platforms.
I very much appreciate those :)
There are, usually big-ish and famous-ish, bands who do the opposite, only release on streaming, leaving me no way to buy the album, also those only releasing on something like Amazon (which then requires me to get the disk to rip it myself, raising the buy-rating for me from 3.5 to 4/5), and of course also Japanese artists who often don’t seem to care about western audiences at all with their music only available on Japanese sites.
I like Prince, have since I was a kid, but I'm not a "Fan" of Prince... I like his music. The problem is that Pop musicians grow and cultivate fans maybe, kids and people that will buy and collect anything an artist sells... Problem is that those Pop fans quickly grow out of it as they get older and often find there's no benefit in collecting things from a fallible character persona. They the artist either retires and fades away (until their unfortunate demise is reported on the news), or keeps going on tour until some embarrassing things begin to happen, like stage tumbles and mental breakdowns.
As a musician myself, I don't want fans, I just want a vast audience to hear my music so that a percentage of people out of it connect with it and collect it. No merchandising involved beyond the music, and streaming it is free... Social media dictates that all musicians need fans to grow, and that is toxic towards good authentic music happening. Major labels manufacture artists, and assemble teams of people that take actors and turn them into musicians, then the marketing machine makes up entire stories, and even lies about these musicians that can't hold up when the budget runs out. If you recall Milli Vanilli, that's just one instance of manufactured artistry. Now with Ai, it's just Milli Vanilli without collateral damage and artists to pay, the good thing though is the whole charade only works for Pop music, and it may entertain fans for short periods of time, as seen with pretty much all the BackStreet Boys, No comebacks Alright!
I'm glad I don't make Pop music, and I'm working to make timeless music, the POP life is not for me.
>As a musician myself, I don't want fans, I just want a vast audience to hear my music so that a percentage of people out of it connect with it and collect it. No merchandising involved beyond the music, and streaming it is free... Social media dictates that all musicians need fans to grow, and that is toxic towards good authentic music happening.
If you don't make any money from distributing your music or from merchandising, how exactly do you make a living? It sounds like you're not a professional musician. Professionals could make a living just from selling concert tickets, but they need to be popular enough to have a strong following and sell a LOT of tickets when they play a venue.
>I'm glad I don't make Pop music, and I'm working to make timeless music, the POP life is not for me.
The music I listen to isn't so popular these days, but these bands still generally need to make a living if they want to be full-time musicians, and they typically do it with concert tours and merchandise. (Streaming and CD sales seem to be mostly only good for advertising for them.)
I am a professional musician, you'd be surprised, most musicians aren't making serious money in the streaming age. many popular musicians aren't making much as well. Record labels are losing money and the Industry is in meltdown mode right now. I'm lucky to have other business ventures that pay my bills.
Most musicians are only getting booked at large festivals which don't pay well, they're often the only ticket in town post-pandemic, as they pack volumes of artists together onto one big lineup. The smaller events rarely provide a good return on investment. Lenny Kravitz for example invests in NYC real estate these days, and has brand deals.
The Western rock/metal bands I see don't usually get packed together into "one big lineup", except at those big multi-day festivals. They seem to be able to do their own tours profitably all by themselves, or sometimes with one opening band.
However, granted, these are older, long-established bands, and all the guys are in their 50s or 60s or older, and their audiences seem to be older/middle-aged people who grew up with these bands, and also some younger people who found an appreciation for classic rock and metal music.
Here in Japan, however, there's lots of local (newer) metal bands that play gigs by themselves profitably. The dynamics of the music business seem pretty different from what's going on in America.
This is the crux for me too. I'm not a "fan" of almost anyone. I might like somebody's music, somebody's movies or somebody's views.
Then the next thing they put out could be bad and I won't want it.
I'm called an "Apple fan boy" because I claim the Apple things I buy are the best versions of those things. But if/when Apple releases something mediocre, I won't want it. E.g. Vision Pro.
Did anyone pick up vibes here of Pattern Recognition from William Gibson?
The use of old web1 web sites, small quirky art pieces being left on back corners of internet to only be appreciated by small group 'in the know', the 1000 true fans.
The music itself sounds more like the past than the future of music and I guess indie is just not my cup of tea, but as a fan of some other obscure bands and styles, I can relate. Even then I do not think it is the future of music distribution, more like marketing gimmick. I am a software developer and I still dread the idea of making downloaded files available on my iPhone. If it is not on Spotify it may just as well not exist.
Something about this just really struck a nerve with me this Sunday morning. The music itself, which is phenomenal but also opening this GeoCities site. What a beautiful little gem today :)
It definitely was for me too, and because it had _everything_, thanks to piracy. I started listening mostly mainstream bands, because that's what I knew, and within a few months I was listening to absolutely random authors, genres and "things" I didn't know existed. And by that I mean stuff like old sega genesis video game music somebody uploaded - without even knowing what the genesis was.
I never BOUGHT so much music since. It was eye opening for me how little I cared about radio/mainstream music after that.
The closest I've found so far is soundcloud. Thanks in no small part due to the barely-working recommendation engine, which doesn't get stuck in a local maxima, frequently going offtrack in pleasant unexpected ways.
I've loved Pat's music for 15 years now. There's an obsessive passion in the people who are into him, trawling for bootlegs and demos on soulseek, binge watching old Women live shows on YT. my friends excitedly recount the email conversations they've had with him, and hell yeah, wavs up for free e-transfer him if you can.
Regardless of whether you like the music, I think the larger object of his art and our reaction to it is terrific and I wish more people could create, discover, and relate to art this way.
Yeah, that was really cool. A couple of years before that, Harvey Danger (yes, the Flagpole Sitta band) literally released their album Little by Little on BitTorrent. I loved that move, and it also happened to be a great album.
I see this shift as a tech hype wave finally having its bubble burst under how shit a deal it is for everyone but the middlemen. Then again, I guess a lot of people actually like streaming services for music? This is alien to me. I just straight up never got into streaming music services. I've never had or wanted a spotify account. I think my use of automated discovery tools consisted of trying last.fm recommendations for a while. For the most part I like discovering music by word of mouth or bands touring together or through random happenstance. When listening to music on purpose I prefer to curate it myself from what I have in my collection (Which is mostly digital and I manage it through a filesystem. Most cloud file storage has a garbage featureset compared to like vanilla POSIX, let alone everything we've invented for file management on computers since). Sometimes, if I don't have something, I'll go try to find it specifically on Bandcamp or Youtube, but especially on the former I'm likely to buy it if I ever want it twice, and this is only untrue for the latter because stuff on youtube doesn't usually have a clear way to give the artist money, making it often easier to pirate than buy. I suppose I could still buy and rip CDs, but my last remaining optical drive is over a decade old and it's kind of inconvenient to do that
I'm not trying to be elitist or anything here. It genuinely baffles me that so many people prefer to just have a random stream of music play at them based on what some recommender system thinks they won't turn off, interspersed with ads or for a monthly subscription service that may average out to slightly less than I spend on music (but I'm pretty novelty-seeking and really like supporting artists when I can, so I think I'm above-average in how much new music I will buy). That's not even considering how bad it is for the artists, how it's yet another piece of a surveillance web, etc. I know people mostly ignore that stuff, and that there's a lot of industry dollars going into making it easier to ignore. But the baseline use case just seems obnoxious rather than pleasant or useful. I don't know how to reconcile the fact that my preferences seem really far outside the norm without explicitly trying to be contrarian about it. What do people like about this stuff?
Today's a great day - what a delightful 2000's throwback on all fronts. I wonder if there's any connection between this article and the rumored Pitchfork -> GQ reorg.
I got caught up in this hype when this album hit number one of the year so far on rateyourmusic (think of it as letterboxd but for music).
So I downloaded it, converted it to a format I could add to Music.app and play on my iPhone (for this reason alone it's not the future of music), listened to it, was distinctly unimpressed, so deleted it. It sounded too derivative.
Since I've heard new music by other artists that did a lot more for me.
See, all of those sound "derivative" to me. Absolutely nothing against Japanese yacht rock/soft funk, but it's silly to blame musicians for using genre conventions when those are inherently part of the musical language IMO. Particularly given Cindy Lee works with 1940s-60s pop genre conventions of girl groups and also performs in drag, it's inherently a kind of music that repurposes familiar elements to say something new.
I've been a fan of Cindy Lee's work since before they started the project and were in the band Women, who're a sort of your favourites' favourite artist. Part of the hype around Diamond Jubilee is the context of that band, and the development of successor bands since.
But part of the hype is also that it comes from a very sincere place - it's a full-on auteurist work, the antithesis of "lo fi chill hip hop beats to study/relax to". It can aesthetically or artistically be your thing or not (it very much is mine), but it's a breath of fresh air to have such a fully-realized artistic statement that isn't a focus-grouped, try-hard Event get the acclaim it deserves.
I'm really happy for you, honestly. It must be amazing to have followed a band for so long and see them "make it", so to speak, like this. I remember feeling the same way having followed Phoenix for years and years before they hit the big time.
I don't have much affinity for 1940-60s pop, outside of The Beatles, Motown, and the Phillu Soul we refer to as Northern Soul here in the UK. Which I guess is probably why Diamond Jubilee doesn't do it for me. It's purposefully derivative, which is fine... it's just not to my tastes.
So I'm keen to hear specifically what you think the Japanese tracks are derivative of, that'd probably be more my style.
I mean, like he said, it’s kind of alright, but not what I’d call great music (I’m listening now and I’m going to have to try really really hard to call it good).
Here’s some great bands/artists to check out (not saying they are in whatever category Cindy Lee wants to be):
I'm in my early thirties and grew up in the midwest, so i feel that plays a bit into my music tastes but Petey has been my favorite artist lately. both of his albums are fantastic front to back, but i'd start with USA.
I mean I can play FLAC on my iPhone if I want to...but I'd rather just drop some files that I don't have to post-process in some way onto an app and have them magically appear on all my devices. That's the future and we have it today.
Even Bandcamp figured this out and gives me the option to choose the type of download that best suits me, and I buy much music from there. If Cindy Lee had put this album out on their Bandcamp page on a Bandcamp Friday, with the included choice of formats, it would be better for everybody. But of course that wouldn't have garnered any press about an unorthodox method of distribution.
All that to say: a zip of FLACs on a no-frills website is definitely not the future of music, regardless of "platform".
In the future if artists can get their way, they would release this as an exclusive for 2 weeks on a site then release it on streaming. 1. People would pay to listen to it first. 2. People will still use stream to listen subsequently as it is easier.
Negative side is that streaming service may not like it, and people will spin it as a rip off even if it technically isn’t.
I am acutely aware that the things I enjoy are not always the highest quality.
I've always thought that having taste is knowing what's high quality and what is not.
A lot of the things I enjoy are low quality. Yoo-hoo, for example. It's basically chocolate flavoured corn syrup water. I still allow myself enjoy one every now and then. It doesn't make my enjoyment of fine bourbon or wine any less.
The best and worst thing to happen to the album. It fully deserves the acclaim, but now loads of people are only going to listen to it through the prism of the hype rather than hear it for what it is
Ariel Pink’s The Doldrums — another anthology of anachronistic nostalgia pop down sampled to AM radio quality — was released nearly 24 years ago. It is surprising to not see his work mentioned but maybe I’m not looking hard enough, or his cancellation has been too thorough?
True. There's a revival of this kind of music/asthetic that happens every 10 or so years, people keep rediscovering it. Which is fine. But you can't mention this if you want to make it sound fresh.
Either way, the lede here is the web 1.0 website and not the music per se, despite the article's title.
Cindy Lee isn't a retro revivalist IMO, their previous band Women already had that technique of using 1940s-60s songwriting form and warping it with a noisy, no-wave, DIY sensibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=673IaJZko9I
Part of that sound was Chad VanGaalen producing Women's two albums, and he went on to produce Alvvays' debut album in a similar DIY, tape-saturated style. Women's other successor act, Preoccupations, pretty clearly shows the post-punk/noise-rock side of Women, so it's kind of interesting to see how the descendants have grown their own roots a decade after the band ended.
Anyway my hot take is that Cindy Lee uses past conventions in an inside-out sort of way as a means to an end, rather than producing a retro-sounding surface as the end goal like Ariel Pink. It's not a style, it's an instrument.
It’s interesting music. Two tracks through, I’m not exactly sure how/what to think about it, but I’ll keep listening for now. Maybe Beck meets Lord Huron meets Bill Callahan?
These comments are embarrassing. It’s a landmark album and being recognized as such by critics and us lifelong hardcore music fans. You see it’s not for any of you, or rather very few. It’s a sort of love letter to me and my ilk, aka those of us that started collecting records when we were teens and went on to own indie record stores in the 80/90s and early 2000 before most of them were shuttered. There are hints of Spacemen 3, Velvet Underground, hell even some more obscure nods to forgotten bands like Boo Radley, Crime and The City Solution and many many more. If you are not steeped in musical experience this record will not land with you. But for me and about 6 of my oldest collector friends (all in our 50s now) this is a towering achievement by a single person that wrote nearly every note on the record. On top of all that there is the utterly brilliant GeoCities website with its decidedly Twin Peaks vibe and oh so much fun to blade runner zoom around. Brilliance like this shines only a few times in life and us ex NeptureRecords and Play It Again forgotten staff and friends of those great record stores are having the time of our lives listening to the entries 2+ hours daily.
This is an excellent point. People have been discussing the album and music industry trends and have neglected to broach the most fundamental topic at hand here: that evo_9 is the poster that is best at listening to music
I've been a music fan since my first 7" vinyl in 1988, and my first CD album in 1990. I listen to all sorts, from all around the world. I live for each Friday.
So, yes, I can hear the influences on this album. No surprise as they're pretty in your face. But, for whatever reason, they didn't excite me. The disappointment is all mine.
(ps: it's The Boo Radleys; I loved their euphoric, trumpet-infused, cover of The La's "There She Goes")
I hear you. For example, I literally cannot find anyone I interact with who has even heard of this band called Islands (Nick Thorburn), but they are probably my favorite band of all time.
I was initially surprised to read this sentiment, since his prior band The Unicorns was relatively popular in indie rock circles. Then I realized that was a full two decades ago, and I suddenly felt old...
it's been interesting to see the public reaction to this album. i'm excited they're finally getting some well-deserved acclaimed.
all the haters are so fascinating. everybody chiming in about this artist, somebody they didn't know anything about until last week. like how everybody became an epidemiologist in 2020, financial expert in 2021-2022, ai expert 2023, bridge expert 2024, war strategist in 2022, etc.
I'm not quite sure I get it, the album itself is kind of...mid? It's 2+ hours of an aggressively boring take on the previous decade's music ideals desperately in need of an editor.
Honestly, it solidifies the ideal that with the vast quantity of new music released today, that if damn near every song isn't worth the listener's time, those songs don't belong on an album, they don't belong on a remix album, they don't belong on a deluxe edition, they really only have a place in live shows, livestreams, or anthologies when you're dead.
No real barrier to the distribution of music might just mean we're getting less curation from the artists. There was a "discipline" that 12" of vinyl imposed that I miss.
I was going back through Pink Floyd's discography the other day and was reminded that The Wall was a four record album! And yeah I do think that exception proves your rule. They coulda trimmed that up a wee bit.
Its a concept album that celebrates the last 60 years of music history. Understandably a lot happened in those decades and cramming all that onto a single LP would lead spirit of the beehive style insanity. I think a double LP makes tons of sense here, the album is only 2 hours long so not like the length is absolutely insane. Obviously its not the tightest, but I think that lets the influences shine even more.
Music critics also love concept albums, I think because they spend all day listening to music so something unique is especially intriguing to them.
Not the person you are replying to, but that sounds like an attempt to combine Billy Eilish with Godspeed You Black Emperor, while not managing to capture the essence of either particularly well. The result is utterly uninspiring and boring.
I'm not sure why you set the track playback to the middle of song, but it feels very literal. There's the "suffering" starting from 2:50 or so from the distortion of the guitars — I guess it reminds me of 56k modems, maybe?
But because that distortion fades completely by ~ 5:00, and the track ends at 7:30, it feels like 90 seconds of "dead space" so it feels incomplete if that makes any sense.
It's a song which places its emphasis on the dead center of the track, but because it doesn't build on the distortion or play off of it — it kind of overstays it's welcome.
Probably because of the extraordinary reception mentioned in the article and the claim that's being made? This is apparently the highest rating Pitchfork has handed out in half a decade and it's supposed to be an indicator of a major shift in the music industry.
That's quite a lot and after having listened to it I have to agree with the original poster, I don't really get it either. I expected the next Bowie after those reviews.
That’s fair. GP doesn’t really seem that upset, they just don’t like the record.
When I wrote this I was coming off another comment where the commenter seemed genuinely upset over the distribution medium. I think a little bit of my sentiment about that post dribbled through.
Even so, I wish people were more live-and-let-live about very subjective things like music. It’s a big world and art is not zero-sum.
I have zero interest in going to a geo cities website to burnish my non existent hipster musical credentials. It's just a marketing stunt and evidently successful.
Is someone forcing you to? Blink twice if you need help.
I see this take all the time on HN and Reddit — trashing something in the most cynical way possible because you personally don’t enjoy it. Things that an outspoken poster dislikes are always “marketing” or “karma farming” or “bots”.
Why not live and let live? Why not accept that people have different tastes and interests? What is their enjoyment taking away from you?
If it were an article that simply was a link to a cool band that would be different. The article sets itself up as click bait claiming to be "the future music" and making the absurd suggestion that we will all soon be getting our music from random Geocities sites. It's akin to the claim that we will all soon be getting all our calories from home produced organic food. As a marketing stunt for one or two bands it's great but it doesn't solve the issue of distribution and monetisation that most artists have. One has been able to buy CD's direct from band sites since ever. The only notable thing in the article is the mention of "Geocities" which seems to be a trigger word around here for the golden days of never were.
The impression I got from the article is that some bands are experimenting with different distribution media because they’re not happy with the discoverability or pay from the big names like Spotify.
The bit about it being the “future” is mad hyperbole but, I dunno, I think it’s kinda interesting that people are experimenting with distribution methods that they control. One of the things that frustrates me about the modern web is that it’s become such a monoculture dominated by these giant vendors like Spotify and Meta. It’s pretty rad to see people say “no” to that.
I don’t know if it’s an experiment that will work beyond Cindy Lee (it reminds me of Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution of In Rainbows which didn’t really work for anyone else) but I’m glad they tried.
Also re Geocities: It triggers some rose-tinted nostalgia for some of us in a certain age range. E.g. for me I learned HTML as a teenager in the late 90s so I could put up my own sites on Geocities. It was a formative part of my career in tech. It was definitely a mess, though.
I can't see it working for many artists. As more artists go for high friction distribution, that sheen of exclusivity gets lost and that little hit of endorphins you got by making a little bit of effort stops happening. Consumers will stay where they have more than enough good music to listen to; there are only so many hours in the day after all and it is a buyers market, even most of the niche ones.
(I am slightly disappointed that it didn't get covered in Me First and the Gimme Gimme's Love Their Country. Back in the day, my father tells me, the reefer cars were the best because (a) they used sawdust and hay to insulate the ice, providing a comfier ride than most wagons, and (b) the view, while sitting in the loading hatches, was panoramic)
It's okay. You won't even get an opportunity to hear the best music. All that stuff is distributed by hand to DJs you've never heard of, who play it once at parties you'll never attend, and then put it into their collection never to be heard again by anyone.
This is hyperbolic but there is a sliver of truth there; "the best" music is not necessarily on exclusive dubplates, but if you don't put in any effort to discover new music you may simply never encounter the vast ocean of incredible art that exists outside of the mainstream. It's totally fine if someone doesn't want to do that (they probably don't care about music that much) but anyone who does so will be well-rewarded.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with being incurious, but it's not an interesting or impressive position to hold.
The idea that there is "best music" is nonsense. There is music you like and there is music you don't like. Good or bad is subjective. I know composers who will wax lyrical on the genius of some piece and to me it sounds like two tortured cats in a sack but give me some great Cuban rhythms I can dance to and those same composers will look at me like I'm daft. We agree to disagree. The concept of "best", "new" and "original" is a teenage thrall to marketing. I assure that there is enough depth on Spotify to satisfy any taste but if it's only important to you to virtue signal then good luck with that.
Yeah, there was literally a Hackernews a few years ago who pretty much said what I said, but unironically: that there was music out there better than you've ever heard, but you'll never hear it because it's only released in print runs as few as one copy, and that copy is owned by a DJ who will never let it be heard again, and that this was by design because a wide listening audience would spoil the goodness of this impeccable music. I can't be arsed to find this comment just now, but I remember reading it.
See also: Prince's Vault (from which I believe his estate is now compiling material to be released).
Here is another example of exclusives from the old soundclash culture.
A dubplate is an acetate disc usually of 10 inches diameter, traditionally used by studios to test recordings prior to mastering for the subsequent pressing of a vinyl record, but pioneered by reggae sound systems as a way to play exclusive music. They would later become an important facet of the jungle/drum and bass, UK garage, grime and dubstep music scenes.
But this phenomenon is real among music purists. There is not irony in the real act of exclusively guarding the sharing of music that is known to put the listener into the state of mind of musical enjoyment unlike anything one has heard before. I would argue that is the a main point of music, and replaying the same sounds at every concert can work but what if the audience had no idea what to really expect? Their minds cannot predict and hence the stimulus hits different. But again, some minds may not want that.
People usually complain about mid and late stage hipsters. The late actors, imitators and wannabes and that keep repeating the same behavior to signal ingroup inclusion. But that has more to do with the commodification of hipsterisum by millenials (hipsters), boomers (hippies) and generations before them.
I'm not really sure what the basis of you complaint is. Has anyone else been releasing albums on GeoCities?
No kidding. This admission feels like a professional food critic whining that McDonalds isn’t available on DoorDash. This music isn’t my cup of tea, but this guy sounds like a real poser.
This reminds me of "1,000 true fans" [0]. A concept I've always liked and been drawn to. The internet has made that more possible than ever with things like Patreon. There are a couple podcasts in way behind on that I still pay for simply because I like the hosts and want to support them, I'd love to see more of that.
[0] https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/