Royal Blood and "Real" Music

Philly_Q

@darthed1981 it feels like that's the first time you've mentioned Mary Spender for a while!

darthed1981

Philly_Q said:

@darthed1981 it feels like that's the first time you've mentioned Mary Spender for a while!

Sorry - but she is a great example of making a living from the "new" music industry.

Philly_Q

darthed1981 said:

Philly_Q said:

@darthed1981 it feels like that's the first time you've mentioned Mary Spender for a while!

Sorry - but she is a great example of making a living from the "new" music industry.

No apology needed!  I don't have to watch her videos.  And I don't.

Cranky

The binary of rock-pop is false.  Rock music is only another form of pop music.  It always has been.  

Good article, btw.

NelsonP

What I dislike a lot about the algorithms is how they just lead you deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole, rather than broadening your horizons. Most of the recommendation engines seem to recommend slightly less good versions of what I've already told it I like.

The spotify app seems almost unintelligible to me, and I spend most of my time on it trying to think up creative ways to tell it to find music I actually want to listen to, rather than the shit it throws at me. Any tips greatly appreciated!

It also doesn't help that the integration with Alexa is crap. This means that the whole family end up playing stuff in our house on my Spotify account. Despite our diverse musical tastes, it still rarely points me in the direction of any new music I want to listen to. I greatly preferred HMV, with their listening stations and curated 'content'.

distressed

NelsonP said:

The spotify app seems almost unintelligible to me, and I spend most of my time on it trying to think up creative ways to tell it to find music I actually want to listen to, rather than the shit it throws at me. Any tips greatly appreciated!

I try to limit it to -so to say- more leftfield and obscure stuff I like. Because If I throw in some Hendrix, Cream or such stuff, I would end up with Eagles, DP/Rainbow and the likes mixed into random playlists. So I use Youtube when I'm into listening to classics.

Philly_Q

NelsonP said:

What I dislike a lot about the algorithms is how they just lead you deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole, rather than broadening your horizons. Most of the recommendation engines seem to recommend slightly less good versions of what I've already told it I like.

The spotify app seems almost unintelligible to me, and I spend most of my time on it trying to think up creative ways to tell it to find music I actually want to listen to, rather than the shit it throws at me. Any tips greatly appreciated!

Spotify works great for me.  But maybe I like rabbit holes and don't want to broaden my horizons. 

My only complaint would be that if I've listened to an album by Band X and it moves on to a playlist starting with Band Y, it's usually the same track by Band Y that it played a previous time.

darthed1981

NelsonP said:

It also doesn't help that the integration with Alexa is crap. This means that the whole family end up playing stuff in our house on my Spotify account.

That's nothing to do with the integration  with Alexa, it's how the accounts work, one account, one user.

I actually went down a road of using a Spotify family account for the Alexas in the house so I could stop the kids screwing up my account.

To make Spotify more like a traditional collection, add the albums you want to your library, you can have a collection to browse through then.

ALR

It's not the first time a completely inappropriate act has been booked for an event. I can still remember seeing U2 at Leeds Roundhay Park on the PopMart tour in 97 and along with with 60000 other people enduring a DJ Set by Howie B that just seemed to piss everyone off. During the U2 set, Bono thanked Cast (big cheer), and Howie B (silence). In the case of Royal Blood, the blame must be shared between the band management and whoever booked them. What either party was thinking that that crowd in particular would like that band, I don't know.

The Guardian article was typically condescending, but did make some good points. That whole rock scene has been as artificial as pop for years, but they've been on the losing side since the decine of landfill indie, emo and Nu-Metal 15-20 years ago. Occasionally I tune into Planet Rock and hear some of the awful modern rock acts and I'm not surprised it's died - wannabe attention seekers churning out lowest common denominator budget value dirge with the connections to get exposure. It has even less authenticity than the current pop scene, but as things stand they're two sides of the same coin.

darthed1981

Philly_Q said:
My only complaint would be that if I've listened to an album by Band X and it moves on to a playlist starting with Band Y, it's usually the same track by Band Y that it played a previous time.

Yeah the radio function needs a little work.

Again AI can probably help - scouring fan pages and tiering tracks by each band, tier 1 being "greatest hits", which it knows anyway, "tier 2" being fan favourites, "tier 3" everything else except excluding sillly stuff (you don't want a 3 second spoken word intro on a playlist etc.)

Then when selecting an artist, you playlist the artists tracks overall on a sliding scale by tier, and introduce more 2nd and 3rd tier as you "guess" that your listener likes the band (as they dont skip).

Jfingers

I tend not to use streaming services for my music. While I have fairly eclectic tastes my core go to is something that I tend to describe as "music made by former punk rockers who after having substance abuse issues have turned to country or  folk, and Dylan and Young"

I watched the full video shared above and it raised a question for me.

Didn't Crass and Dead Moon do that decades ago?

Are they rich? I'm not sure that huge fame and wealth is a good thing.

Meanwhile making and/or enjoying music is a very good thing indeed. My fave classical composer is

Antonín Dvořák

PotentialDonkey

Ah I see we have descended into the old “music streaming service comparison trap”.



I just use that Macintosh music application, Apple Music or iBands or something whatever it is because it’s just there and it just appears on my iTelephone at the same time and sometimes I find it in other places too. Quite wonderful.

That has its quirks. Just wait until you want to listen to something it doesn’t know! Oh my! 

I did once upon a time indulge in that spotty fly program but I found once that Apple thing came out it was just seamless to go back to (being of “the iPod generation” where one used to “rip” CDs or buy songs from iTunes and store them on that little nugget!)

Now I sound like (and feel like) an old fart. 

crunchman

roberty said:

Where does that leave Royal Blood? I don't know if they could tell you what a secondary dominant is, but I know where I'd put my money

I doubt BB King knew what a secondary dominant is.

Philly_Q

crunchman said:

roberty said:

Where does that leave Royal Blood? I don't know if they could tell you what a secondary dominant is, but I know where I'd put my money

I doubt BB King knew what a secondary dominant is.

Isn't it something to do with gimp outfits?

darthed1981

Jfingers said:

Antonín Dvořák

Gives me an idea for another thread "post your favourite classical composer in a big font"

Dvorak is brilliant, but I prefer

Edward Elgar

PotentialDonkey

darthed1981 said:

Jfingers said:

Antonín Dvořák

Gives me an idea for another thread "post your favourite classical composer in a big font"

Dvorak is brilliant, but I prefer

Edward Elgar

I thought DVORAK was just a keyboard layout. Bummer. You learn something new every day I suppose

MagicPigDetective

Hard to say if any music is objectively better. To me, music is something that creates an emotional response... some positive and some negative, which will differ for everyone. Personally, mainstream pop does not do much for me,  however, it does for many others, different strokes for different folks. 

I don't see much point in getting hung up on the demise of rock in the mainstream. It's still about, and there are so many bands out there if you go looking for it, just that it's more fragmented and a niche market. With some digging, I can find some incredible metal bands from all over the world that do something for me hardly anyone knows about apart from fans of those genres etc.  As long as people love making rock/metal, and there are people to listen to, it will continue. If it's underground, so be it.  

On Sunday night, I was in Manchester. While tens of thousands were enjoying Coldplay at the Etihad, I and 500 others were experiencing one hell of a heavy performance by sludge masters The Melvins. Everyone was happy!

Oh, and the support band was Taipei Houston (Lars Ulrich's sons, which I didn't know at the time). Same bass and drum two piece set up as Royal Blood..... and far better imho!

roberty

darthed1981 said:

The biggest problem is that your tenner a month is not distributed based on who YOU listen to, but who EVERYONE does, so if you listen to all independent artists, 95% of your money still goes to the majors...

It sounds silly but this is a problem that blockchain could solve, with revenue distributed on an open ledger. I think there is a good case for Web3 content delivery. Tokenised economies could be a halfway house between service subscriptions and media ownership. I'm not a crypto evangelist but I think there are some legit use cases

roberty

ALR said:

Occasionally I tune into Planet Rock and hear some of the awful modern rock acts and I'm not surprised it's died - wannabe attention seekers churning out lowest common denominator budget value dirge with the connections to get exposure. It has even less authenticity than the current pop scene, but as things stand they're two sides of the same coin.

My feeling is that a lot of modern rock and metal is 'rock' first and 'music' second. It all seems very put on

In the interest of balance I still see stuff that genuinely excites me, like this:

roberty

crunchman said:

roberty said:

Where does that leave Royal Blood? I don't know if they could tell you what a secondary dominant is, but I know where I'd put my money

I doubt BB King knew what a secondary dominant is.

BB King really knew his shit