Streaming, internet and music.
Since everyone is interested in discussing the " return of rock ", and they have lost their rationality, I would like to explain to you why you will not see much good quality music in the near future. And so no, rock won't be back.
The reason is called "streaming": platforms like Spotify, iTunes and others.
You can easily analyze them, and you will easily discover the spermaozoan effect: five hundred million leave, one arrives. But while the other sperms get lost, the streaming industry doesn't quite work that way.
If we look at the streaming by volume we find that yes, the sperm that makes it has had a lot of views and downloads. But this is the peak, not the volume. If we look at the volume, we find that 90% of the traffic is generated for niche groups and singers, that is, those who are NOT successful.
Look at the numbers for one day:
If you consider that according to the RRIA only in the USA Spotify broadcasts ~ 750,000 songs per minute, i.e. about 1,080,000,000 per day, you will discover that the vast majority of user-time (i.e. advertising distributed in free accounts) does not end. in the "hits": we are at about 1/2%.
The vast majority of the streaming platform business is made up of music that is NOT successful, if not niche.
Not for nothing, Spotify boasts of having 40,000 to 60,000 new songs uploaded per day. But of course we don't have, even on a global scale, that many new hit bands a day.
So we are, in fact, in the situation of spermatozoa, with an extravagant clause: many leave, only one arrives, BUT WHAT MATTERS IS THE MASS OF FAILURES.
Let me be clear, I listen to niche music so I listen to "failures", so mine is not contempt. But from the point of view of the charts, 99% of the traffic (and therefore of the advertising in the free accounts) comes from musicians who are NOT successful. And they never will.
Basically, spotify works on music you don't like.
And how do you think that a platform modeled on spreading music that is not popular, can produce quality?
Spotify doesn't give a shit about the top ten's 50 million plays / day. It has to do A BILLION plays to distribute advertisements every few minutes. If we remove the eighty million of the top ten from the one billion and eighty million, the one billion plays comes from the 60,000 bands a day that make an average of 18,000 plays a day.
With which an artist does not live. Not even a smear.
But Spotify lives there.
But not only that: the singer who makes little revenue takes away the same 5 minutes as someone who makes a lot of plays, only that the advertisement you get has exactly the same price. Result: it is much more convenient for him to have the 60,000 spermatozoa that will never reach the egg, since the big stars are paid slightly more.
Here is the point.
Streaming platforms are designed for a market made up of bands that try once, make a few thousand plays and disappear into absolute hunger.
There is no chance that a quality band or artist will emerge from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon & co.
And if you look at the career of the entries you have in the top 10, you find that they become famous OUTSIDE the streaming platforms (in many ways, including Sanremo, talent shows, Eurovision, and others) and then sell and distribute on the platforms of streaming themselves.
This is a fundamental principle to keep in mind:
Streaming platforms CANNOT do quality. For the simple reason that they don't WANT to do it. For the simple reason that they would lose 90% of the traffic (and money) by selecting for quality.
Having established this, we go to see the last eurofestival, and we easily find a glimpse of their influence: the bop song.
The boopers, or creators of bop songs , ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or047P2NOjc ) are those groups that start making the music you expect in a club "of a certain" as a background. While you are trying to feed yourself with scarce quantities of food more expensive than good, and chatting with the princess of the moment, and you do not want to be distracted by the music, which must be there but must not be heard.
The boopers are a godsend for streaming companies, because there are millions of them, they are easily identifiable (there is a rhythmic part made by a synthesizer, a "persuasive" voice that is useless and badly prepared), no particular melody, some harmony (but not too many notes, that people might wake up), and bop, sh, bop, sh, bop, sh. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or047P2NOjc ) You make a playlist, and between urban motorists, pretentious clubs of wooden pussies and people who do not feel emotions from the Triassic period you are good. The French and Swiss songs are an example: I imagine that the Swiss can get excited with that stuff, but we must consider that the Swiss feel emotions even in front of the metronome (if it's accurate, mind you).
Removed the music for the living dead, all the interesting things because creative, like the Ukrainian band or the psychedelic psychedelic Lithuanian, (I don't put the Finns in because Finland can honestly do better) are not of interest for the platforms. streaming.
Why'?
Because getting things like Go_A to success requires one thing: Go_A. Or if you prefer to join the delirium of today then the Maneskins. And if you believe that maneskin have had lightning-fast success and a very short career, try to think that every day there are 60,000 bands born three days ago, doing a bop song , and they cost Spotify NOTHING, if not disk space. and 20,000 downloads each.
The five years as a buskers-> superstar of the Maneskin, as well as the career of Go_A, are an expense, an absurd time for a streaming platform. It is not even remotely conceivable that someone is going to select for quality. Point.
Second chapter: the CDN, and its pig job.
Another technological factor impacting on streaming music is the CDN. Maybe you still think Spotify is streaming from its headquarters, a datacenter somewhere in Sweden. No.
The CDN (content delivery network) is a technology that consists of having many offices and streaming from the nearest office. But it's not like copying ALL the music in EVERY location. This would multiply the storage costs by the number of locations.
If at the beginning CDNs were caches, which dealt only with static content, today some of them are built ad hoc to also deal with dynamic content. If it's worth it. And in the case of streaming, it's always worth it.
It means that when a song is listened to, which I know, in Italy, more than a few times, it is "moved" to an Italian cloud where there is the Spotify CDN, and from that moment on Italians download it from there. '. Since it pays less carrier traffic, and there are no subscriber policies between LSR and the end user, the cost is lower.
Of course, the worst case comes when ALL of the CDN's Points of Delivery are occupied by ONE song. Because if the song were in a playlist instead of an isolated one, and there were other “national” songs in the playlist, it would be much more profit for them. If you want to stream a billion songs a day, you'd rather have a slice of the band remaining for the others as well.
If global success comes, Spotify costs more in terms of CDN. Because the CDN is not just a cache. It also has elements of intelligence, and thus, for example, Spotify's CDN optimizes for playlists. Optimize by time. Optimize by album. A single song streaming anywhere increases the cache advantage but decreases the aggregation and optimization advantage. That's why Spotify pushes a lot on playlists – their CDNs are optimized for it. Ditto for google, etc.
Ultimately, that is, if Europe had listened, in no particular order, the French song in France, the Italian one in Italy, etc., the advantage of the CDN would have been to have only one song in cache per point of delivery / edge server. national, and if everyone follows the pattern every nation will be full of playlists made of national music , while if everyone starts to listen to one song all the time, initially you have the advantage of one song for twelve, but when all the playlists, regardless of country, they contain that song plus the local song, the costs change.
CDNs prefer a hit playlist to a hit song.
In short, it's great for Spotify when every nation has its own playlists. It distributes many of those 60,000 new entrants, but distributes few of them, they are optimized, and if every nation listens to their music, in general optimizing playlists is simple: in a nutshell, many playlists will have many elements in common, which should not be moved to ocean distances because that nation only listens to shit that only likes there.
Clearly this only applies to Spotify's CDN and a few others that are optimized to run playlists well, and very "custom" CDNs can be very different from each other, but hardly a CDN optimized to have a billion extremely heterogeneous plays and organized by playlists, you can be happy to have bands that suddenly explode in ratings: although they are 1% of the traffic, as I said above.
So Spotify's business model will adapt like a glove to the conditions of best use of their CDNs, because those are “opex” expenses, the ones the company hates the most.
And CDNs made like Spotify's generally don't want exploding quality, they want reusable content, that everything can be moved as soon as a piece is requested: the first song of a playlist. After that, if the other songs are also strong in the same country, even better. Local playlists are their boon.
So no, ultimately rock will not return, for two reasons:
- the incubation time of a rock band, with a minimum of experience and a minimum of harmony, more good songs, and a decent technique, is enormous compared to the needs of streamers who want 60,000 new songs a day.
- CDNs much prefer a hit playlist to a hit song, or a hit hit. Rewarding a hit piece is NOT in their best interest.
This transformation of music at the service of streaming companies is now complete in the USA, where music completely lacks 3 of the four fundamental ingredients (rhythm, color, harmony and melody), because in rap only the first element remains, (for give an example of music without music, but I could also mention Billie Eilish who makes a song with ONE note) rhythm which is then obtained with autotune.
Obviously, competitive events like Sanremo, X-Factor, Eurovision, and others are a huge problem for streaming companies, as they struggle to optimize. Sure, a metal music contest allows you to present all the songs in a single playlist and make Spotify's CDNs happy, but a heterogeneous contest like Sanremo or Eurovision (but X-Factor doesn't joke too) is more difficult to follow. .
So yes, an interesting high quality band could emerge from events like Sanremo, X-Factor or Eurovision festival, but not from the streaming world, which is the direction the industry has taken.
Prepare for boredom.
Now you will say: yes, but there is the concert. There's Wacken. There is the M'era Luna. There are live events. You don't have a megaconcert like NightWish or Pink with boopers and rap.
True. You can't do them.
Have you followed the story of Marco from Nightwish? Did you see what he said? In practice, today the concert is organized by the band, at its own risk, paying the expenses in advance. THEN, if the concert is successful, the producer takes almost everything, and if it is not successful, the band's cocks.
In this way, it is clear that musical events as we know them are going to die . Unless the state arrives, as in the case of Sanremo / RAI and the EBU / Eurovision, which organize gigantic events. Events that, by now, in the USA are absent or almost absent.
The point is simply this: the streaming industry is turning music consumption into a mix of boredom and niche genres.
For this reason, rock (like anything that requires talent or time or material musical events to express itself) will not be back in fashion anytime soon. On the one hand it will survive as a niche genre (like metal did), and of course it will re-emerge from time to time in mediocrity because some creatives will come and you will notice the difference.
On the other hand, the streaming industry will react very firmly to the presumption of creative artists that they want to be rewarded because they are creative.
I bet that the public vote will soon be completely canceled (or limited) even in Sanremo. To be clear, in the Eurofestival the juries had chosen the perfect songs and for a boring playlist of Spotify & co. It was the popular vote that rewarded the most original. Check out the rankings before and after the popular vote, and you will see the gulf between what the public wants and what the streaming houses want.
Then try to get used to it, because that boredom, that absence of emotions, will soon become the norm. And the fact that someone was scandalized because a rock band (sex, drugs and rock'n roll) had hypothetically used cocaine, tells you a lot about how respectable, boring, emotionally empty, an ideal Spotify playlist is.
The pneumatic vacuum of ideas that the US has already taken is coming, and unfortunately I don't think Sanremo (Or even Eurovision) will stop them.
If I'm right, the public vote will soon be scaled back in all of these events. This is what streaming companies want: ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or047P2NOjc ).
Everywhere. Forever.
Then, of course, as soon as someone arrives who puts a drop of emotion into it, the audience will explode and make them win everywhere.
But you will see, they will find a way to take power away from the public. Eliminating concerts and televoting, and leaving only the juries paid by them.
Everything else will be niche.