M.H wrote: Sun May 23, 2021 4:58 pm
Singles distributed via streaming services (albums increasingly if not totally irrelevant), novelty and image (probably video by video) will be all. I guess that will put a premium on the more vanilla aspects of songcraft and less on the more abstract, innovative ideas. It’ll be like the early days of MTV except the chances of odd things slipping through are slim to none because the algorithms have us figured out better than any VJ ever could.
The mining of the past for obscure / hip reference points to cut and paste together (described by Simon Reynolds in Retromania, very much worth your time, even though that’s over a decade old now) will become increasingly difficult to do in an interesting way.
Increased solipsism via the personalised tech bubbles will kill off the social aspects of music scenes – especially live music, I can’t see that coming back post-Covid.
counterpoint: cool shit is going on all across the world even as we speak, human experience will continue to fuel human expression, every generation will celebrate their own Dionysian rituals next to dimed speakers while ingesting multiple substances.
Simon Reynolds, VJs, tech bubble solipsism blah blah blah those people never did jack shit for music anyways.