Are we circling the drain?

[dubkitty]

but maybe that’s a lens on Greta Van Fleet—kids want that experience for himself but Plant hasn’t stood still, Page retired to his mansion, they’re old men, and the backbone is dead and gone.

see also the entire modern jamband scene, which is entirely comprised of music for people too young to have seen the Grateful Dead (or Phish when they were decent).

[friendship]

More than charts and sales volume as compared to MOTR pop music, I’m concerned about the compensation structure for anyone making music. Spotify being the worst doesn’t mean other streaming is great at getting musicians paid into a middle class standard of living without what used to be rock-star level sales.

I have a lot of Feelings about this. I think what's most painful for me is that my dreams were really modest: I didn't want to be a big star, I just wanted to spend my life doing what I loved and and survive in a (lower) middle class lifestyle. I tried every avenue/role I could think of, but the barriers of entry for all of them were massive, and the only peers I knew who made it work had a lot of financial support and connections from their family. It didn't help that I wasn't very social media savvy and didn't know how to self-promote (though I tried to learn). I came to terms with it, because I loved the act of music making itself, so as long as I could do some of it in my free time, that was okay with me. Work and the stresses of life left me with very little time and energy to do it, but better than nothing, I figured.

But watching online music platforms use people's work to create massive plagiarism machines was the last straw for me. Sure, I didn't expect to make even a tiny bit of money off it anymore, but knowing that whatever I share online will be exploited by a tech company to make themselves rich while making me obsolete has dashed the last bit of faith I had that recording is a worthwhile pursuit. Why work so hard on it when it's just another ladle of slop for the content trough?

I suppose I could forget being a recording artist and just stick to live playing, where music is still vital and real. But I just turned 40. I'm tired, and I'm out of touch. I simply do not have the time and energy to hone a good live act, no matter how badly I miss it. I was visiting an old band mate last year, and he mentioned an open mic he goes to every week. He was like "we should go, you could play a couple songs." It suddenly hit me that I didn't have any new songs to play, and it had been so long since I had played the old ones that I wouldn't remember how. It broke my heart. I so badly wished in that moment that I had fresh material to play for some people and maybe make a meaningful connection to the people listening to it.

I'm in a weird, liminal space where I haven't seriously pursued the craft of music for so long that I don't feel like a real musician, but I also don't know who I am if I'm not. I felt so alive when I was working on songs, playing in bands, making records. It made me feel like my life was going somewhere, like it had meaning. I don't know what role music can even have in my life anymore. I was making some ambient music in 2023, but after seeing all the hours of AI-generated ambient music people can listen to on Youtube, even that feels pointless. All I do now is play guitar for myself on the couch. All those skills I learned, all that knowledge and experience I accumulated over the years... it feels like a big waste. I have good memories, at least, which I treasure. Maybe it's just the end of a long chapter of my life, and I need to find something else to do with myself now that it's over.

Anyway sorry about this self-pitying, whiny, negative rant, I didn't know where else to dump these feelings and maybe someone else is feeling like I'm feeling.

[dubkitty]

Why work so hard on it when it's just another ladle of slop for the content trough?

does the work have no inherent value to you in and of itself?

honestly, i've almost never had anything to show for my work. i was into the San Francisco Sound for decades, but by the time it became mainstream-accessible i was sick of it. nowadays there's hardly anything i like much to compare to anyhow. i do it because those sounds make me happy. but then, i gave up any dreams of "making it" sometime in the mid-80s.

[friendship]

Why work so hard on it when it's just another ladle of slop for the content trough?

does the work have no inherent value to you in and of itself?

honestly, i've almost never had anything to show for my work. i was into the San Francisco Sound for decades, but by the time it became mainstream-accessible i was sick of it. nowadays there's hardly anything i like much to compare to anyhow. i do it because those sounds make me happy. but then, i gave up any dreams of "making it" sometime in the mid-80s.

It used to. Now I'm not so sure.

[Gone Fission]

Frustration and disappointment can sour many things in life. When all the labor making music is treated as worthless or disposable at the maker level, this is increasingly going to be the situation for the makers. How many of your favorite bands revived a decade or more on from leaving the business because they couldn't make a go of it--back when the music industry actually threw some money at songwriters and musicians? They're probably not back to making full time.

I knew so many people back in the day who got lured into the major label thing and scrambled after either to survive in a new way or to go normie. I figured that making a go on an indie scale might have worked out better in cases, sometimes because of the problem of appealing to a mainstream audience, other times just because there was less patience by the mid 90s when I was looking for major labels to let artists develop and connect to the audience. But indie artists and bands had an easier time back then making money before downloads, streaming, and venue/booking consolidation.

Particularly but not exclusively in the US there is such a serial fixation with cheapening labor. We seem deeply committed to not learning the costs of these choices.

[dubkitty]

i'm sorry if i sounded unsympathetic, which was not my intent. i guess it's just that for me this is what i do. i'd rather play guitar and make sounds than go out, watch TV or movies, or do most anything else. it's the only thing that stops me from thinking. so it has inherent value to me regardless if anyone else ever hears it beyond my small reach on Soundcloud. it'd be interesting to play in front of people, but ambient looping is inherently limited in terms of anyone much caring.

[Blackened Soul]

First the poll selections are supposed to be tongue in cheek…

More than charts and sales volume as compared to MOTR pop music, I’m concerned about the compensation structure for anyone making music. Spotify being the worst doesn’t mean other streaming is great at getting musicians paid into a middle class standard of living without what used to be rock-star level sales.

I have a lot of Feelings about this. I think what's most painful for me is that my dreams were really modest: I didn't want to be a big star, I just wanted to spend my life doing what I loved and and survive in a (lower) middle class lifestyle. I tried every avenue/role I could think of, but the barriers of entry for all of them were massive, and the only peers I knew who made it work had a lot of financial support and connections from their family. It didn't help that I wasn't very social media savvy and didn't know how to self-promote (though I tried to learn). I came to terms with it, because I loved the act of music making itself, so as long as I could do some of it in my free time, that was okay with me. Work and the stresses of life left me with very little time and energy to do it, but better than nothing, I figured.

But watching online music platforms use people's work to create massive plagiarism machines was the last straw for me. Sure, I didn't expect to make even a tiny bit of money off it anymore, but knowing that whatever I share online will be exploited by a tech company to make themselves rich while making me obsolete has dashed the last bit of faith I had that recording is a worthwhile pursuit. Why work so hard on it when it's just another ladle of slop for the content trough?

I suppose I could forget being a recording artist and just stick to live playing, where music is still vital and real. But I just turned 40. I'm tired, and I'm out of touch. I simply do not have the time and energy to hone a good live act, no matter how badly I miss it. I was visiting an old band mate last year, and he mentioned an open mic he goes to every week. He was like "we should go, you could play a couple songs." It suddenly hit me that I didn't have any new songs to play, and it had been so long since I had played the old ones that I wouldn't remember how. It broke my heart. I so badly wished in that moment that I had fresh material to play for some people and maybe make a meaningful connection to the people listening to it.

I'm in a weird, liminal space where I haven't seriously pursued the craft of music for so long that I don't feel like a real musician, but I also don't know who I am if I'm not. I felt so alive when I was working on songs, playing in bands, making records. It made me feel like my life was going somewhere, like it had meaning. I don't know what role music can even have in my life anymore. I was making some ambient music in 2023, but after seeing all the hours of AI-generated ambient music people can listen to on Youtube, even that feels pointless. All I do now is play guitar for myself on the couch. All those skills I learned, all that knowledge and experience I accumulated over the years... it feels like a big waste. I have good memories, at least, which I treasure. Maybe it's just the end of a long chapter of my life, and I need to find something else to do with myself now that it's over.

Anyway sorry about this self-pitying, whiny, negative rant, I didn't know where else to dump these feelings and maybe someone else is feeling like I'm feeling.

There is a lot there.. and I’m going ramble, possibly incorrectly…

First I can relate.. I’m a 2nd generation musician, and right when I was starting to really get into music I got to watch the first big decline cause by karaoke in bars.. where in small town bars replaced rock/pop bands with it so everyone switched to country.. then country karaoke came… which meant having to travel large cities… so my parents ended up getting day jobs and only working on personal projects for fun.. I ended up playing in their band because it was fun and my mother wrote great songs.. the big city decline (seattle / Tacoma) was from 2014-2018 where I watched so many bands and musicians that were still doing take what you can get playing cover nights and doing the originals on the now designated Saturday night shows… and playing open mics and fucking jam night disappear from the scenes.. and.. fuck jam nights! That shit killed a lot of places.. same with the “let’s have 20 bands play 3 songs each shit.. THAT DRIVES PEOPLE AWAY!… venues died… I think what bugs me the most is not only is the cover shit about gone but a lot of the original stuff precovid had also started to decline and everyone seemed to just be going through the motions.. just bands playing to the other bands and their people.. but when things opened up again there was no “hey, let’s relook at this” is was the same people with the same ideas… so maybe it needed to die and still does.. because at least now what little audience there is is more engaged.. maybe it needs to/needed to burn and rebuild…

Ambient… I stopped doing ambient in 2019.. Keepers Of Dreams is the LAST ambient album for IceBear. Many reason why: 1. You can only do so much of one thing before you feel you are repeating yourself, 2. every guitarist with a modulated reverb and then ai-s entered to ring over saturating it and making the most boring (on purpose) music more boring and cliche.. y’all can have it..plus there are like 7 to 9 albums worth of the stuff..

When my mother died in 2019 not even getting into none musical subjects and feelings (not going there) N@meless was over, she wrote all thing songs and artist concepts.. it’s tough it turns out to just reinvent what your artistic focus was when you have spent 20 years on one project with someone that was basically a virtuoso… what the fuck do you do? You point at the horizon and say onward! It just isn’t in me to stop. I can’t. Stopping means the assholes win. I don’t care is I sell one fucking download, some one always needs to be spacking back at the mediocre, the mainstream, the boringassfuckers. To quote my mother when ever everyone would complain about the world and shit “THE MUSIC! That’s what’s important!” So we turned my side project that was used to to fill down time into the new band, and we fumbled around until we figured out what we wanted to do and what was the direction… that is a lot of work.. also turns out to be a lot of work when you decide to be an instrumental doom/prog/postpunk/sludge/newage/wizard metal band and have to write a set of songs that people will actually listen to yes I’m condensing 5 years… So….

I’m not going to say what you should do, I barely know what I am… this shit is my life… outside of my dumb job to pay bills music is what I do.. All the different other artistic and media type stuff I do has always been entwined with it.. at 46 am I supposed to get a life? Not put all my spare energy into this artshit? Why? To be a cog? To fit in? I’d rather do my thing even if no one cares.. it’s the hope of a chance to inspire others to move forward to fight again the mundane drake filled trumpified preapocalyptic reality we are in… as for using digital media to “make it” it’s like anything else.. you either have money to force your way in or it’s like winning to lottery.. when I did pedal demos and would get over 10k views on some of my vids NONE of them filtered into people looking at my other stuff.. and I have no interest on being a personality… I think people that do those gear channels that get on camera and work out a scrip wanted to be famous in the first place.. maybe it is subconscious.. but you are not selling your music.. you are selling you selling stuff… like beato or that harp girl… no one really cares what they themselves put out… they are fans of a personality and convince themselves they love the output… best ilf example was our originator… people praised their music in hopes their pedal would get built…. And not fall apart… am I still playing the dumb game though.. sure.. because like I said it’s luck.. (unless $$$) you never know… someone in the right spot could like it… or not.. so make sure what you are creating is fun for you, if it isn’t try other stuff.. put wireless contact mics on rocks and things and throw them at stuff and record to results. If you want to play live play.. even if the is a long line due to the amount of bands vs venues…

My main pointe threadwise.. the focus on hoping for a new effect when we are at a low pointe in the overall musical world and normal world.. I still stand by what I said in that most of the cool effects came from a mistake or something broken or someone had a weird idea for what they were doing.. focus on creating and not of the POSSIBILITY of new tools… they will either happen or not.. focusing on it seems to speed up the circle of the drain….

[Bellyheart]

i've noticed an increase in interest from the younger generations who are discovering previous "anti-cultures" and emulating the music they missed.

90s pedalboard seem to be popping as well. Lots of muffs, chorus, and whammys back on the spread.

I never sold my pedals to get my modular but I did switch once my band broke up after growing tired of relying on other people. It's not collecting dust but I'm getting back into playing guitar live as i've been itching to for the better part of a decade.

What is surprising is the Venn diagram of fans of something like Knocked Loose and Chappell Roan and I'm here for it. Authenticity will never lose forever.

If it does become more skimp I'm here for it if it rids the business mindset that people think you must have to make music.

By the time I was moving on the glitchy pedal was just popping up and oh boy has it really taken over.

[coupleonapkins]

All I've bean watching on YT lately is Cate Le Bon videos, and that's enuff to ensure me that even if she's aliebe & collaborating with ppl (Tim Presley, Horsegirl, Wilco, etc.), the whirled is a better place. If she can make & do good work, so can all of you!

Also, if you don't wanna Beato, you don't gotta - it's a shame that "Remember When?" is it's own category of music, but even if they had that cockamamie Sopranos 2-part documentary about exactly that (different medium, but w/e), you know things is bad.

The Sabino Carpenter/Olivia Drodrigo/Grazie Abrahams/Chappelquiddick Roaninish sphere of Taylor Swiftness dose not give me hope, I'm sorry, folks, even if Olifia tours with WATTFORMPEDRO in 2025 (no shoes no shirt no promblems! tour). Twas a good thread, howebber

I'm here for anyone who wannsta smash 2 classix into 1 box tho: after all, soembody's gotta re-up the Ampeg Scrambler OG & the Ronald Raygun b2b hennyways, rite? We all can win in millions of smashed frequences froebber!

[John]

I'm here for anyone who wannsta smash 2 classix into 1 box tho: after all, soembody's gotta re-up the Ampeg Scrambler OG & the Ronald Raygun b2b hennyways, rite?

Ampeg Scrambler x Fender Blender = Fenpeg Blambler ftw

[TheTransient]

At a personal level, i havent managed to make any music since the pandemic when i was dabbling with synth-based hauntology music. Since then I've gone back to guitar being my main interest, but I have a kid now so time for noodling even is slim, let alone time to attempt write or record anything. And yeah, now its been so long that I'm out of practice, so it's harder.

In the meantime I've just chipped away at some DIY projects (a few pedal builds, put together a 5F1 clone, guitar tech stuff) and bought some pedals I probably don't really need. Sometimes I feel like if I'm not actually making music whats even the point of any of it, but at least the DIY stuff has increased my ability to build or repair stuff in general, so that's come in handy and saved us money.


At a wider level, yeah there are less venues and as a result less opportunities for local bands to play live, but they have better tools at thier disposal to get their music out there online, so i think that evens out to a degree. Also they'll just organise house shows if they have to. Plenty of youngsters still into guitar music, lots of 80s/90s influenced revivial stuff happening. Rock n roll will be just fine.

Rick Beato sucks ass btw. He's an out of touch boomer and needs to shut up basically.

[Velcro Bottom]

I have good memories, at least, which I treasure.

This right here is the complete antithesis of "waste," amigo.

[manymanyhaha]

Read somewhere recently that more music is released in one day today than the entire year of 1989. There was a lot of not interesting (to me) music released back then too. But couldn't find that out until I bought the record.

I have to admit, I'm part of the problem and have been ever since Napster. Before illegal downloading, I probably was buying 3 to 4 albums a month, going into record stores in search of things I just wanted to hear because I had read or heard about them. So many of these records, I put on once and never again. I mean, imagine paying $15 just to hear something once!

So when Napster came around, and I could finally just hear ALL of these records that I had been reading about since forever, it was amazing. Did I think for a second about the harm this was doing me as a music-maker? No. Didn't put 2 and 2 together at all. The music-maker in me loved all of these new influences and wasn't thinking about the loss of suckering folks into buying my records who would only listen to them once.

Honestly, I don't miss those days at all, the pre-streaming days. Not that the current situation is tenable. But I spent so much money on records that I never listened to again, it was ridiculous. So much of the loss in music sales is bands/artists/labels not getting this money anymore: The Sucker Money.

And now streaming. I didn't join the streaming-verse until a couple years ago when I finally gave in to its Napster-like quality of being able to hear just about anything by typing it in. I use Tidal, just because they supposedly kick in a little extra to artists. But it still is just paltry. Ridiculous, especially given the hundreds of millions the CEO of Spotify is pulling in. Artists have always been taken advantage of by labels and distribution because artists are easy prey: They love creating just for the hell of it and they have no money. Eager cheap labor is the best labor, right?

There are folks pulling in five figures a month, or more, from streaming. If you own your own songs and somehow go viral, it is still possible to make a living making music but good fucking luck. It was difficult to pull off in 1989 and now you have 400x the competition for the same money.

But as long as humans have access to instruments, there will always be folks in their formative years who can't stop playing, and creating. I'm not in my formative years, and I can't stop. I'm obsessed and it is apparent that I will be until I die or they come up with some pill to attenuate obsessions. And as much as I would kind of like to not be so obsessed with music-making. my finances and relationships would certainly improve which would be really really nice, I probably would not take it.

[Seance]

Modern life (the filter of capitalism) abstracts everything.

Your time and enjoyment are stripped from you, put into a blender, and you suckle at the technological teat
in recompense and have a hollow, empty feeling because what you get out is never commensurate to what you put in.

So. Pull back from "selling" your time cheap.

There are different forms of interconnectiveness ("relativity" doesn't mean "nothing matters" but everything matters
and everything is connected).


Read some Ernesto Grassi. The Cartesian approach of intellectual box-chopping (if it doesn't fit into the box of my
preconceived notions it must get chopped) isn't the only way. Grassi writes about Giambattista Vico's thesis that
"ingenium" (the creative "genius" or "imagination", the poetic impulse) is the building block of all rational thought
and intellectual/emotional understanding.

We are confronted with a real thing/circumstance and we feel some real things and then we try to communicate
with our imperfect language. We hone our initial impressions and poetic intuitions with rational thought. In concert,
the two are related to the world as it is and connecting us to what was (we as individuals don't invent language, but
improvise with metaphor and imagery and the connotation and contextual signification distribution).


Music is feeling. You experience a thing and feel feelings that you can't articulate. This is what melisma and pure sound
were created to channel. You make sounds in an order that is based on what you felt. People listen and feel things in response.

This cannot die. This cannot be replicated by AI because artificial intelligence does not feel, does not have physical sensations,
and has a memory that retains what is put in... no alchemy of imprecision happens, no melding of Mondegreen and the
perplexia of mild, first-blush dyslexia whereby the misheard, the mis-seen, the misread pattern suggests an innovation.

And a listener might love a sound for "the wrong reasons" from the POV of the musician. But once the music is made,
it exists in the world and finds its own way, makes its own friends, falls in love with whomever it feels affinity/attraction.

A social media Rolling Stone gathers no likes or lichen or moss. So excuse me while I kiss this guy.

[Kacey Y]

This is a tangent away from guitar based music and live performance, but I am absolutely fed up with the state of Youtube channels reviewing any sort of gear. The problem is they pretty much never actually review anything, unless it's 20+ years old. Any new pedal or piece of gear that comes out, everything is a demo, an overview, and introduction. Even if the title of the video/thumbnail is something like "Is it any good?" or "Is it better than the original version?" it's just the person/people showing all the features and playing around a bit, then under the conclusions/thoughts section going "well, that was the ____, what did you think?". We get it, music gear Youtubers are mostly just paid advertisers (wait, sorry "we're not sponsored, but in the interest of disclosure, they did send us one to try out") or the video equivalent of Buzzfeed articles, they rarely ever editorialize or give opinions on anything. I know you can say "well, use your ears, what do you think??" but I don't have their gear, their recording setup, their style, etc. I have made pieces of gear work wonders for me that sound like utter crap on Youtube demos, I'm mostly just curious to hear opinions from people so I know what their taste is. Sometimes the niche sub-genre people will give strong opinions about if something is good for Shoegaze, Doom, surf, etc. and still those are mostly gonna be shootout videos and the only ones they'll give a real opinion about is the stuff that was discontinued a decade or more ago

End of my old lady rant, it doesn't really matter to the state of music or anything. It's just my gripe about how everything is focused monetization and cultivating a following around what amounts to either a tv presenter or socialite style personality and hardly anything is about being a little freak and making weird music, because if you don't it'll set your blood on fire