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Ericka Simone

Where did the enshittification of begin? It definitely wasn’t Napster but it feels like it was before Spotify?

The iPod and those weird DCMA digital laws? Gotta be it.

This is the rabbit hole I will be going down for the next hour.

*Yeah we’re definitely agreeing on the DCMA being the main point. You guys are amazing btw.

From: @sergiodeprado
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I know the ClearChannel/iHeartRadio monopoly on radio stations played a role in it too.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado

@JessTheUnstill @sergiodeprado you snapped. Going to repost to elaborate:

@JessTheUnstill @sergiodeprado wow urban dictionary was right in a flawless way for once. lmaooooooo.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado Autotune? The RCA Mark II synthesizer? Charles Ives? 😉

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado Chuck Berry was a great musician. The jury's still out on Elvis; I liked him in the 1950s but I don't think he aged well.

@AlgoCompSynth @sergiodeprado chuck berry was the one but also I have questions about behavior. I tried to like Elvis. I really did. Have sat with music legends who have told me to my face with PHOTOS to relax on Elvis. Yet I just…… still don’t know. lol.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado Elvis essentially had a fan base from the 1950s that kept following him. If you went to his concerts you could see that the audience was the same people that loved him from the Love Me Tender / Hound Dog days. I moved on in the 1960s to folk, jazz, classical and experimental / electronic. Elvis didn't.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado Bob Dylan, for example, evolved a lot from his early Woody Guthrie worship to a Nobel Literature laureate. What did Elvis do after "The Ghetto"?

@AlgoCompSynth man. If I say what I wanna say someone will report me. lol.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado serious answer: with the invention of labels. It has been a non-stop power-grab since then.

Every time a recording label spun up a publishing arm, it got worse. With ASCAP, it got worse. With the standard contract having language about streams not counting as record sales, it got worse.

By the 1990s, it was BAD. The only real way to make money was to tour. It has gotten worse since then.

@dave okay so everyone know that “labels” are/were just fronts to wash the questionable monies occasionally used to fund careers. Since at leeeeeeast the 1890/1920 mechanical “royalty” era.

I don’t know if it will ever cycle out.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado As an Old, I'd point to the 80s, with the proliferation CDs & absolutely terrible digital remasters of albums folk already owned on vinyl, and dogshit Cassingles, which somehow managed to sound even worse. Consumers spent more on recordings that sounded worse, and labels figured out how to cook the books so that artists got paid less for releases in these new formats.

But like say, I'm an Old, so YMMV...

@RufusJCooter okay but cassette really were the bottoms. And we really thought we were in the future with those memorex recording tapes. Sigh.

SonCD format was bad but the digital version of the cd format was even more irritating. Now I can’t even put my song I bought on iPod to… whatever I was using. So evil. lol.

@ErickaSimone LOL, I remember reading an interview w/ Neil Young around then where he specifically called out "dogshit prerecorded cassettes" of his albums being one his reasons why he hated the Biz

(Soon after, his label sued him for making records that didn't sound enough like Neil Young for their liking...
americansongwriter.com/remembe)

@RufusJCooter yeah that sounds like the label industry.

@jenniferplusplus DEFINITELY BETWEEN HERE AND THE DCMA.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado DCMA. It was at the tail end of Napster, when Apple Music came into existence. We all were trading hard drives full of music.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado I was the iPod - which heralded in the era when the music publishers also owned, or could buy access to, the delivery channel.

Imagine if a vinyl record could only be listened to on a device you had to buy from the same company making the record - even CDs weren't that captured, but then came MP3s...

@ErickaSimone when was the first record company founded? That'd be my bet for when it started 😜

@craige yeah once random companies start getting involved for capitalism…. It’s over.

can pinpoint to the day in 1996 when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act; deregulated all of broadcast media and beyond.

Clinton is part of the fascist transformation of the American government and economy. there would be no billionaire mafia without Clinton. it was him who bailed out all the criminal banksters the first time, not Obama. why? inre: Latin American debt crisis.

Bill Clinton started enshittification.
truthout.org/articles/democrac

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado

Truthout · Democracy in Peril: Twenty Years of Media Consolidation Under the Telecommunications ActIn 1996, President Clinton signed the bill into law. Today, the media industry is donating big to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado to me, 1996 is the year re-segregation was kickstarted with the telecommunications act; but it was sold to the public as “niche marketing”. bullshit.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado When musicians started using synthesized drums/percussion in a way that sounds plainly artificial.

No, kidding, it was the DMCA. But I really do dislike percussion that sounds like a machine did it.

@MisuseCase you leave Gloria Estefan and the Miami sound machine out of this. 🤣

DCMA really was the end. I am tired.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado My contrarian-in-some-circles opinion is that the era of paid iTunes downloads was actually a •high• watermark (at least in recent times), and it's (1) streaming and especially (2) recommender-system-based streaming that have caused the most harm in recent years.

No need to seek out. No need to hold on, to value. Listening can be just an infinite stream of passive, disconnected non-engagement.

@inthehands no need to research, listen, hold on or care. Just wild disconnection to anything tangible about music. The DCMA was it.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado

I lived in Redwood City and walked over while the feds took Napster apart. Sat on a sheriff's car and drank 32oz of Vodka and orange juice while I watched (#RIAA / #MPAA) assholes take apart a network that wasn't illegal.

#Internet #Law #Bullshit.

Fun stuff that day. /s

@elfin oh what a day that must have been.

@ErickaSimone
Rather interesting. Very strange.

@ErickaSimone @sergiodeprado It began with the launch of Apple Music, IMO, but a few things happened in the short run up to that:

- local libraries that used the matching functionality had tracks replaced without permission causing lower quality or censored tracks to overwrite the library

- the death of iTunes

- as recent as last year I've seen it play the wrong track or use the wrong album art for tracks

- constantly having censored tracks played when I'm trying to play the explicit version, no option to completely block all censored tracks

- listening to anything that isn't your normal style causes it to start recommending those all the time. Ambient/sleep tracks? Classical? Suddenly their smart shuffle/playlist is forcing it on you and you can't untrain it

It forced me to go back to building my own private library again. At least I know my music isn't going to be haunted by Schrödinger every time I press play