which phenomenally popular american entertainment institution would you most like to see come to a sudden end by 2023

Streaming music going away would be very fun but obviously social media has had enough toxic real world consequences for me to see it’s truly a net negative

So for you people voting for streaming music is it you object to the whole concept or just certain aspects as it is currently constituted, like the compensation methods? I just don't see how streaming music is harmful in and of itself.

I think the entire enterprise has made songs and albums ephemeral and made narratives disappear and ruined physical media and made everything an exhausting game of 24-hour lifespans and made sound quality shitty, and destroyed the monoculture and hollowed out the entire middle class and pays people dogshit, and created all kinds of false binaries, all of which have made music less fun in general

:)

i would hardly blame streaming alone for a lot of those things

mcu, the rest are good

Love Broadway, hate social media, never encounter the others

the nfl is not good it’s a hateful org and sport, sorry

i know i love wrestling which makes me a hypocrite in these matters

climate change ruined physical music media for me personally

i’m not personally into football, musical theatre, or podcasts, but i am basically indifferent to them and don’t feel the need to take the pleasure away from people who like them. for some reason marvel i just wish it didn’t exist and i want the ppl who like it to suffer. not sure why

streaming music is obviously good, just an insane luxury and convenience to virtually all of recorded music on your phone for $10 per month. if musicians all unionized and raised the price to $20 and got fair compensation it would still be a steal

i still torrent a lot of stuff but movie streaming infinitely preferable to going to the movie store and renting out your little dvd

it’s painful to imagine how much harder the pandemic would have been without social media

my main issue with streaming music is that with this technology literally nothing should be out of print or unavailable but for a whole host of reasons that boil down to “capitalism” that is not the case

i don’t watch football but idk i feel like it’s not hard to be aware of how much it sucks

just watch basketball which rules

my main issue with streaming music is that with this technology literally nothing should be out of print or unavailable but for a whole host of reasons that boil down to “capitalism” that is not the case

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 7:05 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i begrudgingly respect musicians’ rights to withhold their music from some platforms/formats, even if it frustrates me as a fan and objectively makes the world a worse place. like for a while you just couldn’t listen to prince on youtube. imagine how many impromptu living room youtube queue dance parties would have been improved if prince hadn’t scrubbed every second of his music off of it.

i was recently trying to listen to some music by wendy carlos but because she is a principled luddite/curmudgeon the only way to do that legally is on CD

oh i totally respect musicians who don’t want their work on streaming, makes a ton of sense to me, still boils down to crapitalism tho

No pro sport is close to as bad as the WWE

THANK you

everything on the list boils down to capitalism

facebook and instagram are repellent to me, but I would be sad to see twitter go away, so I can't vote for social media. the NFL promotes a toxic culture and is a candidate for worst

have to vote for MCU. the dominance of MCU and blockbuster sequels has been such a dumbing-down of cinema. 90% of theaters are now only showing that shit. we don't have to cater only to the tastes of 14 year old boys

i feel like capitalism still existed and was bad before streaming and social media tho

think the point was it's the reason why those things are bad, not the other way around

so capitalism makes streaming music bad, in a way that it didn’t make physical media music bad?

the ways in which streaming is worse than physical media (worse business model is the big one) is due to the effects of capitalism & not inherent to the technology

I thought Whiney's point that it was inherent in the technology was good

sorry for flattening things out with “capitalism,” but obv it affects all things not equally but individually

and obv there’s a level on which “streaming music” is unenvisionable without capitalism so

world sucks and is a trap

xps ufo - is there something intrinsic to the technology that made the business model bad? maybe capitalism just got worse, and the business model would have devolved to a similar point under physical media. it seems like the period pre-streaming but post-peak of physical media, when file-sharing trashed revenues, was also a bad business model. idk, i just don’t see how having to manufacture a bunch of jewel cases improves the business model from an artists’ pov

now that we’ve invented the technology of streaming music, i don’t think we’re going to like, forget how to do it. if the world transitioned to communism, streaming music would probably remain. it would be funny if the new communist leaders were like “ok folks, we’re going back to turntables and cassingles ONLY” tho

yes that’s exactly what i imagine would happen in this thought experiment no one was participating in

I feel like streaming music would have a place in our Communist future. It's a great cultural resource and archive for the masses.

I'm thinking more in a high culture context-- I feel like the early Soviets would have killed to have multiple versions of every Beethoven symphony at one's fingertips for little or no cost to the recipient. I was just watching last night Soviet-made 1970s short films of Pushkin's poetry no available on YouTube for the enlighteenment of new generations of the Masses.

a lot of classical music on streaming was transferred at a pitifully low quality bc…… well i don’t wanna say it

there is a lot of amazing experimental music that is not on streaming

there is a lot of amazing experimental music that is not on streaming

shifts in technology provided an opportunity for the business model to get worse, certainly, but the current worse business model of streaming is surely not the only one possible for it, just one encouraged by capitalism etc.

i don't really agree with whiney's other points about why streaming is bad though, "pays people dogshit" is the only real complaint i have about it.

a lot of classical music on streaming was transferred at a pitifully low quality bc…… well i don’t wanna say it

Good riddance to the monoculture.

xp re: Whiney's post, I thought the other points he had were most important

Also: There's also the infamous "digital watermark" Universal Classics (DG and Decca) put on their digital releases until a few years ago.
― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:14 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s what i was referring to! did they correct this across the board

i don't really agree with whiney's other points about why streaming is bad though, "pays people dogshit" is the only real complaint i have about it.

― ufo, Saturday, October 16, 2021

really?

"made songs and albums ephemeral and made narratives disappear and ruined physical media and made everything an exhausting game of 24-hour lifespans and made sound quality shitty, and destroyed the monoculture"

i don’t really think it made narratives disappear

Also: There's also the infamous "digital watermark" Universal Classics (DG and Decca) put on their digital releases until a few years ago.
― Typo? Negative! (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, October 16, 2021 5:14 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that’s what i was referring to! did they correct this across the board

“made sound quality shitty” reminds me of ppl complaining about radio

yes that’s exactly what i imagine would happen in this thought experiment no one was participating in

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 8:06 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was just replying to you saying an end to capitalism is unenvisionable without an end to music streaming. personally, i can envision one without the other. they don’t seem that related

i didn’t say such a thing!

streaming does seem to make all songs and albums ephemeral

NFL: definitely; brain damage for the participants (and the fans, ha ha), plus it's owned/run by psychotic bigots, plus there's the whole economy of stadiums
Marvel Cinematic Universe: definitely; has poisoned the brains of an entire generation (though this goes hand in hand with social media, TBF)
Broadway Musical Theater: definitely; since I live in the NY media market I see a seemingly endless amount of media coverage of this shit, including local news stories, it's a nightmare
True Crime Podcasts: have never listened, never will, so...don't care
Streaming Music: I don't use it that much, but I do use it for research (Spotify, occasionally YouTube), and it helps me to share music with people who might buy it - as far as "destroyed the monoculture," good fucking riddance
Streaming Video: I don't expect to ever go to a movie theater again, so if I want to see a movie it's gonna be on Amazon Prime or Hulu or HBO Max

maybe i misunderstood

obv there’s a level on which “streaming music” is unenvisionable without capitalism so’

isn’t there a stanislaw lem short story where he invents music streaming?

i'm young enough that i was only ever buying cds in my teens and i don't miss physical media at all. most of the other complaints (e.g. death of the monoculture) seem more attributable to the internet than streaming directly & often somewhat predate streaming's prominence? would also completely disagree with 'making narratives disappear', don't really understand the sound quality complaint either, both spotify & apple music are high enough bitrate to be basically indistinguishable from cd quality and even spotify's free tier is surprisingly difficult to notice issues with. it's obviously good to have flacs available but they're not at all necessary for most purposes.

my actual pick is social media bc the mild fondness i have for twitter is drastically outweighed by the incredible harm fb does

lol could be

i wasn’t making a bigger point other than “the technologies that we know of prob wouldn’t exist without capitalism so me blaming capitalism for an issue with a technology is sort of a catch-22” etc.

did i malaprop catch-22 there, i haven’t read the book

xp

monoculture didn’t even die, look at the fucking articles

it's diminished though so i can at least understand what people mean when they complain about 'death of the monoculture'

It's easily one of the first two, and since most of the people in my circle successfully ignore the NFL, it's for sure MCU

Wound up voting for the MCU, but I am very curious to see what's gonna happen if/when social media (read: Facebook and Twitter) melt down and disappear. People have built entire lives, and entire ecosystems and ways of running businesses, on those two platforms. The ripple effects are going to be massive.

Someone said the idea of social media going away was exciting and I agree, at this point it would be satisfying in the way it would be to idk watch Lumen Corp get destroyed in the series finale of severance. Like just such an awful thing in life emphasizing the worst aspects of people. My friends I keep in touch with there, well I’d keep in touch with them anyway and probably keep in touch with them better, and the rest are the ones who in earlier times wouldn’t have been crawling out of the woodwork with friend requests, they were meant to naturally fade away and be forgotten. Which is just how life works. Or how it did work.

adele album’s gonna save the monoculture

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, October 16, 2021 10:14 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

let's reflect a moment

podcasts... this option has to be far less of a thing than the others, right? amirong?

From what I read here and in the press, Twitter seems capable of becoming so crippled by Musk's clueless management that its investors decide to mercy kill it rather than pouring good money after bad. otoh, the Facebook-dependent small business ecosystem is why FB won't melt down and disappear with anything like the speed that Twitter could fold up its tent. Meta's decline is going to be more gradual as FB slides into revenue stagnation and then negative growth and Meta can't prop up all the money-losing spin-offs Zuckerberg is trying to pump artificial life into. It feels like it is headed into a long slide into the marginal relevance.

Undated article from a site I never heard of really puts things in perspective

https://musicwithflavor.com/adeles-worst-selling-album/

Amazed no-one has suggested The Simpsons (I'm an agnostic, haven't seen an episode since the 90s). Maybe it's so diminished now no-one thinks of it as major?

yeah it's been pretty easy to ignore for 20+ years e.g. none of the many popular memes its generated seem to come from that time period

I was going to counter with old man yells at cloud but it's from fucking 2002 and that's probably the newest

This is very much the NFL or social media

― castanuts (DJP), Thursday, December 29, 2022

I find these all pretty inoffensive at worst. I suppose I'll vote for musical theater, since it seems to have crowded out any other sort of theater.

I'm only aesthetically irked by the MCU whereas I'm kinda morally irked by the True Crime business

true crime podcasts seem the most insidious to me since the ones I hear ads for tend to brand themselves as feminist and social justice oriented while perpetuating stranger danger and other conservative bullshit, and people actually seem to take them seriously as guides for how-not-to-be-murdered which is fucked up in all sorts of ways

Mind you aesthetics is morality so lemme chew it over

xp I think maybe some of them might meet that description, Left, but there are others that take a much more thoughtful and nuanced approach. One of the OGs, "Criminal," comes to mind.

sure and not all westerns are manifest destiny apologism but you know

the NFL is indefensible but I still like it, so I can't vote for that

have no clue about True Crime or Broadway

social media is bad in a thousand ways but I admit I find Twitter to be incredibly amusing sometimes, and Facebook is legitimately useful for keeping up with old friends and family members if you are inclined to do so. I use Facebook Messenger a lot though I suppose that could be easily replaced

Streaming...idk why people would want to get rid of that. we're not going back to the era of DVDs and CDs. IMO it was a good thing before Disney and Paramount wanted to make their own exclusive services, which has basically put us back to the era of expensive cable packages.

I voted MCU, no real reason, but I think having a particular genre of very expensive blockbuster movie become this popular is really bad for the industry as a whole. I liken it a bit to Michael Jackson's Thriller, yeah it's a good album (and the MCU movies I've seen are pretty entertaining) but they did so well that it shaped the whole industry in a pretty negative way.

I was happier before social media allowed people to comment on your statuses.

I don't need my non-existent Aunt Ida's comments on why it's problematic that I listen to Bathtub Shitter or a cousin revealing to me that he supports National Burn a Koran day in response to me talking about the show Brooklyn 99

There are a lot of good true crime podcasts and books out there, but the ones that seem to view crime as pure entertainment fodder are not among those.

For example on the bad side of true crime is something like the subreddits that were devoted to the recent murders that took place in Moscow Idaho, and weeks were spent pointing the finger at various people and discussing conspiracy theories and it turned out of course everybody was wrong.

Fuck the NFL:

Pay to play: How 21 NFL stadiums have been financed

and

Taxpayers are paying billions for the renovations and construction of NFL stadiums. Here’s how

In 2022, the Tennessee Titans of the NFL unveiled their plans for a new stadium in the heart of Nashville. The 1.7 million-square-foot stadium can house 60,000 screaming football fans and is estimated to cost $2.1 billion.

The public would fund more than half of the stadium through a one-time contribution from the state of $500 million and $760 million through revenue bonds issued by Nashville’s Metropolitan Sports Authority.

Since 2000, public funds diverted to helping build professional sports stadiums and arenas have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion. While the NFL and team owners contend that building stadiums will provide economic growth for a city, economists and urban planners think otherwise.

The impact of a stadium can be something that leads to really great placemaking, and that is a catalyst for community gathering and other small businesses in a neighborhood. Yet a typical football stadium has a really different design, the impact on the surrounding community is really more just that the stadium is kind of like a big spaceship that is parked there.

The reason cities end up paying for stadiums begins with the issuance of tax-exempt bonds from state and local governments that the federal government has signed off on for decades.

These tax exemptions help lower the burden of high debt through low-interest municipal bonds used by cities and teams to pay for stadiums. Since 1913, municipal bonds have been a popular financing option for airports, roads, hospitals and schools. Private entities could still access these bonds but were subject to a volume cap limiting how many public bonds are issued annually.

As for stadiums, well, they weren’t subject to that cap. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 wanted to end the exemptions for private use, including stadiums. Instead, the bill inadvertently created a loophole allowing stadiums to be backed by tax-free public bonds.

The loophole works by creating an artificial financing structure through tax-exempt municipal bonds. To gain access to those bonds, private companies must fail one of two tests stipulated by the Tax Reform Bill of 1986.

The private use-case test states that a private entity can use no more than 10% of the money from a bond, a test that NFL teams will most certainly pass. Then there’s the private-payment test which states that no more than 10% of the bond’s debt service is backed by the stadium itself.

So if a state or local government is willing to finance at least 90% of the stadium’s cost, it fails the private-payment test — meaning the stadium will get tax-exempt financing through municipal bonds.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.