Spotify Label Search Feature – WTF?
Recently Spotify has been running an advertisement about a new feature allowing you to search for music by record label. That seems about as useful as searching for music by street name or color. Who cares what label produced a certain record? Labels don’t make music. In fact labels don’t make anything at all, they just put money on the table – they are an increasingly irrelevant fragment of the past when a recording studio was something fancy and printing a record cost involved a huge factory instead of an on demand print with shipping at $4.95.
And since we are using Spotify, printing CDs is even less relevant. Why would I care about a record label? A better related music feature or a better genre based radio feature would be a much better expenditure of time.
Hi. Hmm, in some context you are right, labels is more
or less going to dissapear, or atleast turn to something
else, maybe societies and a “cheaper” kind of puplisher/
management, because not all musicians want to deal with
all the stuff besides the music.
But I still think that
a label-search could be somewhat useful, (ironically not
for me, not my cup of tea), and don’t forget that we
have 50 years of music behind us, and some labels
where surprisingly good of finding artist. So
hurray for label search, and hopefully hurray for better
genre based radio feature in the future.
You might not care, but some people do. I use the label search all the time, as I know that certain labels (such as 4AD, Drag City, Bella Union, Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian, Merge, Track & Field, Elephant 6 &c.) are pretty reliable at finding the more interesting bands. Also, people may well be curious about the other artists on a label.
Don’t assume everyone approaches music in the same closed-minded way you do.
What are you saying? It’s very useful if you know a label that releases mostly music you like? WTF?
Alan,
On the contrary, forgoing the labels is about being open minded. Most labels today are marketing companies and what use is that to me? I try not to rely on marketing for picking music but rather social like services such as Last.fm, or technical utilities like Pandora.
At the end I bought a Spotify subscription so no more complaints from me regarding the advertising.
Some labels are more than just marketing companies, and some definitely maintain a particular aesthetic which – if it’s your kind of thing – can make a label just as reliable as any social app for finding music.
Case in point: Drag City, mentioned by Alan above. A great label with plenty of acts on its roster, many of which I discovered through the label. None of their music is on Spotify (where I too have a premium account), but because I have such faith in the label, I’m willing to buy vinyl, CD or iTunes downloads on spec: I know it’ll be good music. I don’t really get that from anywhere else.
Obviously you don’t know … about music. If you listen to bands who release their stuff on EMI and Sony you listen to mostly crap. I listen to electronic music and labels are very important. Every label has it’s own style, it’s the overall image of a bunch of artists.