Bulerias2005 -> RE: Why isn’t Javier Conde more popular? (Oct. 10 2022 1:38:24)
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This is going to be less a response directly to the OP's question and more a general sentiment, but as someone who grew up with the internet (I was plugging away at Nickelodeon and Nintendo websites since the mid 90s, from as early as 4 or 5 years old), I feel like the way in which the internet functions nowadays has done massive, in some way irreversible damage to legions of artists. If folks remember, the early days of YouTube felt palpably different -- no one was fighting algorithms and views were somehow easier to come by, there was meaningful engagement from the community by way of comments and posts on one's general YouTube page or private messages (remember when that was a thing?). There was no click-bait or need to create thumbnails where the content creator always has some stupid exaggerated expression on their face. And as much as I love services like Spotify, they have also been responsible for cratering physical media sales that don't have significant marketing muscle behind them. I speak with some bitterness because I feel like even with some of my more viral videos (like that Animal Crossing: New Horizons theme that ended up getting over 100,000 views), it hardly registers as meaningful engagement because it does not translate into further reciprocative interaction or people checking out other content that doesn't have an immediate connection to some sort of popular media. My arrangements of beautiful songs like Bruno Martino's Estate or Michel Legrand's The Windmills of your Mind are sitting somewhere in the range of several thousand to maybe 10k views (with, interestingly, older videos that I uploaded in the early days of YouTube having garnered many more views and comments). You have a few breakout social media / YouTube stars who have been able to strike a balance between serious musicality and more click-baity humorous content (someone like Lucas Brar, a brilliant guitarist, comes to mind). But these folks are few and far between. All these feelings arise for me amidst a time when many of the artists I grew up with and admired are on their way out -- almost the entirety of the Brazilian bossa-nova and Tropicalia movements are in their 70s-80s, for example, give it another ten years and the vast majority will be dead. It's deeply upsetting to me that the current state of art and music is not conducive to the rise of distinct movements. Or, at the very least, these movements do not strike me as anywhere near as cohesive or meaningful as, for example, bossa-nova, the Paco de Lucia generation, etc... there are largely no big figures anymore, not because of a lack of talent or artistic distinctiveness, but the irony of massively greater access to content but the exact same human attention span and the same 24 hours in a day... sorry, his was a bit of a stream of consciousness, it probably didn't help that I just went down a YouTube rabbit hole checking out all of my favorite Brazilian artists and realizing that they aren't getting any younger.
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