9 ms·

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

98 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

hullo 11y ago
Worth noting article is by Steven Johnson, author most recently of How We Got to Now. Bonus points for Walter Benjamin reference in the lead.
- henrik_w 11y ago
  How We Got to Now is excellent! Quick and fascinating read. Especailly loved the story about Ada Lovelace at the end - waaay ahead of her times.
  - nubianwarrior 11y ago
    Was my favorite part as well. Surprisingly fun read.
exelius 11y ago
Good article. I think the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain -- they are the ones getting cut out. In the music industry, what happened were bands just started self-producing albums once it became feasible to do so with a consumer PC. The bands ended up making more (which wasn't hard because record companies had been screwing them over for years) and suddenly had a publicity outlet other than radio. Most bands were more than happy to give their music away for free because they had been doing it for years anyway. And I think we're starting to see the beginning of the "content crash" hitting TV as well. With the rise of cord cutting, the big TV networks are going to have a hard time justifying the prices they charge to cable providers. Cable video prices will have to come down significantly -- millennials are not willing to pay $30/mo AND have to watch ads when they can pay $8/mo for ad-free content from Netflix. People may be willing to spend $30/mo on video, but they're going to want that content to not be laden with ads.
- larrik 11y ago
  $30/month? It's not that cheap around here! I think the bigger crash is that people prefer to watch a full season of a TV show in one sitting, rather than once a week for 9 months or whatever. How do you make television when the audience you really want is going to wait until you have already produced a few seasons to even start looking? Nevermind the damage that premature cancellations due to future viewership.
  - exelius 11y ago
    It's about $30/mo when you consider the incremental cost of a cable+internet bundle over just internet (since that's what a potential cord cutter would be considering). And while I understand your viewpoint, cable video does offer on-demand, and they can negotiate for extended series rights if they feel it's important to their product. I don't think that's a deal breaker; just a product feature. But at a minimum, the price needs to come down -- and I think it will as consumers become used to the idea that not every show will be available on every service. It's no longer completely ridiculous to imagine a cable TV service without ESPN or any of the other Disney channels, for example.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - scott_s 11y ago
    I think very few people actually watch an entire season in one sitting - but I think most people want access to an entire season at once. I think this is a good thing; I read a book at my own pace, and I want to watch a season of a show at my own pace. (Which usually is about five episodes of the show a week.) There was an NY Times piece (which I cannot find) back when House of Cards first came out talking about why actors and directors who typically do movies are now doing television. Giving viewers an entire season at once gives them enough space to tell long, subtle stories, and the up-front investment from companies like Netflix lets them have production values typically reserved for feature films.
    - 11y ago
TheGRS 11y ago
I'd like to know more about how ticketmaster has affected the world of live music. Its such a bizarre market of scalping and reselling. You have entire companies now dedicated to the act of scalping, like stubhub, where the artist doesn't see a dime of the transactions. The article points out that the revenue generated by ticket sales is greater than it once was, but it still hasn't eclipsed the amount once made from album sales. I have to wonder if the "ticket industry" has something to do with that, but of course its like comparing apples to oranges.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Well, the artist sees some of the original ticket sold. And places like StubHub may increase the total number of tickets sold (or may not, I have no actual data). > The article points out that the revenue generated by ticket sales is greater than it once was, but it still hasn't eclipsed the amount once made from album sales. That's revenue, though. How much did the artist see from album sales? In most cases, not much, given the way the game was rigged to favor the labels. The artists saw a much bigger slice of the ticket sales.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  I heard a lot of the ticketmaster surcharges are kicked back to the artist, in a sense ticketmaster is playing the bad guy to get more money for a concert without blaming the artists.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  I don't really understand why ticket sales haven't long since switched to an airline model: sell the first tickets (relatively) cheap, then ramp up prices as the venue fills up.
aschearer 11y ago
I think the same trends are playing out with game development. As development and distribution have gotten easier the winners are winning more. It reminds me a bit of Sam Altman's "Upside Risk": > It’s common to make more money from your single best angel investment than all the rest put together. Applies to games as well as start ups.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Book publishers and movie studios have been operating off of this model for decades. Probably others as well.
AstroJetson 11y ago
A well researched article, I love it when people write/speak and have the data to back up their positions. As far as $30 a month goes for content, my Comcast bill sans internet is about $45 (I split the taxes in 1/2). I'm about to cut the TV part out, I can get all the shows we watch other ways for about $25 a month. I also pay for some of the online content, I have enough value for the NY Times that I pay to get past their paywall (I'm trading down Starbucks $$$ coffee for a better information flow) Another poster asked about Ticketmaster / Stubhub / etc. I've given up on major venue's, I can't afford the $100+ seats to be next to a drunk yelling "California!!" (Yes, looking at you G131 at the last Brian Wilson concert) We will go to smaller places where the ticket price isn't so bad. One of the points in the article that's very true for me is that I have a big music library of new music that's not from the traditional mainstream publishers. I'm always picking up new stuff that I get leads on. (Which reminds me there was someone here that said they had a new album out and I got it, so that direct to consumer model works). Things change due to technology. Buggy whips are mostly gone at this point and there isn't anyone lobbying congress about bringing them back.
coldtea 11y ago
Someone said in the comments that “the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain”. In reality I think those were just the voices that were heard more. Because obviously being at the top of the food chain gives them more visibility. Plenty of small-scale artists cried too, but nobody heard them or cared for. Regardless of what people NOT in the music business will say, the thing, from all I’ve been able to gather, goes like this: 1) Album sales ―which before mp3s used to be a decent way for a small scale independent artist to make a living (shifting even 50.000 units was enough to live on as an independent artist in the eighties and early nineties)― have dried up. Top acts sell this myth in their interviews that if you weren’t in the charts, or you barely made spot number 46 for example you might as well not exist. That, in IT terms, is like saying that 37 Signals is not a “real company” and only Google and Facebook are. Just because they were used to limos and champagne release parties doesn’t mean the thousands of artists outside top-100 didn’t make a living and create their art. So, yeah, there WAS a huge, booming scene outside the “Billboard Top 100” (not to mention the UK and regional European scenes, and obviously elsewhere in the developed world), and those musicians could make a decent living too. Mp3 and streaming have killed that for the most part (the “decent living”, not the scene part). 1.2) A small aside regarding this: You’ll hear musicians tell horror stories about how the company took all their profits, and even charged them for recording costs, held their advance etc (e.g. the classic rant by Steve Albini). That was something that mostly happened to first-time stars and star-struck kids. Musicians with some experience in the game, independent lower-volume selling acts etc, could always go to an independent label, have better contracts and a personal experience, etc. And of course those independent musicians also didn’t need 1.5 year in the studio to make an album, blowing most of their time (and advance money) on hookers and coke. 2) In the early days of mp3 (and still today) you heard people saying “piracy hasn’t harmed album sales, I buy more music now, since I can hear more stuff before I decide what to buy” etc. Those people were either outliers or telling BS — the declining numbers of both CD and digital sales all this time disprove their claims. 3) There’s another suggestion often heard to “make money from playing live”. First, for smaller bands (that weren’t the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead), live shows were a loss leader for album sales — and it’s not much better now. In fact, in most of the world, people — when adjusted for growing up — go to fewer live shows that they used to. Second, while this might work for some, it’s a very american thing to assume that musicians exist to “play live”. In Europe there were lots of electronic musicians (not DJ/EDM style) having decent album sales that never cared for playing live. There’s also the issue that a musician with 30.000 fans buying their albums around the world, might not have the required number of fans in any single town (apart from his hometown or some mega-city like NY) to hold concerts. And with the 30.000 fans becoming 2.000 people still buying his CD (and 28.000 just downloading it of somewhere) the artist is now screwed. Then there’s the inane “sell merchandise” “solution”, as if a musician is just some merchant, and if one thing (selling music) doesn’t work, he’ll just pivot to selling some other stuff. Not to mention that all those ideas are based on very US-centric perception, where all music that matters contains guitars and plays live, and all musicians are selling to 13 to 25 year old kids (because those are the primarily buyers of BS band merchandise — not 40 or 50 year old jazz, blues, electronica etc fans). 4) Streaming just made all of this worse. 5) I’m not saying we can go back in time. Or that we have some duty to provide musicians with a living if their business model doesn’t work. I’m Just stating this, to recap: independent musicians that used to do well income-wise in the album days, are fucked up in the digital/streaming/piracy days. That doesn’t stop them making music (especially since you can now create something from your home studio that used to take thousands upon thousands in studio time and you can release on your own on the internet), but it does stop them making a career in music, in the way musicians in the 70s, 80s and 90s used to.
davidw 11y ago
I'd like to see more discussion, numbers and focus on the 'margin' - those people who are on the edge of being able to work full time on their art/music/whatever. That's where gains or losses will be, not with bands that can sell out stadiums.
zeveb 11y ago
> As a society, what we most want to ensure is that the artists can prosper — not the record labels or studios or publishing conglomerates, but the writers, musicians, directors and actors themselves. I'd think that as a society what we most want to ensure is that art prospers. If that means prospering artists, great. But the goal for society is not wealthy artists but a wealth of art.
- saint_fiasco 11y ago
  There is already more art than can be consumed in a lifetime. I think at this point, some people really do buy art to support high status artists.
multinglets 11y ago
Nothing will ever be more bewildering than the people who get all sanctimonious that some rando can no longer get rich turning his blues scale riff into a 7 year marketing cicada. People who actually care about music and can do something unique with it are currently taking advantage of the internet's costless promotional channels, getting famous, and making a perfectly good living off of youtube views if nothing else. The real issue is that these promotional channels exist and the entrenched players don't control them, so they can't fabricate a superstar out of regurgitated shitmusic anymore. Cry me a river, mainstream media. Cry me a river, narcissistic "band" who aspires to be millionaires.
- bsder 11y ago
  > People who actually care about music and can do something unique with it are currently taking advantage of the internet's costless promotional channels, getting famous, and making a perfectly good living off of youtube views if nothing else. Hogwash. Every heard of Mike Keneally? Exactly. He fits your description to a T. Except that you have heard of him. He plays for this guy: http://www.satriani.com/splash/ http://www.satriani.com/splash/ Oh, and he happens to play guitar in this band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dethklok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dethklok Now, if that guy can't make it work, I doubt anybody can.
  - leoedin 11y ago
    It would be far more informative if you could tell us why he isn't making it work? Is he not making a living playing music? Regardless, music is the ultimate free market. Regardless of how talented you are, if you don't make something that people will vote with their money to see, you won't make any money. This hasn't changed for 50 years and has absolutely nothing to do with the fall of record sales. 30 years ago talented musicians were still being ignored because their genre wasn't fashionable. Do you really doubt that anyone can make it work as a professional musician? Really? Because I don't work anywhere near the music industry and I know a handful of professional musicians. Sure, there's far more people who play instruments and can't make it work professionally, but that's always been the case.
  - 11y ago
jpatokal 11y ago
Interesting read, but there's one fairly major shift the author missed: the transition away from long-form printed books into bite-sized, often free/ad-supported online content. In the charge-by-the-piece print publishing world, the economics don't work for anything smaller than a hundred pages or so, which means you need to get a single author to write a lot (= a book) or compile together a bunch of stuff from different authors (= magazines, anthologies, etc). We take this as granted, but a hundred years ago smaller works were still common: Marx's Communist Manifesto was a 30-page pamphlet. In the online world, this is no longer a concern. Much of my print reading has been replaced by following blogs, many of them on "serious" topics, where even the longest post is rarely longer than a single book chapter. And whereas it was previously quite difficult for an unknown to get accepted into a magazine, much less a book, it's now an everyday occurrence for an aggregator like HN to pick up a piece and get tens of thousands of readers for it. This parallels what we're seeing in music and film: the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered, but the effort/skill/luck needed to make money off it has gone up to compensate.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hullo 11y ago

Worth noting article is by Steven Johnson, author most recently of How We Got to Now. Bonus points for Walter Benjamin reference in the lead.

henrik_w 11y ago
How We Got to Now is excellent! Quick and fascinating read. Especailly loved the story about Ada Lovelace at the end - waaay ahead of her times.
- nubianwarrior 11y ago
  Was my favorite part as well. Surprisingly fun read.

exelius 11y ago

Good article. I think the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain -- they are the ones getting cut out. In the music industry, what happened were bands just started self-producing albums once it became feasible to do so with a consumer PC. The bands ended up making more (which wasn't hard because record companies had been screwing them over for years) and suddenly had a publicity outlet other than radio. Most bands were more than happy to give their music away for free because they had been doing it for years anyway. And I think we're starting to see the beginning of the "content crash" hitting TV as well. With the rise of cord cutting, the big TV networks are going to have a hard time justifying the prices they charge to cable providers. Cable video prices will have to come down significantly -- millennials are not willing to pay $30/mo AND have to watch ads when they can pay $8/mo for ad-free content from Netflix. People may be willing to spend $30/mo on video, but they're going to want that content to not be laden with ads.

larrik 11y ago
$30/month? It's not that cheap around here! I think the bigger crash is that people prefer to watch a full season of a TV show in one sitting, rather than once a week for 9 months or whatever. How do you make television when the audience you really want is going to wait until you have already produced a few seasons to even start looking? Nevermind the damage that premature cancellations due to future viewership.
- exelius 11y ago
  It's about $30/mo when you consider the incremental cost of a cable+internet bundle over just internet (since that's what a potential cord cutter would be considering). And while I understand your viewpoint, cable video does offer on-demand, and they can negotiate for extended series rights if they feel it's important to their product. I don't think that's a deal breaker; just a product feature. But at a minimum, the price needs to come down -- and I think it will as consumers become used to the idea that not every show will be available on every service. It's no longer completely ridiculous to imagine a cable TV service without ESPN or any of the other Disney channels, for example.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- scott_s 11y ago
  I think very few people actually watch an entire season in one sitting - but I think most people want access to an entire season at once. I think this is a good thing; I read a book at my own pace, and I want to watch a season of a show at my own pace. (Which usually is about five episodes of the show a week.) There was an NY Times piece (which I cannot find) back when House of Cards first came out talking about why actors and directors who typically do movies are now doing television. Giving viewers an entire season at once gives them enough space to tell long, subtle stories, and the up-front investment from companies like Netflix lets them have production values typically reserved for feature films.
  - 11y ago

TheGRS 11y ago

I'd like to know more about how ticketmaster has affected the world of live music. Its such a bizarre market of scalping and reselling. You have entire companies now dedicated to the act of scalping, like stubhub, where the artist doesn't see a dime of the transactions. The article points out that the revenue generated by ticket sales is greater than it once was, but it still hasn't eclipsed the amount once made from album sales. I have to wonder if the "ticket industry" has something to do with that, but of course its like comparing apples to oranges.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Well, the artist sees some of the original ticket sold. And places like StubHub may increase the total number of tickets sold (or may not, I have no actual data). > The article points out that the revenue generated by ticket sales is greater than it once was, but it still hasn't eclipsed the amount once made from album sales. That's revenue, though. How much did the artist see from album sales? In most cases, not much, given the way the game was rigged to favor the labels. The artists saw a much bigger slice of the ticket sales.
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
I heard a lot of the ticketmaster surcharges are kicked back to the artist, in a sense ticketmaster is playing the bad guy to get more money for a concert without blaming the artists.
jpatokal 11y ago
I don't really understand why ticket sales haven't long since switched to an airline model: sell the first tickets (relatively) cheap, then ramp up prices as the venue fills up.

aschearer 11y ago

I think the same trends are playing out with game development. As development and distribution have gotten easier the winners are winning more. It reminds me a bit of Sam Altman's "Upside Risk": > It’s common to make more money from your single best angel investment than all the rest put together. Applies to games as well as start ups.

stephengillie 11y ago
Book publishers and movie studios have been operating off of this model for decades. Probably others as well.

AstroJetson 11y ago

A well researched article, I love it when people write/speak and have the data to back up their positions. As far as $30 a month goes for content, my Comcast bill sans internet is about $45 (I split the taxes in 1/2). I'm about to cut the TV part out, I can get all the shows we watch other ways for about $25 a month. I also pay for some of the online content, I have enough value for the NY Times that I pay to get past their paywall (I'm trading down Starbucks $$$ coffee for a better information flow) Another poster asked about Ticketmaster / Stubhub / etc. I've given up on major venue's, I can't afford the $100+ seats to be next to a drunk yelling "California!!" (Yes, looking at you G131 at the last Brian Wilson concert) We will go to smaller places where the ticket price isn't so bad. One of the points in the article that's very true for me is that I have a big music library of new music that's not from the traditional mainstream publishers. I'm always picking up new stuff that I get leads on. (Which reminds me there was someone here that said they had a new album out and I got it, so that direct to consumer model works). Things change due to technology. Buggy whips are mostly gone at this point and there isn't anyone lobbying congress about bringing them back.

coldtea 11y ago

Someone said in the comments that “the voices that cried the loudest about this were people at the top of the food chain”. In reality I think those were just the voices that were heard more. Because obviously being at the top of the food chain gives them more visibility. Plenty of small-scale artists cried too, but nobody heard them or cared for. Regardless of what people NOT in the music business will say, the thing, from all I’ve been able to gather, goes like this: 1) Album sales ―which before mp3s used to be a decent way for a small scale independent artist to make a living (shifting even 50.000 units was enough to live on as an independent artist in the eighties and early nineties)― have dried up. Top acts sell this myth in their interviews that if you weren’t in the charts, or you barely made spot number 46 for example you might as well not exist. That, in IT terms, is like saying that 37 Signals is not a “real company” and only Google and Facebook are. Just because they were used to limos and champagne release parties doesn’t mean the thousands of artists outside top-100 didn’t make a living and create their art. So, yeah, there WAS a huge, booming scene outside the “Billboard Top 100” (not to mention the UK and regional European scenes, and obviously elsewhere in the developed world), and those musicians could make a decent living too. Mp3 and streaming have killed that for the most part (the “decent living”, not the scene part). 1.2) A small aside regarding this: You’ll hear musicians tell horror stories about how the company took all their profits, and even charged them for recording costs, held their advance etc (e.g. the classic rant by Steve Albini). That was something that mostly happened to first-time stars and star-struck kids. Musicians with some experience in the game, independent lower-volume selling acts etc, could always go to an independent label, have better contracts and a personal experience, etc. And of course those independent musicians also didn’t need 1.5 year in the studio to make an album, blowing most of their time (and advance money) on hookers and coke. 2) In the early days of mp3 (and still today) you heard people saying “piracy hasn’t harmed album sales, I buy more music now, since I can hear more stuff before I decide what to buy” etc. Those people were either outliers or telling BS — the declining numbers of both CD and digital sales all this time disprove their claims. 3) There’s another suggestion often heard to “make money from playing live”. First, for smaller bands (that weren’t the Rolling Stones or the Grateful Dead), live shows were a loss leader for album sales — and it’s not much better now. In fact, in most of the world, people — when adjusted for growing up — go to fewer live shows that they used to. Second, while this might work for some, it’s a very american thing to assume that musicians exist to “play live”. In Europe there were lots of electronic musicians (not DJ/EDM style) having decent album sales that never cared for playing live. There’s also the issue that a musician with 30.000 fans buying their albums around the world, might not have the required number of fans in any single town (apart from his hometown or some mega-city like NY) to hold concerts. And with the 30.000 fans becoming 2.000 people still buying his CD (and 28.000 just downloading it of somewhere) the artist is now screwed. Then there’s the inane “sell merchandise” “solution”, as if a musician is just some merchant, and if one thing (selling music) doesn’t work, he’ll just pivot to selling some other stuff. Not to mention that all those ideas are based on very US-centric perception, where all music that matters contains guitars and plays live, and all musicians are selling to 13 to 25 year old kids (because those are the primarily buyers of BS band merchandise — not 40 or 50 year old jazz, blues, electronica etc fans). 4) Streaming just made all of this worse. 5) I’m not saying we can go back in time. Or that we have some duty to provide musicians with a living if their business model doesn’t work. I’m Just stating this, to recap: independent musicians that used to do well income-wise in the album days, are fucked up in the digital/streaming/piracy days. That doesn’t stop them making music (especially since you can now create something from your home studio that used to take thousands upon thousands in studio time and you can release on your own on the internet), but it does stop them making a career in music, in the way musicians in the 70s, 80s and 90s used to.

davidw 11y ago

I'd like to see more discussion, numbers and focus on the 'margin' - those people who are on the edge of being able to work full time on their art/music/whatever. That's where gains or losses will be, not with bands that can sell out stadiums.

zeveb 11y ago

> As a society, what we most want to ensure is that the artists can prosper — not the record labels or studios or publishing conglomerates, but the writers, musicians, directors and actors themselves. I'd think that as a society what we most want to ensure is that art prospers. If that means prospering artists, great. But the goal for society is not wealthy artists but a wealth of art.

saint_fiasco 11y ago
There is already more art than can be consumed in a lifetime. I think at this point, some people really do buy art to support high status artists.

multinglets 11y ago

Nothing will ever be more bewildering than the people who get all sanctimonious that some rando can no longer get rich turning his blues scale riff into a 7 year marketing cicada. People who actually care about music and can do something unique with it are currently taking advantage of the internet's costless promotional channels, getting famous, and making a perfectly good living off of youtube views if nothing else. The real issue is that these promotional channels exist and the entrenched players don't control them, so they can't fabricate a superstar out of regurgitated shitmusic anymore. Cry me a river, mainstream media. Cry me a river, narcissistic "band" who aspires to be millionaires.

bsder 11y ago
> People who actually care about music and can do something unique with it are currently taking advantage of the internet's costless promotional channels, getting famous, and making a perfectly good living off of youtube views if nothing else. Hogwash. Every heard of Mike Keneally? Exactly. He fits your description to a T. Except that you have heard of him. He plays for this guy: http://www.satriani.com/splash/ http://www.satriani.com/splash/ Oh, and he happens to play guitar in this band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dethklok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dethklok Now, if that guy can't make it work, I doubt anybody can.
- leoedin 11y ago
  It would be far more informative if you could tell us why he isn't making it work? Is he not making a living playing music? Regardless, music is the ultimate free market. Regardless of how talented you are, if you don't make something that people will vote with their money to see, you won't make any money. This hasn't changed for 50 years and has absolutely nothing to do with the fall of record sales. 30 years ago talented musicians were still being ignored because their genre wasn't fashionable. Do you really doubt that anyone can make it work as a professional musician? Really? Because I don't work anywhere near the music industry and I know a handful of professional musicians. Sure, there's far more people who play instruments and can't make it work professionally, but that's always been the case.
- 11y ago

jpatokal 11y ago

Interesting read, but there's one fairly major shift the author missed: the transition away from long-form printed books into bite-sized, often free/ad-supported online content. In the charge-by-the-piece print publishing world, the economics don't work for anything smaller than a hundred pages or so, which means you need to get a single author to write a lot (= a book) or compile together a bunch of stuff from different authors (= magazines, anthologies, etc). We take this as granted, but a hundred years ago smaller works were still common: Marx's Communist Manifesto was a 30-page pamphlet. In the online world, this is no longer a concern. Much of my print reading has been replaced by following blogs, many of them on "serious" topics, where even the longest post is rarely longer than a single book chapter. And whereas it was previously quite difficult for an unknown to get accepted into a magazine, much less a book, it's now an everyday occurrence for an aggregator like HN to pick up a piece and get tens of thousands of readers for it. This parallels what we're seeing in music and film: the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered, but the effort/skill/luck needed to make money off it has gone up to compensate.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]