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I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same w

I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen. ~ David Bowie, 2002

npunt 11y ago
Lets not forget he started an ISP in 1998 (BowieNet). He was always on the cutting edge.
cageface 11y ago
If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. There's a ton of interesting music being made outside their domain but most people will never hear any of it.
- rplnt 11y ago
  One would think services like Spotify would help, but they only make the music more accessible, they don't help you find it. I don't have pro and only ads I hear (besides the spotify ones that are trying to annoy you into paying) are ones from Universal Music.
  - wyclif 11y ago
    I don't agree—I use Spotify a lot and it's helped tremendously in my finding new music. The "Discover Weekly" and social playlists features always point me to sources of new music.
    - cageface 11y ago
      Spotify and other streaming services are amazing for discovering new music if you're willing to put in the effort but most people just listen to what they have pushed on them. I doubt most people even realize that top 40 music isn't written by the people that perform it.
      - kedean 11y ago
        Those people wouldn't have been willing to put forth the effort in any of the old systems either. Why does that mean Spotify made things worse?
  - arnvald 11y ago
    I actually use Spotify to discover new music. I take some artist I know, and then I go to some related one, and then to artist related to that one, etc. Spotify actually made discovering music way easier to me. BTW there was one website that I used very often. It was called "We are Hunted"[1] and unfortunately it was acquired by Twitter, and as we all know Twitter Music is dead. That website had a playlist of emerging new tracks and I found a lot of good music there (and I heard some artists just 1-2 years before they became very famous) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted
  - bufordsharkley 11y ago
    The internet continues to make human-curated content (college/community radio, in my opinion unmatched for discovery) more accessible. But very few people listen, and with changes to fee structure, very few stations can afford to continue online broadcasting. [0] [0] http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-independent-internet-radio-may-go-extinct-in-2016/ http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-indepen...
  - dluan 11y ago
    Really? What about the anti-Spotify's like HypeMachine? Fiercely independent, trendspotting/trendsetting, and sustainable. It's a very valuable service to lots of folks. IMO Spotify/Rdio/Pandora could only ever hope to go the advertising route over subscription because they couldn't crack the much harder distribution problem (e.g. the HypeM's, SoundCloud's, Drip's, etc).
    - blfr 11y ago
      Spotify stopped working on Ubuntu a while back so I can't check but I'm pretty sure there is a HypeMachine app for Spotify. So you can get recommendations from them within the Spotify client. EDIT: it stopped working after 15.04. Something with an old version libgcrypt. I didn't care enough to debug it.
      - Nullabillity 11y ago
        Spotify works fine for me, under both Ubuntu and Arch, but they removed support for apps a while ago (on all platforms, IIRC Linux was actually the last holdout).
        jorgearturo 11y ago
        It is buggy for sure; But many of the Spotify apps I use work fine on Linux even without support though.
      - s0l1dsnak3123 11y ago
        I don't know about whether the spotify app doesn't work for you anymore, but I use mopidy-spotify on arch which gives me full spotify access in the terminal.
      - rplnt 11y ago
        There are alternative clients (pro-only).
  - lectrick 11y ago
    > they don't help you find it Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)
- bootload 11y ago
  "If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford." That's what record companies would like you to think. Counter-example, Milk Records, Melbourne. It's might be a record company but it looks so much like a startup. - http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 - http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turning-my-brain-inside-out-and-showing-it-to-everyone http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turni...
  - cageface 11y ago
    I've been traveling all over the world and all I hear everywhere I go is crap American top 40 pop music. Like I said there's a ton of interesting stuff going on outside their purview but they control the conversation right now.
    - brandnewlow 11y ago
      That's unfortunately what most people want to hear.
      - pmontra 11y ago
        Most people want to hear what most people hear, to be able to talk about it and don't be cut off from their group of friends. Same thing about TV, movies, cloths, phones, books, games etc.
        will_pseudonym 11y ago
        I'm a non-sports person, but I had a dawning realization earlier this week. We crave shared, tribal experiences, and that's why we seek out those shared events. On the same topic, sports is a religion. If you disagree, or don't yet understand, please compare and contrast the two for me.
        philh 11y ago
- kbart 11y ago
  My music style is far from trendy, but I can't remember the last time I listened (even more so bought something) from the major label. I'd say is much harder to become millionaire rock star now, but for indie bands, that play as a hobby, situation is very favorable as you can contact you audience directly and you don't need to frame yourself into "format" dictated by the labels.
  - cageface 11y ago
    It's an amazing time to be a hobby musician. You can record and produce your own music very cheaply and publish it to the world at the touch of a button. The problem is what happens next, which in most cases is nothing, unless you've got somebody spending money marketing your music or you're willing to work very very very hard to promote it yourself. The difference between now and the 60s through early 90s was that labels were willing to put their weight behind more oddball artists like Bowie. He wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of achieving the same fame if he were starting now. We're in a weird time where mainstream music is the most timid and cynically commercial it's ever been but the fringes are exceptionally vital.
    - tjl 11y ago
      Bowie's first albums didn't catch on at all. It wasn't until he decided to change his presentation and style that he became successful. I recommend seeing "David Bowie & The Story of Ziggy Stardust" which talks about it. It wasn't until Hunky Dory in 1971 that he really got traction. He was dropped by his label (Mercury) after his third album. He signed with RCA for his 4th, Hunky Dory (Ziggy was his 5th). After that, he basically hit single digits for his peak chart position in the UK for in to the 90s for his studio albums. So, you can look at it as Mercury took a chance, didn't succeed and dropped him. RCA tried again and succeeded. But, he changed his approach and style around this time in an attempt to market himself better. Then, EMI would reap the rewards again in the 80s for Let's Dance which hit number 1 in a half-dozen countries and close to it in a few others.
      - leoc 11y ago
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Not really. They are important to the ever-shrinking mainstream pop industry ... but here in the Great Cultural Fragmentation, that's a smaller and smaller slice of a larger and larger pie.
- ebbv 11y ago
  > If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. That's just not true. While the very few artists that do sell albums nowadays (Taylor Swift, Adele, Kanye West, etc.) are on major labels and do have promotion from major labels, these artists are also already successful enough to have done their own promotion if they wanted to. On top of that, these successful artists by todays standards are selling what would have been considered disappointing numbers for artists at their levels 20 years ago. In the 90s Hootie and the Blowfish (an act with no staying power) sold 16 million albums in the US. By comparison Adele's 25 which is a huge hit by today's standards has only sold 3 million copies in the US (though 16 million worldwide.) In the 90s many albums sold tens of millions of copies, nobody does that any more. Bowie was 100% right.
  - maldusiecle 11y ago
    Where are your numbers coming from? Wikipedia says 25 has sold 7.6 million in the US, and it's only been out a few months. 21 sold 11 million. In comparison, Thriller, one of the bestselling records of all time, sold 30 million. (All these numbers are US sales only.) The data says exactly the opposite of what you're saying.
- hammock 11y ago
  Music sales /= music (although there's an interesting debate to be had on that)
eiz 11y ago
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0-51IkWpFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0-51IkWpFE
braythwayt 11y ago
> I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, > because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution > systems in the same way. > > --David Bowie, 2002 Something to think about in music that also happens in startups and software: These are social activities. People don’t judge music solely by some kind of independent metric of appeal. They also judge whether the music is popular within their social circle. Choice of music is one of the mediums people use for communicating. To listen to something nobody except you likes is a little like programming in a language nobody you know uses. We make up all sorts of stories about how network effects affect the quality of a language, the availability of tools, and so on, and all that is true. But it’s also true that we self-identify in a tribal way with our choices, and that those choices have social import. Even if you brag defiantly that you’re a pragmatist who doesn’t care who does or doesn’t use a tool: That’s a lot like being a hipster growing a beard and putting on plaid. So back to music. The vast majority of people wish to belong to the tribe of “The vast majority of people.” They work very hard to study what is and isn’t “mainstream.” There is thus a very natural force by the market to want to have some kind of pop music dominated by just a few superstars at a time. This, I believe, drives a winner-take-all market for pop music, which in turn is a huge incentive for the existence of massive pop marketing machines. Even if you take all the friction out of distribution and discovery, the mainstream want there to be a massive marketing push for pop artists, it helps them judge who is going to be popular. It’s not that much different than picking a JavaScript library because some large and well-heeled organization is devoting themselves to support it. You may personally say it has something to do with bug fixes, but for most people that fact helps them judge whether other people will adopt the library, which helps them judge whether they want to belong to that particular tribe. And most people want to belong to the biggest tribe, and will follow the signals with the biggest boost. Thus, labels or some other kind of very big, very efficient machine for manipulating pop culture.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sjclemmy 11y ago
  I think Bowie was the antithesis of this. If you'll forgive the hyperbole, he is the archetypal outsider, the patron saint of the dispossessed. So for all those who don't feel that they belong, Bowie's activities provided a message - 'It's OK to be an outsider', and, curiously, through that message provided a sense of belonging - I'm going to get all metaphysical and say that that is alchemical / transformative in a very profound way for many people.
joosters 11y ago
See also 'Bowie Bonds' - http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/11/2149761/a-short-history-of-the-bowie-bond/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/11/2149761/a-short-histor... David Bowie sold the rights to future royalties from his music, in the form of bonds. Presumably influenced by his thinking that music was going to be napsterised.
rayiner 11y ago
It's so funny how people construct narratives. I'm listening to Bloomberg Business on the radio and they're talking about how David Bowie was a pioneer in monetizing future copyright cashflows to finance music production.
- nkrisc 11y ago
  Was a pioneer in that when? The two angles aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Theoretically he could be good at milking copyright while it lasted even if he didn't believe it would be around forever.
  - goodJobWalrus 11y ago
    1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond#Bowie_Bonds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond#Bowie_Bonds
- lmm 11y ago
  If you believed that copyright was going to go away in ten years, surely selling off future copyright cashflows is exactly what you would want to do.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Brilliant. Cash out now before the music became a stranded asset.
SonicSoul 11y ago
this is a travesty. In addition to loving his music he also lived in my neighborhood in nyc and I've been naming our internal applications after his songs. Put up a black banner on Ground Control as we speak :( my favorite is the collab he did with Trent Reznor on I'm Afraid of Americans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPVrFIP0CMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPVrFIP0CMs
- miles932 11y ago
  Yeah, that song rocks pretty hard :)
  - kleer001 11y ago
    If you haven't yet check out the single for that song. It goes really deep into the aesthetics and experiements with Trent Reznor's sensibilities. It's like Reznor shacked up in a cabin for the weekend to bang out some remixes. Warning, they get dark and noisy fast.
- wanda 11y ago
  I wonder if the starman Perl webserver is named after the David Bowie song...
  - SonicSoul 11y ago
    very likely!!! I considered that name too for my next app and i didn't know about the Perl webserver :)
martin1975 11y ago
Metallica hates you, Major Tom! And you are right - music is becoming a commodity, and I hope to pay not $15/album, but more like $2/album, of which 1.5 goes to the artist and .5 goes to whomever helped them do a professional studio recording. The distribution will inevitably happen on the internet. That's how you end piracy and motivate people to pay artists for their divine gift.
malkia 11y ago
This reminds me of Francis Ford Coppola interview in 99u.com - http://99u.com/articles/6973/francis-ford-coppola-on-risk-money-craft-collaboration http://99u.com/articles/6973/francis-ford-coppola-on-risk-mo... Quoting from the article: Q: How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce? A: We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script. This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money.
- eslaught 11y ago
  But is that the way we want the world to work, or just something we've resigned ourselves to because we think it's inevitable? I'm pursuing a CS PhD; in my free time, I'm working on a science fiction novel. In some ways, I think a PhD is the perfect vehicle for this since I'm free to "explore" intellectually, as long I still publish in my field. And I make things work: I squirrel away bits of time for writing, and still have enough left over to get my work done. But I look at the industry (especially in Silicon Valley), and I'm not sure I can expect to keep going on my side projects. Work weeks of 50, 60, or more hours are common at companies in the area, and even more so at startups. I did a lot of interviews for internships and such in undergrad and early grad school, and I would ask interviewers whether they worked on any open source projects during their free time. The answer was almost always no. I found it perplexing at the time, but looking back I think it's a relatively straightforward consequence of the environment people are working in. Most people aren't in a position to take up serious hobbies, and a big part of that is work culture and the sorts of hours employers expect. I think Coppola is very lucky if he has a job where he can do this balancing act. Perhaps I'll be lucky too, I don't know. But I hope we're not driving our society towards a situation where you need to have some sort of exceptionally flexible day job in order to make progress on your other pursuits. And while I wouldn't want to be a professional artist myself (I love CS too much for that), I do hope that it'll be possible to be paid to do art in the next 100 years.
markman 11y ago
Why was this quote posted? To show that Bowie was a moron like Al Gore? In 2002 everybody knew the above quote. Honestly some people...

npunt 11y ago

Lets not forget he started an ISP in 1998 (BowieNet). He was always on the cutting edge.

cageface 11y ago

If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. There's a ton of interesting music being made outside their domain but most people will never hear any of it.

rplnt 11y ago
One would think services like Spotify would help, but they only make the music more accessible, they don't help you find it. I don't have pro and only ads I hear (besides the spotify ones that are trying to annoy you into paying) are ones from Universal Music.
- wyclif 11y ago
  I don't agree—I use Spotify a lot and it's helped tremendously in my finding new music. The "Discover Weekly" and social playlists features always point me to sources of new music.
  - cageface 11y ago
    Spotify and other streaming services are amazing for discovering new music if you're willing to put in the effort but most people just listen to what they have pushed on them. I doubt most people even realize that top 40 music isn't written by the people that perform it.
    - kedean 11y ago
      Those people wouldn't have been willing to put forth the effort in any of the old systems either. Why does that mean Spotify made things worse?
- arnvald 11y ago
  I actually use Spotify to discover new music. I take some artist I know, and then I go to some related one, and then to artist related to that one, etc. Spotify actually made discovering music way easier to me. BTW there was one website that I used very often. It was called "We are Hunted"[1] and unfortunately it was acquired by Twitter, and as we all know Twitter Music is dead. That website had a playlist of emerging new tracks and I found a lot of good music there (and I heard some artists just 1-2 years before they became very famous) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted
- bufordsharkley 11y ago
  The internet continues to make human-curated content (college/community radio, in my opinion unmatched for discovery) more accessible. But very few people listen, and with changes to fee structure, very few stations can afford to continue online broadcasting. [0] [0] http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-independent-internet-radio-may-go-extinct-in-2016/ http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-indepen...
- dluan 11y ago
  Really? What about the anti-Spotify's like HypeMachine? Fiercely independent, trendspotting/trendsetting, and sustainable. It's a very valuable service to lots of folks. IMO Spotify/Rdio/Pandora could only ever hope to go the advertising route over subscription because they couldn't crack the much harder distribution problem (e.g. the HypeM's, SoundCloud's, Drip's, etc).
  - blfr 11y ago
    Spotify stopped working on Ubuntu a while back so I can't check but I'm pretty sure there is a HypeMachine app for Spotify. So you can get recommendations from them within the Spotify client. EDIT: it stopped working after 15.04. Something with an old version libgcrypt. I didn't care enough to debug it.
    - Nullabillity 11y ago
      Spotify works fine for me, under both Ubuntu and Arch, but they removed support for apps a while ago (on all platforms, IIRC Linux was actually the last holdout).
      - jorgearturo 11y ago
        It is buggy for sure; But many of the Spotify apps I use work fine on Linux even without support though.
    - s0l1dsnak3123 11y ago
      I don't know about whether the spotify app doesn't work for you anymore, but I use mopidy-spotify on arch which gives me full spotify access in the terminal.
    - rplnt 11y ago
      There are alternative clients (pro-only).
- lectrick 11y ago
  > they don't help you find it Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)
bootload 11y ago
"If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford." That's what record companies would like you to think. Counter-example, Milk Records, Melbourne. It's might be a record company but it looks so much like a startup. - http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 http://messandnoise.com/features/4666617 - http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turning-my-brain-inside-out-and-showing-it-to-everyone http://diymag.com/2015/03/23/courtney-barnett-its-like-turni...
- cageface 11y ago
  I've been traveling all over the world and all I hear everywhere I go is crap American top 40 pop music. Like I said there's a ton of interesting stuff going on outside their purview but they control the conversation right now.
  - brandnewlow 11y ago
    That's unfortunately what most people want to hear.
    - pmontra 11y ago
      Most people want to hear what most people hear, to be able to talk about it and don't be cut off from their group of friends. Same thing about TV, movies, cloths, phones, books, games etc.
      - will_pseudonym 11y ago
        I'm a non-sports person, but I had a dawning realization earlier this week. We crave shared, tribal experiences, and that's why we seek out those shared events. On the same topic, sports is a religion. If you disagree, or don't yet understand, please compare and contrast the two for me.
        philh 11y ago
kbart 11y ago
My music style is far from trendy, but I can't remember the last time I listened (even more so bought something) from the major label. I'd say is much harder to become millionaire rock star now, but for indie bands, that play as a hobby, situation is very favorable as you can contact you audience directly and you don't need to frame yourself into "format" dictated by the labels.
- cageface 11y ago
  It's an amazing time to be a hobby musician. You can record and produce your own music very cheaply and publish it to the world at the touch of a button. The problem is what happens next, which in most cases is nothing, unless you've got somebody spending money marketing your music or you're willing to work very very very hard to promote it yourself. The difference between now and the 60s through early 90s was that labels were willing to put their weight behind more oddball artists like Bowie. He wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of achieving the same fame if he were starting now. We're in a weird time where mainstream music is the most timid and cynically commercial it's ever been but the fringes are exceptionally vital.
  - tjl 11y ago
    Bowie's first albums didn't catch on at all. It wasn't until he decided to change his presentation and style that he became successful. I recommend seeing "David Bowie & The Story of Ziggy Stardust" which talks about it. It wasn't until Hunky Dory in 1971 that he really got traction. He was dropped by his label (Mercury) after his third album. He signed with RCA for his 4th, Hunky Dory (Ziggy was his 5th). After that, he basically hit single digits for his peak chart position in the UK for in to the 90s for his studio albums. So, you can look at it as Mercury took a chance, didn't succeed and dropped him. RCA tried again and succeeded. But, he changed his approach and style around this time in an attempt to market himself better. Then, EMI would reap the rewards again in the 80s for Let's Dance which hit number 1 in a half-dozen countries and close to it in a few others.
    - leoc 11y ago
davidgerard 11y ago
Not really. They are important to the ever-shrinking mainstream pop industry ... but here in the Great Cultural Fragmentation, that's a smaller and smaller slice of a larger and larger pie.
ebbv 11y ago
> If anything labels are more important than ever and music sales are driven by the kind of marketing campaigns that only big records labels can afford. That's just not true. While the very few artists that do sell albums nowadays (Taylor Swift, Adele, Kanye West, etc.) are on major labels and do have promotion from major labels, these artists are also already successful enough to have done their own promotion if they wanted to. On top of that, these successful artists by todays standards are selling what would have been considered disappointing numbers for artists at their levels 20 years ago. In the 90s Hootie and the Blowfish (an act with no staying power) sold 16 million albums in the US. By comparison Adele's 25 which is a huge hit by today's standards has only sold 3 million copies in the US (though 16 million worldwide.) In the 90s many albums sold tens of millions of copies, nobody does that any more. Bowie was 100% right.
- maldusiecle 11y ago
  Where are your numbers coming from? Wikipedia says 25 has sold 7.6 million in the US, and it's only been out a few months. 21 sold 11 million. In comparison, Thriller, one of the bestselling records of all time, sold 30 million. (All these numbers are US sales only.) The data says exactly the opposite of what you're saying.
hammock 11y ago
Music sales /= music (although there's an interesting debate to be had on that)

eiz 11y ago

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0-51IkWpFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0-51IkWpFE

braythwayt 11y ago

> I don’t even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, > because I don’t think it’s going to work by labels and by distribution > systems in the same way. > > --David Bowie, 2002 Something to think about in music that also happens in startups and software: These are social activities. People don’t judge music solely by some kind of independent metric of appeal. They also judge whether the music is popular within their social circle. Choice of music is one of the mediums people use for communicating. To listen to something nobody except you likes is a little like programming in a language nobody you know uses. We make up all sorts of stories about how network effects affect the quality of a language, the availability of tools, and so on, and all that is true. But it’s also true that we self-identify in a tribal way with our choices, and that those choices have social import. Even if you brag defiantly that you’re a pragmatist who doesn’t care who does or doesn’t use a tool: That’s a lot like being a hipster growing a beard and putting on plaid. So back to music. The vast majority of people wish to belong to the tribe of “The vast majority of people.” They work very hard to study what is and isn’t “mainstream.” There is thus a very natural force by the market to want to have some kind of pop music dominated by just a few superstars at a time. This, I believe, drives a winner-take-all market for pop music, which in turn is a huge incentive for the existence of massive pop marketing machines. Even if you take all the friction out of distribution and discovery, the mainstream want there to be a massive marketing push for pop artists, it helps them judge who is going to be popular. It’s not that much different than picking a JavaScript library because some large and well-heeled organization is devoting themselves to support it. You may personally say it has something to do with bug fixes, but for most people that fact helps them judge whether other people will adopt the library, which helps them judge whether they want to belong to that particular tribe. And most people want to belong to the biggest tribe, and will follow the signals with the biggest boost. Thus, labels or some other kind of very big, very efficient machine for manipulating pop culture.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sjclemmy 11y ago
I think Bowie was the antithesis of this. If you'll forgive the hyperbole, he is the archetypal outsider, the patron saint of the dispossessed. So for all those who don't feel that they belong, Bowie's activities provided a message - 'It's OK to be an outsider', and, curiously, through that message provided a sense of belonging - I'm going to get all metaphysical and say that that is alchemical / transformative in a very profound way for many people.

joosters 11y ago

See also 'Bowie Bonds' - http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/11/2149761/a-short-history-of-the-bowie-bond/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/01/11/2149761/a-short-histor... David Bowie sold the rights to future royalties from his music, in the form of bonds. Presumably influenced by his thinking that music was going to be napsterised.

rayiner 11y ago

It's so funny how people construct narratives. I'm listening to Bloomberg Business on the radio and they're talking about how David Bowie was a pioneer in monetizing future copyright cashflows to finance music production.

nkrisc 11y ago
Was a pioneer in that when? The two angles aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Theoretically he could be good at milking copyright while it lasted even if he didn't believe it would be around forever.
- goodJobWalrus 11y ago
  1997. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond#Bowie_Bonds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond#Bowie_Bonds
lmm 11y ago
If you believed that copyright was going to go away in ten years, surely selling off future copyright cashflows is exactly what you would want to do.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Brilliant. Cash out now before the music became a stranded asset.

SonicSoul 11y ago

this is a travesty. In addition to loving his music he also lived in my neighborhood in nyc and I've been naming our internal applications after his songs. Put up a black banner on Ground Control as we speak :( my favorite is the collab he did with Trent Reznor on I'm Afraid of Americans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPVrFIP0CMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPVrFIP0CMs

miles932 11y ago
Yeah, that song rocks pretty hard :)
- kleer001 11y ago
  If you haven't yet check out the single for that song. It goes really deep into the aesthetics and experiements with Trent Reznor's sensibilities. It's like Reznor shacked up in a cabin for the weekend to bang out some remixes. Warning, they get dark and noisy fast.
wanda 11y ago
I wonder if the starman Perl webserver is named after the David Bowie song...
- SonicSoul 11y ago
  very likely!!! I considered that name too for my next app and i didn't know about the Perl webserver :)

martin1975 11y ago

Metallica hates you, Major Tom! And you are right - music is becoming a commodity, and I hope to pay not $15/album, but more like $2/album, of which 1.5 goes to the artist and .5 goes to whomever helped them do a professional studio recording. The distribution will inevitably happen on the internet. That's how you end piracy and motivate people to pay artists for their divine gift.

malkia 11y ago

This reminds me of Francis Ford Coppola interview in 99u.com - http://99u.com/articles/6973/francis-ford-coppola-on-risk-money-craft-collaboration http://99u.com/articles/6973/francis-ford-coppola-on-risk-mo... Quoting from the article: Q: How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce? A: We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script. This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money.

eslaught 11y ago
But is that the way we want the world to work, or just something we've resigned ourselves to because we think it's inevitable? I'm pursuing a CS PhD; in my free time, I'm working on a science fiction novel. In some ways, I think a PhD is the perfect vehicle for this since I'm free to "explore" intellectually, as long I still publish in my field. And I make things work: I squirrel away bits of time for writing, and still have enough left over to get my work done. But I look at the industry (especially in Silicon Valley), and I'm not sure I can expect to keep going on my side projects. Work weeks of 50, 60, or more hours are common at companies in the area, and even more so at startups. I did a lot of interviews for internships and such in undergrad and early grad school, and I would ask interviewers whether they worked on any open source projects during their free time. The answer was almost always no. I found it perplexing at the time, but looking back I think it's a relatively straightforward consequence of the environment people are working in. Most people aren't in a position to take up serious hobbies, and a big part of that is work culture and the sorts of hours employers expect. I think Coppola is very lucky if he has a job where he can do this balancing act. Perhaps I'll be lucky too, I don't know. But I hope we're not driving our society towards a situation where you need to have some sort of exceptionally flexible day job in order to make progress on your other pursuits. And while I wouldn't want to be a professional artist myself (I love CS too much for that), I do hope that it'll be possible to be paid to do art in the next 100 years.

markman 11y ago

Why was this quote posted? To show that Bowie was a moron like Al Gore? In 2002 everybody knew the above quote. Honestly some people...