5 ms·

No, it shows us that our economies make it very hard to maintain a valuable and beautiful cultural/artistic ecosystem as a commercial entity.

WJW 9y ago
I feel it is also a culture thing: Some artistic subcommunities seem to revel in the image of the 'starving artist' and making a lot of money is often regarded as 'selling out'. Certainly anything liked by the mainstream immediately loses its appeal for the groups that like to think the have exquisite tastes. (almost by definition) So, websites like soundcloud find themselves in a bind: on one hand they can't start making lots of money because they would lose their artistic street cred, on the other hand their servers and bandwidth cost money. Blaming this lack of money for artistic on the economy seems a little bit off, this has basically been the case since Roman days. I feel sites like github have a nice middle ground, charging a little bit to professional users while offering the service for free to open source users. It doesn't lead to billion dollar valuations quite as fast as an advertising model though...
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
  - WJW 9y ago
    I think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users. I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much.
    - pas 9y ago
      How would you distribute the recommendation system efficiently?
duncan_bayne 9y ago
The music industry takes $18bn / year revenue, and movies $62bn. Perhaps I'm missing your point, because that seems like a whole lot of "valuable" to me?
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  I was referring to the non-mainstream music that is what people originally loved soundcloud for. The figures you refer to are entirely dominated by sales for music and movies of mainstream genres.
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything, unless the target audience happens to be particularly rich. I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it?
    - Myrmornis 9y ago
      > By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything Consider a market with genre A with 1 million listeners, and 10 million other genres with 1 listener each. We can agree that the definition of the word "mainstream" will be such that genre A is "mainstream", and yet there is much more money in the sum of the non-mainstream genres. > I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it? When I said "valuable ecosystem" I meant culturally valuable, not necessarily revenue/year valuable. I am simply saying that it would be nice if our world satisfied the following: IF: Some sound engineers who are into electronic music create a website which allows lots of people to share underground electronic music with each other, and start employing people to work on the website THEN: The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely.
      - the_common_man 9y ago

WJW 9y ago

I feel it is also a culture thing: Some artistic subcommunities seem to revel in the image of the 'starving artist' and making a lot of money is often regarded as 'selling out'. Certainly anything liked by the mainstream immediately loses its appeal for the groups that like to think the have exquisite tastes. (almost by definition) So, websites like soundcloud find themselves in a bind: on one hand they can't start making lots of money because they would lose their artistic street cred, on the other hand their servers and bandwidth cost money. Blaming this lack of money for artistic on the economy seems a little bit off, this has basically been the case since Roman days. I feel sites like github have a nice middle ground, charging a little bit to professional users while offering the service for free to open source users. It doesn't lead to billion dollar valuations quite as fast as an advertising model though...

Myrmornis 9y ago
I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
- WJW 9y ago
  I think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users. I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much.
  - pas 9y ago
    How would you distribute the recommendation system efficiently?

duncan_bayne 9y ago

The music industry takes $18bn / year revenue, and movies $62bn. Perhaps I'm missing your point, because that seems like a whole lot of "valuable" to me?

Myrmornis 9y ago
I was referring to the non-mainstream music that is what people originally loved soundcloud for. The figures you refer to are entirely dominated by sales for music and movies of mainstream genres.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything, unless the target audience happens to be particularly rich. I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it?
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    > By definition, there will be less money for non-mainstream anything Consider a market with genre A with 1 million listeners, and 10 million other genres with 1 listener each. We can agree that the definition of the word "mainstream" will be such that genre A is "mainstream", and yet there is much more money in the sum of the non-mainstream genres. > I guess I'm failing to understand what your vision of a better music market would look like. Can you describe it? When I said "valuable ecosystem" I meant culturally valuable, not necessarily revenue/year valuable. I am simply saying that it would be nice if our world satisfied the following: IF: Some sound engineers who are into electronic music create a website which allows lots of people to share underground electronic music with each other, and start employing people to work on the website THEN: The website can continue to play the role which people have come to love it for, without having to change much, and the employees will be reasonably and stably compensated for working on the website, indefinitely.
    - the_common_man 9y ago