4 ms·

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 underst

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
  > 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 issue is that such websites come to be abused and people upload copyrighted material (like youtube). Then the record company sues and the website cannot stay alive any longer.
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem? For example, I know there are various sorts of "fingerprinting" technologies developed for identifying music fragments -- perhaps it would be possible to automatically identify copyrighted material using these sorts of technologies? Presumably Google does this already for YouTube, so someone make the technology available to indy websites providing upload functionality?
    - the_common_man 9y ago
      > Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem? The issue is that the companies do not have the originals to fingerprint since they are held hostage by media companies... :/ Maybe there is a way to fingerprint using pirated music or youtube audio? As for youtube, it was filled with pirated content and was getting sued to oblivion until Google saved them.
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    In a perfect world I guess the media companies would work with technology companies and distribute some sort of fingerprint database such that if smaller fish obey the fingerprint database then they can be fairly sure of not being sued. One might even naively think that it would be in the interests of the large media companies to distribute such a thing because it would help avoid piracy.

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
> 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 issue is that such websites come to be abused and people upload copyrighted material (like youtube). Then the record company sues and the website cannot stay alive any longer.
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem? For example, I know there are various sorts of "fingerprinting" technologies developed for identifying music fragments -- perhaps it would be possible to automatically identify copyrighted material using these sorts of technologies? Presumably Google does this already for YouTube, so someone make the technology available to indy websites providing upload functionality?
  - the_common_man 9y ago
    > Shouldn't we be able to come up with technical solutions to that problem? The issue is that the companies do not have the originals to fingerprint since they are held hostage by media companies... :/ Maybe there is a way to fingerprint using pirated music or youtube audio? As for youtube, it was filled with pirated content and was getting sued to oblivion until Google saved them.
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  In a perfect world I guess the media companies would work with technology companies and distribute some sort of fingerprint database such that if smaller fish obey the fingerprint database then they can be fairly sure of not being sued. One might even naively think that it would be in the interests of the large media companies to distribute such a thing because it would help avoid piracy.