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> How will I be able to support my gift? In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly.

> How will I be able to support my gift? In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Control of new types of distribution created scarcity and new forms of expression and shifting norms jacked up demand. But now distribution is free, instant and global. Demand has flatlined and production has exploded. The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not "how do I get paid for what my art is worth?", but instead "was my art ever worth much to begin with?"

dkrich 9y ago
The question of worth changes as time goes by and technology changes. When your only option for consuming a new song was to either wait for it to play on the radio or go buy the album, the value was much higher because supply was controlled by a few and consequently in short supply, so pricing power was much higher. Now most of the power lies with the consumer who will typically consume whatever artists choose to offer their creations for close to free. There are some artists like Garth Brooks and formerly Taylor Swift, who wield enough power through enormous demand for their songs to limit supply and charge higher amounts, but these are the exceptions. What's ironic about this article to me is that Justin Bieber would likely not have ever become famous in the first place if not for YouTube because that's where he was discovered. The same goes for a large percentage of today's most successful artists. So previously the record labels wielded all the power and only the chosen few who they deemed worthy made large sums of money. Now pretty much anybody can put their stuff out there but the consequence is that they can't control the supply.
olivermarks 9y ago
>The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not "how do I get paid for what my art is worth?", but instead "was my art ever worth much to begin with?" I disagree. The hard questions for creators of anything is how to control sales of the product. The digital platforms have failed musicians. The challenge is how to enforce prevention of piracy (ie illegal uploading of material). This will ultimately be legal hardball, and what 'record companies' used to do to protect their label and artist roster. Someone needs ot take on the big digital platforms in a landmark case. Regarding creativity, a tangible asset (like a box and booklet containing the music in some new format for example) would go a long way to making people think they had actually bought 'something' rather than just listening to an fM radio like stream of tunes. Art is rarely worth very much at the time of creation, but can subsequently explode in future popularity. Creators need robust protection mechanisms in place to help them keep creating, and that is legal precidents.
- dhruvrrp 9y ago
  What? Piracy isn’t the evil that it used to be 15-20 years ago where people would rip cds and tapes. Nowadays everyones music is hosted and streamed legally on youtube/spotify/play music/any generic music service. The days of people paying $20 for an album cd just to listen to the one hit they like are long gone. If artists trust their popularity then they can pull their music from streaming services, indirectly forcing fans to purchase their albums (like taylor swift did a while ago). But even this isnt an option for smaller artists, who would just disappear into obscurity because of how over saturated the industry is.
  - rlonstein 9y ago
    > The days of people paying $20 for an album anecdata, but I see a lot of people (myself included) buying $10 CD's and $20 vinyl with a download code at shows in small venues.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      What parent said holds up if you include the other half of that sentence.
- cl0ne 9y ago
  I'm not too worried about people pirating my music. It's already up on Spotify and Apple Music legally and I make no money from that. Most people I know in smaller bands are not in it for the money and support themselves through other jobs. I'm happy as long as enough people turn out to shows and have a good time and we make enough money to help out a bit with practice space rent or gas and food while on tour. People who are into it are supportive and do buy tangible assets such as records or tapes at shows or order them online. There are enough people out there who'd rather pay for a record they can hold, look at the artwork and listen to as a complete album instead of just skipping through some mp3 files or hearing a random song in a stream. I'd say that people coming out to shows and buying records and merch is what helps us keep creating.
walshemj 9y ago
Is this when your being held upside down out of the window over Denmark street (londons tin pan alley)? BTW the father of one reality show host is alledged to have done this to a famous British musician back in the day.
- dave_sullivan 9y ago
  I thought that was Suge Knight's move with Vanilla Ice. Music business can be rough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zesMAuJrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zesMAuJrM
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Apocryphally it was Don Arden (Sharon Osbourne's Father) did this to Tommy Steel
Animats 9y ago
In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Historically, musicians and actors were very poorly paid. For a brief period in the 20th century, some of them made a lot of money. That's over. There were, at peak, several million Myspace bands. Some of which didn't suck. Supply of musicians far exceeds demand.
- cl0ne 9y ago
  Myspace was great for smaller bands. It made it very easy to connect with like-minded artists and set up tours and shows on your own.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    Clearly, it did not work for myspace.
Applejinx 9y ago
If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous. Just because some of us are eking out a sort of existence in the new era doesn't make it a functional system. I would be perfectly happy to see it become 'this is the Star Trek future, your entire compensation is the satisfaction of a job well done and being personally liked for what you've created', if our world operated on some sort of UBI and we didn't have to have our performance linked to survival at all. Under those circumstances, things naturally shift down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and people take for granted that they'll live, and get desperate for validation and popularity, that being what they lack. I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'. Self-evidently it doesn't anyway, so literally nothing of value is lost. BUT, we have that completely decoupled world and yet demand that people pay for even the most frugal living with money they got somebody to give them, in a world where people simply can't and don't do that anymore. Silicon Valley clever-boffins: come up with some disruptive alternative really fast. We don't have time to mess around, and what these songwriters face is the same fate waiting for all of us, in turn, including you. How about abolishing money and replacing it entirely with 'likes'?
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > abolishing money Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. > Star Trek is an imaginary utopia. You can always make things work when writing a script.
  - Retric 9y ago
    I know of several Communes that worked just fine for 20+ years. What's interesting is not that they die off, but that the form so naturally. To survive they need to be like collage fraternity's and focus on new membership regularly, but naturally occurring Communes don't have that drive out of thin air. Monastic orders for example can be stable over hundreds of years, but to pull that off they need a focus on new membership. They fail not when the last member dies, but when nobody signed on 20 years before then. PS: There are ideological reasons that people oppose communes, and many had significant issues. However, the jump from 6 young people sharing rent, to 20 young people living together is not that difficult. And at 20 people economy of scale kicks in where buying in bulk saves money but meticulous record keeping is not worth the effort.
ropeladder 9y ago
You are confusing "distribution" with "supply". Having lots of people making music is a different issue from having music freely available via youtube. Music has been pretty darn cheap to reproduce for decades. Yes, availability of substitutes can diminish bargaining power of music rights holders, but I'm not convinced that's at all how we should interpret these numbers. I think this is more about market power and network effects of the middlemen (google, pandora, the labels, etc...) I would be interested in the revenue split between rights holders and YouTube.
- abiox 9y ago
  > Music has been pretty darn cheap to reproduce for decades. in a sense yes, but it depends on what you refer to by 'cheap'. other factors like convenience, availability, quality, storage, etc. were often quite different. it's one thing to wait around for your song and then tape if off an FM radio broadcast, another to just download some 'lossless'-encoded bits off the web at will.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > Music has been pretty darn cheap to reproduce for decades. "Cheap" is relative. It is relatively "cheap" to copy tape or Vinyl. Now, we have digital files. Copying them is perfect and free. "Cheap" is infinitely more expensive than free.
sdfnnii3388 9y ago
What de-humanizing nonsense. I have inate creative abilities. What should it matter to me whether others find value in what I choose to produce with them? Participating in free market capitalism is simply a pragmatic choice when no others exist. If people can't create freely and survive, that's a problem with our society, not where an individual is putting their efforts. "But now distribution is free, instant and global." You got subsidized free internet? A free computer? Free software tools that aren't a kludgey mess? What sort of fairy tale world do you live in?
briholt 9y ago
Turns out writers weren't being paid for their songs, but were being paid for a portion of the massive markup on a plastic disk. Now that the disks are gone, the value of the song is laid bare. The same has largely become true for software. How many new Lotus's or Corels are being funded today?
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Yup. The value of software has been driven literally to $0. Yet I still keep writing software :-)
  - briholt 9y ago
    Me too. But I write it for the web, so I get paid for the massive markup on web servers running the code.
    - _dps 9y ago
      I'm not sure if I'm missing sarcasm here; if I am I apologize. But... this is obviously not how the world works. In the records and CDs era revenue was proportional to disks shuffled around. It is absolutely not the case that a typical web business has revenue proportional to the number of servers they employ. The important point here is what economists call "trapping the value" and "pricing power": a CD full of music has lots of value, but the person selling the physical item was at one point the person controlling scarcity, and thus had pricing power, so they trapped most of the value. Nowadays web business models allow developers to trap the value of their software more effectively. That doesn't mean they are piggybacking on the markup on web servers.
      - briholt 9y ago
        I meant we markup the computing power of the server (not exactly the purchase price). My host rents me a server that can perform X calculations for $Y/hour. I divide and resell that computation power, plus my software, to customers at Z markup.
  - deleted 9y ago
danvoell 9y ago
"But now distribution is free, instant and global" The only word in this phrase that's new is global. You could always go out on the corner and "instantly distribute" your music for free. What we are seeing in music is the same as we are seeing in the retail industry with Amazon. Those who own the distribution channel create the winners and the losers. With certain distributers having so much leverage they take power away from the creators. It becomes a race to the bottom.
- look_lookatme 9y ago
  You are making a semantic argument. I apologize for not being more precise with my language. Going out on the street to sell your music is hardly meaningful distribution at all compared to putting up a Bandcamp with your music for sale. One has the upside of maybe a few hundred people in a day, the other has billions of Internet-connected consumers. In the past, the distribution channels were owned by radio conglomerates and retail conglomerates and distributors/publishers/marketing/etc. Basically the music industrial complex. And it was very hard to penetrate that complex with your art and have anyone consume it, much less pay for it. And they picked winners and losers capriciously. Now you can put your music on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, etc. If one of those won't take you, there are others that will. And you can promote a song on Reddit and it can go to the front page and you can have millions of people listening to your music tomorrow. That's what I mean by distribution.
amelius 9y ago
> But now distribution is free That is laughable. Middle-men like YouTube (Google), record companies and other channels take most of your money. I wouldn't call that free. (Discoverability is part of distribution)
- civilian 9y ago
  Free as in cost-- the cost is nearly free. The point is--- if the cost is nearly free, why not do it yourself? You're right that youtube/google/spotify are going to take a cut for distribution, but you really don't need the record companies. And if your music is good, and you already have a following, you can just sell it on Bandcamp.

dkrich 9y ago

The question of worth changes as time goes by and technology changes. When your only option for consuming a new song was to either wait for it to play on the radio or go buy the album, the value was much higher because supply was controlled by a few and consequently in short supply, so pricing power was much higher. Now most of the power lies with the consumer who will typically consume whatever artists choose to offer their creations for close to free. There are some artists like Garth Brooks and formerly Taylor Swift, who wield enough power through enormous demand for their songs to limit supply and charge higher amounts, but these are the exceptions. What's ironic about this article to me is that Justin Bieber would likely not have ever become famous in the first place if not for YouTube because that's where he was discovered. The same goes for a large percentage of today's most successful artists. So previously the record labels wielded all the power and only the chosen few who they deemed worthy made large sums of money. Now pretty much anybody can put their stuff out there but the consequence is that they can't control the supply.

olivermarks 9y ago

>The hard question a creator needs to ask themselves now is not "how do I get paid for what my art is worth?", but instead "was my art ever worth much to begin with?" I disagree. The hard questions for creators of anything is how to control sales of the product. The digital platforms have failed musicians. The challenge is how to enforce prevention of piracy (ie illegal uploading of material). This will ultimately be legal hardball, and what 'record companies' used to do to protect their label and artist roster. Someone needs ot take on the big digital platforms in a landmark case. Regarding creativity, a tangible asset (like a box and booklet containing the music in some new format for example) would go a long way to making people think they had actually bought 'something' rather than just listening to an fM radio like stream of tunes. Art is rarely worth very much at the time of creation, but can subsequently explode in future popularity. Creators need robust protection mechanisms in place to help them keep creating, and that is legal precidents.

dhruvrrp 9y ago
What? Piracy isn’t the evil that it used to be 15-20 years ago where people would rip cds and tapes. Nowadays everyones music is hosted and streamed legally on youtube/spotify/play music/any generic music service. The days of people paying $20 for an album cd just to listen to the one hit they like are long gone. If artists trust their popularity then they can pull their music from streaming services, indirectly forcing fans to purchase their albums (like taylor swift did a while ago). But even this isnt an option for smaller artists, who would just disappear into obscurity because of how over saturated the industry is.
- rlonstein 9y ago
  > The days of people paying $20 for an album anecdata, but I see a lot of people (myself included) buying $10 CD's and $20 vinyl with a download code at shows in small venues.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    What parent said holds up if you include the other half of that sentence.
cl0ne 9y ago
I'm not too worried about people pirating my music. It's already up on Spotify and Apple Music legally and I make no money from that. Most people I know in smaller bands are not in it for the money and support themselves through other jobs. I'm happy as long as enough people turn out to shows and have a good time and we make enough money to help out a bit with practice space rent or gas and food while on tour. People who are into it are supportive and do buy tangible assets such as records or tapes at shows or order them online. There are enough people out there who'd rather pay for a record they can hold, look at the artwork and listen to as a complete album instead of just skipping through some mp3 files or hearing a random song in a stream. I'd say that people coming out to shows and buying records and merch is what helps us keep creating.

walshemj 9y ago

Is this when your being held upside down out of the window over Denmark street (londons tin pan alley)? BTW the father of one reality show host is alledged to have done this to a famous British musician back in the day.

dave_sullivan 9y ago
I thought that was Suge Knight's move with Vanilla Ice. Music business can be rough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zesMAuJrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3zesMAuJrM
- walshemj 9y ago
  Apocryphally it was Don Arden (Sharon Osbourne's Father) did this to Tommy Steel

Animats 9y ago

In the end what we are seeing is that that golden era of creators making a living (and much much more) was an anomaly. Historically, musicians and actors were very poorly paid. For a brief period in the 20th century, some of them made a lot of money. That's over. There were, at peak, several million Myspace bands. Some of which didn't suck. Supply of musicians far exceeds demand.

cl0ne 9y ago
Myspace was great for smaller bands. It made it very easy to connect with like-minded artists and set up tours and shows on your own.
- notyourday 9y ago
  Clearly, it did not work for myspace.

Applejinx 9y ago

If even people reaching a truly stupidly huge number of people don't get even close to making a living (I get more than that off a few hundred people on Patreon for the work that I do), in a situation where those operating the streaming services are renting out entire floors of office buildings in Manhattan, your question is disingenuous. Just because some of us are eking out a sort of existence in the new era doesn't make it a functional system. I would be perfectly happy to see it become 'this is the Star Trek future, your entire compensation is the satisfaction of a job well done and being personally liked for what you've created', if our world operated on some sort of UBI and we didn't have to have our performance linked to survival at all. Under those circumstances, things naturally shift down the Maslow hierarchy of needs, and people take for granted that they'll live, and get desperate for validation and popularity, that being what they lack. I have NO problem with a world that completely unlinks money from performance, because I'm not a free-market capitalist type demanding that financial reward behave like a 'meritocracy'. Self-evidently it doesn't anyway, so literally nothing of value is lost. BUT, we have that completely decoupled world and yet demand that people pay for even the most frugal living with money they got somebody to give them, in a world where people simply can't and don't do that anymore. Silicon Valley clever-boffins: come up with some disruptive alternative really fast. We don't have time to mess around, and what these songwriters face is the same fate waiting for all of us, in turn, including you. How about abolishing money and replacing it entirely with 'likes'?

WalterBright 9y ago
> abolishing money Communes have been tried, voluntary ones and forcible ones, over and over. They never work out. People just aren't wired up that way. > Star Trek is an imaginary utopia. You can always make things work when writing a script.
- Retric 9y ago
  I know of several Communes that worked just fine for 20+ years. What's interesting is not that they die off, but that the form so naturally. To survive they need to be like collage fraternity's and focus on new membership regularly, but naturally occurring Communes don't have that drive out of thin air. Monastic orders for example can be stable over hundreds of years, but to pull that off they need a focus on new membership. They fail not when the last member dies, but when nobody signed on 20 years before then. PS: There are ideological reasons that people oppose communes, and many had significant issues. However, the jump from 6 young people sharing rent, to 20 young people living together is not that difficult. And at 20 people economy of scale kicks in where buying in bulk saves money but meticulous record keeping is not worth the effort.

ropeladder 9y ago

You are confusing "distribution" with "supply". Having lots of people making music is a different issue from having music freely available via youtube. Music has been pretty darn cheap to reproduce for decades. Yes, availability of substitutes can diminish bargaining power of music rights holders, but I'm not convinced that's at all how we should interpret these numbers. I think this is more about market power and network effects of the middlemen (google, pandora, the labels, etc...) I would be interested in the revenue split between rights holders and YouTube.

abiox 9y ago
> Music has been pretty darn cheap to reproduce for decades. in a sense yes, but it depends on what you refer to by 'cheap'. other factors like convenience, availability, quality, storage, etc. were often quite different. it's one thing to wait around for your song and then tape if off an FM radio broadcast, another to just download some 'lossless'-encoded bits off the web at will.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
> Music has been pretty darn cheap to reproduce for decades. "Cheap" is relative. It is relatively "cheap" to copy tape or Vinyl. Now, we have digital files. Copying them is perfect and free. "Cheap" is infinitely more expensive than free.

sdfnnii3388 9y ago

What de-humanizing nonsense. I have inate creative abilities. What should it matter to me whether others find value in what I choose to produce with them? Participating in free market capitalism is simply a pragmatic choice when no others exist. If people can't create freely and survive, that's a problem with our society, not where an individual is putting their efforts. "But now distribution is free, instant and global." You got subsidized free internet? A free computer? Free software tools that aren't a kludgey mess? What sort of fairy tale world do you live in?

briholt 9y ago

Turns out writers weren't being paid for their songs, but were being paid for a portion of the massive markup on a plastic disk. Now that the disks are gone, the value of the song is laid bare. The same has largely become true for software. How many new Lotus's or Corels are being funded today?

WalterBright 9y ago
Yup. The value of software has been driven literally to $0. Yet I still keep writing software :-)
- briholt 9y ago
  Me too. But I write it for the web, so I get paid for the massive markup on web servers running the code.
  - _dps 9y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm missing sarcasm here; if I am I apologize. But... this is obviously not how the world works. In the records and CDs era revenue was proportional to disks shuffled around. It is absolutely not the case that a typical web business has revenue proportional to the number of servers they employ. The important point here is what economists call "trapping the value" and "pricing power": a CD full of music has lots of value, but the person selling the physical item was at one point the person controlling scarcity, and thus had pricing power, so they trapped most of the value. Nowadays web business models allow developers to trap the value of their software more effectively. That doesn't mean they are piggybacking on the markup on web servers.
    - briholt 9y ago
      I meant we markup the computing power of the server (not exactly the purchase price). My host rents me a server that can perform X calculations for $Y/hour. I divide and resell that computation power, plus my software, to customers at Z markup.
- deleted 9y ago

danvoell 9y ago

"But now distribution is free, instant and global" The only word in this phrase that's new is global. You could always go out on the corner and "instantly distribute" your music for free. What we are seeing in music is the same as we are seeing in the retail industry with Amazon. Those who own the distribution channel create the winners and the losers. With certain distributers having so much leverage they take power away from the creators. It becomes a race to the bottom.

look_lookatme 9y ago
You are making a semantic argument. I apologize for not being more precise with my language. Going out on the street to sell your music is hardly meaningful distribution at all compared to putting up a Bandcamp with your music for sale. One has the upside of maybe a few hundred people in a day, the other has billions of Internet-connected consumers. In the past, the distribution channels were owned by radio conglomerates and retail conglomerates and distributors/publishers/marketing/etc. Basically the music industrial complex. And it was very hard to penetrate that complex with your art and have anyone consume it, much less pay for it. And they picked winners and losers capriciously. Now you can put your music on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, iTunes, etc. If one of those won't take you, there are others that will. And you can promote a song on Reddit and it can go to the front page and you can have millions of people listening to your music tomorrow. That's what I mean by distribution.

amelius 9y ago

> But now distribution is free That is laughable. Middle-men like YouTube (Google), record companies and other channels take most of your money. I wouldn't call that free. (Discoverability is part of distribution)

civilian 9y ago
Free as in cost-- the cost is nearly free. The point is--- if the cost is nearly free, why not do it yourself? You're right that youtube/google/spotify are going to take a cut for distribution, but you really don't need the record companies. And if your music is good, and you already have a following, you can just sell it on Bandcamp.