7 ms·

It's also the reason behind ridiculous things like DRM. The idea that there is a difference between broadcasting and copying, and that computers can emulate th

It's also the reason behind ridiculous things like DRM. The idea that there is a difference between broadcasting and copying, and that computers can emulate that difference is a pipe dream; nonetheless shared by most music labels.

QAPereo 9y ago
It’s an endless boon to piracy, which should have largely died if not for the rampant greed and incompetence of publishers.
- sideshowb 9y ago
  I agree publishers were incompetent (in clinging onto old models rather than adapting), but has streaming really helped the average artist? Having the option to distribute music for free has been good, for sure Setting the expectation that music should be near enough free, less so You could argue this is one of those public good situations universal income is designed to address, but it certainly hasn't yet.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    For the vast majority of history, musicians were not some of the wealthiest members of society, far from it. Music has traditionally been “near free” and only ceased to be during a brief period necessitated by tech. That period has long since ended. I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development? At any rate, rich, world-famous artists are the least harmed by changes in the music industry.
      - CamperBob2 9y ago
        How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development? I'd ask how much FOSS software is running on your machine right now, and how you intend to pay for it...
        scarface74 9y ago
        How much FOSS software is actually funded by big companies that are either trying to upsell support or non free offerings, trying to get others to contribute for free to help them,or by companies who are trying to "commoditize their compliments"? Most major open source software is not done as a labor of love.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        Whereas most music is clearly the muses working through mortal souls, right? Come on...
        scarface74 9y ago
        Whereas most music is clearly the muses working through mortal souls, right? Come on... I'm saying just the opposite, he seems to implying that the majority of well known, popular open source software is done by starving programmers as a labor of love. Their is usually a financial motive.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - fnovd 9y ago
        I'm now imagining a disenchanted musician spending 8 hours a day at the cubicle making "business music."
        krallja 9y ago
        Sounds like session musicians, or maybe the composers of advertising jingles.
    - state_less 9y ago
      Being a musical artist is not easy business for pretty much every artists except for a few outliers, though we do appreciate and consume music. If you made a graph with the x axis being percentile and the y axis being the amount of money made, on the far right side of the x axis there would be a huge spike where a tiny fraction are making a fortune. (I think) I'd prefer the spike to be smoothed out. What's interesting is that Apple/Google/Pandora/Spotify could test this. Adjust the distribution curve and then see how demand for music services changes over the years. With more artists able to live as pros, would music as a whole be more in demand? I'd venture that music as a whole would be more in demand due to increasing the number of (quality) trials in the musical search space. And if you flatten it out too much, you would reduce the motivation to continue to try to "hit it big", so you're looking to optimize the distribution curve.
      - xyproto 9y ago
        If you want to redistribute wealth, why stop at oenly musicians? I'm thinking universal basic income, then let robots do the work.
      - sideshowb 9y ago
        I think what you're doing (seeing this as an optimization problem) is asking the right sort of question A related point is the FOSS-style model of "give away music for free, make money on tours/advertising/movie soundtracks" biases the search towards music that works well in live performance/in advertising/in a film. So we are missing huge parts of the search space.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      Not even then. Musicians as a group weren't wealthy even in the heyday of physical albums. As with so many things, it's only a handful of top names that make a bundle.
    - sideshowb 9y ago
      Can we ignore any question about whether 21st century tech/economic changes are helpful to us by saying "for the vast majority of history, we lived in caves and many died in childbirth?"
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        That’s an excellent point, but I’d say that death during childbirth has always been recognized as a bad outcome. I’m not so convinced that the same can be said for the history of music before the modern mass market. I don’t think that the history of music is akin to the history of premedical chikdbirth; the history of music is in fact replete with positive outcomes we enjoy to this day.
        sideshowb 9y ago
        Sure, but the question of whether or not streaming has helped music or musicians overall has nothing to do with the economic model of the 19th century and prior. It's about the change from 20th to 21st century. I hope in future we come up with something better than any of the three.
  - ekimekim 9y ago
    > but has streaming really helped the average artist? Sure has helped most of the artists I know, who would never be lucky enough/know the right people to be among the chosen elite that got to participate in the record system. Streaming services and the internet means that 100000s of artists can have a following of maybe 1000 people each and still make ends meet doing what they love. They won't get filthy rich, but they'll make a living.
emodendroket 9y ago
It doesn't seem outlandish to claim there's a distinction between a broadcast, where you might hear a song at a particular time of day, and having an on-demand copy of a song at any time. The former scenario could see you, for instance, buying a CD because you liked a song you heard on the radio; that is probably not as likely with Spotify.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  People used to regularly create mix tapes from radio broadcasts.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Yes, I can remember putting the New Radicals on a dictaphone. If you did that the quality would be exceptionally low.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  There is, but that distinction does not exist with internet distribution. It's arbitrarily enforced via DRM (which doesn't really work), which is in turn enforced by Section 1201 of the DMCA. > The former scenario could see you, for instance, buying a CD because you liked a song you heard on the radio; that is probably not as likely with Spotify. That depends on whether you want to support the record label/artist, and find CDs as/more convenient as/than streaming. The trouble is that CDs are really less convenient, and therefore less valuable. Copyright holders should react to the declining value of physical media by creating better distribution platforms. Unfortunately, they have failed miserably, and now resort to disproportional copyright enforcement and DRM, which pushes the value of their product even farther down.
  - thirdsun 9y ago
    I can't seem to follow your argument. If you want DRM-free, lossless, digital music to download and own you can buy it from countless shops - from iTunes (well, not lossless) to platforms like Bandcamp to niche stores like Boomkat. I think the music industry, in contrast to its Hollywood sibling, has very much succeeded in offering DRM-free content from a wide range of stores, shops and platforms. Physical media like CDs aren't relevant to this development. Of course a subscription-based streaming service like Spotify can't operate without DRM. It's the whole point of the service: If you stop being a subscriber you lose access to the content.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Friendly reminder: when discussed in context of copyright laws, "broadcasting" and "copying" are colours, only tangentially related to technical meaning of those terms. The law deals with colours, not with physical reality. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 (TL;DR: 'colour' captures those path-dependent aspects of a thing, like where did it came from and why someone is doing something with it. A song legally bought and one illegally acquired may be bit-for-bit identical, but they have different colours.)
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > only tangentially related to technical meaning of those terms. Let's get some new words then. We need to be explicit.

QAPereo 9y ago

It’s an endless boon to piracy, which should have largely died if not for the rampant greed and incompetence of publishers.

sideshowb 9y ago
I agree publishers were incompetent (in clinging onto old models rather than adapting), but has streaming really helped the average artist? Having the option to distribute music for free has been good, for sure Setting the expectation that music should be near enough free, less so You could argue this is one of those public good situations universal income is designed to address, but it certainly hasn't yet.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  For the vast majority of history, musicians were not some of the wealthiest members of society, far from it. Music has traditionally been “near free” and only ceased to be during a brief period necessitated by tech. That period has long since ended. I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development? At any rate, rich, world-famous artists are the least harmed by changes in the music industry.
    - CamperBob2 9y ago
      How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development? I'd ask how much FOSS software is running on your machine right now, and how you intend to pay for it...
      - scarface74 9y ago
        How much FOSS software is actually funded by big companies that are either trying to upsell support or non free offerings, trying to get others to contribute for free to help them,or by companies who are trying to "commoditize their compliments"? Most major open source software is not done as a labor of love.
        QAPereo 9y ago
        Whereas most music is clearly the muses working through mortal souls, right? Come on...
        scarface74 9y ago
        Whereas most music is clearly the muses working through mortal souls, right? Come on... I'm saying just the opposite, he seems to implying that the majority of well known, popular open source software is done by starving programmers as a labor of love. Their is usually a financial motive.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - fnovd 9y ago
      I'm now imagining a disenchanted musician spending 8 hours a day at the cubicle making "business music."
      - krallja 9y ago
        Sounds like session musicians, or maybe the composers of advertising jingles.
  - state_less 9y ago
    Being a musical artist is not easy business for pretty much every artists except for a few outliers, though we do appreciate and consume music. If you made a graph with the x axis being percentile and the y axis being the amount of money made, on the far right side of the x axis there would be a huge spike where a tiny fraction are making a fortune. (I think) I'd prefer the spike to be smoothed out. What's interesting is that Apple/Google/Pandora/Spotify could test this. Adjust the distribution curve and then see how demand for music services changes over the years. With more artists able to live as pros, would music as a whole be more in demand? I'd venture that music as a whole would be more in demand due to increasing the number of (quality) trials in the musical search space. And if you flatten it out too much, you would reduce the motivation to continue to try to "hit it big", so you're looking to optimize the distribution curve.
    - xyproto 9y ago
      If you want to redistribute wealth, why stop at oenly musicians? I'm thinking universal basic income, then let robots do the work.
    - sideshowb 9y ago
      I think what you're doing (seeing this as an optimization problem) is asking the right sort of question A related point is the FOSS-style model of "give away music for free, make money on tours/advertising/movie soundtracks" biases the search towards music that works well in live performance/in advertising/in a film. So we are missing huge parts of the search space.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Not even then. Musicians as a group weren't wealthy even in the heyday of physical albums. As with so many things, it's only a handful of top names that make a bundle.
  - sideshowb 9y ago
    Can we ignore any question about whether 21st century tech/economic changes are helpful to us by saying "for the vast majority of history, we lived in caves and many died in childbirth?"
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      That’s an excellent point, but I’d say that death during childbirth has always been recognized as a bad outcome. I’m not so convinced that the same can be said for the history of music before the modern mass market. I don’t think that the history of music is akin to the history of premedical chikdbirth; the history of music is in fact replete with positive outcomes we enjoy to this day.
      - sideshowb 9y ago
        Sure, but the question of whether or not streaming has helped music or musicians overall has nothing to do with the economic model of the 19th century and prior. It's about the change from 20th to 21st century. I hope in future we come up with something better than any of the three.
- ekimekim 9y ago
  > but has streaming really helped the average artist? Sure has helped most of the artists I know, who would never be lucky enough/know the right people to be among the chosen elite that got to participate in the record system. Streaming services and the internet means that 100000s of artists can have a following of maybe 1000 people each and still make ends meet doing what they love. They won't get filthy rich, but they'll make a living.

emodendroket 9y ago

It doesn't seem outlandish to claim there's a distinction between a broadcast, where you might hear a song at a particular time of day, and having an on-demand copy of a song at any time. The former scenario could see you, for instance, buying a CD because you liked a song you heard on the radio; that is probably not as likely with Spotify.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
People used to regularly create mix tapes from radio broadcasts.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Yes, I can remember putting the New Radicals on a dictaphone. If you did that the quality would be exceptionally low.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
There is, but that distinction does not exist with internet distribution. It's arbitrarily enforced via DRM (which doesn't really work), which is in turn enforced by Section 1201 of the DMCA. > The former scenario could see you, for instance, buying a CD because you liked a song you heard on the radio; that is probably not as likely with Spotify. That depends on whether you want to support the record label/artist, and find CDs as/more convenient as/than streaming. The trouble is that CDs are really less convenient, and therefore less valuable. Copyright holders should react to the declining value of physical media by creating better distribution platforms. Unfortunately, they have failed miserably, and now resort to disproportional copyright enforcement and DRM, which pushes the value of their product even farther down.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  I can't seem to follow your argument. If you want DRM-free, lossless, digital music to download and own you can buy it from countless shops - from iTunes (well, not lossless) to platforms like Bandcamp to niche stores like Boomkat. I think the music industry, in contrast to its Hollywood sibling, has very much succeeded in offering DRM-free content from a wide range of stores, shops and platforms. Physical media like CDs aren't relevant to this development. Of course a subscription-based streaming service like Spotify can't operate without DRM. It's the whole point of the service: If you stop being a subscriber you lose access to the content.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Friendly reminder: when discussed in context of copyright laws, "broadcasting" and "copying" are colours, only tangentially related to technical meaning of those terms. The law deals with colours, not with physical reality. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 (TL;DR: 'colour' captures those path-dependent aspects of a thing, like where did it came from and why someone is doing something with it. A song legally bought and one illegally acquired may be bit-for-bit identical, but they have different colours.)

thomastjeffery 9y ago
> only tangentially related to technical meaning of those terms. Let's get some new words then. We need to be explicit.