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A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

202 points by howsilly 8y ago

TheMagicHorsey 8y ago
The author is out of touch. Plenty of people are making a good living making music. They just aren't making their money selling CDs and MP3s. I wish the author would read up on self-made artists like Post Malone and Logic. They have made tons of money ... starting small, selling merch, and then finally filling stadiums at $50-$100 a ticket.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  Those are household names and it also requires that the artist wants to tour.
  - slothtrop 8y ago
    Touring isn't a new requirement for making real money
  - empath75 8y ago
    A friend of mine makes 6 figures touring as a dj, backed by work he does producing and remixing for a pittance just to get his name out there. And he is far from a household name. Is he rich? No, but it’s a living.
tyingq 8y ago
Is there a historical chart anywhere that shows earnings for low/mid/top popularity tier performers over time? I believe the general consensus that they make less on average, but no idea how much less, if the hit was even across tiers, what the timeframe was, etc.
cletus 8y ago
So this article is largely about the changes in technology, namely that with a high barrier to entry and when distribution was predicated on moving physical products, times were good for musicians selling the media of the time (records, CDs). But this article makes the same mistake pretty much every article decrying the zero cost of distribution (ie the Internet) and the inevitable piracy, it ignores a key point: at probably every point in this era only a very few musicians could ever earn a living just from selling recorded music. The primary source of income for the majority of musicians has been for performances. Even in the Internet/MP3 era, people still want to see live music. Maybe that's not attractive to those who want to sit at home collecting royalties but getting in front of a live audience and playing music was, is and will continue to be a potential source of a living. And while the income from recorded music situation is unquestionably worse than, say, 50 years ago, we also no longer have record companies and radio stations as the gatekeepers of taste. Anyone can publish digital music to Spotify, Youtube, Soundcloud, etc so it's not all bad. So whenever you see any articles complaining about low royalties paid by streaming services or the unfairness of record contracts, look at that article and see if it anything about income from performances because almost always it doesn't.
- ilamont 8y ago
  But the sale of recorded music did enable many musicians to earn income even if they didn't want to or couldn't tour, or couldn't make much money off of touring, which was the story for most small/indie artists. It was another income stream, and for the smaller artists, a source of revenue that helped justify continuing to record. (If they worked with an honest publisher and/or had control over rights) As you noted, for a smaller number of top artists, record sales served as the sole source of income, and enabled them to do amazing stuff. XTC springs to mind - Andy Partridge apparently had terrible stage fright, hated touring, and basically stopped after the late 70s. During the 80s they recorded some truly groundbreaking albums on the strength of their songwriting and studio talents, and were able to survive on record sales based on a strong fan base and very limited radio airplay to promote record sales. The KLF is another example. I worked for their record label in the early 90s, and they did absolutely no touring at that time (or ever, AFAIK). Revenue was from the sale of singles, the White Room album, special releases, and foreign licensing.
jedberg 8y ago
For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that's only because of artificial scarcity. Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the performance of music, by doing live shows and such. I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".
- RankingMember 8y ago
  Well put, your description of the history of paid art puts things in a different perspective.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  > For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. This seems wildly improbable to me? People didn't get paid for art until a few hundred years ago? Are you suggesting artisans weren't a thing? That all the art produced globally outside of the past few hundred years was done just for love of doing?
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    I've never heard of artisans getting wealthy before the 20th century.
    - Pfhreak 8y ago
      "Wealthy" is a different goalpost than "doing art/music for money". But even then, artisans in antiquity definitely reached middle classes. (And it's plausible to assume that at least a few individuals were wealthier or converted their artisanship into a bigger merchant operation.)
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
I would have included George Orwell as a successful futurist. For those that are younger: Courtney Love Does the Math (https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/). Hard to believe it's been (almost) 20 years since that was written. I'm watching a young, extremely talented guy make his bones on YouTube. He's now started touring extensively, and working with other up-and-comers. I'm hoping he can reach the tipping point to become mainstream.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Aha! I have been looking for this article, I believe it's the same one Billy Corgan referenced in a podcast when he was going over the economics of Smashing Pumpkins' chart success in the '90s.
MereInterest 8y ago
> However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing. Human hearing only goes up to 20 kHz when you are young, dropping to about 12 kHz at the age of 50. 44 kHz sampling gives a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, easily encompassing the full range of human hearing. Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in the first place. >I have long since abandoned arguments about the quality of sound. The analog sound was better. It was fuller and warmer, and it held all the sonic information. 16-bit samples on a CD can represent about 96 dB of dynamic range. The cassette tapes that he is arguing for can only represent 60-70 dB of dynamic range. It certainly doesn't hold "all the sonic information". I really appreciate the historical view that the author brings. In terms of the technology, though, he sounds like one of the foolish audiophiles buying the $1,500 HDMI cables.
- mrob 8y ago
  Also: >The sample rate of an MP3 is 23,000 compressed samples per second, half the sample rate of a commercial CD and a quarter of the sample rate of a studio quality digital recording. The MP3 format does not support 23kHz sample rate, which is a strange non-standard rate that I've never hear of anybody using in any format.
  - stephen_g 8y ago
    Must be confusing it with the 32kHz option, which I don't believe was that widely used. As far as I recall, most MP3s were 44.1kHz (same as CDs) but 48kHz was an option too.
- ms013 8y ago
  Yup. I dug deep into the technology recently when I taught a class on the science of sound at a local college. When you look at media not only from the mathematical perspective (Nyquist, etc), but the physical (grain density and size on tape), it’s pretty clear that past technologies did have fundamental limits. It’s hard to disentangle the technical appeal of certain recording media from the nostalgia for a rosier looking past when reading some of these articles.
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skookumchuck 8y ago
> The value of the work is the key phrase here. It's another version of the Labor Theory of Value which has been thoroughly discredited. It doesn't matter how much work was put in. Only the results matter.
jalgos_eminator 8y ago
This article reeks of blaming new technology for killing an industry (it didn't), and resistance to change (i.e. things were so much better when I was young). He actually (sort-of) acknowledges this in the last paragraph when he mentions theatre taking a hit when films came about, but music hasn't been replaced like theatre has so the comparison is moot. > Now everybody can make a record – and maybe that’s not a good thing No, that is a very good thing. High studio costs mean that you had to get funded by a record company to get anything recorded and released. Record companies were the gatekeepers. Now, you can make a decent sounding record with only a few thousand dollars worth of recording equipment and a laptop. No, it will not sound as good as one recorded at a proper studio, but Joe/Jane Consumer generally won't be able to tell the difference anyway. The magic of music is not how high quality the recording is, but how well the artists composed the music and how they played it. I think the punk recordings he mentions showed that the best, because they objectively sound bad from a traditional music production standpoint, but that was the whole point those punk artists were making. There have been some absolutely great records made in people's home studios, even as early as the 90's. The key ingredient of good music is creativity, not sound quality, and having decent recording gear for cheap just lets more people be more creative.
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  As much as I hate sifting through the mountain of music that should probably have not been released, I couldn't agree more. It's relatively inexpensive to setup a home studio that yields excellent results. You still need technical skills, of course. But, assuming you have them, a computer, a DAW, and a basic audio interface can go a long way.
- arvinsim 8y ago
  > The key ingredient of good music is creativity, not sound quality, and having decent recording gear for cheap just lets more people be more creative. I have to remind myself of this everytime I get the urge to buy new stuff aka GAS
TheLoneAdmin 8y ago
I checked out Ian Tamblyn on Spotify. He has 319 monthly listeners. His top track has 11k plays. Is it because analog has more fidelity?
Causality1 8y ago
Sounds like sour grapes to me. "I'm done arguing about it, but analog sounded better" as if he has any evidence to back up his claim. Not all of us can tolerate music with an assload of white noise splattered all over it. I've yet to listen to a vinyl without the experience being ruined by analog hiss.
- criddell 8y ago
  My daughter got an inexpensive record player (Audio Technica) and some records for Christmas and I was shocked by how great it sounds. I remember playing records 30 years ago and just accepting pops and hisses and skips. Plus I owned a lot of crappy records (anybody remember K-Tel?) Going to the record store with her has gotten me back into buying music as well. She shops the vinyl section and I buy CDs. I think CDs sound better and I like not having to flip the disc, but there's something very satisfying about handling a large grooved record where you can "see" the music and the accompanying booklet or sleeve with lyrics and artwork. Something I didn't expect is how cheap CDs are now. I've bought lots of stuff for $6-$8.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    I'd wager that modern vinyls and record players are significantly better than those produced in the 60-70s, so you get very decent sound. And the physicality of it surely can't be beat.
- benji-york 8y ago
  I posted this elsewhere, but you will probably enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
LifeLiverTransp 8y ago
If all of western society downsizes its eco-footprint by massive media consumption and the state subsidizes this (panem at circensis) by lawlessness - im okay with it. Sorry, its hard on everyones dreams, mine was to life from game-design- wont happen. Nobody will live from music anymore. Thats just the way it is- your dream is your hobby. But that hobby keeps a lot of people sitting in front of a glowing rock, like meditating monks, instead of buying useless tanksized cars and overdimensioned houses. Worth it.
jdietrich 8y ago
The author's basic premise is false and his article is riddled with basic factual errors. The vast majority of artists never made a significant proportion of their income from recorded music, due to the extremely shady accounting practices used by the industry to deprive artists of royalties. For detail on this, see Steve Albini's notorious essay The Problem With Music. https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 The internet has hugely undermined the value of recorded music, but it has greatly increased the marketability of live music, which is and always has been the most reliable source of income for musicians. If you've got a mailing list with a few thousand people who'll pay to see you perform, you've got a career. You don't need a record contract, you don't need a booking agent, you don't need radio airplay, you just need 40 or 50 towns with enough fans to sell out a small venue. Prior to the internet, building that mailing list almost always involved a record deal, because there was no other way to reach the public; a few independent artists made it through 'zines and word-of-mouth and tenacious effort, but most didn't. If you didn't get on a radio playlist, nobody got to hear your music and nobody came to your shows. Today, the equation is completely different. There are a thousand different niche acts with absolutely no recognition among the general public, who nonetheless make a respectable living from touring because they can connect directly with fans.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > it has greatly increased the marketability of live music Yet that might be a blip. Some of my friends who used to be passionate concertgoers, now say there’s no reason to pay for a concert, deal with getting to the venue, etc. when bands are uploading full-length concerts in fine video and audio to YouTube. Also, since musical tastes have fragmented enormously due to the wider supply, people are less likely to share favourite bands with friends, and so you might not have anyone to go to concerts with you. Concerts used to have an attraction as a social outing, but if you’d have to attend alone, what’s the point?
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  - Spellchamp 8y ago
zon 8y ago
this feels very 'old man yells at cloud.' People still make money making music (and other art,) but it's changed. That's true, but this person has an outsized view of his own impact if he thinks that hustling to move 100k copies of his own record changed anything for better or worse.
larrydag 8y ago
The lifelong plight of the artist. I don't think it will every change. The community tends to only respect the artist once they are long gone.
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gumby 8y ago
He harks back to the "savannah" age but really he's hankering for a much more recent, 20th century mythical golden age. The title he should have used was "why musicians and music writers now have a very hard time exploiting a temporary, and vanishing distribution shortage to make even a fraction of the money collected by the record companies." Plenty of artists of all sorts are still making money; maybe not as much as during the 40-year bubble and of course a small number as it ever was.
bambax 8y ago
Two very bad analogies in the first paragraph. 1/ We don't know much or anything about our prehistoric ancestors; but we do know that lions don't hunt humans, because where they still cohabit in a natural state, it's rather the other way around 2/ The story of the frog in slowly boiling water is apocryphal and false; if you put a frog in a jar and heat it, however slowly, the frog WILL JUMP OUT
idiot900 8y ago
My experience in college radio (a while back) suggests that most professional musical artists, indie or otherwise, are just not that good. I don't lament the democratization of music like this guy does. If nobody wants to listen to him, am I supposed to feel bad? As for supporting the musicians, I'm happy to pay 10 USD/month for music streaming, but it's not worth more to me. My totally acceptable alternative is just not listening to such paid music at all. The musicians owe me nothing, and vice versa.
dmitriid 8y ago
> There are signs that the royalty-collecting agencies are beginning to catch up to the myriad array of digital offspring ranging from the internet to satellite television and radio. They were never behind. Wherever there is music, they have their claws in it. They are also the single most important reason we can't have good things and why musicians don't get paid nearly enough.
Townley 8y ago
A few weeks ago, one of my favorite artists came out with a new album. The day I tried it out, I played through it several times. My brain was invigorated, my blood was pumping, and I had an abnormally productive day of coding. That day of productive coding produced tens of thousands of dollars of value for my company. That's value that, at least partially, wouldn't exist without the artist's new album. My company will reap benefits in the form of added revenue. I'll reap benefits in the form of bonuses and promotions. But the artist, who produced this value as an externality, will only receive value if I decide to buy their CD out of gratitude. The gap between artists producing value for society, and being rewarded for that value, is a shame, and we're worse off for it. I can't think of a solution, but I also can't shake the feeling that this disconnection of value is at the heart of the "making a living" issue.
- deleted 8y ago
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- lovehashbrowns 8y ago
  Solutions already exist. Bandcamp allows artists to let users pick their price, and services like Patreon allow you to support the artist directly. So all of this would have actually been more difficult in the "good old days," and you now have more ways of supporting your favorite artist however much you want.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    And those solutions are not so great for quite a variety of artists, which is what this story is about. Network effects force everyone to deal with a small number of platform vendors who dominate their market.
tehsauce 8y ago
Wonderful article!
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chmod775 8y ago
I decided to fact-check one random thing while skimming the article, and of course the article got it wrong. Makes me wary of the whole thing. > With the addition of multi -track recording, invented by jazz guitarist Les Paul, another golden age of recording began. No he didn't. He was just the first person to buy a system capable of doing so [1], though he had some influence on the development of that particular system. In reality it was a lot of incremental work by many different people. There was also people experimenting with "homemade" stuff long before the first commercial system. Giving all the credit to the one guy who was already famous, just because he happens to be a known figure, always irks me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_multitrack_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_multitrack_recordin...
tahoemph999 8y ago
The title of this needs to be changed go "A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living recording music". Live music is still huge and there are great musicians who make the majority of their income making something unique every night. Much like how people have made money off music has changed from selling sheet music to live performances to recordings we are back at creating music. Not selling its reproduction.
zepearl 8y ago
I don't remember the moment when I first installed in the 90' on Windows 3.x "Napster" on a PC connected to my 28.8k modem, but I do remember the "oh-my-gosh-it-seems-to-really-work"-feeling while watching the download bar(s) slowly progressing towards the ultimate target of 100%. And then the "oh-my-gosh-this-technology-is-incredible"-feeling after doubleclicking on the downloaded file and seeing/hearing Winamp playing it (not sure if I was already using Winamp right from the start). That's when I really realized that I was connected to the whole world. Nowadays I still usually first download songs/CDs but only to be sure that they aren't bad (in the 90' I often had to pay 30CHF for a CD which contained only 1 good song) => if they're good then I buy the CDs or the single digital files (I have to "own" the media, hehe) => many people think that I'm more or less stupid/weird doing this but personally I just try to motivate the artists to keep creating what I like (kind of similar to opensource donations) and I do not want to have dependencies towards 3rd-parties => this (that for other people it's weird that I really "buy" the CDs & songs if I have anyway already downloaded them) makes me think that "ethics" have recently been lost not only in the big/high areas (e.g. big mixed scandals like Enron/Andersen, AIG/Lehman, Madoff, Volkswagen, ...) but as well on an individual level. On the other hand Spotify & Co. are anyway changing all the rules (except for me, as I have to "own" the song, hehe), so what I mentioned above is now probably not relevant anymore.
benji-york 8y ago
Aside from the history and opinion in the piece, there are technical errors that are addressed by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM Anyone interested in the argument over digital audio vs. analog will enjoy the above.
jimrhods23 8y ago
It's the same reason why journalists and whole host of other content creators are no longer making a living: There is so much out there for free, most people don't perceive it as having value anymore. This is why music piracy of the early 2000s hurt the industry: the individual artist wasn't necessarily losing money directly at the time, but it definitely made it difficult for all artists to make money 2 decades later. The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  >The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS. This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions. Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings? I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance (live music at restaurants and cafes and the like) which makes such things rare and usually very poorly paid. I would love to frequent places with good food and good live music with the atmosphere of being able to carry a conversation while the band was on. What I've experienced is bands in big rooms with terrible acoustics and bad mixing so loud I can't hear myself think or anything really but the drummer. Combine this with the social and economic situation of everyone staying home and watching TV most nights makes the demand for live music weak. There is an opportunity for targeting that kind of market but difficult to capture requiring a good booker and a sound person that doesn't want everything to sound like a rock show.
  - jimrhods23 8y ago
    "Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings?" Yes. I know plenty of independent artists before and after the Napster days and they could no longer make a living. People just expected it for free, because Napster changed the culture of music..which is the long-term danger of piracy. It also made it so the only artists that could make a real living are forced to sign with a big label, because you now need an entire marketing department behind your music to compete with free. Music is now used as free marketing to get people to go to a show...and you need to be signed with a giant label to play at any decent venue. Small artists don't have access to any of this. "I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance" These were always poorly paid gigs..and for good reason. There is no ROI for the restaurant/cafe, who are barely eking out a profit. "This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions." This IS true. Many software companies went to SaaS because it can't be shared for free and the cost of server space/hosting is now very cheap. I should know, I was involved in many meetings with business owners that did just this. So the unintended consequences of over a decade of software/music piracy is pushing all of the independent artists out of a living and we now need to pay a monthly fee for software instead of being able to purchase it outright.
ineedasername 8y ago
I was under the impression that music industry revenue had been on the uptick for the last 2-3 years [0] But did artists actually make more money during the 40's/ 50's? It was my impression that large record labels generally reserved the profits for themselves then too (would love to hear a more knowledgeable answer though about whether is was easier for a musician to make a living then) [0]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
jancsika 8y ago
Ok, so further down in the comments there is this: > Superficially there is some sense - the higher frequency signals are rendered less and less accurately, and nearer a binary on-off. Who knows what nuance and harmonics may be lost affecting what's heard at lower frequencies. It's true that at a given sampling rate, if you choose a sine wave with a frequency right below Nyquist it is composed of fewer samples per period than a lower frequency sine. But lots of audiophiles-- like the one I quoted above-- seem to equate "fewer samples" with "less accuracy" which does not follow[1]. So here's the question-- what would it sound like if you built a filter to make this common misunderstanding true? So the closer the frequency content gets to Nyquist, the more the filter distorts that frequency. It would be fun to build so that people could apply it to digital input and realize just how awful the output would sound if their misunderstanding of digital audio were true. [1] https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  No idea of the technicals, other than sampling at double the audible frequency does- to this layman - seem logical it would give you a wave more diverged from reality as frequency increases - and at the absurd extreme a 22khz (inaudible to most) square wave if sampling at 44, 4 points to represent 11k etc. I don't see how it can be otherwise, just as interpolating and anti aliasing is often right but cannot always correctly insert missing pixels - see the attempts to use AI to make hires versions of Mario and other 8 bit assets, some work, many don't. It was only an idle conjecture after the main point, which was meant to be about mastering, so I'll expand that a little. One of the places I worked at in the 90s was connected with a well known recording studio. We got to blind demo from master tapes how their latest attempts at going digital were going compared to analogue a few times. At least a couple with whatever graphs they'd measured. 25-30 years later, I don't have much recollection of the how or what. Aurally, it wasn't something subtle to listen out carefully for, flaws were plain, therefore memorable. Surprising in the era of digital and CD growth and their supposed "perfect" sound forever, and DDD being marketed as always preferable to ADD or AAD. Not so surprising when you realise it was the era of all ADCs and DACs at any cost being shit. By the time I left, analogue mastering was still preferred by the engineers and still the studio's first choice for albums they recorded. Can't explain that technically either, though they clearly thought, and could demonstrate analogue was still doing a measurably better job. Were they misunderstanding? shrug.
magpi3 8y ago
I think an even easier way to describe this phenomenon: can you commodify what you do? If you can, you can sell it and make a living. If you can't, you can't. Albums and three minute songs became a popular format to record in because they could be commodified as a record sales. Novels become the most popular form of creative writing because they could be commodified as moderate sized- and moderately priced book sales. Etc. The title itself is problematic, because it should be "A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making popular music." Classical musicians (with notable exceptions) have been unable to make a living recording new music for a long time. Only specific genres were able to thrive during the 3-minute song album era. And now the internet has made that more difficult because we don't need the commodified form -- records, cds -- anymore. But people can still make money writing music that is bundled with other commodities: movies, games, etc.
bashwizard 8y ago
Popular music will always sell one way or the other. It's that simple. I've been producing for +10 years and I used to dj almost every weekend for two years but eventually I stopped because even though I loved doing it, it just wasn't bringing in any significant money. I'd probably make more money by creating sample packs and sell them through various of sites but it would be the equivalent of "buy my mix tape!" and I'm not doing that. I produce a very niche genre where there isn't any real money to be made unless you're one of the absolute top names in that genre and they're not rich by any means but they do make a good living doing it. It's not a right to make a living making music or art and neither should anyone expect doing it unless you set out to commodify it. Very few people will succeed in doing so.
shams93 8y ago
Meanwhile some poor fool is spending over $50,000 a year to get an MFA in music always do your market research before going into tremendous debt to enter a field of work that no longer exists.
musicale 8y ago
Someone should come up with a system where concert tickets could be sold and some of the money could be paid to the performers. It could work similarly to the way stage actors are paid.

202 points by howsilly 8y ago

The author is out of touch. Plenty of people are making a good living making music. They just aren't making their money selling CDs and MP3s. I wish the author would read up on self-made artists like Post Malone and Logic. They have made tons of money ... starting small, selling merch, and then finally filling stadiums at $50-$100 a ticket.

adamnemecek 8y ago
Those are household names and it also requires that the artist wants to tour.
- slothtrop 8y ago
  Touring isn't a new requirement for making real money
- empath75 8y ago
  A friend of mine makes 6 figures touring as a dj, backed by work he does producing and remixing for a pittance just to get his name out there. And he is far from a household name. Is he rich? No, but it’s a living.

tyingq 8y ago

Is there a historical chart anywhere that shows earnings for low/mid/top popularity tier performers over time? I believe the general consensus that they make less on average, but no idea how much less, if the hit was even across tiers, what the timeframe was, etc.

cletus 8y ago

So this article is largely about the changes in technology, namely that with a high barrier to entry and when distribution was predicated on moving physical products, times were good for musicians selling the media of the time (records, CDs). But this article makes the same mistake pretty much every article decrying the zero cost of distribution (ie the Internet) and the inevitable piracy, it ignores a key point: at probably every point in this era only a very few musicians could ever earn a living just from selling recorded music. The primary source of income for the majority of musicians has been for performances. Even in the Internet/MP3 era, people still want to see live music. Maybe that's not attractive to those who want to sit at home collecting royalties but getting in front of a live audience and playing music was, is and will continue to be a potential source of a living. And while the income from recorded music situation is unquestionably worse than, say, 50 years ago, we also no longer have record companies and radio stations as the gatekeepers of taste. Anyone can publish digital music to Spotify, Youtube, Soundcloud, etc so it's not all bad. So whenever you see any articles complaining about low royalties paid by streaming services or the unfairness of record contracts, look at that article and see if it anything about income from performances because almost always it doesn't.

ilamont 8y ago
But the sale of recorded music did enable many musicians to earn income even if they didn't want to or couldn't tour, or couldn't make much money off of touring, which was the story for most small/indie artists. It was another income stream, and for the smaller artists, a source of revenue that helped justify continuing to record. (If they worked with an honest publisher and/or had control over rights) As you noted, for a smaller number of top artists, record sales served as the sole source of income, and enabled them to do amazing stuff. XTC springs to mind - Andy Partridge apparently had terrible stage fright, hated touring, and basically stopped after the late 70s. During the 80s they recorded some truly groundbreaking albums on the strength of their songwriting and studio talents, and were able to survive on record sales based on a strong fan base and very limited radio airplay to promote record sales. The KLF is another example. I worked for their record label in the early 90s, and they did absolutely no touring at that time (or ever, AFAIK). Revenue was from the sale of singles, the White Room album, special releases, and foreign licensing.

jedberg 8y ago

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that's only because of artificial scarcity. Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the performance of music, by doing live shows and such. I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".

RankingMember 8y ago
Well put, your description of the history of paid art puts things in a different perspective.
Pfhreak 8y ago
> For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. This seems wildly improbable to me? People didn't get paid for art until a few hundred years ago? Are you suggesting artisans weren't a thing? That all the art produced globally outside of the past few hundred years was done just for love of doing?
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  I've never heard of artisans getting wealthy before the 20th century.
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    "Wealthy" is a different goalpost than "doing art/music for money". But even then, artisans in antiquity definitely reached middle classes. (And it's plausible to assume that at least a few individuals were wealthier or converted their artisanship into a bigger merchant operation.)

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

I would have included George Orwell as a successful futurist. For those that are younger: Courtney Love Does the Math (https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/). Hard to believe it's been (almost) 20 years since that was written. I'm watching a young, extremely talented guy make his bones on YouTube. He's now started touring extensively, and working with other up-and-comers. I'm hoping he can reach the tipping point to become mainstream.

rchaud 8y ago
Aha! I have been looking for this article, I believe it's the same one Billy Corgan referenced in a podcast when he was going over the economics of Smashing Pumpkins' chart success in the '90s.

MereInterest 8y ago

> However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing. Human hearing only goes up to 20 kHz when you are young, dropping to about 12 kHz at the age of 50. 44 kHz sampling gives a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, easily encompassing the full range of human hearing. Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in the first place. >I have long since abandoned arguments about the quality of sound. The analog sound was better. It was fuller and warmer, and it held all the sonic information. 16-bit samples on a CD can represent about 96 dB of dynamic range. The cassette tapes that he is arguing for can only represent 60-70 dB of dynamic range. It certainly doesn't hold "all the sonic information". I really appreciate the historical view that the author brings. In terms of the technology, though, he sounds like one of the foolish audiophiles buying the $1,500 HDMI cables.

mrob 8y ago
Also: >The sample rate of an MP3 is 23,000 compressed samples per second, half the sample rate of a commercial CD and a quarter of the sample rate of a studio quality digital recording. The MP3 format does not support 23kHz sample rate, which is a strange non-standard rate that I've never hear of anybody using in any format.
- stephen_g 8y ago
  Must be confusing it with the 32kHz option, which I don't believe was that widely used. As far as I recall, most MP3s were 44.1kHz (same as CDs) but 48kHz was an option too.
ms013 8y ago
Yup. I dug deep into the technology recently when I taught a class on the science of sound at a local college. When you look at media not only from the mathematical perspective (Nyquist, etc), but the physical (grain density and size on tape), it’s pretty clear that past technologies did have fundamental limits. It’s hard to disentangle the technical appeal of certain recording media from the nostalgia for a rosier looking past when reading some of these articles.

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skookumchuck 8y ago

> The value of the work is the key phrase here. It's another version of the Labor Theory of Value which has been thoroughly discredited. It doesn't matter how much work was put in. Only the results matter.

jalgos_eminator 8y ago

This article reeks of blaming new technology for killing an industry (it didn't), and resistance to change (i.e. things were so much better when I was young). He actually (sort-of) acknowledges this in the last paragraph when he mentions theatre taking a hit when films came about, but music hasn't been replaced like theatre has so the comparison is moot. > Now everybody can make a record – and maybe that’s not a good thing No, that is a very good thing. High studio costs mean that you had to get funded by a record company to get anything recorded and released. Record companies were the gatekeepers. Now, you can make a decent sounding record with only a few thousand dollars worth of recording equipment and a laptop. No, it will not sound as good as one recorded at a proper studio, but Joe/Jane Consumer generally won't be able to tell the difference anyway. The magic of music is not how high quality the recording is, but how well the artists composed the music and how they played it. I think the punk recordings he mentions showed that the best, because they objectively sound bad from a traditional music production standpoint, but that was the whole point those punk artists were making. There have been some absolutely great records made in people's home studios, even as early as the 90's. The key ingredient of good music is creativity, not sound quality, and having decent recording gear for cheap just lets more people be more creative.

H1Supreme 8y ago
As much as I hate sifting through the mountain of music that should probably have not been released, I couldn't agree more. It's relatively inexpensive to setup a home studio that yields excellent results. You still need technical skills, of course. But, assuming you have them, a computer, a DAW, and a basic audio interface can go a long way.
arvinsim 8y ago
> The key ingredient of good music is creativity, not sound quality, and having decent recording gear for cheap just lets more people be more creative. I have to remind myself of this everytime I get the urge to buy new stuff aka GAS

TheLoneAdmin 8y ago

I checked out Ian Tamblyn on Spotify. He has 319 monthly listeners. His top track has 11k plays. Is it because analog has more fidelity?

Causality1 8y ago

Sounds like sour grapes to me. "I'm done arguing about it, but analog sounded better" as if he has any evidence to back up his claim. Not all of us can tolerate music with an assload of white noise splattered all over it. I've yet to listen to a vinyl without the experience being ruined by analog hiss.

criddell 8y ago
My daughter got an inexpensive record player (Audio Technica) and some records for Christmas and I was shocked by how great it sounds. I remember playing records 30 years ago and just accepting pops and hisses and skips. Plus I owned a lot of crappy records (anybody remember K-Tel?) Going to the record store with her has gotten me back into buying music as well. She shops the vinyl section and I buy CDs. I think CDs sound better and I like not having to flip the disc, but there's something very satisfying about handling a large grooved record where you can "see" the music and the accompanying booklet or sleeve with lyrics and artwork. Something I didn't expect is how cheap CDs are now. I've bought lots of stuff for $6-$8.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  I'd wager that modern vinyls and record players are significantly better than those produced in the 60-70s, so you get very decent sound. And the physicality of it surely can't be beat.
benji-york 8y ago
I posted this elsewhere, but you will probably enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

LifeLiverTransp 8y ago

If all of western society downsizes its eco-footprint by massive media consumption and the state subsidizes this (panem at circensis) by lawlessness - im okay with it. Sorry, its hard on everyones dreams, mine was to life from game-design- wont happen. Nobody will live from music anymore. Thats just the way it is- your dream is your hobby. But that hobby keeps a lot of people sitting in front of a glowing rock, like meditating monks, instead of buying useless tanksized cars and overdimensioned houses. Worth it.

jdietrich 8y ago

The author's basic premise is false and his article is riddled with basic factual errors. The vast majority of artists never made a significant proportion of their income from recorded music, due to the extremely shady accounting practices used by the industry to deprive artists of royalties. For detail on this, see Steve Albini's notorious essay The Problem With Music. https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 The internet has hugely undermined the value of recorded music, but it has greatly increased the marketability of live music, which is and always has been the most reliable source of income for musicians. If you've got a mailing list with a few thousand people who'll pay to see you perform, you've got a career. You don't need a record contract, you don't need a booking agent, you don't need radio airplay, you just need 40 or 50 towns with enough fans to sell out a small venue. Prior to the internet, building that mailing list almost always involved a record deal, because there was no other way to reach the public; a few independent artists made it through 'zines and word-of-mouth and tenacious effort, but most didn't. If you didn't get on a radio playlist, nobody got to hear your music and nobody came to your shows. Today, the equation is completely different. There are a thousand different niche acts with absolutely no recognition among the general public, who nonetheless make a respectable living from touring because they can connect directly with fans.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> it has greatly increased the marketability of live music Yet that might be a blip. Some of my friends who used to be passionate concertgoers, now say there’s no reason to pay for a concert, deal with getting to the venue, etc. when bands are uploading full-length concerts in fine video and audio to YouTube. Also, since musical tastes have fragmented enormously due to the wider supply, people are less likely to share favourite bands with friends, and so you might not have anyone to go to concerts with you. Concerts used to have an attraction as a social outing, but if you’d have to attend alone, what’s the point?
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- Spellchamp 8y ago

zon 8y ago

this feels very 'old man yells at cloud.' People still make money making music (and other art,) but it's changed. That's true, but this person has an outsized view of his own impact if he thinks that hustling to move 100k copies of his own record changed anything for better or worse.

larrydag 8y ago

The lifelong plight of the artist. I don't think it will every change. The community tends to only respect the artist once they are long gone.

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gumby 8y ago

He harks back to the "savannah" age but really he's hankering for a much more recent, 20th century mythical golden age. The title he should have used was "why musicians and music writers now have a very hard time exploiting a temporary, and vanishing distribution shortage to make even a fraction of the money collected by the record companies." Plenty of artists of all sorts are still making money; maybe not as much as during the 40-year bubble and of course a small number as it ever was.

bambax 8y ago

Two very bad analogies in the first paragraph. 1/ We don't know much or anything about our prehistoric ancestors; but we do know that lions don't hunt humans, because where they still cohabit in a natural state, it's rather the other way around 2/ The story of the frog in slowly boiling water is apocryphal and false; if you put a frog in a jar and heat it, however slowly, the frog WILL JUMP OUT

idiot900 8y ago

My experience in college radio (a while back) suggests that most professional musical artists, indie or otherwise, are just not that good. I don't lament the democratization of music like this guy does. If nobody wants to listen to him, am I supposed to feel bad? As for supporting the musicians, I'm happy to pay 10 USD/month for music streaming, but it's not worth more to me. My totally acceptable alternative is just not listening to such paid music at all. The musicians owe me nothing, and vice versa.

dmitriid 8y ago

> There are signs that the royalty-collecting agencies are beginning to catch up to the myriad array of digital offspring ranging from the internet to satellite television and radio. They were never behind. Wherever there is music, they have their claws in it. They are also the single most important reason we can't have good things and why musicians don't get paid nearly enough.

Townley 8y ago

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite artists came out with a new album. The day I tried it out, I played through it several times. My brain was invigorated, my blood was pumping, and I had an abnormally productive day of coding. That day of productive coding produced tens of thousands of dollars of value for my company. That's value that, at least partially, wouldn't exist without the artist's new album. My company will reap benefits in the form of added revenue. I'll reap benefits in the form of bonuses and promotions. But the artist, who produced this value as an externality, will only receive value if I decide to buy their CD out of gratitude. The gap between artists producing value for society, and being rewarded for that value, is a shame, and we're worse off for it. I can't think of a solution, but I also can't shake the feeling that this disconnection of value is at the heart of the "making a living" issue.

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lovehashbrowns 8y ago
Solutions already exist. Bandcamp allows artists to let users pick their price, and services like Patreon allow you to support the artist directly. So all of this would have actually been more difficult in the "good old days," and you now have more ways of supporting your favorite artist however much you want.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  And those solutions are not so great for quite a variety of artists, which is what this story is about. Network effects force everyone to deal with a small number of platform vendors who dominate their market.

tehsauce 8y ago

Wonderful article!

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chmod775 8y ago

I decided to fact-check one random thing while skimming the article, and of course the article got it wrong. Makes me wary of the whole thing. > With the addition of multi -track recording, invented by jazz guitarist Les Paul, another golden age of recording began. No he didn't. He was just the first person to buy a system capable of doing so [1], though he had some influence on the development of that particular system. In reality it was a lot of incremental work by many different people. There was also people experimenting with "homemade" stuff long before the first commercial system. Giving all the credit to the one guy who was already famous, just because he happens to be a known figure, always irks me. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_multitrack_recording https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_multitrack_recordin...

tahoemph999 8y ago

The title of this needs to be changed go "A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living recording music". Live music is still huge and there are great musicians who make the majority of their income making something unique every night. Much like how people have made money off music has changed from selling sheet music to live performances to recordings we are back at creating music. Not selling its reproduction.

zepearl 8y ago

I don't remember the moment when I first installed in the 90' on Windows 3.x "Napster" on a PC connected to my 28.8k modem, but I do remember the "oh-my-gosh-it-seems-to-really-work"-feeling while watching the download bar(s) slowly progressing towards the ultimate target of 100%. And then the "oh-my-gosh-this-technology-is-incredible"-feeling after doubleclicking on the downloaded file and seeing/hearing Winamp playing it (not sure if I was already using Winamp right from the start). That's when I really realized that I was connected to the whole world. Nowadays I still usually first download songs/CDs but only to be sure that they aren't bad (in the 90' I often had to pay 30CHF for a CD which contained only 1 good song) => if they're good then I buy the CDs or the single digital files (I have to "own" the media, hehe) => many people think that I'm more or less stupid/weird doing this but personally I just try to motivate the artists to keep creating what I like (kind of similar to opensource donations) and I do not want to have dependencies towards 3rd-parties => this (that for other people it's weird that I really "buy" the CDs & songs if I have anyway already downloaded them) makes me think that "ethics" have recently been lost not only in the big/high areas (e.g. big mixed scandals like Enron/Andersen, AIG/Lehman, Madoff, Volkswagen, ...) but as well on an individual level. On the other hand Spotify & Co. are anyway changing all the rules (except for me, as I have to "own" the song, hehe), so what I mentioned above is now probably not relevant anymore.

benji-york 8y ago

Aside from the history and opinion in the piece, there are technical errors that are addressed by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM Anyone interested in the argument over digital audio vs. analog will enjoy the above.

jimrhods23 8y ago

It's the same reason why journalists and whole host of other content creators are no longer making a living: There is so much out there for free, most people don't perceive it as having value anymore. This is why music piracy of the early 2000s hurt the industry: the individual artist wasn't necessarily losing money directly at the time, but it definitely made it difficult for all artists to make money 2 decades later. The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS.

colechristensen 8y ago
>The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS. This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions. Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings? I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance (live music at restaurants and cafes and the like) which makes such things rare and usually very poorly paid. I would love to frequent places with good food and good live music with the atmosphere of being able to carry a conversation while the band was on. What I've experienced is bands in big rooms with terrible acoustics and bad mixing so loud I can't hear myself think or anything really but the drummer. Combine this with the social and economic situation of everyone staying home and watching TV most nights makes the demand for live music weak. There is an opportunity for targeting that kind of market but difficult to capture requiring a good booker and a sound person that doesn't want everything to sound like a rock show.
- jimrhods23 8y ago
  "Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings?" Yes. I know plenty of independent artists before and after the Napster days and they could no longer make a living. People just expected it for free, because Napster changed the culture of music..which is the long-term danger of piracy. It also made it so the only artists that could make a real living are forced to sign with a big label, because you now need an entire marketing department behind your music to compete with free. Music is now used as free marketing to get people to go to a show...and you need to be signed with a giant label to play at any decent venue. Small artists don't have access to any of this. "I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance" These were always poorly paid gigs..and for good reason. There is no ROI for the restaurant/cafe, who are barely eking out a profit. "This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions." This IS true. Many software companies went to SaaS because it can't be shared for free and the cost of server space/hosting is now very cheap. I should know, I was involved in many meetings with business owners that did just this. So the unintended consequences of over a decade of software/music piracy is pushing all of the independent artists out of a living and we now need to pay a monthly fee for software instead of being able to purchase it outright.

ineedasername 8y ago

I was under the impression that music industry revenue had been on the uptick for the last 2-3 years [0] But did artists actually make more money during the 40's/ 50's? It was my impression that large record labels generally reserved the profits for themselves then too (would love to hear a more knowledgeable answer though about whether is was easier for a musician to make a living then) [0]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/

jancsika 8y ago

Ok, so further down in the comments there is this: > Superficially there is some sense - the higher frequency signals are rendered less and less accurately, and nearer a binary on-off. Who knows what nuance and harmonics may be lost affecting what's heard at lower frequencies. It's true that at a given sampling rate, if you choose a sine wave with a frequency right below Nyquist it is composed of fewer samples per period than a lower frequency sine. But lots of audiophiles-- like the one I quoted above-- seem to equate "fewer samples" with "less accuracy" which does not follow[1]. So here's the question-- what would it sound like if you built a filter to make this common misunderstanding true? So the closer the frequency content gets to Nyquist, the more the filter distorts that frequency. It would be fun to build so that people could apply it to digital input and realize just how awful the output would sound if their misunderstanding of digital audio were true. [1] https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
No idea of the technicals, other than sampling at double the audible frequency does- to this layman - seem logical it would give you a wave more diverged from reality as frequency increases - and at the absurd extreme a 22khz (inaudible to most) square wave if sampling at 44, 4 points to represent 11k etc. I don't see how it can be otherwise, just as interpolating and anti aliasing is often right but cannot always correctly insert missing pixels - see the attempts to use AI to make hires versions of Mario and other 8 bit assets, some work, many don't. It was only an idle conjecture after the main point, which was meant to be about mastering, so I'll expand that a little. One of the places I worked at in the 90s was connected with a well known recording studio. We got to blind demo from master tapes how their latest attempts at going digital were going compared to analogue a few times. At least a couple with whatever graphs they'd measured. 25-30 years later, I don't have much recollection of the how or what. Aurally, it wasn't something subtle to listen out carefully for, flaws were plain, therefore memorable. Surprising in the era of digital and CD growth and their supposed "perfect" sound forever, and DDD being marketed as always preferable to ADD or AAD. Not so surprising when you realise it was the era of all ADCs and DACs at any cost being shit. By the time I left, analogue mastering was still preferred by the engineers and still the studio's first choice for albums they recorded. Can't explain that technically either, though they clearly thought, and could demonstrate analogue was still doing a measurably better job. Were they misunderstanding? shrug.

magpi3 8y ago

I think an even easier way to describe this phenomenon: can you commodify what you do? If you can, you can sell it and make a living. If you can't, you can't. Albums and three minute songs became a popular format to record in because they could be commodified as a record sales. Novels become the most popular form of creative writing because they could be commodified as moderate sized- and moderately priced book sales. Etc. The title itself is problematic, because it should be "A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making popular music." Classical musicians (with notable exceptions) have been unable to make a living recording new music for a long time. Only specific genres were able to thrive during the 3-minute song album era. And now the internet has made that more difficult because we don't need the commodified form -- records, cds -- anymore. But people can still make money writing music that is bundled with other commodities: movies, games, etc.

bashwizard 8y ago

Popular music will always sell one way or the other. It's that simple. I've been producing for +10 years and I used to dj almost every weekend for two years but eventually I stopped because even though I loved doing it, it just wasn't bringing in any significant money. I'd probably make more money by creating sample packs and sell them through various of sites but it would be the equivalent of "buy my mix tape!" and I'm not doing that. I produce a very niche genre where there isn't any real money to be made unless you're one of the absolute top names in that genre and they're not rich by any means but they do make a good living doing it. It's not a right to make a living making music or art and neither should anyone expect doing it unless you set out to commodify it. Very few people will succeed in doing so.

shams93 8y ago

Meanwhile some poor fool is spending over $50,000 a year to get an MFA in music always do your market research before going into tremendous debt to enter a field of work that no longer exists.

musicale 8y ago

Someone should come up with a system where concert tickets could be sold and some of the money could be paid to the performers. It could work similarly to the way stage actors are paid.