You know, Hacker News is one of the last places that should be criticising the 'old fashioned' way of making money from music (e.g. contract with recording stud

You know, Hacker News is one of the last places that should be criticising the 'old fashioned' way of making money from music (e.g. contract with recording studio, make an album, recording studio keeps lion share of the profits). Why? Because the 'old fashioned' model of financing a band to produce a record is directly analogous to the VC model of financing a startup to produce a product. Consider: in both cases the investor is taking a large risk, and needs to make multiple investments because the chance of each one going bust is large, and correspondingly they are looking for a 20x return (or more) from a 'hit', because they need to make big dollars from the few that achieve success to pay for all the ones that fail. Except that, of course, the evil corps that make up the RIAA did much more for the artists than VCs ever do for software startups, including (but not limited to) big marketing pushes of their product. NB: yes, I'm aware of Courtney Love's rant about how evil the music industry is: see http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2000/06/14/love http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2000/06/14/love for an insider point of view. I just think it is a bit rich to have people who suckle on the teat of VC money to tell the music industry that they need to change and get with the times. I wonder how much that point of view is motivated by the "music should be free" way of thinking - or as we like to call it "something for nothing and your money back".