11 ms·

Platform capitalism devalued the music industry

53 points by laurex 7y ago

Isamu 7y ago
Seems to be actually a complaint about the decline of music journalism. Which I agree is sad, but is probably not related to the rise of "platforms" but part of the overall struggles of print journalism. Also the graph in the beginning shows the long linear decline in non-streaming music sales that started decades before streaming became viable, hence not caused by streaming, and in fact streaming platforms are now propping up the mainstream music industry which otherwise would be really circling the drain.
- evilantnie 7y ago
  I don't know if it's a fair takeaway to consider the decline in non-streaming music was unaffected by streaming that early on. Napster launched in 1999 as a first iteration of what could be considered a streaming service at the time. This chart doesn't represent that impact at all since it's focused on revenue, but timing wise I think there could be correlation.
  - Isamu 7y ago
    >Napster .. could be considered a streaming service It was downloads. Anyway the article specifically calls out "streaming platforms" and that's what I take issue with. The big difference is the newer streaming platforms tend to be subscription-based or otherwise ad-based and share revenue with the music industry. My point is the decline in music industry revenue is more due to rogue free download sites or user uploads to YouTube, etc. This generated no (direct) revenue to the music industry. Whereas the newer streaming platforms are working with the music industry and are turning back the tide.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      I wouldn't be so certain. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-platforms-keeping-more-money-from-artists-than-ever-817925/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-... https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/artists-vs-spotify/ https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/artists-vs-spotify/ That music industry money isn't going to the artists. https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-... (Ironically, Napster's streaming service appears to pay the most out of all of them now)
      - Isamu 7y ago
        >That music industry money isn't going to the artists. No argument there! The artists have always been the last to be paid. It may be getting worse for the artists, but the situation for actual creators has always been bad ... on average.
        drngdds 7y ago
        Yeah, this is important. I remember reading plenty of screeds about how awful the music industry and record labels are for artists long before streaming took over.
        52-6F-62 7y ago
        It’s been bad, but it’s getting worse. Buddy Holly was revolutionary for the way he negotiated his contracts and set a precedent for better treatment for a time. There a lot more nuance to that history.
- extradego 7y ago
  This doesn’t hold at all. The blog era was a golden age of indie pop, expressly because there was no dominant platform. The blogs themselves hosted mp3 singles along with the journalism. The way we found the blogs was by each blog having a blogroll, a list of links to other blogs with associated tastes. The bloggers were almost always locally employed. They were talent buyers, musicians, indie labels and writers for local dailies. It led to a surge in music festivals that hosted gobs of smaller musicians as a result. A booming industry that was glorious for the enthusiasts like myself. The major labels started buying the smaller labels as imprints and hiring the blog owners as representatives. In turn, the musicians that conformed and followed orders survived, and those that didn’t died. As the blogs dried up, Shazaam and Spotify filled the void of access to singles while social media filled the void of journalism, to the reluctance of the audience. Likewise, the print journaism industry ran a similar course, with MTV and Clear Channel taking the place of local radio DJs. The issue seems to be the tendency to conform local markets to a broad average. For a corporation, it makes no sense to have local tastemakers. They always tend toward a cosmopolitan ideal but in the end we get nothing but a monoculture that alienates everyone.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >but part of the overall struggles of print journalism. which not coincidentally is also related to another platform economy, the shift of advertising revenue from publishers and distributors to the large platforms, Ben Thompson writes about this all the time. I think it's largely detrimental to independent creators, it treats the independent creator of artistic work as an afterthought in the name of aggregate consumer welfare and price. It's centralizing power in the name of efficiency and people talk gleefully about it because it robs the distributors and taxi companies, and movie studios and so on of their perceived ill-gotten power. I think that's a huge mistake, the centralization of power streamlines all goods and removes all diversity, takes agency away from everyone but the large platforms, it turns open spaces into proprietary walled gardens because it's the only way for platforms to defend their content, and we're going to really regret it in a few years if we don't already.
  - rumanator 7y ago
    > It's centralizing power in the name of efficiency and people talk gleefully about it because it robs the distributors and taxi companies, and movie studios and so on of their perceived ill-gotten power. I don't agree, because "the movie studios and so on" that you referred were actually the centralizing power, and that power was overthrown by these new platforms in a way that they no longer control and arbitrarily restrict access to the public.
- wwweston 7y ago
  > but is probably not related to the rise of "platforms" but part of the overall struggles of print journalism. This is partially accurate, but I think it's more accurate to say that journalism in general is struggling because the way the attention economy works now: firehose supply, fiercer competition for attention, consumer indifference to being the customer rather than product, and algorithmic/crowdsourced content recommendation. And the rise of platforms figures into some degree of every one of those aspects.
- matchagaucho 7y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Payola was alive and well until Internet distribution took over. Music Journalists were the "Social Influencers" of their day. They were given front row seats, overnight stays at 5-star hotels, lavish meals, and flights on private jets with touring bands. Without Music Journalists, and their access to print, there was just no means to getting the word out. They could make or break any artist.
aphextim 7y ago
Music Industry failed to adapt. NoFx had a song about this called Dinosaurs will die. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKQSQSVVos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKQSQSVVos
- j2bax 7y ago
  Love NOFX! Been a big fan since like 7th grade (circa 1996) They are real a-holes, but they also have some pretty spot on commentary!
rayiner 7y ago
Or did content socialism (mandatory licensing and government-set streaming royalty rates) devalue the music industry?
- profunctor 7y ago
  Socialism isn’t when the government does stuff.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Correct, Socialism is when the government does something I don't like.
    - sremani 7y ago
      In this case rayiner seems to use Socialism as a word contrast to headlines use of Capitalism.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I agree with that. But the government forcing property owners to let other people use their property at prices set by the government is pretty socialist: https://completemusicupdate.com/article/us-copyright-royalty-board-confirms-44-increase-in-streaming-royalty-on-songs https://completemusicupdate.com/article/us-copyright-royalty.... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Royalty_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Royalty_Board Imagine if we had a government board deciding what prices people could charge for App Store/Google Play Store apps. (It's not like we're talking about radioactive waste or something involving externalities, where government regulation might be justified.)
    - dantheman 7y ago
      True - though copyright is a government granted monopoly, so there is a tradeoff. It's not real property. Copyright holders get special privileges granted by the government to control what others do with the copyrighted material, so it only makes sense that it comes with strings attached.
Camas 7y ago
When did this trend of naming things [noun] capitalism start?
- sremani 7y ago
  In US, since post great recession. (my observation).
- abathur 7y ago
  I'm not sure this is one of those new-things-under-the-sun: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*_NOUN+capitalism&year_start=1910&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*_NOUN+capital...
- rumanator 7y ago
  Since the people doing the labeling became desperate to pin negative outcomes to capitalism even when they clearly don't apply at all.
awinter-py 7y ago
100% Youtube created a world where distribution matters more than content because section 230 interpretations allowed them to steal content for a while. And now they pay for it, but that's a new development after years of piracy that drove down the price. The viacom lawsuit has emails from senior youtube execs saying that stolen music content drove most of their traffic
ilamont 7y ago
The introduction of Platform Capitalism to the music industry through streaming services and online media brands more or less reoriented the music industry’s function of supply and quality of demand by flooding the market with valueless content in the form of user-uploaded music and evergreen “click-bait” articles. How quickly we forget the other platforms that used to dominate the music industry -- radio, MTV, distribution networks, music retailers -- that extracted maximum profit from listeners while excluding most artists from profits. It's a similar story in other media industries. B&N is regarded as a victim of Amazon's dominance of the book industry, but 25 years ago it was regarded as a heartless juggernaut devouring the book industry.
- cmiles74 7y ago
  In fact, this is the premise of the film "You've Got Mail".
dummydata 7y ago
The article references some google trends data on electronic dance music, but if you query for EDM instead you get a different picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-01-01%202020-02-07&geo=US&q=EDM https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-01-01%202.... I don't follow the EDM scene personally, so I don't know if interest has been on the decline in recent years.
- budgi4 7y ago
  I think the decline is in the term 'EDM' as a blanket reference as the audience matures into the nuances of electronic music.
twohearted 7y ago
The music industry has been fighting against the natural economic theories of capitalism ever since the mp3. Digital files have infinite supply. Draw a classic supply and demand diagram using that information and look at where the price should be. The supply curve is a vertical line at infinity on the x-axis. The demand curve crosses it at $0. Everyone knows and feels this intrinsically. The artist is the thing with extremely limited supply. Something like Patreon will end up being the correct model.
- klodolph 7y ago
  This argument falls apart because it is using the incorrect definition of “supply”. The “supply” is the amount available on the market. Just because the cost of duplicating a digital file is nearly zero does not mean that the supply is infinite. The supply is limited by laws that restrict who is allowed to duplicate the file and the limited number of people who are willing to break those laws.
mxfh 7y ago
Not showing the growing live part of it, kind of missing the big picture: https://www.statista.com/statistics/239276/growth-of-the-global-music-revenue-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/239276/growth-of-the-glo... EDM and Techno experiences, unlike Pop, are hardly reproducable at home to begin with, they can't really exist without the events and their PA systems. Techno is it's own beast, it's most surprising, that it didn't get flogged to death by commercialization. EDM had the stigma to be perceived as a fad by most to begin with, a non-sustainable stardom driven branch-off that has used up it's novelty quite fast. Music rights themselves still seem super expensive, when they are not meant to lure in customers, when it comes to video games and how they are shut down left and right.
- wwweston 7y ago
  Growing live performance isn't great news; it's likely driven by the fact that buffet streaming is murder for artist capture of revenue from recordings. Live performing is one of the remaining options. And it doesn't scale.
  - msla 7y ago
    Anything which does scale is going to go the same way as recorded music. We can take bets on how long, either directly using betting markets or indirectly by founding or investing in companies which depend on the profitability of certain kinds of scalable thing, but there's nothing scalable which can magically only be scaled the right way by the right people.
    - wwweston 7y ago
      We had a better model for artists for recorded music before buffet streaming: pay for recordings. The trajectory we're now on was less an inevitability driven by new tech + market forces and more a result of specific policy choices and business plays. If your generalization applies (and it may well apply), then that's something to consider for anyone who could find themselves as easily exploited by scale as its beneficiary.
  - 7y ago
DrNuke 7y ago
Harsh reality of the internet content is once you start making something available for free somewhere, then it will be worth zero everywhere. This is pretty sad, because at local level you still have to pay real monies to buy bread & milk and nobody of sound mind would ask for freebies just because somewhere else someone is giving bread & milk away for free.
- boublepop 7y ago
  Which explains why the porn industry, music industry and streaming video industry have all collapsed completely.
throwaway894345 7y ago
What's the difference between "platform capitalism" and "collective bargaining" in this case? Seems like Spotify, etc are acting on behalf of their customers to get a better deal from the music industry.

53 points by laurex 7y ago

Seems to be actually a complaint about the decline of music journalism. Which I agree is sad, but is probably not related to the rise of "platforms" but part of the overall struggles of print journalism. Also the graph in the beginning shows the long linear decline in non-streaming music sales that started decades before streaming became viable, hence not caused by streaming, and in fact streaming platforms are now propping up the mainstream music industry which otherwise would be really circling the drain.

evilantnie 7y ago
I don't know if it's a fair takeaway to consider the decline in non-streaming music was unaffected by streaming that early on. Napster launched in 1999 as a first iteration of what could be considered a streaming service at the time. This chart doesn't represent that impact at all since it's focused on revenue, but timing wise I think there could be correlation.
- Isamu 7y ago
  >Napster .. could be considered a streaming service It was downloads. Anyway the article specifically calls out "streaming platforms" and that's what I take issue with. The big difference is the newer streaming platforms tend to be subscription-based or otherwise ad-based and share revenue with the music industry. My point is the decline in music industry revenue is more due to rogue free download sites or user uploads to YouTube, etc. This generated no (direct) revenue to the music industry. Whereas the newer streaming platforms are working with the music industry and are turning back the tide.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    I wouldn't be so certain. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-platforms-keeping-more-money-from-artists-than-ever-817925/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-... https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/artists-vs-spotify/ https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/artists-vs-spotify/ That music industry money isn't going to the artists. https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-services-pay-musicians https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-... (Ironically, Napster's streaming service appears to pay the most out of all of them now)
    - Isamu 7y ago
      >That music industry money isn't going to the artists. No argument there! The artists have always been the last to be paid. It may be getting worse for the artists, but the situation for actual creators has always been bad ... on average.
      - drngdds 7y ago
        Yeah, this is important. I remember reading plenty of screeds about how awful the music industry and record labels are for artists long before streaming took over.
      - 52-6F-62 7y ago
        It’s been bad, but it’s getting worse. Buddy Holly was revolutionary for the way he negotiated his contracts and set a precedent for better treatment for a time. There a lot more nuance to that history.
extradego 7y ago
This doesn’t hold at all. The blog era was a golden age of indie pop, expressly because there was no dominant platform. The blogs themselves hosted mp3 singles along with the journalism. The way we found the blogs was by each blog having a blogroll, a list of links to other blogs with associated tastes. The bloggers were almost always locally employed. They were talent buyers, musicians, indie labels and writers for local dailies. It led to a surge in music festivals that hosted gobs of smaller musicians as a result. A booming industry that was glorious for the enthusiasts like myself. The major labels started buying the smaller labels as imprints and hiring the blog owners as representatives. In turn, the musicians that conformed and followed orders survived, and those that didn’t died. As the blogs dried up, Shazaam and Spotify filled the void of access to singles while social media filled the void of journalism, to the reluctance of the audience. Likewise, the print journaism industry ran a similar course, with MTV and Clear Channel taking the place of local radio DJs. The issue seems to be the tendency to conform local markets to a broad average. For a corporation, it makes no sense to have local tastemakers. They always tend toward a cosmopolitan ideal but in the end we get nothing but a monoculture that alienates everyone.
Barrin92 7y ago
>but part of the overall struggles of print journalism. which not coincidentally is also related to another platform economy, the shift of advertising revenue from publishers and distributors to the large platforms, Ben Thompson writes about this all the time. I think it's largely detrimental to independent creators, it treats the independent creator of artistic work as an afterthought in the name of aggregate consumer welfare and price. It's centralizing power in the name of efficiency and people talk gleefully about it because it robs the distributors and taxi companies, and movie studios and so on of their perceived ill-gotten power. I think that's a huge mistake, the centralization of power streamlines all goods and removes all diversity, takes agency away from everyone but the large platforms, it turns open spaces into proprietary walled gardens because it's the only way for platforms to defend their content, and we're going to really regret it in a few years if we don't already.
- rumanator 7y ago
  > It's centralizing power in the name of efficiency and people talk gleefully about it because it robs the distributors and taxi companies, and movie studios and so on of their perceived ill-gotten power. I don't agree, because "the movie studios and so on" that you referred were actually the centralizing power, and that power was overthrown by these new platforms in a way that they no longer control and arbitrarily restrict access to the public.
wwweston 7y ago
> but is probably not related to the rise of "platforms" but part of the overall struggles of print journalism. This is partially accurate, but I think it's more accurate to say that journalism in general is struggling because the way the attention economy works now: firehose supply, fiercer competition for attention, consumer indifference to being the customer rather than product, and algorithmic/crowdsourced content recommendation. And the rise of platforms figures into some degree of every one of those aspects.
matchagaucho 7y ago
Exactly my thoughts. Payola was alive and well until Internet distribution took over. Music Journalists were the "Social Influencers" of their day. They were given front row seats, overnight stays at 5-star hotels, lavish meals, and flights on private jets with touring bands. Without Music Journalists, and their access to print, there was just no means to getting the word out. They could make or break any artist.

aphextim 7y ago

Music Industry failed to adapt. NoFx had a song about this called Dinosaurs will die. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKQSQSVVos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKQSQSVVos

j2bax 7y ago
Love NOFX! Been a big fan since like 7th grade (circa 1996) They are real a-holes, but they also have some pretty spot on commentary!

rayiner 7y ago

Or did content socialism (mandatory licensing and government-set streaming royalty rates) devalue the music industry?

profunctor 7y ago
Socialism isn’t when the government does stuff.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Correct, Socialism is when the government does something I don't like.
  - sremani 7y ago
    In this case rayiner seems to use Socialism as a word contrast to headlines use of Capitalism.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I agree with that. But the government forcing property owners to let other people use their property at prices set by the government is pretty socialist: https://completemusicupdate.com/article/us-copyright-royalty-board-confirms-44-increase-in-streaming-royalty-on-songs https://completemusicupdate.com/article/us-copyright-royalty.... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Royalty_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Royalty_Board Imagine if we had a government board deciding what prices people could charge for App Store/Google Play Store apps. (It's not like we're talking about radioactive waste or something involving externalities, where government regulation might be justified.)
  - dantheman 7y ago
    True - though copyright is a government granted monopoly, so there is a tradeoff. It's not real property. Copyright holders get special privileges granted by the government to control what others do with the copyrighted material, so it only makes sense that it comes with strings attached.

Camas 7y ago

When did this trend of naming things [noun] capitalism start?

sremani 7y ago
In US, since post great recession. (my observation).
abathur 7y ago
I'm not sure this is one of those new-things-under-the-sun: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*_NOUN+capitalism&year_start=1910&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*_NOUN+capital...
rumanator 7y ago
Since the people doing the labeling became desperate to pin negative outcomes to capitalism even when they clearly don't apply at all.

awinter-py 7y ago

100% Youtube created a world where distribution matters more than content because section 230 interpretations allowed them to steal content for a while. And now they pay for it, but that's a new development after years of piracy that drove down the price. The viacom lawsuit has emails from senior youtube execs saying that stolen music content drove most of their traffic

ilamont 7y ago

The introduction of Platform Capitalism to the music industry through streaming services and online media brands more or less reoriented the music industry’s function of supply and quality of demand by flooding the market with valueless content in the form of user-uploaded music and evergreen “click-bait” articles. How quickly we forget the other platforms that used to dominate the music industry -- radio, MTV, distribution networks, music retailers -- that extracted maximum profit from listeners while excluding most artists from profits. It's a similar story in other media industries. B&N is regarded as a victim of Amazon's dominance of the book industry, but 25 years ago it was regarded as a heartless juggernaut devouring the book industry.

cmiles74 7y ago
In fact, this is the premise of the film "You've Got Mail".

dummydata 7y ago

The article references some google trends data on electronic dance music, but if you query for EDM instead you get a different picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-01-01%202020-02-07&geo=US&q=EDM https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2010-01-01%202.... I don't follow the EDM scene personally, so I don't know if interest has been on the decline in recent years.

budgi4 7y ago
I think the decline is in the term 'EDM' as a blanket reference as the audience matures into the nuances of electronic music.

twohearted 7y ago

The music industry has been fighting against the natural economic theories of capitalism ever since the mp3. Digital files have infinite supply. Draw a classic supply and demand diagram using that information and look at where the price should be. The supply curve is a vertical line at infinity on the x-axis. The demand curve crosses it at $0. Everyone knows and feels this intrinsically. The artist is the thing with extremely limited supply. Something like Patreon will end up being the correct model.

klodolph 7y ago
This argument falls apart because it is using the incorrect definition of “supply”. The “supply” is the amount available on the market. Just because the cost of duplicating a digital file is nearly zero does not mean that the supply is infinite. The supply is limited by laws that restrict who is allowed to duplicate the file and the limited number of people who are willing to break those laws.

mxfh 7y ago

Not showing the growing live part of it, kind of missing the big picture: https://www.statista.com/statistics/239276/growth-of-the-global-music-revenue-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/239276/growth-of-the-glo... EDM and Techno experiences, unlike Pop, are hardly reproducable at home to begin with, they can't really exist without the events and their PA systems. Techno is it's own beast, it's most surprising, that it didn't get flogged to death by commercialization. EDM had the stigma to be perceived as a fad by most to begin with, a non-sustainable stardom driven branch-off that has used up it's novelty quite fast. Music rights themselves still seem super expensive, when they are not meant to lure in customers, when it comes to video games and how they are shut down left and right.

wwweston 7y ago
Growing live performance isn't great news; it's likely driven by the fact that buffet streaming is murder for artist capture of revenue from recordings. Live performing is one of the remaining options. And it doesn't scale.
- msla 7y ago
  Anything which does scale is going to go the same way as recorded music. We can take bets on how long, either directly using betting markets or indirectly by founding or investing in companies which depend on the profitability of certain kinds of scalable thing, but there's nothing scalable which can magically only be scaled the right way by the right people.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    We had a better model for artists for recorded music before buffet streaming: pay for recordings. The trajectory we're now on was less an inevitability driven by new tech + market forces and more a result of specific policy choices and business plays. If your generalization applies (and it may well apply), then that's something to consider for anyone who could find themselves as easily exploited by scale as its beneficiary.
- 7y ago

DrNuke 7y ago

Harsh reality of the internet content is once you start making something available for free somewhere, then it will be worth zero everywhere. This is pretty sad, because at local level you still have to pay real monies to buy bread & milk and nobody of sound mind would ask for freebies just because somewhere else someone is giving bread & milk away for free.

boublepop 7y ago
Which explains why the porn industry, music industry and streaming video industry have all collapsed completely.

throwaway894345 7y ago

What's the difference between "platform capitalism" and "collective bargaining" in this case? Seems like Spotify, etc are acting on behalf of their customers to get a better deal from the music industry.