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>> The music isn’t your product, the music is your marketing. The shows, the merch, your influence - that’s your product. > Man, that's depressing. If the CEO

• singhrac 6y ago
  It's not comparable - music is art.
  • oarsinsync 6y ago
    The implication in your comment is that code isn't art, when code absolutely can be art. Functional things can be artistically beautiful too.
    • Juliate 6y ago
      Plus the implication that music might not be a tool for a specific purpose (which it is also absolutely in some contexts). The thing is that "music", is not "one thing". It all depends on the purpose, if there is one, and on the intention of the composer and of the players and of the audience. Here, Spotify's CEO adresses a very specific market in the music industry, not "musicians" per se.
    • bmitc 6y ago
      This is a really silly argument. There is an art to building software, no doubt, in terms of it being a craft. But I think you've misspoken about functional things being artistically beautiful. What you really should mean is that functional things can be aesthetically beautiful, which is true and different. Art is primarily defined by expression and exploration, particularly revolving around human emotions. Software products, in the end, do not fit this category. There is a vast difference. Edit: I defined it elsewhere a bit smoother. I define art as the exploration of emotional expression. Art products are the end result of that exploration. Live acts or art or performances could be viewed as a sort of merger between the two, either as a reenactment of the exploration or as a new exploration happening in the moment.
      • meheleventyone 6y ago
        Some software products. There are loads of artistic pieces of software.
        • bmitc 6y ago
          Can you elaborate on what you're referring to or talking about? Of course there are loads of software that people use in art. But in the end, those are still solving a problem and are not art. Examples are TouchDesigner, Processing, Logic, Studio One, Pure Data, vvvv, and much more. These software products are not art themselves but are rather solutions to problems to allow artists to create art easier. They are not art products, in my opinion, since they aren't the result of an exploration of expression. Where the line is blurred for me is in live coding artistic performances. The software there is considered part of the art, as part of the performance. But even then, the software is a tool. If a person uses a hammer in a live art piece, is the hammer now suddenly art? No, I wouldn't think so. It's a tool serving as a utility or maybe medium. It isn't art itself. The art is the performance. Of course there are always exceptions which cannot be captured in every argument. Something that blurs the line is something like DIN . But see, in such a software product, we begin to see expression and not just a thing solving a problem or being a tool. Similarly with Orca (although I wish they would change the name so as to not interfere with actual orcas which some populations are in danger of going extinct). https://dinisnoise.org/ https://dinisnoise.org/
          • meheleventyone 6y ago
            A tremendously important example is videogames which as well as being a multi-billion dollar industry akin to music are also a major medium of individual self expression. In the broader set you have interactive fiction and a whole slew of art that shares a lot in common with time-based art. Demoscene is a good example of the latter.
            • bmitc 6y ago
              Games certainly can be art! But I don't see how that conflicts with what I said or serves as a counterexample. Games are not just software products. They are the culmination of work by artists, designers, writers, and engineers. The end product is often an artistic piece, and a rather interesting one. Games being art doesn't suddenly mean software products are art. The software itself helps drive the art but is not the art itself. I feel a good way to think about it is that software and code running the game is not art in the same way that the paint in a painting is not art. My favorite game designer is Fumito Ueda. His games of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian are prime examples of games can be art.
    • CydeWeys 6y ago
      Sure, code can be art, but most isn't, and the software that the code comprises is almost always functional rather than artistic in purpose.
    • x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      This is a stretch.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • pkulak 6y ago
      If I had one second to say the word that means the opposite of "art", I would say "engineering".
    • ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
      Sorry, it can't. It can be beautiful and amazingly crafted, but it's not art.
    • ssalazar 6y ago
      This is a tired argument that lacks much nuance. Ill believe this when people regularly gather in the thousands to see a brilliant coder at work or view amazing code in a gallery.
      • woutr_be 6y ago
        Are there not thousands of conferences each year? People giving talks at meet-ups, the yearly Apple developer conference draws thousands of people. All events that people sign up for voluntarily to listen to someone else talk about code. As for viewing it; there are also many places where people participate in coding competitions or code golfs, where others judge and appreciate the code. Is that really so different from going to a concert or an art gallery?
  • AndrewUnmuted 6y ago
    I think you will find many here who would argue that code can be art, too. The thing that people don't realize is that it is in fact quite comparable: the binary that one works with to hear a song is not intrinsically worth any more than the same bytes that produce a software application. I'm a musician who now primarily makes music with code. [0] I've decided therefore to always make my music available for free, without exception. We all agree software can and often should be free - music, to me, is exactly the same way. [0] https://multipli.city https://multipli.city
  • AsyncAwait 6y ago
    Code (can be) a form of artistic expression and not every piece of music is art.
  • lux 6y ago
    Musician and software developer here, and I'm calling BS on that. Here's a transcript of a talk I gave last year on "code as art" (apologies if this sounds like self-promo). You can skip the first half and scroll down to where it says "Which leads me back to code as an artform". There are a lot of ways to demonstrate that code IS art, and this was just a quick 5-minute overview of the subject. Cheers! https://www.johnluxford.com/blog/code-as-art https://www.johnluxford.com/blog/code-as-art
    • andybak 6y ago
      Good response. It's simultaneously true that coding (and engineering and science and maths) is more artistic than generally accepted and that "art" in the conventional sense has more in common with those disciplines generally considered to be it's polar opposite.
    • apocalypstyx 6y ago
      As an acquaintance of mine put it the other day on this exact topic (who happens to be a writer/graphic artist/programmer): "First STEM says that the humanities are worthless. Then they say how, really, STEM should get all that glory too because, really, it's the same thing -- but better." Or this quote: "Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk." https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
      • lux 6y ago
        I forgot about Hackers and Painters! Pretty sure there's a copy on a bookshelf here somewhere... Interesting quotes. Reminded me of a conversation I had with some local artists a while back who were staunchly in favour of their kids going into STEM because the humanities don't have a direct application to industry any more. They didn't want their kids wasting money on exploratory education, or in pursuit of the arts which they saw as a dead-end. I found that really sad, but it stemmed from an acute awareness of the direction industries like music are going. Historically, the sciences emerged as areas of philosophy, but they've since become detached from those roots. Those roots have a grounding effect, a sense of the greater context of human life, that's missing in the culture around STEM today. I see echoes of that in the rationalizations made by Spotify's CEO: Who cares if the album is dead? Get with the new program, whatever the cost; it was inevitable anyway.
  • AlexandrB 6y ago
    That's irrelevant. Both software and music are: * infinitely reproducible for near zero marginal cost * subject to changing tastes and style * easily obtainable through illegal means This is especially true for games. Many software companies seem to have solved this dilemma by becoming surveillance or advertising companies that happen to make software. Games have solved it by peddling an increasing quantity of paid, high-margin add-on content and integrating gambling mechanics into their products. I hope the solution musicians come up with isn't as slimy as these. Edit: I also find that most people treat most music as a commodity much of the time. Why else would random feeds of related music be so popular?
    • egypturnash 6y ago
      If you stop playing the huge AAA games and start playing smaller ones, you see another solution: lower prices for games that can be finished in an amount of time that fits into the busy life of an adult, and very often a grant from a national art fund. Not for American games, of course, we basically destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts, thanks a lot guys.
      • sukilot 6y ago
        I prefer art not selected by the government. "Finishing" a game is a weird concept. I don't know anyone who finished chess. Small games aren't necessarily cheaper than big ones; it depends on popularity to sustain a low unit price.
        • danparsonson 6y ago
          Chess doesn't have a narrative arc - unless I've been playing it wrong
          • CarbyAu 6y ago
            And the King, having vanquished his foe at great cost, surveyed the empty field and muttered: "It matters not, for in the end the claw chooses who will go and who will stay".
  • jimbokun 6y ago
    I think some software is certainly also art, such as games.
  • adrr 6y ago
    Code can be describe with aesthetic qualities like clean, beautiful, shitty, complex, delicate, etc. Just like music. Art is just a representation of human creativeness and imagination which is what software is.
  • mola 6y ago
    There is no art anymore, only products. Once you optimize for monetary compensation via popular consumption, all creative endeavours are seen as and become products. Your sentence, while it reasonate with me, is seen today as naive and non realistic.
• shindasingh 6y ago
  isn't this true now for gaming? With the success of things like Fortnite seeing games being released for free and relying on the DLC's and skins and rewards as the product.
  • Uehreka 6y ago
    Yeah, and I’d argue that sucks too.
    • leetcrew 6y ago
      I agree with you on DLC. I'd rather just pay $100 upfront (or whatever it needs to cost) to get a finished product. on the other hand, I think F2P monetized with cosmetic items is a pretty good model for a multiplayer game. anyone with a computer can enjoy the game, and the people who care the most (or have the most disposable income) support ongoing development without messing with the balance.
  • germinalphrase 6y ago
    More like Fortnight realizing that they need to push merch hard at target, etc.
• ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  Music is different from software in my mind. Software, with rare exceptions, is solving a problem—music is not.
  • falcor84 6y ago
    I would disagree. I would instead phrase it as "addressing a need", and with that phrasing, I don't see a clear distinction between software and music.
    • leeoniya 6y ago
      by that logic, breathing and eating would also fall into this category, as would literally any action taken by a living thing.
    • bmitc 6y ago
      That is really diluting the difference between art and software, so much so that it's almost comical. I define art as the exploration of emotional expression, and software simply does not fit into that category except in the cases of using software as a tool or mechanism in the exploration. The "need" in creating art is often described by artists in that the act of creation is fulfilling an internal need. Writers, musicians, etc. often describe their works as pouring out of them, almost by necessity. This is rarely the case for software and engineering products which seek to fulfill an external need. Software, like engineering, seeks to solve problems. Art can but does not in general. I personally find it mindblowing and a bit disturbing that I see people in this thread equating software to art. It's a bit disrespectful and elitist to claim that they're the same. Artist make pennies and are being forced by market dynamics to change their expression to merely survive. Meanwhile, software engineers make six figures and retire early playing a game of connect the dots. It's flippant to those artists who struggle for years and years in the hopes of even a modicum of support or recognition and live on pennies.
      • wolco 6y ago
        It is elitist to claim they are not the same. Software is the product of expression. Music is the product of expression. They both can use emotion when creating. They both can evoke emotion while experiencing. Who retires first debate: the famous musician or famous programmer is still unsettled. Classically an artist put themselves in difficult situations in order to grow as a person so the art can say more. Don't be angry at others making money because an artist has choosen a different path.
• ChrisKingWebDev 6y ago
  What if they said, "Our product isn't our software, our product is our marketing"? This makes more sense because there can me many products offering the same service, but the one with the best marketing can win, even if it's not the best software.
• 13415 6y ago
  I would definitely feel the same way.
• dnprock 6y ago
  "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing" I think this is fairly accurate. In software, you can write some for marketing, but keep some proprietary.
• number6 6y ago
  > How do I land a decent software engineer job? Publish your work on github. Software is not your product, it's your marketing.
• JAlexoid 6y ago
  Music isn't functional... But then look at games - companies release X games yearly or rely heavily on fans.
• Bjorkbat 6y ago
  I wouldn't. But I think that's because open-source software development companies are the exception rather than the norm. No one expects you to open-source your software and then hope someone hires you for your services or buys one of your t-shirts. It's still the norm in our industry to write something and sell copies of it. Plus, software pays more. Software developers generally don't get squeezed. Musicians, on the other hand, never seem to catch a break. EDIT: Or, even better, it's the norm to sell a monthly right to use what we wrote. Also, freemium games have business models very similar to music. Yeah, there are some successful freemium games out there, but in general it's pretty brutal and depressing.
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    > Software developers generally don't get squeezed Where I live, they do...go live in one of the countries where software gets outsourced. People are paid < $200 monthly here. Software developers have skills that are easily transferable than musicians. If software developers stop learning, they will quickly be devalued with legacy maintenance as an exception. We used to value musicians more because of supply and distribution problems. It was an artificially constrained labor market. Now it is not. That's why they aren't getting paid the same. Similar to how writing html and css would get you a good paying job, not now though. Musicians need to change and adapt. They need to pick up more transferable skills.
  • gwd 6y ago
    Thank you; I think you answered my question. Basically, in software, you can choose to open-source your software as marketing if you want, but proprietary is still a sustainable business model. The claim here (which I am in no position to evaluate) is that for music, you no longer really have any choice: selling music itself is no longer a sustainable business model; you can only give it away in hopes that you can sell something else as a result. That is pretty depressing.
• yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > If the CEO of an open-source company said, "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way? Yes, absolutely, 100%! By all means care about image and marketing, but if your actual product isn't good (software, music, or anything else), then who cares?
  • tropdrop 6y ago
    What defines "good"? Marketability to the lowest common denominator?
    • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      For software, actual usefulness. A word processor that's trending on Twitter but which makes it hard to actually edit documents is not useful. A graphics driver that actually renders my screen is useful even if nobody's ever heard of it (although I grant that below a certain size maintenance issues might come up). For music... I'm far less qualified to say, but there's still a notion of (subjective) quality, which is only loosely correlated to marketing. I suppose we could say "good" music is that music which people enjoy, which still is driven by the actual music and not marketing.
      • tropdrop 6y ago
        My (implicit) point was that software can be optimized for one factor, which is usefulness. By evaluating usefulness, we can evaluate whether a piece of software is "good" or not. However, use-value makes for a very poor metric for evaluating music (I am ignoring arguments about the "usefulness" of music when it's played on a factory floor, making workers slightly more productive). So what must we use to evaluate its "good"-ness? Anything you propose here will have certain people agree, and others disagree, e.g. one set of people say good music must make you dance, and another set will say good music must make you feel relaxed (the opposite of dance). When aggregated, these individual differences will cancel out. So the average most marketable music must, therefore, be as bland as water.
        • 6y ago
• jldugger 6y ago
  If that CEO was in charge of Redhat, sure. Or maybe one of those open source SaaS companies, but many of them are realizing that maybe giving away the software was also a product decision that is now harming the bottom line.
• jimbokun 6y ago
  Kinda, yeah. I think it's a little sad that you can't write some great software that solves a problem for people and get paid for it anymore. Or at least not as easily as in the past. The changing business model has a lot of negative externalities, too. Like the temptation to monetize user data instead of monetizing the value of the software directly, and the temptation to push the line on privacy.
  • dri_ft 6y ago
    The spiritual rewards of doing good work have never, in any field, reliably aligned with the worldly rewards of popularity and success.
    • gwd 6y ago
      This is basically an argument in favor of UBI.
  • webmaven 6y ago
    > I think it's a little sad that you can't write some great software that solves a problem for people and get paid for it anymore. Or at least not as easily as in the past. I think that you're ignoring the fact that you were actually getting paid for solving their problem, not for great software per-se. Just because the constraints on different parts of the value chain have changed, altering where the convenient bottlenecks are for extracting payments, doesn't make the past environment any better overall, just different.
• quacked 6y ago
  I see your point. But I still think that if the CEO said "software is our marketing- our real product is our influence", I'd still find that depressing.
• CryptoBanker 6y ago
  That's literally what it is most of the time. Software is marketing and enterprise level support is the product
• bsder 6y ago
  > "Software isn't our product, software is our marketing", would you feel the same way? It did happen. We call it "In App Purchasing". And we ALL loathe it like the plague.
• mdavidn 6y ago
  But some open source software is marketing, is it not? The big open source frameworks released by tech companies come to mind. These projects shape the industry and advance the company's recruitment goals. Bootstrap. React. TensorFlow. Kubernetes. WebKit.
• zerotolerance 6y ago
  The primary value of OSS is marketing. Education is a distant second.
• mmis1000 6y ago
  Isn't is? open-source company typically don't sell 'software'. They sell 'support' ans 'service'. And even microsoft, a typical software company do this now
• mikro2nd 6y ago
  My immediate question to that CEO would be, "OK, so what is it you're marketing?" In the case of open-source software, they're probably marketing consulting, books, training. (I think conferences would likely be part of the marketing.) And that, folks, is how we end up with those crapulacious open-source software tools (libraries, whatever) that are deliberately incomprehensible to anybody outside the producer bubble. e.g. Bouncy Castle: Utterly shite API to the point of unusable, despite the undoubtedly well done implementation underneath; completely absent documentation in any useful/usable form. Everything around it is just, "Buy our books, come on our courses if you want to use this library." The code itself is obfuscatory. Not a design document or user-guide in sight. (Other examples abound. I just pick on the one that burned me the worst.) So, back to music. How is this a good result for the "market"? We end up with a flume of mediocre-to-crap music (but frequently! as if that's a good thing all by itself) all in the name of marketing,... what precisely? Where's the passion gone? Where's the art? Where's the music I'll listen to over and over again for decades?