7 ms·

At one of the earliest E3s, the keynote was from the CTO of AOL. I wish I remembered the year or his name or could find some video of the talk, but this was at

by madrox 6y ago

At one of the earliest E3s, the keynote was from the CTO of AOL. I wish I remembered the year or his name or could find some video of the talk, but this was at the height of Napster where it seemed like no one was paying for music. This guy compared music piracy to the prohibition. He said people didn't want to break the law. People just wanted to drink. I haven't looked at piracy the same way since. Fast forward to seeing this, and I realize this doesn't have the same draw as it would have 20 years ago. People can get the music they want at a price they're willing to accept.

tomrod 6y ago
Completely agree. People rationally evaluate the cost to breaking the law. It's not a perfect economics 201 model, though, as its not like increasing the enforcement and costs fully deter piracy engagement.
kace91 6y ago
The problem has been solved for the public, but there's still issues for the supply side though. All the non-mainstream music makes I follow since I was a teenager complain that music has never been in a harder place in terms of making money off of it. Apparently their piece of the cake has massively reduced.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Do we know if it has actually constrained supply? As far as I can tell there is an effectively limitless amount of new music to listen to in almost any genre you could pick. I just searched for one genre and I found no less than a hundred new albums this year. https://theboot.com/new-music-rundown-country-americana-bluegrass-folk-albums-coming-in-2020/ https://theboot.com/new-music-rundown-country-americana-blue... I think this is not exhaustive because most of the names I spot checked have produced chart topping singles or won industry-wide awards.
- vkou 6y ago
  > All the non-mainstream music makes I follow since I was a teenager complain that music has never been in a harder place in terms of making money off of it. Apparently their piece of the cake has massively reduced. This should be expected, given that the amount of artists making commercial non-mainstream music has skyrocketed. The pie has gotten bigger, and the non-mainstream share of the pie has gotten bigger, but there's a lot more people fighting over its scraps.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    This is what I also believe but I haven't seen data that shows it (as in: I have actually seen none, not that I have seen it showing the opposite), do you know of any?
  - lloeki 6y ago
    Lots of friends and my very own wife are musicians, their take on it is that to be competitive on Spotify and such, you have to produce content so regularly that quality is diluted. There’s a whole market of tool-assisted beat and melody makers that build and curate then offer these for sell for artists to buy. The whole process is heavily industrialised, tools allow the maker to produce dozens of such bricks a day, basically bruteforcing a whole space, but everything resembles everything else, diluted to no end, channeling the money stream and bleeding the “old way” creators to death. Albums have been dying for a while already, even EPs are barely living corpses in this attention grabbing landscape. Even for singles there’s just no way to mature ideas and create truly creative content in an amount of time that allows to keep up pace and make money through these platforms. So they stay on the local scene, which is being obliterated by COVID.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > their take on it is that to be competitive on Spotify and such, you have to produce content so regularly that quality is diluted. I think this idea is misguided. The more music you produce, the more good music you produce. Trying to keep average quality up by restricting production is counterproductive in two separate ways; (1) it ends up causing you to produce lower-quality output than otherwise, and (2) nobody cares that you released some bad songs if you also released some good songs. I read a fun paper documenting this very effect (the first one) in a college pottery class. One class was told the grading procedure would be as follows: 1. Over the course of the term, you make some pots. It's up to you. 2. Turn in all your pots at the end of the term. 3. The instructor will evaluate your pots for quality, and you will receive a grade accordingly. A second class was told they'd be graded like so: 1. Over the course of the term, you make some pots. It's up to you. 2. Turn in all your pots at the end of the term. 3. The instructor will never look at your pots. They will be smashed into tiny shards, and your shards will be weighed. Your grade will be based on the weight of your accumulated pots after they are destroyed. More is better. In fact, the pots in group two were evaluated for quality just like group one. Students in group two produced more pots. They also produced better pots.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  What if there are simply not enough people who enjoy this sort of music enough to be ready to pay for it? Maybe the problem is not that it is hard for non-mainstream music to find its supporters. Maybe the problem is that non-mainstream musicians are deluded to think they have enough supporters to make a living off their music. Even YouTubers that produce free content can make a living off Patreon. Even some podcasters can.
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    Yes, but pre streaming and piracy the only way to listen to music from these artists was to pay for it. They just need to change the model. A Youtuber doesn't have 80% of their earnings go to a record label.
  - kace91 6y ago
    There is enough people who enjoy it, however; the proof is that those artists used to be able to make a living through their followers in the past. The issue is that attention is a scarce resource, and the means to keep it through market formulas and analysis of trends have become way too effective. Artists are now in a race to the bottom where they have to choose between playing the game, and changing their style, message and work to chase engagement metrics, or resign themselves to be drowned and forgotten for staying "real" Youtubers suffer the same fate. You can see people moving from tech reviews to game streaming and then to music production or vlogging in their search for views. But they (most of them) are more businessmen than artists, and don't feel tied to a message or artistic vision that they need to communicate. I'd argue that an ideal system should have a place for artistic quality to shine beyond entertainment, and that used to happen, at least to a higher degree than it does now. Which is not to say that everything's worse: the tools to become a creator are better and more accessible than ever (hardware, resources to learn, etc).
sneak 6y ago
I wish. About a quarter to a third of the stuff I want to listen to either has been pulled from Spotify in the last few years, or was never there to begin with. I’d love to be able to pay a cloud service to be able to stop shuttling rare files around.
- disillusioned 6y ago
  Google Music has just the--what's that--oh--oh dear.
- stainforth 6y ago
  Soon there could be messages like "Leaving Spotify this month", having albums shopped around each service
segmondy 6y ago
It's actually too much of a price. Most of on this site can gladly afford $10 a month for 12 months, but that's $120 a year. That's a lot of money for some people, and when you add people in other countries, that could be someone's monthly salary.
- harikb 6y ago
  Well, Spotify plans in certain countries are cheaper & adjusted to what the market can afford - just like many other services.
- canofbars 6y ago
  Get a family plan and share it between a bunch of people. The cost is now much more affordable.
  - patd 6y ago
    If people do this, it only shows that the normal price is too high for many. And I guess it’s against their ToS.
    - canofbars 6y ago
      The price is fine for the majority of people. For those that can't afford the full price they can do this. The inconvenience of it stops most people doing it so I doubt spotify cares.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
> People can get the music they want at a price they're willing to accept. People can get what is popular. There's just so many albums and soundtracks that just can't be found on Spotify. Legal streaming is nothing compared to the private music torrent tracker scene... Before it was shut down, one particular site was often called the library of Alexandria for music and even had actual artists release their music there.
- danmur 6y ago
  There's also the issue of having your music collection tied to a cloud provider. I've been using Play Music for years, happily, but I don't much like the replacement (YouTube/YouTube Music/whatever). And I don't trust Google to have a stable product lineup either.
  - njanirudh 6y ago
    Seriously one of the worst playlist and downloads UX ever
  - Qued79 6y ago
    I had the same issue and moved to AIMP which has been pretty great honestly. To be clear though it's only a replacement if you're like me and all of your music is loaded onto your phone anyway (and don't mind the initial time investment of making playlists)
- canofbars 6y ago
  These days there is RED which comes close to what WCD was but the user base is a fraction of the size and will never reach WCD because torrents are far less popular.
  - ponker 6y ago
    I hope at least one person has all of WCD archived.
  - hosteur 6y ago
chippy 6y ago
> People can get the music People can rent the music, they cannot really get it. (Of course, piracy is not a way to own music legally either...)
illumin8 6y ago
Even though Spotify "lets people drink," it still suffers from many of the same problems that piracy solves. For example, music publishers can arbitrarily decide they don't want you to be able to listen to their music any more, and even if you had "liked" the song to add it to your library, it will show up as greyed out and you can't listen to it. Here's a song I added to my library a few years ago that I can no longer listen to. It's too bad I didn't buy this song instead of rent it. I could still listen to it if I had... https://open.spotify.com/track/5gk4KOkSqWOCUjnxzILSTG?si=OrlDxHFtST2UPxYKUlSzEw https://open.spotify.com/track/5gk4KOkSqWOCUjnxzILSTG?si=Orl...
stubish 6y ago
'Price they're willing to accept' is interesting. Here, Spotify is $1/month more than Netflix. And $4/month more than Amazon Prime. This makes Spotify look very overpriced, since intuitively we think Video & Movies should be more expensive than Music. My gut feel is Spotify needs to be priced a lot cheaper for general acceptance, because people don't evaluate pricing of these services in a vacuum. I think this is why households are subscribing to two or three video streaming services, but not Spotify.

by madrox 6y ago

tomrod 6y ago

Completely agree. People rationally evaluate the cost to breaking the law. It's not a perfect economics 201 model, though, as its not like increasing the enforcement and costs fully deter piracy engagement.

kace91 6y ago

The problem has been solved for the public, but there's still issues for the supply side though. All the non-mainstream music makes I follow since I was a teenager complain that music has never been in a harder place in terms of making money off of it. Apparently their piece of the cake has massively reduced.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Do we know if it has actually constrained supply? As far as I can tell there is an effectively limitless amount of new music to listen to in almost any genre you could pick. I just searched for one genre and I found no less than a hundred new albums this year. https://theboot.com/new-music-rundown-country-americana-bluegrass-folk-albums-coming-in-2020/ https://theboot.com/new-music-rundown-country-americana-blue... I think this is not exhaustive because most of the names I spot checked have produced chart topping singles or won industry-wide awards.
vkou 6y ago
> All the non-mainstream music makes I follow since I was a teenager complain that music has never been in a harder place in terms of making money off of it. Apparently their piece of the cake has massively reduced. This should be expected, given that the amount of artists making commercial non-mainstream music has skyrocketed. The pie has gotten bigger, and the non-mainstream share of the pie has gotten bigger, but there's a lot more people fighting over its scraps.
- riffraff 6y ago
  This is what I also believe but I haven't seen data that shows it (as in: I have actually seen none, not that I have seen it showing the opposite), do you know of any?
- lloeki 6y ago
  Lots of friends and my very own wife are musicians, their take on it is that to be competitive on Spotify and such, you have to produce content so regularly that quality is diluted. There’s a whole market of tool-assisted beat and melody makers that build and curate then offer these for sell for artists to buy. The whole process is heavily industrialised, tools allow the maker to produce dozens of such bricks a day, basically bruteforcing a whole space, but everything resembles everything else, diluted to no end, channeling the money stream and bleeding the “old way” creators to death. Albums have been dying for a while already, even EPs are barely living corpses in this attention grabbing landscape. Even for singles there’s just no way to mature ideas and create truly creative content in an amount of time that allows to keep up pace and make money through these platforms. So they stay on the local scene, which is being obliterated by COVID.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > their take on it is that to be competitive on Spotify and such, you have to produce content so regularly that quality is diluted. I think this idea is misguided. The more music you produce, the more good music you produce. Trying to keep average quality up by restricting production is counterproductive in two separate ways; (1) it ends up causing you to produce lower-quality output than otherwise, and (2) nobody cares that you released some bad songs if you also released some good songs. I read a fun paper documenting this very effect (the first one) in a college pottery class. One class was told the grading procedure would be as follows: 1. Over the course of the term, you make some pots. It's up to you. 2. Turn in all your pots at the end of the term. 3. The instructor will evaluate your pots for quality, and you will receive a grade accordingly. A second class was told they'd be graded like so: 1. Over the course of the term, you make some pots. It's up to you. 2. Turn in all your pots at the end of the term. 3. The instructor will never look at your pots. They will be smashed into tiny shards, and your shards will be weighed. Your grade will be based on the weight of your accumulated pots after they are destroyed. More is better. In fact, the pots in group two were evaluated for quality just like group one. Students in group two produced more pots. They also produced better pots.
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
What if there are simply not enough people who enjoy this sort of music enough to be ready to pay for it? Maybe the problem is not that it is hard for non-mainstream music to find its supporters. Maybe the problem is that non-mainstream musicians are deluded to think they have enough supporters to make a living off their music. Even YouTubers that produce free content can make a living off Patreon. Even some podcasters can.
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Yes, but pre streaming and piracy the only way to listen to music from these artists was to pay for it. They just need to change the model. A Youtuber doesn't have 80% of their earnings go to a record label.
- kace91 6y ago
  There is enough people who enjoy it, however; the proof is that those artists used to be able to make a living through their followers in the past. The issue is that attention is a scarce resource, and the means to keep it through market formulas and analysis of trends have become way too effective. Artists are now in a race to the bottom where they have to choose between playing the game, and changing their style, message and work to chase engagement metrics, or resign themselves to be drowned and forgotten for staying "real" Youtubers suffer the same fate. You can see people moving from tech reviews to game streaming and then to music production or vlogging in their search for views. But they (most of them) are more businessmen than artists, and don't feel tied to a message or artistic vision that they need to communicate. I'd argue that an ideal system should have a place for artistic quality to shine beyond entertainment, and that used to happen, at least to a higher degree than it does now. Which is not to say that everything's worse: the tools to become a creator are better and more accessible than ever (hardware, resources to learn, etc).

sneak 6y ago

I wish. About a quarter to a third of the stuff I want to listen to either has been pulled from Spotify in the last few years, or was never there to begin with. I’d love to be able to pay a cloud service to be able to stop shuttling rare files around.

disillusioned 6y ago
Google Music has just the--what's that--oh--oh dear.
stainforth 6y ago
Soon there could be messages like "Leaving Spotify this month", having albums shopped around each service

segmondy 6y ago

It's actually too much of a price. Most of on this site can gladly afford $10 a month for 12 months, but that's $120 a year. That's a lot of money for some people, and when you add people in other countries, that could be someone's monthly salary.

harikb 6y ago
Well, Spotify plans in certain countries are cheaper & adjusted to what the market can afford - just like many other services.
canofbars 6y ago
Get a family plan and share it between a bunch of people. The cost is now much more affordable.
- patd 6y ago
  If people do this, it only shows that the normal price is too high for many. And I guess it’s against their ToS.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    The price is fine for the majority of people. For those that can't afford the full price they can do this. The inconvenience of it stops most people doing it so I doubt spotify cares.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> People can get the music they want at a price they're willing to accept. People can get what is popular. There's just so many albums and soundtracks that just can't be found on Spotify. Legal streaming is nothing compared to the private music torrent tracker scene... Before it was shut down, one particular site was often called the library of Alexandria for music and even had actual artists release their music there.

danmur 6y ago
There's also the issue of having your music collection tied to a cloud provider. I've been using Play Music for years, happily, but I don't much like the replacement (YouTube/YouTube Music/whatever). And I don't trust Google to have a stable product lineup either.
- njanirudh 6y ago
  Seriously one of the worst playlist and downloads UX ever
- Qued79 6y ago
  I had the same issue and moved to AIMP which has been pretty great honestly. To be clear though it's only a replacement if you're like me and all of your music is loaded onto your phone anyway (and don't mind the initial time investment of making playlists)
canofbars 6y ago
These days there is RED which comes close to what WCD was but the user base is a fraction of the size and will never reach WCD because torrents are far less popular.
- ponker 6y ago
  I hope at least one person has all of WCD archived.
- hosteur 6y ago

chippy 6y ago

> People can get the music People can rent the music, they cannot really get it. (Of course, piracy is not a way to own music legally either...)

illumin8 6y ago

Even though Spotify "lets people drink," it still suffers from many of the same problems that piracy solves. For example, music publishers can arbitrarily decide they don't want you to be able to listen to their music any more, and even if you had "liked" the song to add it to your library, it will show up as greyed out and you can't listen to it. Here's a song I added to my library a few years ago that I can no longer listen to. It's too bad I didn't buy this song instead of rent it. I could still listen to it if I had... https://open.spotify.com/track/5gk4KOkSqWOCUjnxzILSTG?si=OrlDxHFtST2UPxYKUlSzEw https://open.spotify.com/track/5gk4KOkSqWOCUjnxzILSTG?si=Orl...

stubish 6y ago

'Price they're willing to accept' is interesting. Here, Spotify is $1/month more than Netflix. And $4/month more than Amazon Prime. This makes Spotify look very overpriced, since intuitively we think Video & Movies should be more expensive than Music. My gut feel is Spotify needs to be priced a lot cheaper for general acceptance, because people don't evaluate pricing of these services in a vacuum. I think this is why households are subscribing to two or three video streaming services, but not Spotify.