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The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. There will always be superstars that make the maj

The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today. If anything, streaming makes it possible to find those smaller artists and sample what they're making without having to go to some esoteric store and pay $20 for an album that you've never heard before. The system may be broken, but I'm not sure going back to the old system is the right approach.

vlovich123 6y ago
Isn't that just a truism of the Pareto principle? Is there any field where that's not the case? 20% of lawyers make 80% of the money. 20% of doctors make 80% of the money. etc etc. The difference I think is if 80% of professional musicians can't make a living & it's not clear that's actually the case (i.e. streaming isn't the only source of revenue). Similarly, music may have a higher "stickiness" for tenacity where people see it as a higher calling for them even if they're not making money (vs someone not cutting it as a lawyer/doctor to even pay the bills is going to quit & find something else if they weren't even weeded out during school).
- rtx 6y ago
  I don't think it's true for doctors, the wealth there is more distributed.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Some professions are lottery professions. Others aren't. I suppose a lot of it is a demand/supply thing. Also independent contractor vs. employee. Not to say employees all make a lot of money. Janitor probably makes a fairly predictable minimum wage level in the US. On the other hand an employed software developer or other engineer might have a 5-10x wage disparity (even within a given country) for various reasons. But it won't be an "actor" waiting tables versus an A-list celebrity.
  - geodel 6y ago
    Once you expand this to doctors all over the world. This will become definitely true. There are enough doctors in third world who make < $10K a year.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    Even in the West, a doctor who becomes the CEO of a successful medical supplies company or the administrator for an upscale hospital will make more than a doctor running their own practice who make more than a regular doctor employed by a corporation. Keep in mind there’s also a wide variety of “medical practitioners” like chiropractors, therapists, various “unlicensed medical practitioners” who practice eastern medicine etc. Even within traditional medicine you’ve got your small GP whose struggling to keep their practice afloat (it’s a regular business) and extremely wealthy surgeons or other doctors who identify a niche they can make extremey lucrative (eg unscrupulous pain management doctors who process high volume and low effort clients). There’s a wide variety of outcomes even after the great filter that are MCATs and medical school. For example, Thomas F. Frist Jr. is worth ~13 billion. Now granted at those levels he’s more an entrepreneur/businessman as all such people are. Still, the difference between his net worth and a regular GP making $400k is probably about the same difference as a musician worth $300 million and a musician making $200/year.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
  Perhaps the problem is there are simply too many musicians all fighting for the same fixed size pie. I'm guessing the reason is there are a lot of people willing to work for a very low pay because they want to be a musician and not that they see it as a profitable pursuit.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    This is what is known in economics as a compensating differential. It's also my pet theory for why bog standard backend devs tend to get paid a lot more than game devs, even though the game devs tend to be more skilled and harder working.
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      So what you are saying is that because the job of the backend dev isn't as interesting as game dev,they are paid more? I very much doubt that's the reason.
      - Aerroon 6y ago
        No, it's the other way around. Gamedevs make less, because there are so many people that want to work as gamedevs.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        While I absolutely disagree with the above comment that "bog standard" backend devs have less skills than game devs [0], the call to "passion" does tend to deflate salaries and inflate working hours (at very real costs of work/life balance and burnout/early "retirement") in games. (It's among many reasons game developers pretty much need to unionize to avoid mistreatment from management, because "passion" is always going to be a weakness in negotiation.) [0] The call to "passion" tends to work the other direction too in that game developers are overwhelmingly young, fresh out of school, and the turnover ratio in the industry implies a huge turnover of skills and experience over time as well as consequent losses to institutional memory. There aren't a lot of safe spaces in games to build skills and game companies have fewer incentives to retain skilled workers than a lot of the, for instance, "dark matter" enterprise uses of backend developers where the backend developer becomes an institutional knowledge bottleneck.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Although if that's the case there then the average earning of the top 20% of musicians is at most £800 a year.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  If you fail MCAT or LSAT you can't even study for a medical/law degree. If you throw random samples into FL Studio and publish the result on iTunes or Spotify you can claim to be a part of the oppressed 80% that earns less than £200 a year.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    But once you get your medical/law/MBA/HR degree you can be incredibly mediocre at your job and still get six/seven/eight figures a year. It's entirely down to organised (guild) gatekeeping and managed perceptions of value, not actual value provided. More, it's covertly about political power.
    - mypalmike 6y ago
      Medicine and law are not the sure fire lucrative professions they once were.
- serjester 6y ago
  Law and medicine aren’t winner take all fields so that’s not a fair comparison. Should 80% of authors be able to make a living from their book sales? Athletes? Social media CEO’s? Fair or not fair is subjective. In my opinion you shouldn’t go into fields with heavy power law dynamics unless you’re comfortable with a very high likelihood of coming out a ‘failure’. At least it’s gotten more meritocratic than in years past.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    This is confusing cause and effect. Should 80% of middle managers be able to make a living from their work? Politicians? Bankers? Investors? Backend developers? The fact that there's no question that these people are somehow magically worth it, while musicians and artists somehow magically aren't, is a symptom of the covert beliefs that define value, not a cause of them. Realistically this is just a different kind of social credit - and no less brutal than the Chinese kind, even though the values are (somewhat) different.
    - satyrnein 6y ago
      People might think developers should be able to make a living from their work, but that doesn't translate into thinking that developers somehow "deserve" to make a living selling apps on the App Store. One is a job, the other is being an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs fail, of all kinds. I don't think it's a value judgement on art or music.
- tanilama 6y ago
  > 80% of professional musicians can't make a living It might hurt people's feeling, but most of those are not professional musicians. I don't think it is judgemental to say that to claim oneself as professional, one need to demonstrate that they could make a living out of it. Otherwise, it is no different than a hobbyist, albeit much more time is dumped on it. In case of streaming, now more people can declare themselves as musicians, since the barrier of publishing has been significantly lowered comparing to physical CDs. But that doesn't mean profit would follow. To produce hit music isn't easy, and luck is certainly a factor of it.
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    I think too many non-musicians believe this is a case the population being comprised of a small number of professional musicians and a huge number of untalented hacks. The reality is that there is while there are a lot of hacks and untalented musicians alongside the professional musicians, there are also actually a ton of talented musicians that are working very hard to write, record, and release music, and just simply never get heard. They submit to pandora or Spotify or wherever and it never makes it into the algorithms. It's up to them to do all their own marketing. We're influenced by survivorship bias and it's easy to say "they should just tour and play out and submit to music blogs!" and it's difficult to communicate just how hard it is to find any traction at all.
    - satyrnein 6y ago
      This is true, but what ought to happen instead?
      - tunesmith 6y ago
        I personally don't have strong opinions on a solution, because I think it is a very hard problem. A lot of people that listen to music don't have any interest in discovering new music, or finding music that is a distinct match for their unique personality. They're just happy to listen to what is shoved in front of them. But if you change your approach away from what is good for each listener, and more toward what is good for a healthy culture, then maybe that starts suggesting some paths. I'd personally like it to be more of a combination of aggressively introducing people to new music, making hard not to rank/react to music, and heavily rewarding artists of new music that yield positive response. I also think there should be a form of progressive redistribution of the power law. Just because there's a power low doesn't mean the slope can't be flattened a bit.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Percentages are different than absolute numbers, though. It would be surprising if, for instance, 80% of lawyers earn less than 200 GBP a year.
  - aforwardslash 6y ago
    They wouldn't. They could just work in something else, as probably the majority of people with a law degree do. Only a fraction of those are actually lawyers.
pgayed 6y ago
^ this. Eighty percent of actors work as waiters & waitresses. Eighty percent of startups make $0. Why is this article topping hn?
- kennywinker 6y ago
  Actors are paid very well, on union scales, when they do get gigs. I suspect well over 80% of actors who get at least one gig per year are going to make at LEAST 10 x $200. Startups are a different situation, but in fact so different it seems silly to compare. But the real reason this is on HN is because this is the consequences of applying technology (smartphones, cellular data, cloud scale web services) to an industry (music sales).
  - vladmk 6y ago
    I don’t think it’s silly at all giving both a hand. Both are risky, both Take skill and luck, both rarely work out. I don’t agree
  - saaaaaam 6y ago
    Are startups such a different situation? You have a few people with a new creative vision and their success is largely determined by how well they can communicate that vision and how many customers they can acquire before their runway expires. Music is a subscription business, and the clever people have an eye to CAC, ARPU, MAU and LTV just as much as startups.
  - pgayed 6y ago
    There are probably more people supporting themselves from creative endeavors than ever before. (Proportionally and absolutely.) Think about all the tiktok'ers, OnlyFans, youtubers, instagram influencers, etc., who might have been otherwise dismissed as “the pretty face in the office”. This is not to say any significant proportion will end up “rich”—no different than the rest of us—but there have never been more “exit ramps”.
kennywinker 6y ago
There are many places in between the place we are headed, aka "everything is streamed, streams pay basically nothing" and where we used to be. A collective action by artists to force streaming services into a better deal seems like what is required, tho the general appetite for collective action in 2020 still seems a little lacking.
- drusepth 6y ago
  Wouldn't negotiating a "better deal" for the 80% of artists earning less than £200 likely just raise costs on the already-expensive streaming platforms to help pay for it?
- russli1993 6y ago
  But then if you look at Spotify's earning report, they are losing money. A large percentage of the cost is music licensing. I think the solution is the streaming services like Spotify either 1) comes up with more revenue streams 2) Raise prices on their core business, the subscription prices higher than $10 a month. If the second option is happening, I am sure we will get another HN discussion post, with some people complaining its too expensive. So we have to think, are we the consumer, by demanding that we want cheap "all you can eat" music subscription, we are hurting the musicians? If you think about it, $10 a month is two cups of Starbucks coffee. I drink more cups of coffee a month than that. And how much effort is it to make two cups of coffee and the coffee beans are industrially produced? Versus a musicians writing a song and perform the song? I claim the latter involves much more effort. Also lets remember how we ended up with the $10/month all you can eat subscription. Pirating, CD rips, online MP3 sharing, Youtube music videos, etc. The majority of the people don't want to pay for music anymore. I feel people are more likely to value a physical good. For example: I feel somewhat balanced for paying $5 for that Starbucks coffee because I get a physical thing in the end. In the early 2000s, the computer and internet was the new thing, not everyone used it, and it was a bit complicated. So using it made me feel like I am "smarter", more frontier chasing, more elite than others. And there were ideals like internet freedom, free access to information. And then when I discovered there is MP3s, copy and paste, BitTorrent and Napster, I felt like I have just been bestowed special powers. Through my "hard" work with computers, I gained the rights to listen to music for free. I actually felt I was righteous to download music from the Internet and listen to them. Had content locked behind a paywall, had to pay for that? It was against internet freedom, it was an outrage. Then I remember when Steven Jobs later came out with Itunes and every song is 99 cents. I felt, 99 cents? alright, it's only a dollar and really not that much. That was the first time I started to actually pay for music. But the music industry and musicians were outraged because Steve Jobs is making their work worth only a dollar. Job's point was that if you charge people more than 99 cents a song, people would just pirate. I agree with him. The later "all you can streaming" subscription came out with the competitive advantage being even cheaper than Itune's a dollar a song purchase scheme. But then everyone as the desire to seek for cheaper prices and better access. Maybe its just natural progression of things and we can't fault for that. Stakeholders have to adapt for change in behavior and landscapes. I believe the advantages nowadays for a musician is that "getting yourself known and advertise yourself" is cheaper than ever. And there are so many people out there that you can easily reach that even a niche artist can find audiences. Its much easier now to create a fanbase and consistently communicate and maintain a fanbase. And when you have a fanbase, you just have to figure out how to monetize that. Concerts, fan items, album sales, even sponsorship and advertisement, a Youtube channel makes you a lot of money already. Look at the amount of fans a Youtuber and TikTok star has and how much they earn money from the fanbase and popularity, they make a lot. Justin Bieber became a star on Youtube and that jump started his career. Lindsey Stirling became a star because of Youtube. Without the internet and "free access" to content the internet is providing, I don't think both will be as well known as they are now. Not sure if they would even stay as artists.
jonplackett 6y ago
The new system only works because smaller bands are subsidising the bigger ones. For example. I only listen to smaller indie bands on Spotify for a month. I give Spotify my £10 for the month. Does my £10 go to those smaller bands? No. It gets given to Lady Ga Ga because she got 100 bazzillion listens that month. Even though I never listen to her music. Spotify should work out who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. It would be fairer, but it would mean the bigger bands earn less, and expose the fact that streaming really isn’t making anyone enough money. How could it when I’m now paying only £10 a month for what used to cost hundreds? But it’s better than piracy!
- coliveira 6y ago
  sorry, but I don't think what you're proposing makes sense. The same way you're listening to small bands, millions of people are listening to the #1 hits. The result would be the same, the big names getting millions and small bands getting a few bucks.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Thought experiment. Imagine I only listen to one song in one month by one band who currently make ~0 on Spotify. In my new system, they now make £10.
    - fireflies_ 6y ago
      Sounds like this only works if people who listen to smaller bands/indie music listen to fewer songs on average. I'm not sure if this is true. People who find themselves exploring niche tastes are probably "enthusiasts" who do more listening and listen more broadly.
      - mortenjorck 6y ago
        It's all hypotheticals until there's some data. You could just as easily have an enthusiast who finds a few new indie albums per month and listens to them all the way through, or someone who leaves a top-40 playlist on in the background.
simias 6y ago
An other problem is commoditization of music. With modern DAW software, a good autotune, youtube tutorials and some time you can make commercial-sounding music from the comfort of your home with a shoestring budget (especially if you pirate said software). Even if the music industry dies, music itself is going nowhere. It sucks for people who really love making music and want to live from it but from a purely capitalistic perspective it just doesn't add up: there's a massive amount of offer and a fixed amount of demand. You can find dozens of incredibly gifted artists on Youtube, Twitch or elsewhere who'll never manage to live from their craft. It's like becoming a pro footballer, it's amazing if you make it but it's not a reasonable long term career prospect if you're not incredibly gifted and incredibly lucky.
aylmao 6y ago
> The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. I disagree. The fundamental issue isn't power law distributions either, it's the fact that £200 won't even pay for a new guitar. It's not hard to imagine that the distribution of earnings in other fields is lopsided too, but even average-earning teachers, corporate lawyers and secretaries make a wage they can get by on. Music as a whole might just undervalued. Music is also very unequal. I haven't heard of teachers earning less than £200 a year, nor of teachers earning as much as say, Taylor Swift. The parameters of these two earning distributions are widely different. It's interesting, since Music is and has always been very valuable in every culture since time immemorial. Is it undervalued because the post-industral world just tends to undervalue creative work in general? Is it not really that undervalued, and we just get that impression because such as small part of the industry captures such an insane percentage of profits? Could be both to be honest.
- yibg 6y ago
  There is a fundamental difference here though. Being a teacher is a form of employment, where at least theoretically there is a match of supply vs demand. Music in this context is more like a business, where there may not be demand. You don't get to create a random business and expect a livable wage from it. Music as a whole may be valued, but music from any particular band may not be.
em500 6y ago
No, the fundamental problem is not Pareto / power law. The fundamental problem is simply a huge supply of musicians. There's only 8bln total revenue / year in total to be divided. That's just not much for more than a million artists, even without any other middle men. No change in distribution will change the fact that only a small fraction of the artists can hope to make a living from it.
pratik661 6y ago
> There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today I partially disagree. The power law dynamics were present 20 years ago. However the DEGREE of inequality between the 'superstars' and average musicians has skyrocketed, possibly due to technological changes. On one hand, ease of access lets a wider demographic become musicians (think of the proliferation of SoundCloud rappers and YouTube singers). On the other hand, popular artists are able to reach a wider audience and grab a wider slice of aggregate 'attention'.
insulanus 6y ago
> The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions I think that's an important truth to keep in mind when discussing this. > That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today. Hmm. Let's consider 3 different periods of time. 1. Olden times before radio. To listen to music, you had to play it yourself, or go see it in person. 2. Radio and Records exist. 3. Internet streaming. Each artist has a problem along the lines of: how much of my time do I spend figuring out how to make money, and how much making music or performing? Obviously, after a certain point, it is way more efficient to let Warner Bros. do the marketing, etc. However, the power dynamic of this new business model means that that "natural" power law (if each musician were doing all the business stuff themselves), is more like a power-power law. Each step above increases the max payout to the Mozarts and the Jay-Zs, but more importantly, it concentrates power in the hands of the rights-holders. Among other things, now your cost of entry to the super-star lottery is to give up rights that would otherwise give you a better chance at a lower, but more certain return in another system. I agree that we can't go back. But the fact that someone twice as good may get 10 times the attention is not the only effect at play. In an ideal society, we get to choose how the market works. And it should probably work differently for businesses that have different functions in society. For example, some different classes might be Entertainment, the Internet, Power & Water utilities.
coffeecat 6y ago
I object to the description of lesser-known artists as "wannabe". Mainstream commercial popularity results from a combination of luck, connections, and palatability for mainstream tastes. Vast numbers of talented, passionate artists will never achieve mainstream popularity because they don't strive for it or because the selection process is mostly arbitrary.
misiti3780 6y ago
The Long Tail[1] talks about this in detail. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKSE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKSE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
zitterbewegung 6y ago
In Spotify, Youtube and a great deal of content platforms you don't necessarily make money on it. You generally make money on conversions to buy merchandise (which you can easily increate profit margins) or going to shows (which also gets people to buy merchandise.
TrackerFF 6y ago
Eh, when I started playing and recording with my first serious band some 20 years ago, our physical EP that sold around 1000 copies made considerably more than spotify would give us today, for 1000 listens. Of course, Spotify (and the likes) would give us much, MUCH more exposure to listeners all over the world - but buck for buck, it's a worse deal on the scale a lot of amateurs are operating. The best way to support smaller acts is: 1. Go to their shows. 2. Buy their physical or digital copies. 3. Buy their merch, if there's any. 4. Donate. Digital streaming services will pay them pennies. So one needs to actively support artists.
- satyrnein 6y ago
  You can't really compare 1000 sales to 1000 streams. Each individual sale would (hopefully) have resulted in many streams over its lifetime.
  - npteljes 6y ago
    Also many of the streams wouldn't have translated to sales. If it wasn't for the algorithm to pick the tracks as background music when the user was doing whatever else, the song wouldn't have been played at all. Similar how pirated game downloads wouldn't translate to sales - often the game wouldn't have been bought at all, and the person would have just done something else with their time.
coldtea 6y ago
>The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. Well, for millenias it wasn't that way. So not 100% "natural". It happened because of the extra distribution power recorded and now streaming music allows. When you didn't have recorded music, musicians all around the globe could make a living in their local communitities.

vlovich123 6y ago

Isn't that just a truism of the Pareto principle? Is there any field where that's not the case? 20% of lawyers make 80% of the money. 20% of doctors make 80% of the money. etc etc. The difference I think is if 80% of professional musicians can't make a living & it's not clear that's actually the case (i.e. streaming isn't the only source of revenue). Similarly, music may have a higher "stickiness" for tenacity where people see it as a higher calling for them even if they're not making money (vs someone not cutting it as a lawyer/doctor to even pay the bills is going to quit & find something else if they weren't even weeded out during school).

rtx 6y ago
I don't think it's true for doctors, the wealth there is more distributed.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Some professions are lottery professions. Others aren't. I suppose a lot of it is a demand/supply thing. Also independent contractor vs. employee. Not to say employees all make a lot of money. Janitor probably makes a fairly predictable minimum wage level in the US. On the other hand an employed software developer or other engineer might have a 5-10x wage disparity (even within a given country) for various reasons. But it won't be an "actor" waiting tables versus an A-list celebrity.
- geodel 6y ago
  Once you expand this to doctors all over the world. This will become definitely true. There are enough doctors in third world who make < $10K a year.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Even in the West, a doctor who becomes the CEO of a successful medical supplies company or the administrator for an upscale hospital will make more than a doctor running their own practice who make more than a regular doctor employed by a corporation. Keep in mind there’s also a wide variety of “medical practitioners” like chiropractors, therapists, various “unlicensed medical practitioners” who practice eastern medicine etc. Even within traditional medicine you’ve got your small GP whose struggling to keep their practice afloat (it’s a regular business) and extremely wealthy surgeons or other doctors who identify a niche they can make extremey lucrative (eg unscrupulous pain management doctors who process high volume and low effort clients). There’s a wide variety of outcomes even after the great filter that are MCATs and medical school. For example, Thomas F. Frist Jr. is worth ~13 billion. Now granted at those levels he’s more an entrepreneur/businessman as all such people are. Still, the difference between his net worth and a regular GP making $400k is probably about the same difference as a musician worth $300 million and a musician making $200/year.
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
Perhaps the problem is there are simply too many musicians all fighting for the same fixed size pie. I'm guessing the reason is there are a lot of people willing to work for a very low pay because they want to be a musician and not that they see it as a profitable pursuit.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  This is what is known in economics as a compensating differential. It's also my pet theory for why bog standard backend devs tend to get paid a lot more than game devs, even though the game devs tend to be more skilled and harder working.
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    So what you are saying is that because the job of the backend dev isn't as interesting as game dev,they are paid more? I very much doubt that's the reason.
    - Aerroon 6y ago
      No, it's the other way around. Gamedevs make less, because there are so many people that want to work as gamedevs.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      While I absolutely disagree with the above comment that "bog standard" backend devs have less skills than game devs [0], the call to "passion" does tend to deflate salaries and inflate working hours (at very real costs of work/life balance and burnout/early "retirement") in games. (It's among many reasons game developers pretty much need to unionize to avoid mistreatment from management, because "passion" is always going to be a weakness in negotiation.) [0] The call to "passion" tends to work the other direction too in that game developers are overwhelmingly young, fresh out of school, and the turnover ratio in the industry implies a huge turnover of skills and experience over time as well as consequent losses to institutional memory. There aren't a lot of safe spaces in games to build skills and game companies have fewer incentives to retain skilled workers than a lot of the, for instance, "dark matter" enterprise uses of backend developers where the backend developer becomes an institutional knowledge bottleneck.
contravariant 6y ago
Although if that's the case there then the average earning of the top 20% of musicians is at most £800 a year.
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
If you fail MCAT or LSAT you can't even study for a medical/law degree. If you throw random samples into FL Studio and publish the result on iTunes or Spotify you can claim to be a part of the oppressed 80% that earns less than £200 a year.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  But once you get your medical/law/MBA/HR degree you can be incredibly mediocre at your job and still get six/seven/eight figures a year. It's entirely down to organised (guild) gatekeeping and managed perceptions of value, not actual value provided. More, it's covertly about political power.
  - mypalmike 6y ago
    Medicine and law are not the sure fire lucrative professions they once were.
serjester 6y ago
Law and medicine aren’t winner take all fields so that’s not a fair comparison. Should 80% of authors be able to make a living from their book sales? Athletes? Social media CEO’s? Fair or not fair is subjective. In my opinion you shouldn’t go into fields with heavy power law dynamics unless you’re comfortable with a very high likelihood of coming out a ‘failure’. At least it’s gotten more meritocratic than in years past.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  This is confusing cause and effect. Should 80% of middle managers be able to make a living from their work? Politicians? Bankers? Investors? Backend developers? The fact that there's no question that these people are somehow magically worth it, while musicians and artists somehow magically aren't, is a symptom of the covert beliefs that define value, not a cause of them. Realistically this is just a different kind of social credit - and no less brutal than the Chinese kind, even though the values are (somewhat) different.
  - satyrnein 6y ago
    People might think developers should be able to make a living from their work, but that doesn't translate into thinking that developers somehow "deserve" to make a living selling apps on the App Store. One is a job, the other is being an entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs fail, of all kinds. I don't think it's a value judgement on art or music.
tanilama 6y ago
> 80% of professional musicians can't make a living It might hurt people's feeling, but most of those are not professional musicians. I don't think it is judgemental to say that to claim oneself as professional, one need to demonstrate that they could make a living out of it. Otherwise, it is no different than a hobbyist, albeit much more time is dumped on it. In case of streaming, now more people can declare themselves as musicians, since the barrier of publishing has been significantly lowered comparing to physical CDs. But that doesn't mean profit would follow. To produce hit music isn't easy, and luck is certainly a factor of it.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  I think too many non-musicians believe this is a case the population being comprised of a small number of professional musicians and a huge number of untalented hacks. The reality is that there is while there are a lot of hacks and untalented musicians alongside the professional musicians, there are also actually a ton of talented musicians that are working very hard to write, record, and release music, and just simply never get heard. They submit to pandora or Spotify or wherever and it never makes it into the algorithms. It's up to them to do all their own marketing. We're influenced by survivorship bias and it's easy to say "they should just tour and play out and submit to music blogs!" and it's difficult to communicate just how hard it is to find any traction at all.
  - satyrnein 6y ago
    This is true, but what ought to happen instead?
    - tunesmith 6y ago
      I personally don't have strong opinions on a solution, because I think it is a very hard problem. A lot of people that listen to music don't have any interest in discovering new music, or finding music that is a distinct match for their unique personality. They're just happy to listen to what is shoved in front of them. But if you change your approach away from what is good for each listener, and more toward what is good for a healthy culture, then maybe that starts suggesting some paths. I'd personally like it to be more of a combination of aggressively introducing people to new music, making hard not to rank/react to music, and heavily rewarding artists of new music that yield positive response. I also think there should be a form of progressive redistribution of the power law. Just because there's a power low doesn't mean the slope can't be flattened a bit.
tshaddox 6y ago
Percentages are different than absolute numbers, though. It would be surprising if, for instance, 80% of lawyers earn less than 200 GBP a year.
- aforwardslash 6y ago
  They wouldn't. They could just work in something else, as probably the majority of people with a law degree do. Only a fraction of those are actually lawyers.

pgayed 6y ago

^ this. Eighty percent of actors work as waiters & waitresses. Eighty percent of startups make $0. Why is this article topping hn?

kennywinker 6y ago
Actors are paid very well, on union scales, when they do get gigs. I suspect well over 80% of actors who get at least one gig per year are going to make at LEAST 10 x $200. Startups are a different situation, but in fact so different it seems silly to compare. But the real reason this is on HN is because this is the consequences of applying technology (smartphones, cellular data, cloud scale web services) to an industry (music sales).
- vladmk 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s silly at all giving both a hand. Both are risky, both Take skill and luck, both rarely work out. I don’t agree
- saaaaaam 6y ago
  Are startups such a different situation? You have a few people with a new creative vision and their success is largely determined by how well they can communicate that vision and how many customers they can acquire before their runway expires. Music is a subscription business, and the clever people have an eye to CAC, ARPU, MAU and LTV just as much as startups.
- pgayed 6y ago
  There are probably more people supporting themselves from creative endeavors than ever before. (Proportionally and absolutely.) Think about all the tiktok'ers, OnlyFans, youtubers, instagram influencers, etc., who might have been otherwise dismissed as “the pretty face in the office”. This is not to say any significant proportion will end up “rich”—no different than the rest of us—but there have never been more “exit ramps”.

kennywinker 6y ago

There are many places in between the place we are headed, aka "everything is streamed, streams pay basically nothing" and where we used to be. A collective action by artists to force streaming services into a better deal seems like what is required, tho the general appetite for collective action in 2020 still seems a little lacking.

drusepth 6y ago
Wouldn't negotiating a "better deal" for the 80% of artists earning less than £200 likely just raise costs on the already-expensive streaming platforms to help pay for it?
russli1993 6y ago
But then if you look at Spotify's earning report, they are losing money. A large percentage of the cost is music licensing. I think the solution is the streaming services like Spotify either 1) comes up with more revenue streams 2) Raise prices on their core business, the subscription prices higher than $10 a month. If the second option is happening, I am sure we will get another HN discussion post, with some people complaining its too expensive. So we have to think, are we the consumer, by demanding that we want cheap "all you can eat" music subscription, we are hurting the musicians? If you think about it, $10 a month is two cups of Starbucks coffee. I drink more cups of coffee a month than that. And how much effort is it to make two cups of coffee and the coffee beans are industrially produced? Versus a musicians writing a song and perform the song? I claim the latter involves much more effort. Also lets remember how we ended up with the $10/month all you can eat subscription. Pirating, CD rips, online MP3 sharing, Youtube music videos, etc. The majority of the people don't want to pay for music anymore. I feel people are more likely to value a physical good. For example: I feel somewhat balanced for paying $5 for that Starbucks coffee because I get a physical thing in the end. In the early 2000s, the computer and internet was the new thing, not everyone used it, and it was a bit complicated. So using it made me feel like I am "smarter", more frontier chasing, more elite than others. And there were ideals like internet freedom, free access to information. And then when I discovered there is MP3s, copy and paste, BitTorrent and Napster, I felt like I have just been bestowed special powers. Through my "hard" work with computers, I gained the rights to listen to music for free. I actually felt I was righteous to download music from the Internet and listen to them. Had content locked behind a paywall, had to pay for that? It was against internet freedom, it was an outrage. Then I remember when Steven Jobs later came out with Itunes and every song is 99 cents. I felt, 99 cents? alright, it's only a dollar and really not that much. That was the first time I started to actually pay for music. But the music industry and musicians were outraged because Steve Jobs is making their work worth only a dollar. Job's point was that if you charge people more than 99 cents a song, people would just pirate. I agree with him. The later "all you can streaming" subscription came out with the competitive advantage being even cheaper than Itune's a dollar a song purchase scheme. But then everyone as the desire to seek for cheaper prices and better access. Maybe its just natural progression of things and we can't fault for that. Stakeholders have to adapt for change in behavior and landscapes. I believe the advantages nowadays for a musician is that "getting yourself known and advertise yourself" is cheaper than ever. And there are so many people out there that you can easily reach that even a niche artist can find audiences. Its much easier now to create a fanbase and consistently communicate and maintain a fanbase. And when you have a fanbase, you just have to figure out how to monetize that. Concerts, fan items, album sales, even sponsorship and advertisement, a Youtube channel makes you a lot of money already. Look at the amount of fans a Youtuber and TikTok star has and how much they earn money from the fanbase and popularity, they make a lot. Justin Bieber became a star on Youtube and that jump started his career. Lindsey Stirling became a star because of Youtube. Without the internet and "free access" to content the internet is providing, I don't think both will be as well known as they are now. Not sure if they would even stay as artists.

jonplackett 6y ago

The new system only works because smaller bands are subsidising the bigger ones. For example. I only listen to smaller indie bands on Spotify for a month. I give Spotify my £10 for the month. Does my £10 go to those smaller bands? No. It gets given to Lady Ga Ga because she got 100 bazzillion listens that month. Even though I never listen to her music. Spotify should work out who you’re listening to and give them a direct slice of what you have paid, rather than putting everyone in a pot together and dividing by number of plays. It would be fairer, but it would mean the bigger bands earn less, and expose the fact that streaming really isn’t making anyone enough money. How could it when I’m now paying only £10 a month for what used to cost hundreds? But it’s better than piracy!

coliveira 6y ago
sorry, but I don't think what you're proposing makes sense. The same way you're listening to small bands, millions of people are listening to the #1 hits. The result would be the same, the big names getting millions and small bands getting a few bucks.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Thought experiment. Imagine I only listen to one song in one month by one band who currently make ~0 on Spotify. In my new system, they now make £10.
  - fireflies_ 6y ago
    Sounds like this only works if people who listen to smaller bands/indie music listen to fewer songs on average. I'm not sure if this is true. People who find themselves exploring niche tastes are probably "enthusiasts" who do more listening and listen more broadly.
    - mortenjorck 6y ago
      It's all hypotheticals until there's some data. You could just as easily have an enthusiast who finds a few new indie albums per month and listens to them all the way through, or someone who leaves a top-40 playlist on in the background.

simias 6y ago

An other problem is commoditization of music. With modern DAW software, a good autotune, youtube tutorials and some time you can make commercial-sounding music from the comfort of your home with a shoestring budget (especially if you pirate said software). Even if the music industry dies, music itself is going nowhere. It sucks for people who really love making music and want to live from it but from a purely capitalistic perspective it just doesn't add up: there's a massive amount of offer and a fixed amount of demand. You can find dozens of incredibly gifted artists on Youtube, Twitch or elsewhere who'll never manage to live from their craft. It's like becoming a pro footballer, it's amazing if you make it but it's not a reasonable long term career prospect if you're not incredibly gifted and incredibly lucky.

aylmao 6y ago

> The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. I disagree. The fundamental issue isn't power law distributions either, it's the fact that £200 won't even pay for a new guitar. It's not hard to imagine that the distribution of earnings in other fields is lopsided too, but even average-earning teachers, corporate lawyers and secretaries make a wage they can get by on. Music as a whole might just undervalued. Music is also very unequal. I haven't heard of teachers earning less than £200 a year, nor of teachers earning as much as say, Taylor Swift. The parameters of these two earning distributions are widely different. It's interesting, since Music is and has always been very valuable in every culture since time immemorial. Is it undervalued because the post-industral world just tends to undervalue creative work in general? Is it not really that undervalued, and we just get that impression because such as small part of the industry captures such an insane percentage of profits? Could be both to be honest.

yibg 6y ago
There is a fundamental difference here though. Being a teacher is a form of employment, where at least theoretically there is a match of supply vs demand. Music in this context is more like a business, where there may not be demand. You don't get to create a random business and expect a livable wage from it. Music as a whole may be valued, but music from any particular band may not be.

em500 6y ago

No, the fundamental problem is not Pareto / power law. The fundamental problem is simply a huge supply of musicians. There's only 8bln total revenue / year in total to be divided. That's just not much for more than a million artists, even without any other middle men. No change in distribution will change the fact that only a small fraction of the artists can hope to make a living from it.

pratik661 6y ago

> There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today I partially disagree. The power law dynamics were present 20 years ago. However the DEGREE of inequality between the 'superstars' and average musicians has skyrocketed, possibly due to technological changes. On one hand, ease of access lets a wider demographic become musicians (think of the proliferation of SoundCloud rappers and YouTube singers). On the other hand, popular artists are able to reach a wider audience and grab a wider slice of aggregate 'attention'.

insulanus 6y ago

> The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions I think that's an important truth to keep in mind when discussing this. > That was just as true 20 years ago as it is today. Hmm. Let's consider 3 different periods of time. 1. Olden times before radio. To listen to music, you had to play it yourself, or go see it in person. 2. Radio and Records exist. 3. Internet streaming. Each artist has a problem along the lines of: how much of my time do I spend figuring out how to make money, and how much making music or performing? Obviously, after a certain point, it is way more efficient to let Warner Bros. do the marketing, etc. However, the power dynamic of this new business model means that that "natural" power law (if each musician were doing all the business stuff themselves), is more like a power-power law. Each step above increases the max payout to the Mozarts and the Jay-Zs, but more importantly, it concentrates power in the hands of the rights-holders. Among other things, now your cost of entry to the super-star lottery is to give up rights that would otherwise give you a better chance at a lower, but more certain return in another system. I agree that we can't go back. But the fact that someone twice as good may get 10 times the attention is not the only effect at play. In an ideal society, we get to choose how the market works. And it should probably work differently for businesses that have different functions in society. For example, some different classes might be Entertainment, the Internet, Power & Water utilities.

coffeecat 6y ago

I object to the description of lesser-known artists as "wannabe". Mainstream commercial popularity results from a combination of luck, connections, and palatability for mainstream tastes. Vast numbers of talented, passionate artists will never achieve mainstream popularity because they don't strive for it or because the selection process is mostly arbitrary.

misiti3780 6y ago

The Long Tail[1] talks about this in detail. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKSE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JMKSE2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

zitterbewegung 6y ago

In Spotify, Youtube and a great deal of content platforms you don't necessarily make money on it. You generally make money on conversions to buy merchandise (which you can easily increate profit margins) or going to shows (which also gets people to buy merchandise.

TrackerFF 6y ago

Eh, when I started playing and recording with my first serious band some 20 years ago, our physical EP that sold around 1000 copies made considerably more than spotify would give us today, for 1000 listens. Of course, Spotify (and the likes) would give us much, MUCH more exposure to listeners all over the world - but buck for buck, it's a worse deal on the scale a lot of amateurs are operating. The best way to support smaller acts is: 1. Go to their shows. 2. Buy their physical or digital copies. 3. Buy their merch, if there's any. 4. Donate. Digital streaming services will pay them pennies. So one needs to actively support artists.

satyrnein 6y ago
You can't really compare 1000 sales to 1000 streams. Each individual sale would (hopefully) have resulted in many streams over its lifetime.
- npteljes 6y ago
  Also many of the streams wouldn't have translated to sales. If it wasn't for the algorithm to pick the tracks as background music when the user was doing whatever else, the song wouldn't have been played at all. Similar how pirated game downloads wouldn't translate to sales - often the game wouldn't have been bought at all, and the person would have just done something else with their time.

coldtea 6y ago

>The fundamental problem isn't streaming, as much as it is that natural systems follow power law distributions. There will always be superstars that make the majority of the money, and tons and tons of wannabe artists that make almost nothing. Well, for millenias it wasn't that way. So not 100% "natural". It happened because of the extra distribution power recorded and now streaming music allows. When you didn't have recorded music, musicians all around the globe could make a living in their local communitities.