44 ms·

Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

277 points by juokaz 5y ago

seibelj 5y ago
This is 100% correct. For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs, it’s the same reason a “squares and circles” modern art piece can be worth millions - it’s the story of who made it, the collective belief, the rarity... Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. It’s the same reason the Tom Brady football rookie card sold for millions despite it being nothing more than ink on flimsy cardboard. The actual item itself is secondary to the story it tells.
- hobs 5y ago
  We understand them, we just think y'all are stupid for doing that.
  - peytn 5y ago
    At the very least, these arguments might be more credible if their pushers disclosed their own financial interests in said valuable assets.
- apples_oranges 5y ago
  However that ink on flimsy cardboard is still somewhat unique. The NFT only associates a wallet address with a hash of whatever digital document. It's similar, but not quite. It has value in human imagination, sure, one can convince oneself that's the case. But the token is merely a hash of something that can be obtained very easily in full original quality on the Internet. The flimsy cardboard is not. At least not in the same sense (you could scan it and put a jpg of it online for example). Also the card will stay in this world for a long time if protected from weather and light, I assume, where as the NFT needs to be constantly kept alive by "mining". I agree it's similar, but it's also different. And interesting. At least to me. :) Also value is relative, of course. I mean: One man's collectible is another woman's trash. It probably needs a certain shared set of beliefs/illusions to agree that something like that has value.
  - twox2 5y ago
    There's a good chance that "mining" will out live some pieces of cardboard. Even if the blockchain du jour becomes a thing o the past, it might live on in some device in an emulator thanks to Moore's Law.
    - iamben 5y ago
      But sadly the URL the NFT points to will probably be long gone.
    - SiempreViernes 5y ago
      You do realize that you're comparing a medium that routinely stores information for 350 years versus a field where something saved 10 years ago invariably demands considerable resources to access?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    I think we might disagree on the extent to which the collectible sports card is valuable because of its unique physical materials, and the extent to which it’s valuable because of “human imagination.” I think the latter is responsible for the overwhelming share of the value of a sports card, and the former is only a historical coincidence that creating rare and difficult to counterfeit items was only practical by fabricating physical items.
    - aaroninsf 5y ago
      I have been looking for a useful formulation, or metaphor, for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself. Here is one idea, for how we intuit value: As a fraction, in which non-fungibility (~= "authenticity") is the denominator; nominal value (whatever that is, a function of context etc.) is the numerator. In the sports card example, a physical object with a provenance has intrinsic guarantees of uniqueness. Low uniqueness means high intuited value. In the NFT case, a hash has non-intrinsic guarantees. They are provable; they are not perceptible. Uncertain uniqueness means low intuited value. It's not that it's not provably unique; it's that if we don't perceive it, no one cares. Perceptible and provable for us monkeys is a serious and real difference. That's the general idea. The edges are full of corners, for sure, e.g. a counterfeit or reproduction can be exacting enough to create a new game for us to play (I am reminded of the rabbit hole of reproduction collectible watches...)... the quest of authenticity has a fractal quality in the case of mass-produced but limited goods (what edition number? What pressing? The one with the misaligned cyan?)... ...but in the 80% case, I think it's simply, we monkeys like objects; ideas remain a hard sell. My own belief is this is so deeply baked into the relationship between our world modeling that it will not be overcome through culture. A lemma might be, non-fungibility is less important than materiality. Authenticity for fungible goods, like gold, is persistent, in part because they are fungible. It's their material (perceptible provability) that reassures us. I believe this is rooted in intuitions about the scale and durability of consensus on value containers, which appears until recently to have been in the long view winner-take-all, in the case of things without pragmatic use-value.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  > Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. This feels like a pyramid scheme. What makes it different?
  - gmuslera 5y ago
    The old object-observer duality. Where is the value in this case? It is in the observer, not in the object. It goes in a different layer. The problem there is that culture, social conventions, shared fictions and so on can be manipulated/twisted/adapted to some agenda or interest, and that includes what we feel valuable or not, without minding of what is really behind (like with bitcoins and similar). Once we took this route, all kinds of mirages can appear. And they can vanish into thin air as fast as they appeared.
    - politician 5y ago
      Tulip Mania
  - notyourday 5y ago
    > This feels like a pyramid scheme. It is. My Google-fu is failing me but there was a famous art dealer in the early part of the 20th century who promised that he would buy back the pieces he sold at least for the price the buyer originally paid less some minuscule percentage if the buyer could not sell the pieces to someone else. It made paints he sold significantly go up in price. He died. Buyers tried to get his estate to pay for the paintings and failed.
    - kryptiskt 5y ago
      A Swedish gallery called Timeless pulled that scam recently, they sold art in galleries in Sweden and Poland (and Miami and Dubai) with the promise buy it back N months later with a yearly appreciation of at least 20% (I see here that Polish customers were promised 36%).
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Nothing. NFTs are literally nothing more than a scam. People are running mental gymnastics trying to delude themselves in to believing that having a cryptographically signed json packet pointing to a dead url will be worth a fortune in the future.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  There is a difference between a physical object (painting, sculpture, trading card, slice of bread) which cannot with our current technology be exactly reproduced, and a digital thing, which can be.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    You can reproduce a trading card such that it's indistinguishable to just about every human on the planet.
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      But not to someone using a few simple scientific tools, such as, say, a microscope.
      - darkerside 5y ago
        You don't need a microscope to distinguish NFTs
  - speedyapoc 5y ago
    I've struggled wrapping my ahead around whether this line of thinking has merit or not. I'd argue that everything you listed can be reproduced, almost identically. But there's no value in doing so since it is not the original or was never authorized by the creator. Why does this change all of a sudden once we go digital? Is it because it's so much easier to reproduce something that originates digitally?
    - peytn 5y ago
      It’s not just “going digital”—the creative act isn’t there. It’s just financialization. The act of taking an artwork to an auction house isn’t something that’ll hold value.
      - speedyapoc 5y ago
        I agree, but I think that's just a short term effect of people trying to cash in on the hype. Suppose I'm an artist that releases a limited digital run of an album and that NFTs are used to attribute ownership of the digital release. Would this have more, equal, or less value than an artist doing the same thing but with a physical limited run album release? The actual music content can be pirated and made available just the same, whether or not it was physical or digital. The cost of the physical goods themselves is negligible. However, I feel like many people argue that the digital release via NFTs would be worth less because all you have to show for your ownership is a digital token, and not some sort of limited release physical item.
- the_local_host 5y ago
  Is there anything (other than lawsuits) preventing issuers from "printing NFTs" and diluting the value of those already sold? It seems like a blockchain-based technology that only works when backed by the threat of lawsuits combines the worst aspects of the art market and the cryptocurrency market.
  - darkerside 5y ago
    Many modern art pieces could really be recreated. What's the difference you are trying to draw?
    - the_local_host 5y ago
      Digital art can be recreated easily, which is probably one reason why few people have been paying money for it. Physical art, which people have historically paid for, is much more difficult to credibly reproduce than NFTs. Edited to add: Moreover if the argument in favor of NFTs is that they're not worse than what preceded them, then what's the point of introducing them? If the same problems in the traditional art market (especially for digital works) are recapitulated with NFTs, I don't see the point.
      - tshaddox 5y ago
        You can create copies of digital art easily, of course. But you can’t create a copy of a particular NFT (assuming the blockchain software works as intended). For most of these famous digital art NFTs, the digital work itself is widely distributed online. But of course there’s only one of each NFT.
- christiansakai 5y ago
  Only when the actual piece of digital art imprinted itself on the blockchain and can be viewed with any non-closed source viewer for free, then yes. Until that happens, NFT is useless apart from supply chain/authorship identification
- LegitShady 5y ago
  I call this the MLM approach. The more people you can scam, the more you use the size of your scam to pretend you're legitimate, while being a scam. "Look how many people paid money for this/look how much money was paid for this, it must be worth that money! The actual efficacy of any product sold is secondary to the amount of money I've been paid" I understand the 'tom brady rookie card' argument but it falls apart in the digital world. A digital image of Tom Brady as a rookie is worth nothing. A print of that digital image is worth less than cost of printing it. The value of the card is that its official merchandise of limited run with no way to create 'new' old cards. Stop pretending NFTs are physical items, stop pretending they can't be infinitely reproduced.
- macksd 5y ago
  >> For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs ... >> it has value because people agree it has value Yeah but let's be clear it's often just because 2 people say they agree it has value, and for all we know they're often laundering money. I can look at a motorcycle and understand why it has value to someone even though I wouldn't buy one myself even for a penny. I'm afraid I'm unable to do the same with NFTs and cans of feces from an artist.
- greenshackle2 5y ago
  An important fact to remember about art valuation is that art can be bought and sold anonymously through private dealers who are not subject to anti money laundering regulations. The trick is to buy some art at a reasonable price, store it in a dark warehouse for a couple of years, then anonymously buy it from yourself at an exorbitant price through shell companies with dirty money.
eric_b 5y ago
Sort of tangential to the main point but - I find the new version of Fearless to be utterly lacking in "soul", "energy", "magic" or whatever you want to call it. The unquantifiable things that made the original so good are missing. Sure, the remakes are competent and perhaps even better technically, but after listening to both side by side (song by song, new then old) - to me there is no comparison. I went online looking for reviews of the "new" album and I only found critics gushing over how great the remakes are. Did they even listen? Did they compare? Sounds like it was just a money grab justified with a healthy dose of moral outrage.
- IneffablePigeon 5y ago
  I think it's possibly a bit rich to say that they didn't listen to it just because they had a different opinion. I found the same thing on first listen, because a few things were subtly "wrong" (different). On second or third listen I love the new version, the production and vocals are just that little bit more polished in a fair few ways and I've gotten used to the slightly different mix. The new bonus tracks are pretty decent and it's nice to rediscover one of my favourite albums again. It wasn't at all dissimilar to the effect I get when trying new headphones - I hate them for a little while, invariably. Then I get used to the new tonal balance and I learn to love the sound (if they're good headphones)
  - soperj 5y ago
    I've had the same thing happen with live versions. The Pixies play "Where is my mind" very differently live, the vocal lines especially. First time I heard it was jarring because of the expectation and I didn't think it was good as the recorded version. Recorded version feels much worse now.
    - protomyth 5y ago
      I hate, just hate, the album version of Kiss's God of Thunder, but they speed it up live and it sounds amazing. STP was amazing in the Fargo Civic Center which makes me think the person who mixed their album just hated life because it is noticeably inferior. On the other hand, Aerosmith has sounded like crap the two times I've seen them in concert. It gets weird when you buy the import (for the US) versions of some songs. A lot of the Seattle bands sounded better to my ear on the versions sold in Europe. Japan is always an odd duck.
jtbayly 5y ago
What this piece leaves out is that given this reasoning, Taylor Swift can simply declare another piece of art the "New Taylor version," thus completely devaluing the previous "Taylor version."
- chejazi 5y ago
  It's not like the "New Taylor version" will be valued completely independently of the previous "Taylor version." Her reputation underwrites the transaction; any transaction contributes to her reputation.
  - gretch 5y ago
    Exactly. Doing this would 'dilute' her and the "new new taylor version" would be next to worthless
- the_local_host 5y ago
  If we're invoking theoretical possibilities, anyone can declare another piece of are to be the new version. I don't think re-recording albums for the purpose of attacking former business partners, who priced the intellectual property at roughly all the money that she had been paid in their previous arrangement, indicates a willingness to keep re-recording things.
- paxys 5y ago
  The entire point of the saga was that she wants to own the masters herself (which she does with the rerecorded versions), so she would be devaluing her own asset.
- hnbad 5y ago
  I thought this was kinda the point by comparing it to NFTs. NFTs can be trivially devalued if you derive the value from that attributed to it by the author of whatever it references. It's probably even truer for NFTs as often the NFT itself merely represents a JSON payload which itself references URLs managed by a third party and trusted to continue referencing the original work. Once that third party goes away, the reference chain breaks. The value is not only reliant on everyone agreeing that the third party "owns" (whatever this might mean) the "work" (whatever that might be) but also that the NFT continues to represent this ownership by proxy even when the proxy goes away. There's nothing stopping a new middleman claiming authority over the ownership of a work and issuing an NFT for it. But its value entirely hinges on a shared understanding that this claim is valid. Of course this would break down if an artist really did devalue earlier NFTs for the same work by issuing new ones because the value largely comes from the expectation that the non-fungible token's authority is also non-fungible, i.e. permanent.
Quarrelsome 5y ago
I feel like the author is missing a trick here, there's an epilogue to write. The power of brigading is terrifying and fierce and this is part of marking the transition into personal brigading where an individual uses the hammer of their fans to beat reality into their will. Its not entirely dissimilar to Trump's relationship with his followers to an extent. Pans out just fine with Taylor Swift because I figure she might have a modicum of respect for her fans as opposed to someone like Jake Paul who treats his like dirt. The difference between the ages is that fans that were gatekept by organisations had many levels of PR, admin and marketing to wade through, today we have direct, raw and visceral which also can result in corrupt, unethical and even evil. This is a pattern that could define the coming decades as society coalesces around a few chosen figures and lends them their might directly. Many of them will be found undeserving and the debris they leave might be impactful.
- coredog64 5y ago
  Something similar happened recently with Dave Chappelle. He asked his fans to stop watching Chappelle Show on Netflix. This depressed the value of the asset low enough that he was able to buy back the rights.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Chapelle Show doesn't drive subscriptions. Holding out on any more comedy specials is what made them capitulate.
    - mannerheim 5y ago
      It doesn't sound like he had threatened that (at least not explicitly); articles about it just say he requested Netflix stop streaming it, and so they did. Of course, them expecting him to create more specials for them in the future likely motivated them here, but it doesn't sound like it was an explicit ultimatum.
  - theNJR 5y ago
    Chappelle was brought up in the article ;)
throw7 5y ago
I suppose we'll see contracts include the artist not "de-valuing" their "own" works in such future where they are super-stars able to shape a story to direct their fans on what to believe.
- satyrnein 5y ago
  A non-compete, basically.
- jedberg 5y ago
  I suspect a lot of young artists will have learned their lesson and attempt to retain some control over their masters, either with first right of refusal or requiring the current owner to sell it back to them at some sort of market rate at any time.
rayiner 5y ago
The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves. > Nilay Patel wrote in Vox: > "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.' > This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone. How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! If you tell your mom "I made a song" she will be quite unimpressed if what you actually mean is "I made a digital copy of a song." A book or a song or a movie is more than the bits that make up any individual copy of it. There is a like-with-like comparison in there, but it actually hurts Patel's argument. There is no scarcity of music on the Internet--not referring to digital copies, but because the Internet has made it trivial to create and widely distribute original music (often for free). If consumers were unwilling to pay much for Swift's music because of the vast quantity of alternatives available on the Internet, Patel would indeed have a point. But consumers still want Swift's music, not other peoples' music. Even in the face of huge amounts of free alternatives, consumers still want Swift's music. That only proves Swift's point!
- Aaargh20318 5y ago
  > How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! Yes, they are two different things. The problem is that artists (and record labels) want to get paid for the non-scarce thing: the copies, and not for the actually scarce thing: the artists time and effort. This is why people don't see pirating music as stealing, while at the same time they are more than willing to pay a small fortune for a concert ticket. The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music.
  - karpierz 5y ago
SloopJon 5y ago
I've always found the idea of master recordings curious. Once a song becomes a hit, the band may perform it almost every day for the rest of their career, but what we listen to through our headphones or speakers is this one particular moment in time. Yes, there are live recordings and bootlegs, but by and large it's this one master recording, which may get dusted off every couple of decades for a remaster. Some masters are guarded jealously by their owners. For example, I've heard that some of the Stevie Wonder releases aren't even from the masters, because he won't part with them. Some masters may truly capture something irreproducible; say, John Lennon's hoarse voice in "Twist and Shout." In this particular case, at least, Taylor Swift has put the lie to the uniqueness of the masters. If she has the right to rerecord everything, the old masters aren't so special. But I think the article is also right. After this exercise, she may have made her point, and may force Shamrock Capital to make a deal.
- bombcar 5y ago
  It's also interesting in that if you hear a version that is NOT the master you can easily notice it, even if it's a very close version. I suspect for lots of "hearing but not listening" as long as you hear the "normal master" version you don't notice, but if it were subtly different it would be noticeable (perhaps only subconsciously). I wonder if you could do studies on Muzak at stores (original "radio" masters vs live versions vs lounge vs remaster vs ...).
- klelatti 5y ago
  The concept of the master is unhelpful in inhibiting artists from setting out a version of a song in studio conditions once they've had chance to live with it and play it live for a while. Live recordings are more spontaneous but we all know that the sound can be less than ideal. I've been listening to a few recordings of Little Feat's Rock'n'Roll Doctor [1] - a wonderful song but one where I'm convinced by far the least interesting version is the 'master recording'. How many songs languish because the master is not that great? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-r-qi_cJs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-r-qi_cJs0
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago
  The original masters led to the song sounding "the right way" when you hear it on the radio, instead of sounding different. Sometimes that difference sounds good too, like your favorite live album from some band. But other times that song doesn't sound right, the live version or alternative take just loses that magic. So the original has a lot of value if it hits. But I think you missed another aspect, the real value is the original master plus the tweaks and additions to make it into what became popular. That production of the song probably wouldn't sound the same if you applied those processes to a slightly different version, say the singer or band's best efforts later.
deleted 5y ago
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bombcar 5y ago
Nobody ever bought any music "to support the publisher" - the middle man is just that, the middle man.
- ppod 5y ago
  The middle man is a load balancer for risk. The middleman makes a bunch of artists moderately rich, and they lose money on most of them and make money on some of them. They take on the risk of letting an unproven artist spend a few years doing something that could turn out to generate little money, and in return they get a big share of the ones that do make money. Now, thanks to the internet, the ones that do make it big can cut out the middleman. Now there will be no middleman to take on the small risks of many unproven artists, and because of the relentless greed and ego of Chapelle and Swift many young artists will never have the opportunity that they did.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    In theory things like YouTube and Patreon could provide that gap - but not sure it actually will.
    - ppod 5y ago
      Don't get me wrong, I like the internet. It is almost free to record and publish material now, which probably far outweighs the value that is captured by the fat cats.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        I do think there's a missing ground that is being lost - it was incidental to the publishers but they would provide production, editors, other various things that are seen as "not important". It takes an exceptionally bright young artist to REALIZE they need those things and go out of their way to find and pay for them. Neither Patreon nor Youtube is going to provide an editor and certainly not force you to use one - no matter how valuable it may be.
      - 5y ago
627467 5y ago
In a practical sense, you'd pay for music in pre-internet day because you want to listen to that song/album. Then, people on internet started paying for music because it was easy and accessible (for some, it was easier to just download things off the "dark web" of that day). Now people pay music subscriptions because you don't have to think about where a specific song is: it's just there on Spotify/etc. Note that nowhere do I mention artists. Certainly (some people) also pay for art because they want to compensate for what the artist did but I think that increasingly, people pay artists to keep doing what they are doing. Not for what they did. So, no, I don't think the value that people pay an artist derives from a work that exists today, but derives from the value (speculatively) they will create on the future. And ultimately, I don't think any contract can enforce this, even a smartone.
browningstreet 5y ago
Def Leppard, to name one artist, did something similar: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/def-leppard-re-recording-forgeries-of-old-hits-247079/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/def-leppard-re...
kosyblysk2 5y ago
for real? Taylor Swift an artist? :facepalm:
kin 5y ago
The thing is, Taylor's version sounds completely different. Did Ben Thompson actually look at streaming numbers? All her fans didn't flock to the new version. They listened to it, but it's so different that the old version is still consistently streamed likely by the same fans. Further, the new version isn't on some new platform or anything. It's not like Taylor Swift asked fans to fork extra money to listen to "Taylor's version" so nothing is really proven here regarding Taylor's so called power. In terms of accessibility, the tracks exist side by side with the original on Spotify. The idea of NFTs is incredibly appealing to artists because the technology could allow for artists to sell music that can only be played by some client if the NFT for a track or album was authentic. Ultimately this is bad for consumers and you bet your bottom dollar that some new form of music piracy will be born if music tried to go this direction.
- exolymph 5y ago
  The new Fearless just dropped, it's not like the streaming numbers are going to equalize overnight. Can you link the data? Sounds like it's interesting
  - Hasz 5y ago
    I just spent a few minutes looking for data, expecting something like a stock chart. I can't find almost anything -- even total stream numbers for an album or song are difficult to find. If you have a good source, I'm very interested.
    - cbowal 5y ago
      The Spotify app shows play counts. I'm seeing, for example, 433M plays of "Love Story" and 65M plays of "Love Story (Taylor's Version)". Considering that it was released only 3 days ago it seems like the number of plays for the "(Taylor's Version)" is quite incredible.
      - Hasz 5y ago
        Ah, I only use open.spotify.com. Still, without scraping it/api access, there's no way to see a distribution AFAIK.
frashelaw 5y ago
> Patel wrote about the end of scarcity, so technology that brings scarcity back seems like a panacea. Perhaps Swift’s 2014 vision was simply ahead of its time? If our technology allows us to now distribute media in a post-scarcity environment, isn't that a good thing for culture? It's absolutely ridiculous that artificially reintroducing scarcity is seen as a good thing. It also serves as yet another example of the reliance of profit on artificial scarcity, and the irrationality of the system- as well as the lengths to which people will go, just to desperately preserve an outdated model.
boredumb 5y ago
You wouldn't download an NFT
- politician 5y ago
  Technically, you cannot download an NFT. It's a distributed consensus that you cannot ever truly put your arms around (unless you're running a testnet and operate all of the nodes).
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Wait. Isn't the blockchain operating on the assumption that everyone can, and should, download all NFTs? That's the "distributed" part in "distributed consensus".
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      Sure, you can download the result of the consensus, but you can't download the, err... consensors?
  - throwawayffffas 5y ago
    As long as I can download the gif, you can keep the NFT.
danhite 5y ago
FWIW, this phenomenon is not new under the sun. I observe that we are experiencing a McLuhan Tetrad retrieval of it via our modern ~ Internet media artifact. For example, I experienced (preferentially) buying, in the 1970s, LotR paperbacks with Tolkien's picture on the back cover with his authorial economic plea -- see his statement, below, in this citation ... from "Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties" at https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html > Eventually the authorized edition appeared with Tolkien's stern message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other." This was bad publicity for Ace, who eventually caved in, paid Tolkien royalties, and promised not to reprint. < also referring to this circumstance is a Library of Congress blog post: J.R.R. Tolkien – Paperbacks and Copyright November 24, 2014 by Margaret Wood https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-and-copyright/ https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-a...
marcus_holmes 5y ago
> In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans — not the other way around. I'm not in the industry, so I don't grok it too well. Why would an artist with an established fan base need a record deal?
- andrewzah 5y ago
  They may have some fans, but not a lot of money. The label steps in to give money to fund creating a new album, creating music videos (these can easily run up to millions of dollars), issuing new LP pressings, doing concerts, advertising them, etc.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Because the record label handles all the business aspects which is all the actual work of monetizing an artist. You can DIY but you will end up becoming a record label as you scale in the process. They handle the marketing, merch, venues, social media, distribution, retail relationships, deals with studios, relationships with radio, relationships with personalities to do interviews, all the video production staff for music videos, like this could on forever.
- dakial1 5y ago
  Before streaming, the label owned the means of production (professional studios and professionals), means of distribution (Vynil, CDs etc), means of promotion (deals with radios, magazines, channels etc) and it sort of operated like a bank. So it would give lots of money upfront and the artist would sign the deal to x amount of albums to be distributed by the label (which was kept very non transparent by design, so that the artists who were not business savvy always did a bad deal. There were all kinds of other shenanigans, like underreporting sales (to pay less for the artist) etc. Today labels lost a lot of their power in distribution (Spotify, Youtube, etc), a little in recording (recording is easier) but still have the promotion power. So they operate in a similar way but with deals focused on production and promotion. So an artist with fans would make a deal with a big label to get the promotion/production power they have and the bank function. So he/she would leverage on that to become a global star betting that this will bring more money that he/she owes the label.
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
I don't know if this is completely right. It's true that artists can do damage to the companies that own copyrights and licenses to their work. It's also true that some dynamics will change because of the artist's ability to go directly to the consumer. Substack is a great evidence of this. But those companies can and will fight back with legal means. For example, if I'm a label, non-disparagement clauses are the norm going forward. You don't bring our business in front of (from my perspective) the mob on Twitter. Also, I don't sign a deal unless I get the copyrights, the mechanical rights, the sync rights, the performance rights, and the songwriter rights. I need all the rights. The artist can keep the a perpetual, non-transferrable license to the performance right, but that's it. I bet this won't even cost them that much more, because until Ms. Swift flipped the script, this was kind of de facto understanding of what the master rights meant. This lateral move by Ms. Swift (apparently) caught everyone off guard. She is a genius, though. I'm not sure if what she did was fair, but apparently this was war, and there's no fairness in war.
ineedasername 5y ago
I didn't know that about Dave Chapelle's relationship with Comedy Central. It's a pretty good outcome for someone who over-performed much more than Comedy Central could have expected during initial negotiations. It might seem intuitively strange-- "He signed the contract, he knew what he was getting!" But when I consider it through the lens of the professional business world, that doesn't make sense. If a company hires me at a salary of $X but I underperform, I get fired. In entertainment, the show gets cancelled. But if I vastly over-perform, things like bonuses, merit increases, and promotions are pretty standard: It's a renegotiation of the original terms of employment, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm glad that it's becoming a less novel concept in the entertainment industry as well. (especially in a streaming age where limited air-time is no longer an issue and all old shows can be available, allowing for massive resurgence in demand for given show that might not have been aired at all previously) And Dave was very astute to go to what he says are his real bosses-- his fans-- to address the issue. That is a somewhat unique dynamic to the entertainment industry, where the value that a solo entertainer brings to the table is much more easily quantified than the specific value of many employees at a 10k employee company.
dkarl 5y ago
Patronage is no longer the domain of the rich. When it is clear that it is optional to support an artist, some will do so for the personal satisfaction, some out of gratitude, and others for the social credit it brings. A difference from old-fashioned patronage is that it's easier to lie -- you can pretend to support artists while secretly enjoying their music for free. Happily, it seems like only a minority of people are satisfied by that.
dorkwood 5y ago
> If the creator decides that their NFTs are important, they will have value The reason artists who believe in the value of their own NFTs get paid more is because they're nominating themselves as NFT spokespeople and attracting the attention of marketplace investors with skin in the game. If you're the CFO of one of these marketplaces and you're faced with a choice of which NFT to buy, do you choose the guy who just tweeted "trying out this NFT thing lol", or the guy who acts like he's the next Andy Warhol and constantly pushes the NFTs-have-value narrative?
EGreg 5y ago
That should be a great band name! The NFTs

277 points by juokaz 5y ago

This is 100% correct. For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs, it’s the same reason a “squares and circles” modern art piece can be worth millions - it’s the story of who made it, the collective belief, the rarity... Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. It’s the same reason the Tom Brady football rookie card sold for millions despite it being nothing more than ink on flimsy cardboard. The actual item itself is secondary to the story it tells.

hobs 5y ago
We understand them, we just think y'all are stupid for doing that.
- peytn 5y ago
  At the very least, these arguments might be more credible if their pushers disclosed their own financial interests in said valuable assets.
apples_oranges 5y ago
However that ink on flimsy cardboard is still somewhat unique. The NFT only associates a wallet address with a hash of whatever digital document. It's similar, but not quite. It has value in human imagination, sure, one can convince oneself that's the case. But the token is merely a hash of something that can be obtained very easily in full original quality on the Internet. The flimsy cardboard is not. At least not in the same sense (you could scan it and put a jpg of it online for example). Also the card will stay in this world for a long time if protected from weather and light, I assume, where as the NFT needs to be constantly kept alive by "mining". I agree it's similar, but it's also different. And interesting. At least to me. :) Also value is relative, of course. I mean: One man's collectible is another woman's trash. It probably needs a certain shared set of beliefs/illusions to agree that something like that has value.
- twox2 5y ago
  There's a good chance that "mining" will out live some pieces of cardboard. Even if the blockchain du jour becomes a thing o the past, it might live on in some device in an emulator thanks to Moore's Law.
  - iamben 5y ago
    But sadly the URL the NFT points to will probably be long gone.
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    You do realize that you're comparing a medium that routinely stores information for 350 years versus a field where something saved 10 years ago invariably demands considerable resources to access?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I think we might disagree on the extent to which the collectible sports card is valuable because of its unique physical materials, and the extent to which it’s valuable because of “human imagination.” I think the latter is responsible for the overwhelming share of the value of a sports card, and the former is only a historical coincidence that creating rare and difficult to counterfeit items was only practical by fabricating physical items.
  - aaroninsf 5y ago
    I have been looking for a useful formulation, or metaphor, for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself. Here is one idea, for how we intuit value: As a fraction, in which non-fungibility (~= "authenticity") is the denominator; nominal value (whatever that is, a function of context etc.) is the numerator. In the sports card example, a physical object with a provenance has intrinsic guarantees of uniqueness. Low uniqueness means high intuited value. In the NFT case, a hash has non-intrinsic guarantees. They are provable; they are not perceptible. Uncertain uniqueness means low intuited value. It's not that it's not provably unique; it's that if we don't perceive it, no one cares. Perceptible and provable for us monkeys is a serious and real difference. That's the general idea. The edges are full of corners, for sure, e.g. a counterfeit or reproduction can be exacting enough to create a new game for us to play (I am reminded of the rabbit hole of reproduction collectible watches...)... the quest of authenticity has a fractal quality in the case of mass-produced but limited goods (what edition number? What pressing? The one with the misaligned cyan?)... ...but in the 80% case, I think it's simply, we monkeys like objects; ideas remain a hard sell. My own belief is this is so deeply baked into the relationship between our world modeling that it will not be overcome through culture. A lemma might be, non-fungibility is less important than materiality. Authenticity for fungible goods, like gold, is persistent, in part because they are fungible. It's their material (perceptible provability) that reassures us. I believe this is rooted in intuitions about the scale and durability of consensus on value containers, which appears until recently to have been in the long view winner-take-all, in the case of things without pragmatic use-value.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> Ultimately it has value because people agree it has value. This feels like a pyramid scheme. What makes it different?
- gmuslera 5y ago
  The old object-observer duality. Where is the value in this case? It is in the observer, not in the object. It goes in a different layer. The problem there is that culture, social conventions, shared fictions and so on can be manipulated/twisted/adapted to some agenda or interest, and that includes what we feel valuable or not, without minding of what is really behind (like with bitcoins and similar). Once we took this route, all kinds of mirages can appear. And they can vanish into thin air as fast as they appeared.
  - politician 5y ago
    Tulip Mania
- notyourday 5y ago
  > This feels like a pyramid scheme. It is. My Google-fu is failing me but there was a famous art dealer in the early part of the 20th century who promised that he would buy back the pieces he sold at least for the price the buyer originally paid less some minuscule percentage if the buyer could not sell the pieces to someone else. It made paints he sold significantly go up in price. He died. Buyers tried to get his estate to pay for the paintings and failed.
  - kryptiskt 5y ago
    A Swedish gallery called Timeless pulled that scam recently, they sold art in galleries in Sweden and Poland (and Miami and Dubai) with the promise buy it back N months later with a yearly appreciation of at least 20% (I see here that Polish customers were promised 36%).
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Nothing. NFTs are literally nothing more than a scam. People are running mental gymnastics trying to delude themselves in to believing that having a cryptographically signed json packet pointing to a dead url will be worth a fortune in the future.
zabzonk 5y ago
There is a difference between a physical object (painting, sculpture, trading card, slice of bread) which cannot with our current technology be exactly reproduced, and a digital thing, which can be.
- darkerside 5y ago
  You can reproduce a trading card such that it's indistinguishable to just about every human on the planet.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    But not to someone using a few simple scientific tools, such as, say, a microscope.
    - darkerside 5y ago
      You don't need a microscope to distinguish NFTs
- speedyapoc 5y ago
  I've struggled wrapping my ahead around whether this line of thinking has merit or not. I'd argue that everything you listed can be reproduced, almost identically. But there's no value in doing so since it is not the original or was never authorized by the creator. Why does this change all of a sudden once we go digital? Is it because it's so much easier to reproduce something that originates digitally?
  - peytn 5y ago
    It’s not just “going digital”—the creative act isn’t there. It’s just financialization. The act of taking an artwork to an auction house isn’t something that’ll hold value.
    - speedyapoc 5y ago
      I agree, but I think that's just a short term effect of people trying to cash in on the hype. Suppose I'm an artist that releases a limited digital run of an album and that NFTs are used to attribute ownership of the digital release. Would this have more, equal, or less value than an artist doing the same thing but with a physical limited run album release? The actual music content can be pirated and made available just the same, whether or not it was physical or digital. The cost of the physical goods themselves is negligible. However, I feel like many people argue that the digital release via NFTs would be worth less because all you have to show for your ownership is a digital token, and not some sort of limited release physical item.
the_local_host 5y ago
Is there anything (other than lawsuits) preventing issuers from "printing NFTs" and diluting the value of those already sold? It seems like a blockchain-based technology that only works when backed by the threat of lawsuits combines the worst aspects of the art market and the cryptocurrency market.
- darkerside 5y ago
  Many modern art pieces could really be recreated. What's the difference you are trying to draw?
  - the_local_host 5y ago
    Digital art can be recreated easily, which is probably one reason why few people have been paying money for it. Physical art, which people have historically paid for, is much more difficult to credibly reproduce than NFTs. Edited to add: Moreover if the argument in favor of NFTs is that they're not worse than what preceded them, then what's the point of introducing them? If the same problems in the traditional art market (especially for digital works) are recapitulated with NFTs, I don't see the point.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      You can create copies of digital art easily, of course. But you can’t create a copy of a particular NFT (assuming the blockchain software works as intended). For most of these famous digital art NFTs, the digital work itself is widely distributed online. But of course there’s only one of each NFT.
christiansakai 5y ago
Only when the actual piece of digital art imprinted itself on the blockchain and can be viewed with any non-closed source viewer for free, then yes. Until that happens, NFT is useless apart from supply chain/authorship identification
LegitShady 5y ago
I call this the MLM approach. The more people you can scam, the more you use the size of your scam to pretend you're legitimate, while being a scam. "Look how many people paid money for this/look how much money was paid for this, it must be worth that money! The actual efficacy of any product sold is secondary to the amount of money I've been paid" I understand the 'tom brady rookie card' argument but it falls apart in the digital world. A digital image of Tom Brady as a rookie is worth nothing. A print of that digital image is worth less than cost of printing it. The value of the card is that its official merchandise of limited run with no way to create 'new' old cards. Stop pretending NFTs are physical items, stop pretending they can't be infinitely reproduced.
macksd 5y ago
>> For those that can’t understand the value of NFTs ... >> it has value because people agree it has value Yeah but let's be clear it's often just because 2 people say they agree it has value, and for all we know they're often laundering money. I can look at a motorcycle and understand why it has value to someone even though I wouldn't buy one myself even for a penny. I'm afraid I'm unable to do the same with NFTs and cans of feces from an artist.
greenshackle2 5y ago
An important fact to remember about art valuation is that art can be bought and sold anonymously through private dealers who are not subject to anti money laundering regulations. The trick is to buy some art at a reasonable price, store it in a dark warehouse for a couple of years, then anonymously buy it from yourself at an exorbitant price through shell companies with dirty money.

eric_b 5y ago

Sort of tangential to the main point but - I find the new version of Fearless to be utterly lacking in "soul", "energy", "magic" or whatever you want to call it. The unquantifiable things that made the original so good are missing. Sure, the remakes are competent and perhaps even better technically, but after listening to both side by side (song by song, new then old) - to me there is no comparison. I went online looking for reviews of the "new" album and I only found critics gushing over how great the remakes are. Did they even listen? Did they compare? Sounds like it was just a money grab justified with a healthy dose of moral outrage.

IneffablePigeon 5y ago
I think it's possibly a bit rich to say that they didn't listen to it just because they had a different opinion. I found the same thing on first listen, because a few things were subtly "wrong" (different). On second or third listen I love the new version, the production and vocals are just that little bit more polished in a fair few ways and I've gotten used to the slightly different mix. The new bonus tracks are pretty decent and it's nice to rediscover one of my favourite albums again. It wasn't at all dissimilar to the effect I get when trying new headphones - I hate them for a little while, invariably. Then I get used to the new tonal balance and I learn to love the sound (if they're good headphones)
- soperj 5y ago
  I've had the same thing happen with live versions. The Pixies play "Where is my mind" very differently live, the vocal lines especially. First time I heard it was jarring because of the expectation and I didn't think it was good as the recorded version. Recorded version feels much worse now.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    I hate, just hate, the album version of Kiss's God of Thunder, but they speed it up live and it sounds amazing. STP was amazing in the Fargo Civic Center which makes me think the person who mixed their album just hated life because it is noticeably inferior. On the other hand, Aerosmith has sounded like crap the two times I've seen them in concert. It gets weird when you buy the import (for the US) versions of some songs. A lot of the Seattle bands sounded better to my ear on the versions sold in Europe. Japan is always an odd duck.

jtbayly 5y ago

What this piece leaves out is that given this reasoning, Taylor Swift can simply declare another piece of art the "New Taylor version," thus completely devaluing the previous "Taylor version."

chejazi 5y ago
It's not like the "New Taylor version" will be valued completely independently of the previous "Taylor version." Her reputation underwrites the transaction; any transaction contributes to her reputation.
- gretch 5y ago
  Exactly. Doing this would 'dilute' her and the "new new taylor version" would be next to worthless
the_local_host 5y ago
If we're invoking theoretical possibilities, anyone can declare another piece of are to be the new version. I don't think re-recording albums for the purpose of attacking former business partners, who priced the intellectual property at roughly all the money that she had been paid in their previous arrangement, indicates a willingness to keep re-recording things.
paxys 5y ago
The entire point of the saga was that she wants to own the masters herself (which she does with the rerecorded versions), so she would be devaluing her own asset.
hnbad 5y ago
I thought this was kinda the point by comparing it to NFTs. NFTs can be trivially devalued if you derive the value from that attributed to it by the author of whatever it references. It's probably even truer for NFTs as often the NFT itself merely represents a JSON payload which itself references URLs managed by a third party and trusted to continue referencing the original work. Once that third party goes away, the reference chain breaks. The value is not only reliant on everyone agreeing that the third party "owns" (whatever this might mean) the "work" (whatever that might be) but also that the NFT continues to represent this ownership by proxy even when the proxy goes away. There's nothing stopping a new middleman claiming authority over the ownership of a work and issuing an NFT for it. But its value entirely hinges on a shared understanding that this claim is valid. Of course this would break down if an artist really did devalue earlier NFTs for the same work by issuing new ones because the value largely comes from the expectation that the non-fungible token's authority is also non-fungible, i.e. permanent.

Quarrelsome 5y ago

I feel like the author is missing a trick here, there's an epilogue to write. The power of brigading is terrifying and fierce and this is part of marking the transition into personal brigading where an individual uses the hammer of their fans to beat reality into their will. Its not entirely dissimilar to Trump's relationship with his followers to an extent. Pans out just fine with Taylor Swift because I figure she might have a modicum of respect for her fans as opposed to someone like Jake Paul who treats his like dirt. The difference between the ages is that fans that were gatekept by organisations had many levels of PR, admin and marketing to wade through, today we have direct, raw and visceral which also can result in corrupt, unethical and even evil. This is a pattern that could define the coming decades as society coalesces around a few chosen figures and lends them their might directly. Many of them will be found undeserving and the debris they leave might be impactful.

coredog64 5y ago
Something similar happened recently with Dave Chappelle. He asked his fans to stop watching Chappelle Show on Netflix. This depressed the value of the asset low enough that he was able to buy back the rights.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Chapelle Show doesn't drive subscriptions. Holding out on any more comedy specials is what made them capitulate.
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    It doesn't sound like he had threatened that (at least not explicitly); articles about it just say he requested Netflix stop streaming it, and so they did. Of course, them expecting him to create more specials for them in the future likely motivated them here, but it doesn't sound like it was an explicit ultimatum.
- theNJR 5y ago
  Chappelle was brought up in the article ;)

throw7 5y ago

I suppose we'll see contracts include the artist not "de-valuing" their "own" works in such future where they are super-stars able to shape a story to direct their fans on what to believe.

satyrnein 5y ago
A non-compete, basically.
jedberg 5y ago
I suspect a lot of young artists will have learned their lesson and attempt to retain some control over their masters, either with first right of refusal or requiring the current owner to sell it back to them at some sort of market rate at any time.

rayiner 5y ago

The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves. > Nilay Patel wrote in Vox: > "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.' > This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone. How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! If you tell your mom "I made a song" she will be quite unimpressed if what you actually mean is "I made a digital copy of a song." A book or a song or a movie is more than the bits that make up any individual copy of it. There is a like-with-like comparison in there, but it actually hurts Patel's argument. There is no scarcity of music on the Internet--not referring to digital copies, but because the Internet has made it trivial to create and widely distribute original music (often for free). If consumers were unwilling to pay much for Swift's music because of the vast quantity of alternatives available on the Internet, Patel would indeed have a point. But consumers still want Swift's music, not other peoples' music. Even in the face of huge amounts of free alternatives, consumers still want Swift's music. That only proves Swift's point!

Aaargh20318 5y ago
> How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! Yes, they are two different things. The problem is that artists (and record labels) want to get paid for the non-scarce thing: the copies, and not for the actually scarce thing: the artists time and effort. This is why people don't see pirating music as stealing, while at the same time they are more than willing to pay a small fortune for a concert ticket. The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music.
- karpierz 5y ago

SloopJon 5y ago

I've always found the idea of master recordings curious. Once a song becomes a hit, the band may perform it almost every day for the rest of their career, but what we listen to through our headphones or speakers is this one particular moment in time. Yes, there are live recordings and bootlegs, but by and large it's this one master recording, which may get dusted off every couple of decades for a remaster. Some masters are guarded jealously by their owners. For example, I've heard that some of the Stevie Wonder releases aren't even from the masters, because he won't part with them. Some masters may truly capture something irreproducible; say, John Lennon's hoarse voice in "Twist and Shout." In this particular case, at least, Taylor Swift has put the lie to the uniqueness of the masters. If she has the right to rerecord everything, the old masters aren't so special. But I think the article is also right. After this exercise, she may have made her point, and may force Shamrock Capital to make a deal.

bombcar 5y ago
It's also interesting in that if you hear a version that is NOT the master you can easily notice it, even if it's a very close version. I suspect for lots of "hearing but not listening" as long as you hear the "normal master" version you don't notice, but if it were subtly different it would be noticeable (perhaps only subconsciously). I wonder if you could do studies on Muzak at stores (original "radio" masters vs live versions vs lounge vs remaster vs ...).
klelatti 5y ago
The concept of the master is unhelpful in inhibiting artists from setting out a version of a song in studio conditions once they've had chance to live with it and play it live for a while. Live recordings are more spontaneous but we all know that the sound can be less than ideal. I've been listening to a few recordings of Little Feat's Rock'n'Roll Doctor [1] - a wonderful song but one where I'm convinced by far the least interesting version is the 'master recording'. How many songs languish because the master is not that great? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-r-qi_cJs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-r-qi_cJs0
NotSammyHagar 5y ago
The original masters led to the song sounding "the right way" when you hear it on the radio, instead of sounding different. Sometimes that difference sounds good too, like your favorite live album from some band. But other times that song doesn't sound right, the live version or alternative take just loses that magic. So the original has a lot of value if it hits. But I think you missed another aspect, the real value is the original master plus the tweaks and additions to make it into what became popular. That production of the song probably wouldn't sound the same if you applied those processes to a slightly different version, say the singer or band's best efforts later.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bombcar 5y ago

Nobody ever bought any music "to support the publisher" - the middle man is just that, the middle man.

ppod 5y ago
The middle man is a load balancer for risk. The middleman makes a bunch of artists moderately rich, and they lose money on most of them and make money on some of them. They take on the risk of letting an unproven artist spend a few years doing something that could turn out to generate little money, and in return they get a big share of the ones that do make money. Now, thanks to the internet, the ones that do make it big can cut out the middleman. Now there will be no middleman to take on the small risks of many unproven artists, and because of the relentless greed and ego of Chapelle and Swift many young artists will never have the opportunity that they did.
- bombcar 5y ago
  In theory things like YouTube and Patreon could provide that gap - but not sure it actually will.
  - ppod 5y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I like the internet. It is almost free to record and publish material now, which probably far outweighs the value that is captured by the fat cats.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I do think there's a missing ground that is being lost - it was incidental to the publishers but they would provide production, editors, other various things that are seen as "not important". It takes an exceptionally bright young artist to REALIZE they need those things and go out of their way to find and pay for them. Neither Patreon nor Youtube is going to provide an editor and certainly not force you to use one - no matter how valuable it may be.
    - 5y ago

627467 5y ago

In a practical sense, you'd pay for music in pre-internet day because you want to listen to that song/album. Then, people on internet started paying for music because it was easy and accessible (for some, it was easier to just download things off the "dark web" of that day). Now people pay music subscriptions because you don't have to think about where a specific song is: it's just there on Spotify/etc. Note that nowhere do I mention artists. Certainly (some people) also pay for art because they want to compensate for what the artist did but I think that increasingly, people pay artists to keep doing what they are doing. Not for what they did. So, no, I don't think the value that people pay an artist derives from a work that exists today, but derives from the value (speculatively) they will create on the future. And ultimately, I don't think any contract can enforce this, even a smartone.

browningstreet 5y ago

Def Leppard, to name one artist, did something similar: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/def-leppard-re-recording-forgeries-of-old-hits-247079/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/def-leppard-re...

kosyblysk2 5y ago

for real? Taylor Swift an artist? :facepalm:

kin 5y ago

The thing is, Taylor's version sounds completely different. Did Ben Thompson actually look at streaming numbers? All her fans didn't flock to the new version. They listened to it, but it's so different that the old version is still consistently streamed likely by the same fans. Further, the new version isn't on some new platform or anything. It's not like Taylor Swift asked fans to fork extra money to listen to "Taylor's version" so nothing is really proven here regarding Taylor's so called power. In terms of accessibility, the tracks exist side by side with the original on Spotify. The idea of NFTs is incredibly appealing to artists because the technology could allow for artists to sell music that can only be played by some client if the NFT for a track or album was authentic. Ultimately this is bad for consumers and you bet your bottom dollar that some new form of music piracy will be born if music tried to go this direction.

exolymph 5y ago
The new Fearless just dropped, it's not like the streaming numbers are going to equalize overnight. Can you link the data? Sounds like it's interesting
- Hasz 5y ago
  I just spent a few minutes looking for data, expecting something like a stock chart. I can't find almost anything -- even total stream numbers for an album or song are difficult to find. If you have a good source, I'm very interested.
  - cbowal 5y ago
    The Spotify app shows play counts. I'm seeing, for example, 433M plays of "Love Story" and 65M plays of "Love Story (Taylor's Version)". Considering that it was released only 3 days ago it seems like the number of plays for the "(Taylor's Version)" is quite incredible.
    - Hasz 5y ago
      Ah, I only use open.spotify.com. Still, without scraping it/api access, there's no way to see a distribution AFAIK.

frashelaw 5y ago

> Patel wrote about the end of scarcity, so technology that brings scarcity back seems like a panacea. Perhaps Swift’s 2014 vision was simply ahead of its time? If our technology allows us to now distribute media in a post-scarcity environment, isn't that a good thing for culture? It's absolutely ridiculous that artificially reintroducing scarcity is seen as a good thing. It also serves as yet another example of the reliance of profit on artificial scarcity, and the irrationality of the system- as well as the lengths to which people will go, just to desperately preserve an outdated model.

boredumb 5y ago

You wouldn't download an NFT

politician 5y ago
Technically, you cannot download an NFT. It's a distributed consensus that you cannot ever truly put your arms around (unless you're running a testnet and operate all of the nodes).
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Wait. Isn't the blockchain operating on the assumption that everyone can, and should, download all NFTs? That's the "distributed" part in "distributed consensus".
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Sure, you can download the result of the consensus, but you can't download the, err... consensors?
- throwawayffffas 5y ago
  As long as I can download the gif, you can keep the NFT.

danhite 5y ago

FWIW, this phenomenon is not new under the sun. I observe that we are experiencing a McLuhan Tetrad retrieval of it via our modern ~ Internet media artifact. For example, I experienced (preferentially) buying, in the 1970s, LotR paperbacks with Tolkien's picture on the back cover with his authorial economic plea -- see his statement, below, in this citation ... from "Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties" at https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html > Eventually the authorized edition appeared with Tolkien's stern message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other." This was bad publicity for Ace, who eventually caved in, paid Tolkien royalties, and promised not to reprint. < also referring to this circumstance is a Library of Congress blog post: J.R.R. Tolkien – Paperbacks and Copyright November 24, 2014 by Margaret Wood https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-and-copyright/ https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-a...

marcus_holmes 5y ago

> In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans — not the other way around. I'm not in the industry, so I don't grok it too well. Why would an artist with an established fan base need a record deal?

andrewzah 5y ago
They may have some fans, but not a lot of money. The label steps in to give money to fund creating a new album, creating music videos (these can easily run up to millions of dollars), issuing new LP pressings, doing concerts, advertising them, etc.
Spivak 5y ago
Because the record label handles all the business aspects which is all the actual work of monetizing an artist. You can DIY but you will end up becoming a record label as you scale in the process. They handle the marketing, merch, venues, social media, distribution, retail relationships, deals with studios, relationships with radio, relationships with personalities to do interviews, all the video production staff for music videos, like this could on forever.
dakial1 5y ago
Before streaming, the label owned the means of production (professional studios and professionals), means of distribution (Vynil, CDs etc), means of promotion (deals with radios, magazines, channels etc) and it sort of operated like a bank. So it would give lots of money upfront and the artist would sign the deal to x amount of albums to be distributed by the label (which was kept very non transparent by design, so that the artists who were not business savvy always did a bad deal. There were all kinds of other shenanigans, like underreporting sales (to pay less for the artist) etc. Today labels lost a lot of their power in distribution (Spotify, Youtube, etc), a little in recording (recording is easier) but still have the promotion power. So they operate in a similar way but with deals focused on production and promotion. So an artist with fans would make a deal with a big label to get the promotion/production power they have and the bank function. So he/she would leverage on that to become a global star betting that this will bring more money that he/she owes the label.

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago

I don't know if this is completely right. It's true that artists can do damage to the companies that own copyrights and licenses to their work. It's also true that some dynamics will change because of the artist's ability to go directly to the consumer. Substack is a great evidence of this. But those companies can and will fight back with legal means. For example, if I'm a label, non-disparagement clauses are the norm going forward. You don't bring our business in front of (from my perspective) the mob on Twitter. Also, I don't sign a deal unless I get the copyrights, the mechanical rights, the sync rights, the performance rights, and the songwriter rights. I need all the rights. The artist can keep the a perpetual, non-transferrable license to the performance right, but that's it. I bet this won't even cost them that much more, because until Ms. Swift flipped the script, this was kind of de facto understanding of what the master rights meant. This lateral move by Ms. Swift (apparently) caught everyone off guard. She is a genius, though. I'm not sure if what she did was fair, but apparently this was war, and there's no fairness in war.

ineedasername 5y ago

I didn't know that about Dave Chapelle's relationship with Comedy Central. It's a pretty good outcome for someone who over-performed much more than Comedy Central could have expected during initial negotiations. It might seem intuitively strange-- "He signed the contract, he knew what he was getting!" But when I consider it through the lens of the professional business world, that doesn't make sense. If a company hires me at a salary of $X but I underperform, I get fired. In entertainment, the show gets cancelled. But if I vastly over-perform, things like bonuses, merit increases, and promotions are pretty standard: It's a renegotiation of the original terms of employment, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm glad that it's becoming a less novel concept in the entertainment industry as well. (especially in a streaming age where limited air-time is no longer an issue and all old shows can be available, allowing for massive resurgence in demand for given show that might not have been aired at all previously) And Dave was very astute to go to what he says are his real bosses-- his fans-- to address the issue. That is a somewhat unique dynamic to the entertainment industry, where the value that a solo entertainer brings to the table is much more easily quantified than the specific value of many employees at a 10k employee company.

dkarl 5y ago

Patronage is no longer the domain of the rich. When it is clear that it is optional to support an artist, some will do so for the personal satisfaction, some out of gratitude, and others for the social credit it brings. A difference from old-fashioned patronage is that it's easier to lie -- you can pretend to support artists while secretly enjoying their music for free. Happily, it seems like only a minority of people are satisfied by that.

dorkwood 5y ago

> If the creator decides that their NFTs are important, they will have value The reason artists who believe in the value of their own NFTs get paid more is because they're nominating themselves as NFT spokespeople and attracting the attention of marketplace investors with skin in the game. If you're the CFO of one of these marketplaces and you're faced with a choice of which NFT to buy, do you choose the guy who just tweeted "trying out this NFT thing lol", or the guy who acts like he's the next Andy Warhol and constantly pushes the NFTs-have-value narrative?

EGreg 5y ago

That should be a great band name! The NFTs