7 ms·

The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate investments (bars), and then it was used t

The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate investments (bars), and then it was used to sell little blobs of plastic and cardboard with pictures on them, t-shirts, instruments and some lessons, and then maybe matchmaking at concerts and festivals. Music is the sizzle, not the steak. It's the sound of gross margin, but it's not the product. We just keep letting musicians believe it's a problem to be solved and they keep producing music more and more cheaply, while businesses find new tchotchkas to sell into the channel that a listenership creates. Digitization decoupled the attractive sounds from the merch, and now we're trying to find a way to couple them again. Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising. Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item. Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making money with music I think. I looked into whitelablling cannabis products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in legalization legislation because it's such an obviously good idea. There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to. I agree with the advice, that discovery isn't a product, and the big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new artforms if that's not going to happen. Otherwise it's like trying to sell math.

CPLX 5y ago
What the fuck are you talking about? Music is one of the most powerful elements of the human experience. It's common to all cultures across all periods of history and it has the capacity to inspire people, enrage them, and cause them to fall into tribal affiliation with each other. A large percentage of the largest mass gatherings of humans that have ever occurred have had music as their draw. Entire generations are defined by their music choices, or even a single music festival. It's something our soul needs, it's as essential to to being alive as love, or sex. Pretty sure the business of music is driven by that need.
- katbyte 5y ago
  Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite different. Case in point people who are asexual.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    That some people are asexual does not invalidate the immense importance of sex. Likewise that some people are apathetic towards music doesn't render music any less important. Certainly none of those people who don't care about music are spending oodles of money on merch either.
    - katbyte 5y ago
      yes, however I was responding to a comment which treated it as a universal thing for everyone with phrases like "It's something our soul needs" and pointing out that not everyone feels the same way they do.
      - jjk166 5y ago
        Which was in turn responding to a comment saying that music is a sideshow to selling pieces of plastic. Yes, not literally every single one of the 8 billion people on this planet will die should they go an extended period of time without music, but that's clearly not what the comment you were replying to meant. To claim the two statements are equally hyperbolic is absurd. You brought up asexuals as an example of how if you're sufficiently pedantic the need for sex is not really universal, and I was reaffirming that the comparison was apt.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"Case in point people who are asexual." Whole 2 of them (relatively speaking of course)
- beebmam 5y ago
  Yeah, and to extend on this: simply because music has been used in capitalism to make other industries more profitable doesn't imply that music isn't valuable on its own. Music is life enriching for an uncountable number of people, no matter its profitability. Same with Free Software, for that matter.
dejj 5y ago
I think your view on music is shockingly nihilistic. Thank you for letting me see this perspective (music’s “gritty” backstory).
- gmadsen 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure he is describing the business surrounding music in our western capitalistic tradition, not music as an art form
- nkrisc 5y ago
  Does it not capture the essence of modern music industries in capitalist societies?
- texasbigdata 5y ago
  I believe, but can't cite, for medium to large artists that streaming is <15% of revenue. Restated, selling merch at a show (back in the day) is so much powerful it overwhelms. That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it. Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's, etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each. Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
  - finnh 5y ago
    > I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers, basically.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    This is patent nonsense. You think selling merchandise at the show creates more money then selling the actual tickets to the show? That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who make music have, by far is selling people the experience of listening to that music, either in person or via recordings.
pvarangot 5y ago
I think you are caught in thinking the status quo of the music industry and its history determine what all "valid" potential markets for music are, according to I guess some economical or political belief you have. That Discovery isn't a product right now doesn't mean that if done correctly it can't become a product that changes the music business even just a bit, you need a stronger argument to convince me of that than just "it's not the way it is because it's not how the current business made history". I think there's a lot of people DJing, producing or jamming that would be ok with just getting pennies from their music being streamed or downloaded or whatever. Not every artist needs or wants to live from their art. For a lot the extra money is welcome specially as an incentive to do all the mastering and release work that's involved in releasing digital files or being on a streaming platform, which is not zero. I agree it's similar to selling math, but for some reason no one completely understands people "bond" to "brands" of music more often than to "brands" of math. From my perspective, at least until there's thousands of festivals across the world per week to share proofs and formulas and programs, I think it's deceiving to think selling music is like selling math if you uncouple the music from the merchandise.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Not to over comment on the thread, but this idea of people performing math at festivals could very conceivably happen, and the economics would be precisely same. It's just a question of the artform. Hacker conferences get pretty close to punk math, and blockchains are the repetitive noise your parents don't understand. A bit into the handwavy, but there's two famous quotes, one from Goethe about architecture being 'petrified music,' and another about how 'nobody can dance to architecture' which were just as quirky as what I'm saying, but when you view skateboarders as, literally, dancing to architecture, with festivals everywhere around the world, the ideas of music, architecture, math, and what dancing to them all might mean suddenly becomes plausible and conceptually much closer to one another. The economics of skateboarding (as essentially a dance form) are pretty much the same as that of music, and math. It's the dismal aspect of Economics that provides this kind of indifferent nihilism between the concepts, but when you're trying to create a product, the economics are the necessary lens. Though I will admit it's a different frame of mind.
xikrib 5y ago
Things are always changing. In the early days it wasn’t possible to record music so it made sense to monetize indirectly. When it became possible to actually record music it was hard to distribute it until radio. Later the digital revolution made recording and distributing music so easy it collapsed the market value of recordings. Today, decentralized networks are the next technology poised to shape society and it seems that those who can create digital assets are leveraged to succeed
yesbabyyes 5y ago
This gets me thinking of something an old friend wrote recently, contrasting music with sport in eg a bar setting. A backstreet pub can easily shell out £2200/month (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops. A music catalog is transferred for pretty much the same fee as one football player, AFAIK.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  Music is, to some degree, fungible. Sure we all have our favourite bands, but as far as a pub is concerned, there are tens of thousands of good enough bands that can provide atmosphere. Whereas with football, supply of watchable players is highly constrained. Nobody is coming to your pub to watch the local five aside on the TV. Plus there's the gambling aspect...
- munificent 5y ago
  > A backstreet pub can easily shell out £2200/month (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops. You can't treat information products like fungible commodity goods. Thinking that way leads to all sorts of nonsensical results. A backstreet pub isn't paying for "football" in some general sense of "video products of football matches". They are paying for *the specific currently-occurring matches that the patrons want to watch". That is a very rare product that commands a high price. If you put on "Australian footie highlights from 1987", you aren't going to have a full bar. Sports games are almost completely non-commodity and non-fungible and the pricing reflects that. Music is semi-fungible. Patrons have strong associations with particular songs and love to hear them. But there are generally enough songs that meet that criteria, and enough patrons that don't really care, that a bar just needs a bit mostly-interchangeable bucket of songs. The price reflects that.
  - 5y ago
burkaman 5y ago
Does anyone have historical sources that can back this up? Right now it reads like an extremely strained attempt to find the most cynical possible perspective without any evidence. The idea here seems to be that until churches and bars started hiring musicians in order to attract clientele, nobody had ever tried to make money from music. And since then, no significant portion of the music industry has ever been about a pure exchange of money for music, it's always been driven by ulterior motives. Is there any reason to believe any of this? What about the history of classical music concerts? Operas? Broadway? Buskers? Mariachi bands? I'm sure I'm missing many non-western examples.
- watwut 5y ago
  Of course not. Music was business every single period musicians were free and not serfs or slaves or something like that. Music is fun, people like fun. That being said, there were almost always churches of some sort who would tend to play music too.
- frenchyatwork 5y ago
  High quality source? No. But if you're looking at famous European musicians before the 1800s, almost all of them were employees by sort of church or powerful aristocrat.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  “Court” music is about being a display of power that doesn’t threaten your neighbor into thinking they need to start building an army. That’s why the music itself epitomizes precision and control. Classic soft power. It’s conspicuous consumption. You keep musicians on staff to demonstrate that you are so rich and powerful that you can afford to blow it on something so frivolous that it doesn’t even feed anybody, it doesn’t stick around, and you’re either there to hear it or you’re not. See Haydn for the very best example of this model. Sheet music then becomes the “advertising” so that people can be aware that it’s happening. However, I think sheet music eventually became (and later, records/CDs) mostly a pure exchange of money for music. I guess what I’m trying to say is something in between: the exchange itself can be pure on both sides (creation/consumption), but music is “of” society/culture and almost always serves many other purposes in the power structure of societies. In its very purest form, buskers have almost always been very poor.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
> There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to. Hilariously, it's because women just don't care about this. [1] Excerpt from a study: > Men were more strongly attracted to women with whom they shared musical tastes than to women with whom they did not. The sharing of musical tastes had only a negligible effect on women's attraction to men, however. Many men place a huge emphasis on musical compatibility, but very few women do, and IIRC it's a fairly poor indicator for relationship compatibility. Young single men would probably be better off letting this one go. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009365089016002005 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009365089016002...
- officeplant 5y ago
  So what you're saying is we need a men for men dating site based on music preferences. Anyone out there into long walks in the dead winter woods listening to Lustmord, hit me up.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
I'm not sure if it's still true today, but it used to be the case in Mexico that playing recorded music in a business required paying considerable royalties. This has interesting side-effect: hiring a live musician or a small band became an attractive alternative, and so the restaurants and bars are filled with live music on the weekends. I think live music is probably something we should get back to. Musicians would obviously be on board because they get to make a few bucks, customers are happy to get some live entertainment with their drinks / meal, business owners are happy because the customers stick around longer. In the digital era, recorded music wants to be free, but it's absolutely an inferior substitute to live performances, and I strongly feel that anything that helps musicians support themselves via performances is good for our culture.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

CPLX 5y ago

What the fuck are you talking about? Music is one of the most powerful elements of the human experience. It's common to all cultures across all periods of history and it has the capacity to inspire people, enrage them, and cause them to fall into tribal affiliation with each other. A large percentage of the largest mass gatherings of humans that have ever occurred have had music as their draw. Entire generations are defined by their music choices, or even a single music festival. It's something our soul needs, it's as essential to to being alive as love, or sex. Pretty sure the business of music is driven by that need.

katbyte 5y ago
Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite different. Case in point people who are asexual.
- jjk166 5y ago
  That some people are asexual does not invalidate the immense importance of sex. Likewise that some people are apathetic towards music doesn't render music any less important. Certainly none of those people who don't care about music are spending oodles of money on merch either.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    yes, however I was responding to a comment which treated it as a universal thing for everyone with phrases like "It's something our soul needs" and pointing out that not everyone feels the same way they do.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      Which was in turn responding to a comment saying that music is a sideshow to selling pieces of plastic. Yes, not literally every single one of the 8 billion people on this planet will die should they go an extended period of time without music, but that's clearly not what the comment you were replying to meant. To claim the two statements are equally hyperbolic is absurd. You brought up asexuals as an example of how if you're sufficiently pedantic the need for sex is not really universal, and I was reaffirming that the comparison was apt.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"Case in point people who are asexual." Whole 2 of them (relatively speaking of course)
beebmam 5y ago
Yeah, and to extend on this: simply because music has been used in capitalism to make other industries more profitable doesn't imply that music isn't valuable on its own. Music is life enriching for an uncountable number of people, no matter its profitability. Same with Free Software, for that matter.

dejj 5y ago

I think your view on music is shockingly nihilistic. Thank you for letting me see this perspective (music’s “gritty” backstory).

gmadsen 5y ago
I'm pretty sure he is describing the business surrounding music in our western capitalistic tradition, not music as an art form
nkrisc 5y ago
Does it not capture the essence of modern music industries in capitalist societies?
texasbigdata 5y ago
I believe, but can't cite, for medium to large artists that streaming is <15% of revenue. Restated, selling merch at a show (back in the day) is so much powerful it overwhelms. That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it. Edit: it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists. I tried counting (across all verticals so songwriters, mixers, mastering engineering's, etc etc) how big the teams publicly acknowledged were for two vanilla pop artists: Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran. Now this is across multiple albums so perhaps overstated, but after a tedious tally I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs. For each. Music might be beautiful but it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.
- finnh 5y ago
  > I stopped after getting to 200 FTEs Where are you getting FTE? The specialties you reference (mixers, engineers) are not full-time employees of the artist. Not by a long shot. They are gig workers, basically.
- CPLX 5y ago
  This is patent nonsense. You think selling merchandise at the show creates more money then selling the actual tickets to the show? That's ludicrous. The most successful product people who make music have, by far is selling people the experience of listening to that music, either in person or via recordings.

pvarangot 5y ago

I think you are caught in thinking the status quo of the music industry and its history determine what all "valid" potential markets for music are, according to I guess some economical or political belief you have. That Discovery isn't a product right now doesn't mean that if done correctly it can't become a product that changes the music business even just a bit, you need a stronger argument to convince me of that than just "it's not the way it is because it's not how the current business made history". I think there's a lot of people DJing, producing or jamming that would be ok with just getting pennies from their music being streamed or downloaded or whatever. Not every artist needs or wants to live from their art. For a lot the extra money is welcome specially as an incentive to do all the mastering and release work that's involved in releasing digital files or being on a streaming platform, which is not zero. I agree it's similar to selling math, but for some reason no one completely understands people "bond" to "brands" of music more often than to "brands" of math. From my perspective, at least until there's thousands of festivals across the world per week to share proofs and formulas and programs, I think it's deceiving to think selling music is like selling math if you uncouple the music from the merchandise.

motohagiography 5y ago
Not to over comment on the thread, but this idea of people performing math at festivals could very conceivably happen, and the economics would be precisely same. It's just a question of the artform. Hacker conferences get pretty close to punk math, and blockchains are the repetitive noise your parents don't understand. A bit into the handwavy, but there's two famous quotes, one from Goethe about architecture being 'petrified music,' and another about how 'nobody can dance to architecture' which were just as quirky as what I'm saying, but when you view skateboarders as, literally, dancing to architecture, with festivals everywhere around the world, the ideas of music, architecture, math, and what dancing to them all might mean suddenly becomes plausible and conceptually much closer to one another. The economics of skateboarding (as essentially a dance form) are pretty much the same as that of music, and math. It's the dismal aspect of Economics that provides this kind of indifferent nihilism between the concepts, but when you're trying to create a product, the economics are the necessary lens. Though I will admit it's a different frame of mind.

xikrib 5y ago

Things are always changing. In the early days it wasn’t possible to record music so it made sense to monetize indirectly. When it became possible to actually record music it was hard to distribute it until radio. Later the digital revolution made recording and distributing music so easy it collapsed the market value of recordings. Today, decentralized networks are the next technology poised to shape society and it seems that those who can create digital assets are leveraged to succeed

yesbabyyes 5y ago

This gets me thinking of something an old friend wrote recently, contrasting music with sport in eg a bar setting. A backstreet pub can easily shell out £2200/month (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops. A music catalog is transferred for pretty much the same fee as one football player, AFAIK.

cameronh90 5y ago
Music is, to some degree, fungible. Sure we all have our favourite bands, but as far as a pub is concerned, there are tens of thousands of good enough bands that can provide atmosphere. Whereas with football, supply of watchable players is highly constrained. Nobody is coming to your pub to watch the local five aside on the TV. Plus there's the gambling aspect...
munificent 5y ago
> A backstreet pub can easily shell out £2200/month (almost $3000) for football (that's soccer for you across the pond), but will pinch pennies when it comes to paying for music. It is indeed kind of weird how music is so highly valued, and gives rise to such feelings on one end, and is yet so commoditized and valued so low in eg bars and shops. You can't treat information products like fungible commodity goods. Thinking that way leads to all sorts of nonsensical results. A backstreet pub isn't paying for "football" in some general sense of "video products of football matches". They are paying for *the specific currently-occurring matches that the patrons want to watch". That is a very rare product that commands a high price. If you put on "Australian footie highlights from 1987", you aren't going to have a full bar. Sports games are almost completely non-commodity and non-fungible and the pricing reflects that. Music is semi-fungible. Patrons have strong associations with particular songs and love to hear them. But there are generally enough songs that meet that criteria, and enough patrons that don't really care, that a bar just needs a bit mostly-interchangeable bucket of songs. The price reflects that.
- 5y ago

burkaman 5y ago

Does anyone have historical sources that can back this up? Right now it reads like an extremely strained attempt to find the most cynical possible perspective without any evidence. The idea here seems to be that until churches and bars started hiring musicians in order to attract clientele, nobody had ever tried to make money from music. And since then, no significant portion of the music industry has ever been about a pure exchange of money for music, it's always been driven by ulterior motives. Is there any reason to believe any of this? What about the history of classical music concerts? Operas? Broadway? Buskers? Mariachi bands? I'm sure I'm missing many non-western examples.

watwut 5y ago
Of course not. Music was business every single period musicians were free and not serfs or slaves or something like that. Music is fun, people like fun. That being said, there were almost always churches of some sort who would tend to play music too.
frenchyatwork 5y ago
High quality source? No. But if you're looking at famous European musicians before the 1800s, almost all of them were employees by sort of church or powerful aristocrat.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
“Court” music is about being a display of power that doesn’t threaten your neighbor into thinking they need to start building an army. That’s why the music itself epitomizes precision and control. Classic soft power. It’s conspicuous consumption. You keep musicians on staff to demonstrate that you are so rich and powerful that you can afford to blow it on something so frivolous that it doesn’t even feed anybody, it doesn’t stick around, and you’re either there to hear it or you’re not. See Haydn for the very best example of this model. Sheet music then becomes the “advertising” so that people can be aware that it’s happening. However, I think sheet music eventually became (and later, records/CDs) mostly a pure exchange of money for music. I guess what I’m trying to say is something in between: the exchange itself can be pure on both sides (creation/consumption), but music is “of” society/culture and almost always serves many other purposes in the power structure of societies. In its very purest form, buskers have almost always been very poor.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

> There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to. Hilariously, it's because women just don't care about this. [1] Excerpt from a study: > Men were more strongly attracted to women with whom they shared musical tastes than to women with whom they did not. The sharing of musical tastes had only a negligible effect on women's attraction to men, however. Many men place a huge emphasis on musical compatibility, but very few women do, and IIRC it's a fairly poor indicator for relationship compatibility. Young single men would probably be better off letting this one go. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009365089016002005 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/009365089016002...

officeplant 5y ago
So what you're saying is we need a men for men dating site based on music preferences. Anyone out there into long walks in the dead winter woods listening to Lustmord, hit me up.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

I'm not sure if it's still true today, but it used to be the case in Mexico that playing recorded music in a business required paying considerable royalties. This has interesting side-effect: hiring a live musician or a small band became an attractive alternative, and so the restaurants and bars are filled with live music on the weekends. I think live music is probably something we should get back to. Musicians would obviously be on board because they get to make a few bucks, customers are happy to get some live entertainment with their drinks / meal, business owners are happy because the customers stick around longer. In the digital era, recorded music wants to be free, but it's absolutely an inferior substitute to live performances, and I strongly feel that anything that helps musicians support themselves via performances is good for our culture.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]