5 ms·

Fundamentally, neither spotify nor piracy matter. People enjoy making music. Today, there are more people able to make and publish music then ever, but the day

• ddq 3y ago
  Fundamentally, the artists getting paid doesn’t matter because they enjoy making music? As a musician, your comment is completely ignorant, self-centered, and totally irrelevant to the discussion of people getting economically screwed.
  • developer93 3y ago
    What's your opinion of bandcamp?
  • raincole 3y ago
    No? You completely misread what he said. As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education, etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow proportionally, the average income of musicians/songwriters would decline. The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence. Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much).
    • skinner927 3y ago
      That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper. You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables. People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it. Sure, there are exceptions, but it's not the rule. Michael Jackson would not have existed if there was no money in the career. The money is why his father pushed so (insanely) hard. The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm. And maybe for a while that would happen, but eventually we'll see someone (similar to the private search engines we see today) come out with a new platform with the selling point that artists get a living wage -- as long as the people demand it, and I believe they will.
      • raincole 3y ago
        > That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper. Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper. How much cheaper is another question, as circular saws are already very cheap today, compared to hand-made furniture. So yeah, you're right, it's just like saying that. > if there was no money in the career It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • wwweston 3y ago
          > Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper. I don't know whether circular saws are likely to be the biggest input into a piece of handmade furniture, but my guess is they're not and it's time invested in the specific work and practicing the art rather than industrial capital. Similarly, while DAWs while can (though not necessarily do) reduce capital necessary to do certain aspects of production, they don't represent the most significant investment into writing music. Also time, both in the creation of the specific work AND in terms of time practicing the art. > It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star. Survivorship bias. Billie Eilish or any other individual success are no more an indication that all is well with the status quo than blue zone anecdotes are promises anyone who chooses can be a centenarian.
      • badpun 3y ago
        There's still money in making music, just not in selling recordings. Biggest touring artists (the Beyonces etc.) bring in millions. They, in turn, require skilled producers to make their songs, who are also paid well.
      • ilyt 3y ago
    • ghaff 3y ago
      How would demand grow proportionately? People have a limited attention budget to listen, watch, and read things.
      • raincole 3y ago
        Yes, and that's exactly what the GP was trying to say.
        • ghaff 3y ago
          Ah yes, didn't read far enough upthread. Of course, this isn't new. Tim O'Reilly said something similar in the context of book publishing probably getting on to 20 years ago at this point.
    • wwweston 3y ago
      Might have been interesting to ever find out if this was true. What happened instead was that Spotify led the pricing change by taking capital, cheating policy, and producing a consumption avenue that cut the price by orders of magnitude. And meanwhile: > cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education The gains in education are fractional. The library or a neighborhood piano teacher were good enough resource wise. YouTube eliminates the trip (and the funny thing is that we're iffy on even rewarding those people proportionally), but isn't a new opportunity. And even for materials that are better in the way that 3Blue1Brown is for math... just like you're going to have to sit down and spend a lot of time actually doing problems rather than just watching the videos if you have any hope of really getting it, the constraint when it comes to producing music is still sitting down and putting in the time, not only on the specific problem/work in front of you but in the background to do it elegantly. DAWs are great and can make up for some margin of missing virtuosity, but you have to put in the time practicing using them too -- they become their own instrument. The constraint on making music has always been time. And what gets you more time to do something? Either having another source of wealth, or getting economically rewarded for doing that thing. Spotify and the damage it's done the market absolutely matters. Just because music is getting through the damage doesn't mean there wasn't some lost, and not just quantity, level that could have been leveraged to through the magic of compounding focus. Anybody who's read Graham's "maker schedule/manager scheduler" should already know this.
      • 8note 3y ago
        What even was the music market though? I think it was a spot where record labels could get rich off of music while musicians still had to pay their way with live shows and merch. Why do I care if spotify's investors have replace the record label investors?
        • wwweston 3y ago
          Even before the digital/internet sea change, this didn't capture the whole music industry. There were artists who made good money off their recordings either because they DIYd it, or found better labels, or negotiated better deals. None of those paths has ever been easy but before recording revenue got kneecapped it was more available. But let's say for the sake of argument that's how it worked before the internet. If so, why did we let that level of disruption just replace one set of bad guys with another? What we should have had instead was what we were on track to have: multiple-scale digital recording retail, Apple to Bandcamp to individual artist site to local indie collective as point of sale. Charge whatever artist and buyer choose and can clear a transaction at, they keep 70-90%. True streaming, some with a format, some algorithmically customized for both audio wallpaper and music discovery... but in every case not user-programmed because that's how you justify the difference between the ridiculous fractional cent payouts and recordings. That's the world we could have tomorrow if the policy was there. More likely, everybody's too used to a decade of having the privilege of an unlimited basically free recording buffet that Spotify used to cannibalize the industry and we won't do it no matter how it erodes the economics of creation. But we could.
    • chefandy 3y ago
      I'm never not astonished by the sweeping pseudo-philosophical bullshit conflating hobby art with literally millions of people's livelihood, visual and other creative culture, etc. There has to be an echo chamber in some subreddit where people who have no idea what they're taking about all slap each other on the back for their ill-conceived musings about the disposition of artists in our society and the nature of art.
  • paulddraper 3y ago
    They matter. Also, like everything in the universe, they are subject to supply vs demand. And fundamentally the supply exceeds the demand.
    • easyThrowaway 3y ago
      Problem is, Spotify is engineered to make sure the supply stays concentrated in a very, very small amount of hands.
• bombolo 3y ago
  People being able to afford professional equipment and professional session musicians vs a guy recording himself in a bedroom over a MIDI karaoke track is not the same at all. If you can't hear the difference, see a doctor.
  • deadbeeves 3y ago
    It sounds like you're saying that because one is more expensive than the other it is therefore better.
    • ddq 3y ago
      No, I'm sorry but you are ignorant.
    • bombolo 3y ago
      I agree that a 2 million $ guitar isn't better than a 2k$ guitar. But a 2k$ guitar is certainly better than a 50$ guitar. Not only in how it sounds but in how easy it is to play it. My 1st guitar was bad so I couldn't do barrè chords. I thought I was bad and pros could do it. Turned out pros just had better guitars. Better guitars also have less noise, better cables are shielded. Yes, more expensive is better (up to a point).
      • deadbeeves 3y ago
        Yes. However, the instrument being better just means the sound it makes will be better, not that the music the musician makes with it will be better. EDIT: I should say the sound will likely better, not just better.
        • bombolo 3y ago
          I just gave you an example of how it's easier to play, allowing more music to be played... It's not just about the sound.
  • t0bia_s 3y ago
    Many don't see a difference. Just amount of coolnes. You can apply this on professional filmmaking or vlogging. I guess amount of time consumed audiovisual production today is much higher on amateurish production thanks to antisocial networks.
• kouru225 3y ago
  An unlimited supply of unoriginal music because artists don’t have the luxury to experiment anymore.
  • jononor 3y ago
    That is not what is happening? There are soo many niches and subgenres these days, and it is evolving year over year.
  • matwood 3y ago
    Did you miss a /s? There is more varied music being created every day than ever before right now. There are sub sub sub genres you can seek out if you want. Contrast this with when I was a kid and we basically had what the radio played or what cassette we could buy with our $10. The problem now is that we have so much content (music, books, movies, short vids, long vids, etc...), and not enough aggregate time to consume it all.
• easyThrowaway 3y ago
  We're talking about the business side of the whole ordeal. It's not just about "enjoying making music". It's about paying mixing and mastering. It's about paying NTS, Rinse FM, and the constellation of medium-small distribution channels. It's about distributing on labels like DFA, !K7 or whatever. It's about making sure that Fabric, Rex Club and Sneaky Pete can keep the lights on so they can play your music, so you can get paid, so you can keep making music instead of ahem having to become a webdev and write angry comments on HN. It's about keeping an entire industry, live or recorded, and their milieu alive. The truth is that what happened wasn't a liberation. It was a methodical purge of the medium-sized side of the music industry. Now we're reaching the point of having 5-6 industry giants taking all the money plus...yes, an inordinate amount of people making mostly self-referential music in their own bedroom on weekends, music that will reach no-one outside whatever local scene they hang around. But most of them were making music even before, and were by their own choice irrelevant to the industry. (True, now they can also become influencers on Twitch and maybe one out of thousands can make a living by streaming their life 24h/day. One ticket for the lottery, please). Whoever was between them and the majors is being squeezed out of the game.
  • Sammi 3y ago
    I would love to see some numbers on how many people are able to make a living making music today vs 10 years ago.
• jrockway 3y ago
  Increasing the size of the market is a well understood phenomenon, but it isn't the only way a business can be successful. The music companies would prefer that you spent less time watching TV and more time listening to music. Or, they would prefer that you had less meetings at work so you'd need music to fill the silence. Or, Artist A would like to convince you that they are better than Artist B. Humanity has always been constrained by the 24 hour a day thing, but the economy has grown nonetheless. That last little bit is interesting. Back in the physical media era, if Artist B fell out of your rotation, you could sell your record/tape/CD and decrease the size of their new market a little bit. Then we went to DRM, and every song you bought was a sunk cost; if you didn't listen to it, you still payed. Now with streaming, it's back to the downsides of physical media; if you stop listening to Artist B, they stop getting paid.
• wwweston 3y ago
  If music was fungible for any other music and a musician's day had an unlimited supply of hours, this might be a reasonable position. There was already "enough" recorded music decades ago that someone could fill all their living hours with constant listening and not exhaust it. If that's really all there is to it, I'm sure you'll have no problem committing to never listen to anything after around 1970. If you have any hesitation about that then you might start to see serious shortcomings in this conception of supply. "there are more people able to make and publish music then ever" also papers over nearly everything that matters about the statement. "There are more people" is the defensible part. There's half an argument we have greater access to affordable digital tools for production than ever -- but I'm not even sure it's half. The constraining factor on music composition, performance/recording, production is always time. Even where the tools themselves save time that's a series of converging terms that stops at a limit because to make good music you have to practice using those tools plus others. A lot. Set up a system which rewards those people in proportion to the audience they find and those people are both equipped and incentivized to spend more of their time into making not only more but making better, because they aren't required to spend their time doing other things. Set up a system which says "Oh yeah, we shouldn't reward any of this, people should just do it in their spare time" and sure, some will do it in their spare time. But they'll miss out on the compounding effects of focus and its power laws because they're occupied with whatever other stuff policy+markets have been set up to value instead. And their audience and the rest of the world will miss out on their power law peaks. Which is why I was too generous with my earlier "never listen to anything after around 1970" thought experiment. Really, don't listen to anything except debut releases before 1970. Some of the debuts are really good, of course, and labors of love (or capital-backed love) as you say. But the post-debut work is what's enabled by the economic feedback. There will, of course, likely often be survivors to bias ourselves to the status quo with. And perhaps that's good enough for some. Hell, maybe we're even rapidly getting to a point where we don't even need most artists at all, we can simply have software trained on all the work of all the artists that have ever recorded produce music for you, and be done with not only the pesky idea of rewarding musicians whose work we appreciate but having a pesky human being involved in direct production in the first place.
• rawTruthHurts 3y ago
  > Fundamentally, neither spotify nor piracy matter. Well, I'd say yes because that's what the conversation is about.