7 ms·

It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual d

It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat. If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't really have any other choice unless you fooled around with expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that kinda get what they deserve. [1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?

phone8675309 2y ago
> If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself; B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.' Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's birthday time, so let's sing it. A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist has often poured intense personal energy into it, yet there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens consistently over decades or centuries, it's awesome and that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not necessarily the artist). Business models around particular arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon, other than possibly giving more people the ability to pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which they will have an innate need to do because it is a personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any surrounding business model or economic/religious/political system. "Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.
QuercusMax 2y ago
It was always true that anyone could make music, since the earliest days of modern humans. By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.
- jerf 2y ago
  I think the point is the recording industry was a very different beast. Now it's not. What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording can record it with only a modest percentage increase in time and money. The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we expect anything but an explosion in supply? Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a lot of new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still quite a bit of new great music. [1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it rather than other things, but it's well within an individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where the successful companies were larger than that.
  - QuercusMax 2y ago
    "If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place." That's what I have a problem with. Music hasn't demeaned itself. Music is just as meaningful as it's ever been.
    - CrimsonRain 2y ago
      Why are you failing to read the context? Demeaned economically. And you can't charge me $100 to buy your album. I have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Basic supply and demand.
mbg721 2y ago
There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's minds with.
- bagful 2y ago
  The ease of obtaining such sounds on the cheap makes it difficult to appreciate just how cutting-edge those sounds were in Kraftwerk’s time. Making electronic drums sound good requires a lot of processing, and they did all of that with analog equipment before we even had a complete idea of how electronic drums “should” sound. And that raises the bar for today’s musicians — doing “Kraftwerk” today requires pushing boundaries like they did, not just making the same sounds.
kmeisthax 2y ago
The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. For some reason[0], you can't just upload your music to Spotify or Apple Music directly, you have to have a middleman, and that market of "middlemen for unsigned artists" is just three companies[1]. They all suck in different ways, but there's a lot of creative-class wage theft going on, even beyond Spotify just underpaying indies on rights. You can upload music directly on YouTube, but they pay very little on short videos and music streams. And there's also sketchy management companies and MCNs there anyway. We also have to keep in mind that the music industry loves complicated and unclear ownership structures over the music being produced. Nobody completely owns a music track; there's separate copyrights for melody and recordings, both of which get separated and broken down in extremely opaque ways. Remixes and sampling make the rights situation even more complicated, and at best, mean that the person who made the remix or used the samples has to share revenue. At worst, you get to deal with all sorts of bullshit claims (or lawsuits) from people who think they own more than they do. Insamuch as cheap distribution has flooded the market, it's often either in the form of attempts to launder money through Spotify[2], or online advertising style click fraud of some kind. The problem is not that there are too many honest artists, but that nobody does proper KYC on indies. Either they don't care if you're legit or they don't want to work with people at the small end. [0] In the case of Apple, long-standing trademark disputes with The Beatles prohibit them from representing artists directly, which is how management companies got their start for self-published acts. However, this would not bind Spotify or other streaming services. [1] CDBaby, TuneCore, and DistroKid, if I remember correctly [2] e.g. buy a bunch of Spotify subscriptions with drug money, publish a bunch of nominally unrelated artists on Spotify, listen to them 24/7, then the Spotify payments are clean cash
- bhelkey 2y ago
  > The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. Spotify has a list of recommended distributors [1]. The first one on the list, DistroKid, charges $22/yr for unlimited uploads to Spotify, Apple Music with the artist keeping all royalties[2]. $22 is not free but is very reasonable. [1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music-on-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music... [2] https://distrokid.com/ https://distrokid.com/
bsder 2y ago
> Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? The difference in era was the ability to earn enough money to exist long enough to "Git Gud". Sure, music is cheap to make today. However, that just means there are twelve zillion shitty bands that never progress past that. Many of the bands that are heralded as "awesome" really weren't to start. They generally took years to gel and often the members formed, dissolved and reformed several bands before the one that caught fire. Even the Beatles sounded like every other Merseybeat band to start. Without the ability to make money at their craft, artists don't get better at their craft. It's that simple.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  This confuses skill for song writing ability. There are 1000s of world class jazz players that can play back to you anything you play them. But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. That's the hardest part. The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that. I don't have enough perspective to really know, but it seems to me the record companies were a lot better at identifying this ephemeral quality decades ago, and then pushing it into the mainstream. If the Ramones came around these days, they'd probably go nowhere, but back then someone figured out that people would like listening to their music and pulled the strings to get their music into the public consciousness. >But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. Yep. I've even seen this with plenty of well-known musicians over the years. They achieve fame as part of some band, but then they join up with some other top-tier musicians from other bands as part of a "supergroup", and the result is completely underwhelming: technically very good, but just not all that interesting to listen to. So, many times, it seems that the "magic" came from a particular combination of people writing music together, at a particular time.

phone8675309 2y ago

> If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?

RiverCrochet 2y ago
A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself; B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place. Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.' Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's birthday time, so let's sing it. A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist has often poured intense personal energy into it, yet there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens consistently over decades or centuries, it's awesome and that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not necessarily the artist). Business models around particular arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon, other than possibly giving more people the ability to pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which they will have an innate need to do because it is a personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any surrounding business model or economic/religious/political system. "Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.

QuercusMax 2y ago

It was always true that anyone could make music, since the earliest days of modern humans. By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.

jerf 2y ago
I think the point is the recording industry was a very different beast. Now it's not. What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording can record it with only a modest percentage increase in time and money. The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we expect anything but an explosion in supply? Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a lot of new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still quite a bit of new great music. [1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it rather than other things, but it's well within an individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where the successful companies were larger than that.
- QuercusMax 2y ago
  "If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place." That's what I have a problem with. Music hasn't demeaned itself. Music is just as meaningful as it's ever been.
  - CrimsonRain 2y ago
    Why are you failing to read the context? Demeaned economically. And you can't charge me $100 to buy your album. I have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Basic supply and demand.

mbg721 2y ago

There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's minds with.

bagful 2y ago
The ease of obtaining such sounds on the cheap makes it difficult to appreciate just how cutting-edge those sounds were in Kraftwerk’s time. Making electronic drums sound good requires a lot of processing, and they did all of that with analog equipment before we even had a complete idea of how electronic drums “should” sound. And that raises the bar for today’s musicians — doing “Kraftwerk” today requires pushing boundaries like they did, not just making the same sounds.

kmeisthax 2y ago

The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. For some reason[0], you can't just upload your music to Spotify or Apple Music directly, you have to have a middleman, and that market of "middlemen for unsigned artists" is just three companies[1]. They all suck in different ways, but there's a lot of creative-class wage theft going on, even beyond Spotify just underpaying indies on rights. You can upload music directly on YouTube, but they pay very little on short videos and music streams. And there's also sketchy management companies and MCNs there anyway. We also have to keep in mind that the music industry loves complicated and unclear ownership structures over the music being produced. Nobody completely owns a music track; there's separate copyrights for melody and recordings, both of which get separated and broken down in extremely opaque ways. Remixes and sampling make the rights situation even more complicated, and at best, mean that the person who made the remix or used the samples has to share revenue. At worst, you get to deal with all sorts of bullshit claims (or lawsuits) from people who think they own more than they do. Insamuch as cheap distribution has flooded the market, it's often either in the form of attempts to launder money through Spotify[2], or online advertising style click fraud of some kind. The problem is not that there are too many honest artists, but that nobody does proper KYC on indies. Either they don't care if you're legit or they don't want to work with people at the small end. [0] In the case of Apple, long-standing trademark disputes with The Beatles prohibit them from representing artists directly, which is how management companies got their start for self-published acts. However, this would not bind Spotify or other streaming services. [1] CDBaby, TuneCore, and DistroKid, if I remember correctly [2] e.g. buy a bunch of Spotify subscriptions with drug money, publish a bunch of nominally unrelated artists on Spotify, listen to them 24/7, then the Spotify payments are clean cash

bhelkey 2y ago
> The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. Spotify has a list of recommended distributors [1]. The first one on the list, DistroKid, charges $22/yr for unlimited uploads to Spotify, Apple Music with the artist keeping all royalties[2]. $22 is not free but is very reasonable. [1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music-on-spotify/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music... [2] https://distrokid.com/ https://distrokid.com/

bsder 2y ago

> Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? The difference in era was the ability to earn enough money to exist long enough to "Git Gud". Sure, music is cheap to make today. However, that just means there are twelve zillion shitty bands that never progress past that. Many of the bands that are heralded as "awesome" really weren't to start. They generally took years to gel and often the members formed, dissolved and reformed several bands before the one that caught fire. Even the Beatles sounded like every other Merseybeat band to start. Without the ability to make money at their craft, artists don't get better at their craft. It's that simple.

bongodongobob 2y ago
This confuses skill for song writing ability. There are 1000s of world class jazz players that can play back to you anything you play them. But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. That's the hardest part. The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that. I don't have enough perspective to really know, but it seems to me the record companies were a lot better at identifying this ephemeral quality decades ago, and then pushing it into the mainstream. If the Ramones came around these days, they'd probably go nowhere, but back then someone figured out that people would like listening to their music and pulled the strings to get their music into the public consciousness. >But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. Yep. I've even seen this with plenty of well-known musicians over the years. They achieve fame as part of some band, but then they join up with some other top-tier musicians from other bands as part of a "supergroup", and the result is completely underwhelming: technically very good, but just not all that interesting to listen to. So, many times, it seems that the "magic" came from a particular combination of people writing music together, at a particular time.