7 ms·

There is absolutely zero evidence to support your assertion - "My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success." In

by dbspin 2y ago

There is absolutely zero evidence to support your assertion - "My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success." In fact it's demonstrably wrong. Take any aspect of musical talent, from innovativeness to musicianship, and measure any top 100 chart musician against it. They'll do worse than a typical Berklee or Juliard Grad. Measure technical ability / virtuosity, and essentially no mainstream pop artist will rival the guitarist in one of a hundred thousand unknown speedmetal bands. You're working from the fallacy known as the 'just world' hypothesis rather than reality. We may be at point in post WW2 history where the lines of talent / ability and fame are most divergent in the music space. There absolutely are fantastic musicians with large audiences, but extremely few at the top of the industry. Meanwhile the production line of safe, marketable, utterly conventional pap - from Taylor Swift to K-Pop is operating at maximal efficiency. I don't have a solution to this problem (outside the wholesale destruction of consumer capitalism), but to pretend its not there is ludicrous.

CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
Don think you need to destroy all of capitalism. Just abolishing copyright on music would be a surgical strike with pretty good effect I believe.
- eru 2y ago
  That wouldn't make more people pay for music.
  - CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
    It would not. It is not relevant either. Music is shaped into something you buy by wielders of copyright. Removing copyright as a weapon would leave them powerless to do so, allowing music to once again be some thing you primarily do.
    - eru 2y ago
      That might be true, sure. But it wouldn't get musicians paid. Making music is something people enjoy so much, that many do it for free, and many would do it professionally for very little pay. Predictably, the average musician ain't paid a lot. Even the top, say, 0.1% of best-paid musicians are paid very little compared to eg the top 0.1% of lawyers or surgeons or programmers. (I am not trying to make an argument about whether musicians _should_ get paid nor how much. I'm just following the context of the discussion.)
      - CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
        FWIW I agree with you analysis. I am making the argument that that is how it should be and that copyright gets in the way. For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable.
        eru 2y ago
        > For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable. Seems reasonable? Of course, there's plenty of ways to make this system terrible. But I think the objectionable thing, if any, is the royalty payments in the first place. Making them transferable is just efficient. And eg would allow parents to pay for current expenditures they have because of the kids. See https://www.msf.gov.sg/what-we-do/maintenance-of-parents/about/about-maintenance-of-parents-act https://www.msf.gov.sg/what-we-do/maintenance-of-parents/abo... for something that comes close to a real world example: > The Maintenance of Parents Act allows Singapore residents aged 60 years and above - who are unable to provide for themselves - to claim maintenance from their children who are capable of supporting them, but are not doing so. Parents can claim maintenance, in the form of monthly allowances or a lump-sum payment.
dale_glass 2y ago
Nah, you're just wrong about your quality measure. The production of "conventional pap" is very much a form of mastery. And so is good marketing. Raw technical skill isn't enough for success, you also need an audience for that skill. It doesn't matter that your skill at the guitar is divine if you only play technical pieces only other expert musicians appreciate. Take Minecraft for instance. A graphically unimpressive game made by nobodies before it got famous. It didn't get so big because it demonstrated the pinnacle of game development.
- dbspin 2y ago
  Minecraft was revolutionary in the openness of it's game design... It's a terrible example of 'technically bad'. The technical quality of Minecraft is in design, not graphics. There's no parallel for musicianship. I don't disagree that there are fantastic producers working in bad pop music - they're not the musicians who's names mast the tracks, they're folks like Max Martin, RedOne, Boi-1da. Their skill is not in making music better. It's in producing prototypes that the factory of the industry can mass produce and tweak for different demographics. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of music. It's more akin to propaganda or marketing. The talent at work here is manipulation, not artistry.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world. Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics. (Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)
chii 2y ago
The mistake you made is that you're measuring "good" by your own (arguably sophisticated) taste. The objective measure is commercial success. If's commercially successful, it is "good". Just because someone's musical skills and/or other aspects deserves your respect and admiration, it does not make them "good".
- tempfile 2y ago
  So your original argument is "if an artist is [commercially successful] then they'll be commercially successful"?
  - chii 2y ago
    that's not my argument - that's my statement of fact. I'm arguing that this success cannot be made into a model where many musicians gets a very small slice of the entire pie. There's gonna be mega successes, unless you artificially restrict it (to nobody's benefit).
    - JKCalhoun 2y ago
      The thing I take issue with in your comment narrative is the idea that somehow music labels don't need (have) marketing any more — that we've entered into a wonderful meritocracy for creativity. It seems naive to not imagine that there are huge sums of money being spent behind the scenes by the labels to push specific artists and buy their popularity. I have no reason to believe the masses are suddenly no longer influenced by ... (paid) influencers.
      - chii 2y ago
        > buy their popularity. i dont think you can buy it as easily as you claim. I'm also not claiming meritocracy, but popularity, as success metric. They are different. The quality of popular music is that lots of people resonate with it - so much so that people become fanatics about it. While marketing helps, it's but a spark. The actual music has to be "good" - where good is defined by the metric i mentioned above, not by some theoretical framework of music taste, skill or some other academic measure.
Mathnerd314 2y ago
There was a classic study, https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full...., quality is pretty significantly correlated to success. It is not everything - there are random factors, marketing, etc. - but I would certainly say there is significant evidence that how good a musician is does in fact matter and contributes to their success. Besides "Friday" or the "so bad it's good" category, terrible song = terrible sales.
- acdha 2y ago
  It’s a bit more complicated than that: being good is necessary but not sufficient. It’s true that terrible music will fail even if promoted but once you’re over certain quality thresholds there are many artists who are roughly comparable but most won’t make it big because they weren’t picked by the right label/promoter (not being in with the Ticketmaster/LiveNation cartel means you can’t even play at a high fraction of live venues), didn’t manage the right social media campaign, didn’t ace an interview with a music reporter or popular influencer, etc. or simply didn’t have the interest/stamina/wealth to keep cranking out posts and new material. It’s similar to what we see in the Olympics: Algeria getting a gymnastics gold in a historic first for the entire continent didn’t mean it’s somehow impossible for African kids to train up to that level but rather that no matter what raw talent you’re starting with, nobody gets to the top without expensive infrastructure and training which aren’t even distributed. Music isn’t that extreme but there are still a lot of advantages to the artists who can hang in the right scenes in a few cities compared to equally good performers who can’t swing the rest of the career-making package.
- dbspin 2y ago
  This study is interesting, but it might as well have 'in mice' in the title for all its relevance in the real world. The study is measuring preference - and I'd definitely agree that all else being equal, preference would uplift better work (across artistic domains). But all else is most definitely not equal. Distribution is now essentially free - but all that demonstrated is that it was never the bottleneck. Marketing is. The music industry is a machine for creating what the kids call 'plants'. Groomed, quantised, pop creatures with a minimal bar for talent and huge appeal to their chosen demo (these days primarily young women). The industry is, contrary to what we might have assumed would happen - still the mediator. They negotiate the front page of spotify, book the tours, create the relationships with broadcasters and media outlets. There are absolutely segments in the industry that address and include taste and quality, but they're long tail stuff next to the pop machine.

by dbspin 2y ago

CuriousSkeptic 2y ago

Don think you need to destroy all of capitalism. Just abolishing copyright on music would be a surgical strike with pretty good effect I believe.

eru 2y ago
That wouldn't make more people pay for music.
- CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
  It would not. It is not relevant either. Music is shaped into something you buy by wielders of copyright. Removing copyright as a weapon would leave them powerless to do so, allowing music to once again be some thing you primarily do.
  - eru 2y ago
    That might be true, sure. But it wouldn't get musicians paid. Making music is something people enjoy so much, that many do it for free, and many would do it professionally for very little pay. Predictably, the average musician ain't paid a lot. Even the top, say, 0.1% of best-paid musicians are paid very little compared to eg the top 0.1% of lawyers or surgeons or programmers. (I am not trying to make an argument about whether musicians _should_ get paid nor how much. I'm just following the context of the discussion.)
    - CuriousSkeptic 2y ago
      FWIW I agree with you analysis. I am making the argument that that is how it should be and that copyright gets in the way. For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable.
      - eru 2y ago
        > For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable. Seems reasonable? Of course, there's plenty of ways to make this system terrible. But I think the objectionable thing, if any, is the royalty payments in the first place. Making them transferable is just efficient. And eg would allow parents to pay for current expenditures they have because of the kids. See https://www.msf.gov.sg/what-we-do/maintenance-of-parents/about/about-maintenance-of-parents-act https://www.msf.gov.sg/what-we-do/maintenance-of-parents/abo... for something that comes close to a real world example: > The Maintenance of Parents Act allows Singapore residents aged 60 years and above - who are unable to provide for themselves - to claim maintenance from their children who are capable of supporting them, but are not doing so. Parents can claim maintenance, in the form of monthly allowances or a lump-sum payment.

dale_glass 2y ago

Nah, you're just wrong about your quality measure. The production of "conventional pap" is very much a form of mastery. And so is good marketing. Raw technical skill isn't enough for success, you also need an audience for that skill. It doesn't matter that your skill at the guitar is divine if you only play technical pieces only other expert musicians appreciate. Take Minecraft for instance. A graphically unimpressive game made by nobodies before it got famous. It didn't get so big because it demonstrated the pinnacle of game development.

dbspin 2y ago
Minecraft was revolutionary in the openness of it's game design... It's a terrible example of 'technically bad'. The technical quality of Minecraft is in design, not graphics. There's no parallel for musicianship. I don't disagree that there are fantastic producers working in bad pop music - they're not the musicians who's names mast the tracks, they're folks like Max Martin, RedOne, Boi-1da. Their skill is not in making music better. It's in producing prototypes that the factory of the industry can mass produce and tweak for different demographics. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of music. It's more akin to propaganda or marketing. The talent at work here is manipulation, not artistry.
Qwertious 2y ago
Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world. Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics. (Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)

chii 2y ago

The mistake you made is that you're measuring "good" by your own (arguably sophisticated) taste. The objective measure is commercial success. If's commercially successful, it is "good". Just because someone's musical skills and/or other aspects deserves your respect and admiration, it does not make them "good".

tempfile 2y ago
So your original argument is "if an artist is [commercially successful] then they'll be commercially successful"?
- chii 2y ago
  that's not my argument - that's my statement of fact. I'm arguing that this success cannot be made into a model where many musicians gets a very small slice of the entire pie. There's gonna be mega successes, unless you artificially restrict it (to nobody's benefit).
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    The thing I take issue with in your comment narrative is the idea that somehow music labels don't need (have) marketing any more — that we've entered into a wonderful meritocracy for creativity. It seems naive to not imagine that there are huge sums of money being spent behind the scenes by the labels to push specific artists and buy their popularity. I have no reason to believe the masses are suddenly no longer influenced by ... (paid) influencers.
    - chii 2y ago
      > buy their popularity. i dont think you can buy it as easily as you claim. I'm also not claiming meritocracy, but popularity, as success metric. They are different. The quality of popular music is that lots of people resonate with it - so much so that people become fanatics about it. While marketing helps, it's but a spark. The actual music has to be "good" - where good is defined by the metric i mentioned above, not by some theoretical framework of music taste, skill or some other academic measure.

Mathnerd314 2y ago

There was a classic study, https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full...., quality is pretty significantly correlated to success. It is not everything - there are random factors, marketing, etc. - but I would certainly say there is significant evidence that how good a musician is does in fact matter and contributes to their success. Besides "Friday" or the "so bad it's good" category, terrible song = terrible sales.

acdha 2y ago
It’s a bit more complicated than that: being good is necessary but not sufficient. It’s true that terrible music will fail even if promoted but once you’re over certain quality thresholds there are many artists who are roughly comparable but most won’t make it big because they weren’t picked by the right label/promoter (not being in with the Ticketmaster/LiveNation cartel means you can’t even play at a high fraction of live venues), didn’t manage the right social media campaign, didn’t ace an interview with a music reporter or popular influencer, etc. or simply didn’t have the interest/stamina/wealth to keep cranking out posts and new material. It’s similar to what we see in the Olympics: Algeria getting a gymnastics gold in a historic first for the entire continent didn’t mean it’s somehow impossible for African kids to train up to that level but rather that no matter what raw talent you’re starting with, nobody gets to the top without expensive infrastructure and training which aren’t even distributed. Music isn’t that extreme but there are still a lot of advantages to the artists who can hang in the right scenes in a few cities compared to equally good performers who can’t swing the rest of the career-making package.
dbspin 2y ago
This study is interesting, but it might as well have 'in mice' in the title for all its relevance in the real world. The study is measuring preference - and I'd definitely agree that all else being equal, preference would uplift better work (across artistic domains). But all else is most definitely not equal. Distribution is now essentially free - but all that demonstrated is that it was never the bottleneck. Marketing is. The music industry is a machine for creating what the kids call 'plants'. Groomed, quantised, pop creatures with a minimal bar for talent and huge appeal to their chosen demo (these days primarily young women). The industry is, contrary to what we might have assumed would happen - still the mediator. They negotiate the front page of spotify, book the tours, create the relationships with broadcasters and media outlets. There are absolutely segments in the industry that address and include taste and quality, but they're long tail stuff next to the pop machine.