4 ms·

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.
    - jancsika 2y ago
      > While marketing helps, it's but a spark. But I think in your mental model of the internet, you removed all the marketers and influencers! People whose business is marketing artists have the ability to get orders of magnitude more exposure for an artist than people who are artists. To deny this would be to deny the importance of concepts like SEO. People who market music select for the musicians who are the easiest to sell. This includes not only "musical goodness," but also image, age, and all kinds of other attributes that aren't part of the music itself. There are even famous record executives who have famously stated publicly that they wouldn't support an admittedly "musically good" artist because of her looks. And looks are just one attribute that adds noise to your metric. There's also a rich history of recording studios paying money to gain popularity for their artists. So unless you have an enormous corpus of evidence it appears that your metric is extremely noisy in the non-musical sense.
- tempfile 2y ago
  I think you have made your position unnecessarily confusing by bringing "good" into it. You have entered a conversation about changing the music industry so that it provides a greater reward to certain artists that it currently does. You then said "well, if they're good, they're at the top, so why do you want to change who's at the top?". That's a very confused thing to say, because everyone else in the thread is arguing that by their definition of good, the good people are not at the top. If you are actually trying to argue that we cannot have a music industry where people are rewarded more evenly, you have provided absolutely no justification for it. You just said that since success attracts, it will naturally pool to a smaller and smaller group. Well why is there more than one artist, then? Why is it distributed in exactly the way it is now? When the distribution changes, why does it change? It seems obvious that the world we are in is not the only one that could possibly exist, and that changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it. Do you want to have that argument, or no?
  - chii 2y ago
    > changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it. which i also argued, is at best pointless, but at worst harmful. I don't really think it a problem that there exists superstars that take the majority of the money spent on music. The only argument for changing it is that there are musicians that "deserve" to receive more revenue than they currently do, rather than an explanation of why. Equality of outcome is not sufficiently good to add regulation or restrictions to prevent what occurs today.
- mapt 2y ago
  That's not a statement of fact, it's a tautology. You are responding to an interesting statement that unpacks to "Economically high-performing musicians are more a product of industry effort than an indicator of technical skill ("good at music"); You will find abundant technical skill distributed widely in economically unproductive musicians." You're staking out a semantic position, to wit: "technical measures of musical prowess are not valid, and I refuse to use the word 'good' to describe high rankings in those measures. The only meaningful metric of worth is economic productivity. Therefore, a tautology: Economically productive musicians are economically productive". This is a reasonable semantic usage, but is a less interesting statement.

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.
  - jancsika 2y ago
    > While marketing helps, it's but a spark. But I think in your mental model of the internet, you removed all the marketers and influencers! People whose business is marketing artists have the ability to get orders of magnitude more exposure for an artist than people who are artists. To deny this would be to deny the importance of concepts like SEO. People who market music select for the musicians who are the easiest to sell. This includes not only "musical goodness," but also image, age, and all kinds of other attributes that aren't part of the music itself. There are even famous record executives who have famously stated publicly that they wouldn't support an admittedly "musically good" artist because of her looks. And looks are just one attribute that adds noise to your metric. There's also a rich history of recording studios paying money to gain popularity for their artists. So unless you have an enormous corpus of evidence it appears that your metric is extremely noisy in the non-musical sense.
tempfile 2y ago
I think you have made your position unnecessarily confusing by bringing "good" into it. You have entered a conversation about changing the music industry so that it provides a greater reward to certain artists that it currently does. You then said "well, if they're good, they're at the top, so why do you want to change who's at the top?". That's a very confused thing to say, because everyone else in the thread is arguing that by their definition of good, the good people are not at the top. If you are actually trying to argue that we cannot have a music industry where people are rewarded more evenly, you have provided absolutely no justification for it. You just said that since success attracts, it will naturally pool to a smaller and smaller group. Well why is there more than one artist, then? Why is it distributed in exactly the way it is now? When the distribution changes, why does it change? It seems obvious that the world we are in is not the only one that could possibly exist, and that changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it. Do you want to have that argument, or no?
- chii 2y ago
  > changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it. which i also argued, is at best pointless, but at worst harmful. I don't really think it a problem that there exists superstars that take the majority of the money spent on music. The only argument for changing it is that there are musicians that "deserve" to receive more revenue than they currently do, rather than an explanation of why. Equality of outcome is not sufficiently good to add regulation or restrictions to prevent what occurs today.
mapt 2y ago
That's not a statement of fact, it's a tautology. You are responding to an interesting statement that unpacks to "Economically high-performing musicians are more a product of industry effort than an indicator of technical skill ("good at music"); You will find abundant technical skill distributed widely in economically unproductive musicians." You're staking out a semantic position, to wit: "technical measures of musical prowess are not valid, and I refuse to use the word 'good' to describe high rankings in those measures. The only meaningful metric of worth is economic productivity. Therefore, a tautology: Economically productive musicians are economically productive". This is a reasonable semantic usage, but is a less interesting statement.