10 ms·
Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its worker
by Sytten 2y ago
Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers. I struggle to think of any other privately owned sector of the economy that works that way.
- catapart 2y agoMusic pretty squarely fits that bill. We used to beam it out over the air, now we transmit it through the internet, but everyone has always expected it to be free. And musicians are still expected to make a ton of money off of their music, if a lot of people like it.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoI've taken to buying CDs again. I still stream, but for artists I like I at least own the CD and might pick up some merch too because the reality is that only the big artists make a ton of money, or even any money at all.
- maccard 2y agoI’m in a hobby band, and Spotify is important but we’ve made absolutely nothing from it with a few thousand listens. 50 people buy our album digitally and we have enough to record another track.
- ljf 2y agoGreat to hear some people are buying - I discover a lot of music through spotify (more through instagram to be honest) just wish more of the bands I like would play near me!
- crtasm 2y agoAssuming you have a Bandcamp store, have their zero fees Friday events been helpful to your band?
- maccard 2y agoI had a look and it doesn’t seem to. There’s basically no tail on our last release so what we actually need is more eyeballs, which means making more content. The marketplace is saturated, like the App Store, so really our audience is coming from organic growth - playing gigs, and trying to get radio play or playlisted on Spotify
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoI'm trying to think of a non-tacky/doxxing(if you care) way you could drop your band here so those interested could have a listen.
- crtasm 2y agoGood luck and do keep reminding your fans to follow you on there, maybe you have a demo/live recording that could be released on the day if nothing new? I get a lot of emails from followed artists doing a temporary discount code but even just a "hey this is a great day to buy our music!" + reminding me of past releases makes it more likely I'll visit and buy something.
- seec 2y agoThat's the thing with music, there is so much supply that even if your stuff is good, you are up against plenty of other good stuff that there is no logic to something becoming more popular than the other. But if we are being realistic, if your stuff is truly great and unique, it will blow up. You just need to realize when you are not part of the great that you can do this just for your own pleasure, with no intention of success or anything like that, a hobby like any other...
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoThat's good to know. Yeah, I think Spotify is great for discovering new bands, but if you want them to keep going you gotta chip in. We need more than just the same top 40 artists in our world.
- maccard 2y agoI don’t mind the homogenisation- I work in video games and benefit from it in that side. But you are right if you want it to succeed then you need to chip in. We sell an album for £7 digitally, or £30 for vinyl + digital, but it’s basically just donating to us to say “please keep recording stuff”. We’ve made more off selling a single vinyl than all our combined streaming income
- nunez 2y agoi don't think spotify is good for discovery, unless "discovery" means "more of the same." i've taken to terrestrial radio for true discovery and bandcamp for digging into a genre.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoHonestly, I've found Youtube Music great for discovery. There's a lot of metal bands that are small enough that you can't find their album preorders on Amazon that I found only by following the musical recommendations down the rabbit hole. In my city smaller bands from Europe don't tend to get a lot of playtime on the radio.
- nunez 2y agoInteresting, especially since I really enjoy death/speed metal. I'll give this a try; thank you!
- AbstractH24 2y agoProblem with buying a digital album is the same one as buying anything digitally rather than subscribing - since it's digital how do I know it'll stand the test of time? Does it have resale value? I don't know the answer, considering I don't want to find room to store CDs or carry around a discman, but that's the problem. Honestly, I would rather listen on Spotify and Venmo the band $5 towards their next track. Not sure what that looks like in a scaleable way.
- ljf 2y agoMerch is the way to go - if you really want to put money in the artists pocket. Went to see Pete Doherty not long ago, and bought some hand typed (and signed) lyrics sheets/art from him - felt like buying something quite personal.
- tuoret 2y agoCDs just feel so utterly pointless to me these days, since I can have the 100% identical content on a hard drive. Not trying to diss what you do, it's just a weird state of mind I entered once MP3 players and bluetooth speakers replaced CD players everywhere and I can't seem to shake it. Agree about the principle though, I try to buy merch at every gig I go to. Makes me feel slightly less bad about using Spotify.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoIf you want to do MP3, bandcamp has digital downloads and days when 100% of the proceeds go to the artists. And I understand about the movement to digital - I typically rip the CDs as FLAC files and put them on a hard drive.
- crtasm 2y agoAnd as well as MP3, buying on there gives you access to FLAC (+ multiple other lossless formats) for no extra cost.
- palemoondrop 2y agoHaving something physical is nice, though. You can have the exact bits off the disc and maybe even the artwork on your hard drive, but you can't hold the album and look at it all together - especially for more elaborate packaging than your standard jewel case with inserts. In my mind, having something physical and not implicitly copyable makes it feel more real. I'm in my own weird state of mind where I prioritize collecting physical over digital to the point of neglecting digital-only releases - digital is always going to have a copy somewhere I can listen to or purchase, but physical is limited and there's no guarantee I'll be able to get a copy later. This is probably an overly materialistic view, though.
- catapart 2y agoI've been thinking that what I would like as far as "physical copy" of my media would be more like a card than anything that is actually used to play the media. Something like an NFC-equipped greeting card (maybe more than just a cover; pages can be inside for fun stuff that used to be in the CD inserts/jackets/etc), that I could set on a stand which would then interface with the card and start playing music. Pull the card, playback stops. You get the idea. I just think something like that would serve both purposes - look and display nicely, while giving a conversation piece and more content from the creators; but not prone to damage causing issues with playback and as durable as you want them to be (could be more like HID Prox cards; plastic instead of cardboard. Or even more "exotic" materials. Lots of room for creativity).
- rchaud 2y agoI am buying CDs too because vinyl keeps getting more expensive. However I do want artists to put more effort into making liner notes booklets.
- crtasm 2y agoWatch the sales scroll past on https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/ - a lot of people want to support artists and own music they enjoy.
- AbstractH24 2y agoTIL bandcamp and bandsintown are not the same thing.
- lolinder 2y agoYour last sentence is inaccurate, though: there's a broad understanding that only the absolute top performers will make money on music and everyone else will make an amount that rounds down to nothing. Software stands out in that even the median software developer is making about double the median salary in the market as a whole, all while the products of their efforts are expected to be free.
- rvogler 2y agoi think the analogy holds because there is also an established idea of software developers being passionate about what they do and hence create and maintain open source projects for free. never thought about it but music/musician <> software/developer is pretty isomorphic. also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots.
- 9rx 2y ago> also it simply isn't true that software developers make double the median - that's just true for the sv bias here and a few other hot spots. On a US national basis it is basically true. Median weekly earnings for full-time workers is $1,192[1]. Median hourly pay for a software developer is $62.58[2], which, assuming a 40 hour week, is $2,503.20. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
- lolinder 2y agoYes, this. SV and similar are even more extreme, but if you take all software engineers across the country and compare to the nationwide workforce, we make double the median. That may not be a fair comparison to the extent that software devs are concentrated in high CoL areas, though, so you don't see a ton of us out in the cheaper and poorer regions. The effect of that is somewhat ameliorated by taking the median instead of the mean, but not fully.
- rchaud 2y agoWas it free though? iTunes sold music for $1/song. Spotify and Pandora were ad-supported. People like me may have sailed the high seas as a teen in the 2000s, but those people didn't make up the majority of music listeners. Today, I only buy physical media and from Bandcamp. The younger generation seem happy to pay subscriptions for Spotify and Apple Music. I think this has to do with mobile OSes hiding filesystem access and banning P2P apps from the walled garden.
- RicoElectrico 2y agoComically high salaries are an aberration due to zero interest rates. SWEs should earn well, but not 3-4x as much as the median (and conversely, median salary should pay the rent, the housing market also being distorted by ZIRP).
- lotsofpulp 2y agoHigh prices are due to supply and demand. While ZIRP can cause high demand (and high supply of currency to fulfill that demand), the underlying demand still comes from the fact that software has near zero marginal cost, near zero liability, the ability to easily collect rent, AND high barriers to entry. The ideal business. This means a business that sells software solutions can earn high profit margins, which is a necessary component to be able to then pay high prices to labor sellers. A buyer has to be both able and willing to pay a high price for the seller to be able to sell at a high price. If the labor buyer is only earning 5% profit margin, then the labor seller is going to have a harder time extracting more money. But if a buyer is earning 20%+ margins, and their business is growing to boot, the buyer will be able and willing to part with more, hence higher prices for labor sellers.
- abirch 2y agoSoftware is very scalable and can provide a lot of value. If you look at the revenue per SWE for Microsoft, Alphabet, Netflix, etc, then it's hard to compare them to the person whose job isn't scalable, to say a truck driver, nurse, or bartender.
- bix6 2y agoSo I agree with this but I think it distorts the true value. A nurse is worth way more to society than another SWE but the SWE gets paid way more. Bankers get paid a lot because they control money supply but I don’t think most people believe bankers are helping them or wish we had more bankers. Software is going down a similar path (see artist outrage over AI) because the pull of money is too great.
- abirch 2y ago
- abirch 2y agoWhat about news? Like everyone wants news but no one wants to pay for it.
- jansan 2y agoThe problem with news is that even if you pay they will still try to manipulate you.
- dspillett 2y agoNot unlike “free” online services with pay options. If you pay to go ad-free they'll probably still at least some background requests so their ad-partners can stalk you around your online life.
- lolinder 2y agoIt has the free part but not the high salary part.
- ttyprintk 2y agoAnything ad-supported. If this story was about a div-collapsing feature in software with a banner ad, the reception would be different.
- conaclos 2y agoOne of the problems I have with paid solutions is that they generally use open source softwares and don't contribute a dime to them once their paid solutions are generating cash.
- bathtub365 2y agoAs long as they aren’t violating the license they aren’t legally or even socially obligated to fund any of the open source projects they use. If you release software under an open source license that allows free commercial use and redistribution you are explicitly saying you are fine with this. If you don’t want this to happen, use an open source license with more restrictions on commercial use.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lolinder 2y agoOpen Source is just the free-but-profitable trend that OP is talking about taken to the limit. It's software that developers make for free and release for free—most often under a license that requires nothing but attribution. Then a not insignificant portion of those developers feel entitled to be paid for their work, preferably at something north of the median salary in their native country. If you're developing open source software because you believe in the commons, license it under (A)GPL to ensure the propagation of the commons. If you're developing open source because it looks good on a resume, then you've already been paid for it in reputation. But if you're developing open source because you think you'll get paid for it, I don't know what to tell you except that that is not how the world works. (Which is, of course, a totally different conversation than whether we wish it were how the world works.)
- conaclos 2y ago> If you're developing open source software because you believe in the commons, license it under (A)GPL to ensure the propagation of the commons. If you're developing open source because it looks good on a resume, then you've already been paid for it in reputation. But if you're developing open source because you think you'll get paid for it, I don't know what to tell you except that that is not how the world works. This is not so simple. Even in the FOSS community, some people are allergic to copyleft licenses. I usually choose a license based on the practice of a community. Also, if you make the choice of copy-left in a world or copy-free is king, you are just isolating yourself from others. Often in big projects, you cannot alone, and the decision of license is a collective one. I prefer the idea of regulating this mess: enforcing that everyone who has contributed to the success of a project - directly or indirectly - gets paid. It looks more fair and is based on merit - which this society seems to value.
- lores 2y agoThe Hitchiker's Guide already had a rant about useless jobs like telephone sanitisers and hairdressers. While I don't necessarily agree with hairdressers being useless, I feel like much of the economy is selling stuff no one really needs to solve problems no one really has in order to justify one's employment, and that share is increasing as automation scales the useful things with proportionately less effort. That's just the software section of it. Other sectors can bundle the useless into a product you need to buy as a whole, like cars or TVs, one-purpose software has no bundling.
- relaxing 2y agoThe point of that rant was the culture that got rid of the telephone sanitizers was subsequently wiped out by communicable disease. A lesson we still struggle with…
- lores 2y agoI take it as just a joke, not as Douglas Adams pointing out no job is useless, because management consultants were included too and I can't see him think THEY are useful, but it's possible.
- alehlopeh 2y agoNo one needs hairdressers? How do you figure?
- AtomBalm 2y agoMathematicians aren’t expected to be paid royalties when someone uses their discoveries. Paying to lease a server or for access it, sure, but software itself? It’s nonsense.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIf a mathematician’s discovery has commercial applications (for example in creating arbitrage for trading, or breaking cryptography, or increasing security), then they can choose to keep it to themselves and commercialize it.
- motorest 2y ago> Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers. Shoppers expect shopping carts at a supermarket to be free, but you still have for-profit factories that employ many people to produce shopping carts that they sell for-profit to supermarkets. Do you also struggle to understand how that works?
- lesuorac 2y agoIce was free and now it's not. I don't think consumer expectations matter that much when they don't have a free alternative.
- packtreefly 2y agoTo keep with that analogy, customers expect the SaaS company to respond to the HTTP requests for free, but you still have for-profit factories producing servers...
- seec 2y agoSaaS exists mostly as a rent seeking strategy. It doesn't make that much sense for most software.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 2y ago>> Software is weird because it is expected that should be free (as in beer) for most consumers while while being for profit and giving high salaries to its workers. I struggle to think of any other privately owned sector of the economy that works that way. Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. All software you use has already been developed, you are presumably paying for updates and future versions - otherwise it's just rent. Something like Reddit is not pure software though, they have infra costs. This is why Free Software is worthwhile to use and contribute to - it only needs to be written once for everyone to benefit from. Notice I didn't say "Open Source" because a lot of people want to commercialize that. YMMV.
- akoboldfrying 2y ago> Software is the only industry where the marginal cost of the product is ZERO. The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word.
- rchaud 2y agoNot so for movies, the marketing budget and press junket tours end up costing as much as the film production itself. Music is also pay-for-play, but buying off radio stations and promotional spots on Spotify is not nearly as expensive as movies.
- akoboldfrying 2y agoMarketing doesn't affect the marginal cost of a movie -- the cost of allowing one more person to watch it.
- phkahler 2y ago>> The same is true of anything where all the value is in the bytes -- news, film, music, the written word. Good point. I consider those "media or content" to be "played", "read", "watched" whereas software is more a thing to be used - or a set of capabilities added to a physical thing. Video games OTOH are software meant to be played so that occupies both of my mental categories. Stop it! You're making me think! ;-)
- dspillett 2y agoThe cost of software has been a matter of much debate since long before I was born (and I wasn't exactly born yesterday…). It was a bit of a scandal when software first started costing more than the hardware it was to run on (due to rising complexity in the software requirements needing more human resource to satisfy, and reducing hardware costs from technology improvements/refinements). People programming for fun has always skewed its worth in the eye of some, and we also get the old “doing it for the exposure” expectations that is endemic in all creative realms. But something as simple as the minimal code needed for this particular feature, which is essentially a QoL UX feature, is something that I think should be standard if present, not an added extra charge on top of what is already being paid (this isn't a free service, payment is through letting them sell you to there stalky ad-tech partners). It definitely feels like very deliberate price gouging.
- rchaud 2y agoJSfiddle has been around forever (~15yrs) and managed to amble along with non-Google ads (which I whitelisted). Sad that they have pursued the path of enshitification annoyance as a business model.