6 ms·

> Sure, so when the record companies collapse and there's no one to distribute their albums or pay the recording costs, then what? What a ridiculous thing to s

> Sure, so when the record companies collapse and there's no one to distribute their albums or pay the recording costs, then what? What a ridiculous thing to say. What would happen then? The middlemen would be cut out. Artists will distribute their creations themselves. If they're not savvy enough for that, optimized CMS will sprout about that'll make it easier for them to do so. The best thing is that record-chosen records won't come to top, the best and most preferred things will (to use a crude example, they'll find their way to the top in a Digg-like fashion). This is exactly what needs to happen. This is exactly the turn that needs to be taken. As for the recording costs -- well, the only people that can afford it at the moment are the artists that are ALREADY at the top. Musicianship is a risky business to get into in the first place, and it's just really their responsibility to make smart and systematic decisions themselves in the circumstances they're in. Beside that, the matter of the fact is that it's becoming very possible to do more 1) with less people, and 2) with less money. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UPMEmCqZo -- a HQ video, that anyone reasonable would have to admit beats professionally-created movies in terms of quality (I'll myself admit that the acting isn't the best it could have been). When this happens, a new connection will be born between the artists and the customers. And I think this newfangled connection might encourage a few more people to purchase music (which, hopefully, will go at a cheaper cost than before due to this new, middleman-less, direct artist-to-customer relationship).

pj 17y ago
I think you really underestimate the difficulty in distribution.
- jimmyjim 17y ago
  I have no past experience with anything having to do with distribution, so I can't really say with confidence, but I do think that once we enter this artist-to-customer model, distribution services of a new kind will come about where an artist could place an order and a service could "hook them up" with graphic artists to create artwork for album covers and all that, take care of CD-creations and ship them to customers, etc. Actually, such a service already exists, I just don't remember the URI at the moment.
- amalcon 17y ago
  Distribution isn't difficult at all. It's happening without artists' consent as we speak. The hard parts are marketing and monetization. It's possible that someone might come around and fix those problems if the record labels weren't holding it back. That said, the best way to bring such a state about isn't to infringe their copyrights. It's to listen to music that they don't have copyright to in the first place.
  - seertaak 17y ago
    > It's happening without artists' consent as we speak. No, that's not "distribution". Suppose I own a shop in a lawless city where police are known not to enforce property rights. I place my fruit on baskets just outside the shop, and a significant amount of people steal fruit from the front of my shop. I think you'll agree that it would be trite to call this "distribution", for the simple reason that I'm not in control of the distribution. > The hard parts are marketing and monetization. It's possible that someone might come around and fix those problems if the record labels weren't holding it back. While I agree that marketing is "hard", I don't think it's "the problem". The problem is monetization: first, there is rampant piracy, and this canibalizes sales in both the physical and digital domains, and second, average prices in the digital domain are much lower than CDs. The first problem can be solved -- though it's doubtful that the average consumer will like the solution because the end result will be for his net wealth or time to diminish! -- through a mixture of carrot (hulu.com, Spotify, and iTunes come to mind) and stick (the three strikes law in France comes to mind). The second problem is not so much a problem as a new reality. The equilibrium price of music is probably somewhat above its current price (due to the effect of piracy and the "everything for free" culture prevalent online in the last ten years [which appears, to my mind, to be drawing to a close]), but it is certainly below CD prices. In addition, buying patterns have changed and products like iTunes make it easy to purchase individual tracks, further eroding revenue for the record companies. I don't think this is a trend you can reverse, because any attempt to restrict the buyer to purchasing the entire album will be met with increased piracy. Record companies will have to, and are, adjusting to this by emphasizing other revenue streams, e.g. merchandising, 360 degree contracts, licensing revenue maximization, etc.
gustavo_duarte 17y ago
I also have hope for more independent creation, especially since I prefer indie / weird art to blockbuster stuff. But as much as I like your scenario, copyright still plays an important role in it to enable creators to live doing this. I wonder if people's attitudes will change when The Pirate Bay is ripping off these independent artists, as opposed to the Big Evil Cos.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  And make no mistake, pirates don't have a soft spot for independent artists. See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html
DanielStraight 17y ago
I agree with the other poster that said you underestimate the difficulty of distribution. Consider cases that may be closer to home: Which do people use more, Windows or Linux? Which one can you get from your computer supplier (let's not bother with the 0.0000001% of computers that come with Linux)? How do most people on Linux get software, install from source or a package manager? Which one involves a middleman? Same answer to both, the package manager. How do most people get food? A grocery store or farmers? Middlemen are a very necessary part of society. It is simply impractical for everyone who wants food to have to personally get it from a farmer. No farmer has enough time to sit there and sell food to everyone who needs to eat, and no one has time to get all their food directly from the people that produce it. Similarly, you CAN go searching MySpace and SoundClick and CDBaby, hoping for a gem (and I have found some), or you can turn on the radio, hear something you like, drive to Target and buy the CD. In order to find a complete library worth of music direct from the artists, you have to spend all your time searching for music. The artists would also have to spend all their time promoting and wouldn't have any time to actually make music. Your CMS is just another middleman. Even if you steal music, you're using a middleman, the P2P network. People who steal music don't even make the effort to get it from the artist directly. YouTube is just another middleman in your video example. Here's a question. How did you find that YouTube video? The very fact that you're on Hacker News means you aren't opposed to middlemen. Hacker News is a middleman! There is very little original content here. It's all links. It's a one-stop shop for stuff you COULD find on your own, you just don't have the time to. Where's the direct hacker-to-news relationship? Now, Hacker News doesn't charge for their service, but if they did, breaking in to get the current article list without paying would be no different than music theft. And yes, it is theft. I don't care what the legal term is.
cschwarm 17y ago
I think your point of view is too idealistic. You're attributing too much responsibility to the record companies. Sure, a handful of them dominate the market and their oligopoly has negative effects. But the economic attributes of the product itself is the origin of the current market situation. Consider the following though experiment: People form a club or cooperative. There's a monthly membership fee which is used to pay recording costs for artists, administration (legal fees, secretaries, etc.), and the necessary rights to distribute the recordings to its members. In other words, no large anonymous record company owns the music, anymore -- but just normal people like you an me. But would such a club or cooperative act very differently to a record company? I don't think so: 1.) The club would not allow free redistribution of the recordings. Otherwise nobody had an incentive to be a club member in the first place and the club could not collect enough money to pay artists. In fact, the club would probably also restrict the amount of downloads per month. Otherwise people may be try to become members for a month, download all stuff, and then cancel membership to join another club to do the same thing, again. 2.) The core problem of such a club would be allocation of the collected membership fees. Which artist's music should be bought and recorded? Should the club make lots of low quality recordings or a few high-quality recordings or some mixture thereof? How much money should be spend on advertising of the recordings and club membership? These questions may be answered by some sort of Digg-Style voting but that presupposes that people are motivated to participate. In most cases, though, people have better things to do. This opens a window of opportunity for the most motivated to skew the results, for example, artists. We've seen something similar also happen to Digg. 3.) If a consumer is not sure which style of music and artists he or she likes most, it's most rational to become member of the largest club. In other words, there's also a strong tendency for the large clubs to become the larger, while the small ones are likely to become (relatively) smaller. It will also result in a sort of oligopoly where the largest clubs set the "price" for club memberships. This can also be seen elsewhere, for example in the blogging scene. Although there was nearly no commercial interest in the beginning of blogs, its readership quickly formed a Pareto distribution, as shown by Clay Shirky. Overall, if people would really be concerned about the recording industry, they have all means to make them go away in the near future -- for example, by starting clubs and cooperatives. Most people, however, don't care that much. Otherwise, they would have already done it, right? ;-)
- 17y ago

pj 17y ago

I think you really underestimate the difficulty in distribution.

jimmyjim 17y ago
I have no past experience with anything having to do with distribution, so I can't really say with confidence, but I do think that once we enter this artist-to-customer model, distribution services of a new kind will come about where an artist could place an order and a service could "hook them up" with graphic artists to create artwork for album covers and all that, take care of CD-creations and ship them to customers, etc. Actually, such a service already exists, I just don't remember the URI at the moment.
amalcon 17y ago
Distribution isn't difficult at all. It's happening without artists' consent as we speak. The hard parts are marketing and monetization. It's possible that someone might come around and fix those problems if the record labels weren't holding it back. That said, the best way to bring such a state about isn't to infringe their copyrights. It's to listen to music that they don't have copyright to in the first place.
- seertaak 17y ago
  > It's happening without artists' consent as we speak. No, that's not "distribution". Suppose I own a shop in a lawless city where police are known not to enforce property rights. I place my fruit on baskets just outside the shop, and a significant amount of people steal fruit from the front of my shop. I think you'll agree that it would be trite to call this "distribution", for the simple reason that I'm not in control of the distribution. > The hard parts are marketing and monetization. It's possible that someone might come around and fix those problems if the record labels weren't holding it back. While I agree that marketing is "hard", I don't think it's "the problem". The problem is monetization: first, there is rampant piracy, and this canibalizes sales in both the physical and digital domains, and second, average prices in the digital domain are much lower than CDs. The first problem can be solved -- though it's doubtful that the average consumer will like the solution because the end result will be for his net wealth or time to diminish! -- through a mixture of carrot (hulu.com, Spotify, and iTunes come to mind) and stick (the three strikes law in France comes to mind). The second problem is not so much a problem as a new reality. The equilibrium price of music is probably somewhat above its current price (due to the effect of piracy and the "everything for free" culture prevalent online in the last ten years [which appears, to my mind, to be drawing to a close]), but it is certainly below CD prices. In addition, buying patterns have changed and products like iTunes make it easy to purchase individual tracks, further eroding revenue for the record companies. I don't think this is a trend you can reverse, because any attempt to restrict the buyer to purchasing the entire album will be met with increased piracy. Record companies will have to, and are, adjusting to this by emphasizing other revenue streams, e.g. merchandising, 360 degree contracts, licensing revenue maximization, etc.

gustavo_duarte 17y ago

I also have hope for more independent creation, especially since I prefer indie / weird art to blockbuster stuff. But as much as I like your scenario, copyright still plays an important role in it to enable creators to live doing this. I wonder if people's attitudes will change when The Pirate Bay is ripping off these independent artists, as opposed to the Big Evil Cos.

DanielStraight 17y ago
And make no mistake, pirates don't have a soft spot for independent artists. See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001201.html

DanielStraight 17y ago

I agree with the other poster that said you underestimate the difficulty of distribution. Consider cases that may be closer to home: Which do people use more, Windows or Linux? Which one can you get from your computer supplier (let's not bother with the 0.0000001% of computers that come with Linux)? How do most people on Linux get software, install from source or a package manager? Which one involves a middleman? Same answer to both, the package manager. How do most people get food? A grocery store or farmers? Middlemen are a very necessary part of society. It is simply impractical for everyone who wants food to have to personally get it from a farmer. No farmer has enough time to sit there and sell food to everyone who needs to eat, and no one has time to get all their food directly from the people that produce it. Similarly, you CAN go searching MySpace and SoundClick and CDBaby, hoping for a gem (and I have found some), or you can turn on the radio, hear something you like, drive to Target and buy the CD. In order to find a complete library worth of music direct from the artists, you have to spend all your time searching for music. The artists would also have to spend all their time promoting and wouldn't have any time to actually make music. Your CMS is just another middleman. Even if you steal music, you're using a middleman, the P2P network. People who steal music don't even make the effort to get it from the artist directly. YouTube is just another middleman in your video example. Here's a question. How did you find that YouTube video? The very fact that you're on Hacker News means you aren't opposed to middlemen. Hacker News is a middleman! There is very little original content here. It's all links. It's a one-stop shop for stuff you COULD find on your own, you just don't have the time to. Where's the direct hacker-to-news relationship? Now, Hacker News doesn't charge for their service, but if they did, breaking in to get the current article list without paying would be no different than music theft. And yes, it is theft. I don't care what the legal term is.

cschwarm 17y ago

I think your point of view is too idealistic. You're attributing too much responsibility to the record companies. Sure, a handful of them dominate the market and their oligopoly has negative effects. But the economic attributes of the product itself is the origin of the current market situation. Consider the following though experiment: People form a club or cooperative. There's a monthly membership fee which is used to pay recording costs for artists, administration (legal fees, secretaries, etc.), and the necessary rights to distribute the recordings to its members. In other words, no large anonymous record company owns the music, anymore -- but just normal people like you an me. But would such a club or cooperative act very differently to a record company? I don't think so: 1.) The club would not allow free redistribution of the recordings. Otherwise nobody had an incentive to be a club member in the first place and the club could not collect enough money to pay artists. In fact, the club would probably also restrict the amount of downloads per month. Otherwise people may be try to become members for a month, download all stuff, and then cancel membership to join another club to do the same thing, again. 2.) The core problem of such a club would be allocation of the collected membership fees. Which artist's music should be bought and recorded? Should the club make lots of low quality recordings or a few high-quality recordings or some mixture thereof? How much money should be spend on advertising of the recordings and club membership? These questions may be answered by some sort of Digg-Style voting but that presupposes that people are motivated to participate. In most cases, though, people have better things to do. This opens a window of opportunity for the most motivated to skew the results, for example, artists. We've seen something similar also happen to Digg. 3.) If a consumer is not sure which style of music and artists he or she likes most, it's most rational to become member of the largest club. In other words, there's also a strong tendency for the large clubs to become the larger, while the small ones are likely to become (relatively) smaller. It will also result in a sort of oligopoly where the largest clubs set the "price" for club memberships. This can also be seen elsewhere, for example in the blogging scene. Although there was nearly no commercial interest in the beginning of blogs, its readership quickly formed a Pareto distribution, as shown by Clay Shirky. Overall, if people would really be concerned about the recording industry, they have all means to make them go away in the near future -- for example, by starting clubs and cooperatives. Most people, however, don't care that much. Otherwise, they would have already done it, right? ;-)

17y ago