8 ms·

The Pomplamoose Problem: Artists Can't Survive as Saints and Martyrs

34 points by acangiano 12y ago

jarcane 12y ago
“We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to pay for it anymore." This is utterly and painfully familiar to me. Before I dove into retraining as a programmer, I was a self-published tabletop roleplaying author. Tabletop RPGs are an incredibly small space, and part of the reason they are a small space is that no one pays anyone for anything. I wasn't even self-published because I didn't have publisher interest in my work: I was self-published because when publishers approached me and I sent them quotes asking for less than a penny per word, they would still balk and tell me it was too much money or just stop responding to my emails. And yet, when you talk about this publicly, when you discuss that maybe the reason so many of the industry's most legendary designers all leave and write for video games is because they literally weren't making enough to live, people react to you with hostility and derision. You may as well be spouting Marxist propaganda on the street corner, all for the crime of suggesting that someone actually be paid enough for their work to make it worth doing. You hear new ideas, things like pay-what-you-want, or free-ebook schemes, which conveniently all seem to involve giving them something for free with the understanding that somehow this will magically turn into more sales. It rarely does. IF you're big enough and visible enough, or when you first make a splash on the scene, some of these tricks can work for a short time. What actually happened in all but one occasion was that a whole hell of a lot of people just decided they were more happy to get something for nothing and my sales actually went down (though downloads of course, went up.) Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. They're still all too happy to watch/read/play the hell out of it, and tell you how amazing your thing is. Just don't ask them to give you any money for it.
- eropple 12y ago
  All of this, end to end. We're seeing the same subsistence-level "success" phenomenon in video games now, though. The giants make money, the occasional odd hit turns into something, and everybody else had better be happy with selling too few copies to pay your staff at $3 a pop during a Steam sale, because paying $5 is Just Too Much, Ha Ha Ha. I guess we could all go make free to play games that are designed to exploit consumers and get them on an addiction treadmill. Because that's ethical.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution. In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers. I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.
Pxtl 12y ago
Welcome to every artistic endeavor ever. You go into a field for love, you have to pay for the privilege by competing against an overcrowded market because everybody is making a labor of love. To me, the real solution is not go pay more for labours of love, but to institute a shorter workweek so everybody can pursue their own labours of love on the side.
- dnautics 12y ago
  that makes it worse, because you'll increase the supply and drive the price down.
  - Pxtl 12y ago
    Yes, but then everybody can participate instead of the tiny elite select few that achieve a living wage.
  - Flimm 12y ago
    Are we trying to maximise the number of people creating good art, or the number of people making a living out of art? It's not the same thing.
    - tunesmith 12y ago
      That's really the heart of it. Everything has moved so fast that I don't think we understand the first principles of the system. For a while I believed that all the new music production tools out there meant that the market is flooded with crappy music released by hobbyists giving it away for free. The system affects of that sort of thing is that the listeners are bombarded, they shut down, they don't have the opportunity to reliably discover "good" music, and that therefore people writing "good" music fall through the cracks, don't earn money, eventually stop writing, and culture is worse off. But... I'm coming around to the view that the market is pretty much flooded now with "good" music. I'm being hand-wavy, defining it as merely music that deserves to exist alongside other "good" music. If that's true, then it's a different model. Great for the consumer, they can probably subsist on a healthy music diet received for free. There the only path through for a musician is to try and invite fans into the "family" and hope fans will pay a premium for that. But still, you're going to have artists that write good music fall through the cracks and stop writing - it's just that in those cases, culture isn't necessarily worse off.
rcarmo 12y ago
I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items. Would it have been any better for them to hide how much they paid for various parts of their show? (So what if they paid X for lights? If they wanted _those_ lights... etc.)
- eropple 12y ago
  > I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items Because it discredits them. It isn't far off from when Fox News dismisses the problems of poverty with "but they have refrigerators" or when people (often around here) yet to reorient reality so that the cause of poverty is buying $5 quality-of-life improvements instead of societal economic intent. It helps folks sleep at night.
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  Well... there's a difference between wanting things and being able to afford them, for starters. And... it's weird that they 'lost' money, but were able to pay themselves as well. Cut back on the lighting expenses a bit, and/or pay yourselves less, then ... bam you're profitable. But given that they got the lights anyway, they (individuals) could afford it, just not in the context of paying for things from the tour revenue. Paying yourself... $15k (?) then complaining that you 'lost' money... just seems a bit weird.
bitwize 12y ago
This is why virtually every small-time musician I ever spoke to called for some sort of unobtrusive, universal DRM -- and if you care about music, you should too.
- nkurz 12y ago
  I think this is a matter of perception. I feel like I've known quite a few small-time musicians, and I think I've only heard one express a desire for better DRM. Obviously there are more, since presumably you and the people you know are examples, but I don't think those who desire better DRM are anywhere close to a majority. If anything, as stereotypical lower-income music lovers I find the minority who are familiar with the DRM express a desire (right or wrong) for greater access to free or low priced music, both for themselves and others worldwide. The general desire is to increase the ease with with those who love music can access it. Many wouldn't object to better DRM (if they knew what it was) but the emphasis would be on better modes of distribution with less economic discrimination.
- _almosnow 12y ago
  I don't see the reason for the downvotes. Maybe because "DRM is bad". But I agree with you, there has to be an open dialog about a way to control (yes, orwell-lovers, CONTROL) the way intellectual property gets shared on the internet. The internet may (and should) be free but that doesn't mean that you should be free to do whatever you want in it; just as the guarantee of being free in the real world doesn't entitles you with the right to go kill or steal from someone else.
  - smosher_ 12y ago
    > > called for some sort of unobtrusive, universal DRM -- and if you care about music, you should too > I don't see the reason for the downvotes. Perhaps because this reads like "you have to want DRM if you care about music" with no supporting argument. I don't believe profit is the best motivator for artists and much of the music I listen to (and all of the music I make) is made by unpaid producers. With that point of view DRM is entirely uncalled for. I'm not trying to argue that point of view here, just presenting it as a contrast to reveal the hidden assumptions in the assertion made above.
zephl 12y ago
a response: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-ed/ http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-ed/
ForHackernews 12y ago
> “We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to pay for it anymore. Of course, please keep making it – but you’ll have to find another way to do it." Ok, so this is going to be controversial, but...do we really need people to keep making art? At least as a profitable venture? There's already more art, music, movies, books existent than I could ever experience in a hundred lifetimes, and there's no reason to think that recently-created art is better or more interesting than older art. It's not like it's getting stale. Would it really be that bad if artists stopped making art? If people don't want to pay for it, maybe artists should stop? Eventually maybe society would want to pay for it again?
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  That's fine. Just don't consume any new art then. If you do, pay for it.
- tszyn 12y ago
  People do want new art. Just look at the most torrented works of art -- far more people download Game of Thrones than I Love Lucy. One major reason is that societies change and today's audiences are different from audiences of 30 years ago. The reason people don't want to pay for art is not that they assign a value of zero to it; it's that they have figured out a way to get it without paying the artist.
- tunesmith 12y ago
  Art reacts to culture and creates new culture. Culture is always changing, so new art will always be able to say things that old art has never said before.
teddyh 12y ago
Since we don’t have a “Basic Income”, to survive in society you have to provide value to others¹, i.e. make money. If you want to spend your time being an artist, you still have to make money. The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. A non-rivalrous good with zero marginal cost will therefore trend towards a price of zero. Digital copies of things fall under this category. Therefore, you cannot expect to be able to make money by having a profit margin on each item sold on these types of products. You cannot make money this way. You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. You will have to make money some other way. There will probably never arise a perfect substitute. The worst case scenario is that the modern but pre-digital age was a golden age for production of these kinds of now-digitizeable things, just as ancient Egypt was a golden age for the production of pyramids. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t complain that there isn’t any substitute business model to cover your situation. Reality is what it is. ① http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...
- wwweston 12y ago
  > The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. This is really the problem that copyright was meant to address in the first place -- once industrialized publishing hit, marginal cost of production was always cheap compared to investment required to produce the first work. Digital changes the degree but not the character of the problem. Of course, that's really only half the equation. > You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. "Reality" is a pretty fluid concept when you're talking about money, markets, or value, all of which are largely cultural concepts. It's arguably accurate to say that right now we're tending towards a culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media. That doesn't make it the only possible reality.
  - teddyh 12y ago
    > […] marginal cost of production was always cheap […] Yes, but it wasn’t zero, like digital copying is today. > Reality" is a pretty fluid concept […] Sure, there are laws like Copyright which change the normal market forces, just like any other country can have laws changing society. But the principle, the trend for the cost towards zero, is the same, Copyright notwithstanding. Copyright sort-of worked when the marginal cost was small but non-zero, but when it actually hits too-cheap-to-meter zero, then it starts being ridiculous. > […] culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media. This isn’t a “cultural” thing. It’s a “normal market forces” thing, which was my point. If it were a cultural thing, we could influence culture to turn the tide and actually affect things. But it isn’t, so we can’t.
coldtea 12y ago
That's the problem with lots of other professions, in an age where tons of skills become obsolete, either because tools, knowledge and opportunities to learn become too widespread (e.g. recording music, video making, photography, journalism -- millions enter a market that can only sustain 1/1000 of them because the barriers to entry are now much lower), or because they got automated / migrated to China, etc. The usual BS about "being creative", "practicing hard" and getting a leg up the competition is also not really helpful. It's just advice for the individual, not a systemic solution to a problem (that might not even have one).
tunesmith 12y ago
One thing I'm really happy about regarding this article and the accompanying blog post from Pomplamoose is that it pretty much devastates the argument of "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!" People can quibble about how much they spent on lights etc but none of it would have made an order of magnitude difference. Plus, Pomplamoose is comparatively huge - I've seen that touring/merch argument made against the indie that only has 1-2 CDs out and simply wants their cd/recordings sales to cover the production costs of recording the CDs. I wish Pomplamoose had broken out their "merch" number - how much was from selling posters/t-shirts, and how much was from selling CDs? The fact that they were even bundled together almost as an afterthought is another indication of how devalued it has become.
- wwweston 12y ago
  > "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!" Yeah, I hate this argument so much. Touring is labor intensive, often risky, and scales badly except for the biggest acts. And there's also a degree to which it's competed against by any amount of freely released music (yes, they're different experiences, but ask yourself why the live band market labor became considerably tighter when recorded music came into its own). Merchandising is another way of saying musicians should have other jobs besides music. And saying that is another way of saying you don't really care if musicians can use more of their time to either improve or increase their output. (Which I guess is fine if you really don't care, but own it, don't pretend we're in some kind of new magic economy that makes those fundamentals go away...)
- Pxtl 12y ago
  At the same time, look at how we comics do the same. Their primary output is free/ad-supported and their main source of direct income from customers is side-projects, merch, and donations.
  - tunesmith 12y ago
    What do you mean by comics?
quadrangle 12y ago
Nobody explains the situation better than Corey Doctorow: http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free Making a living as an artist is a dream only the tiniest fraction of privileged people have ever been able to do. Of all the economic injustices in the world, the fact that it's a lot of work to scrape by providing some awesome entertainment is not one that justifies a lot of sympathy and certainly not one that we should destroy cultural freedom and technological freedom over. It's nice to be transparent, and I don't mind Pomplamoose's original article. The artistempathy.com article is hyperbolic and out of touch.
Animats 12y ago
When we see a shortage of rock bands, then there's a problem. There isn't. At one point there were 13.5 million bands on Myspace. With Band-In-A-Box and AutoTune, anyone can make music now. All music worth hearing is on line, so anyone can listen to a band that's better than you. The musician as star concept dates from the vinyl and radio era, when manufacturing and distribution of records, and getting airplay, created a mass market for rock stars. That was a brief historical anomaly. For centuries, almost all musicians were nobodies, outranked by bartenders. Now, with the tools for making and distributing music available to everyone, we're back there. You are in a business where, unless you're really good and really well promoted, you don't matter. Deal with it. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_your_garage_band http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_yo...
Grue3 12y ago
The bands who know what they're doing, even small bands, do make money from tours: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-tour http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-t... The problem with Pomplamoose is that they spent a ridiculous amount of money on silly things. Their loss.
ForHackernews 12y ago
I find a little bit telling that HN has basically no sympathy for cab drivers, whose job formerly paid a living wage (protected by that reliable bogeyman "government regulation") but whose livelihoods are now under assault from any number of "disruptive" startups. But as soon as creative class workers are threatened, HN is falling all over itself defending copyright law (a government regulation!) as just and right and natural.
Mz 12y ago
Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759 They are a business. If they didn't make money, or even lost money, then they didn't take care of the financial side of things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405 I have a problem with both of these ideas (from different comments here, and I did cite them). First of all, I think it is in the best interest of the world to make a lot of stuff freely available to the masses. I think the world is a better place when some things are readily available. It is a form of public education. I don't want culture to be something only rich people can afford. Having said that, yeah, if you are doing something creative, it takes a lot of your time and you should be compensated but that doesn't mean business stuff comes naturally to creative types. I have a done a lot of stuff over the years that I have reason to believe benefited other people. I don't feel I have gotten enough financially out of it. I don't think that is just a case of me being stupid and not business-savvy. I think some things are just hard to monetize and I also think some things are hard to accomplish at all and may be impossible to accomplish if you have to worry about how to also monetize it. I am encouraged that we now have things like Patreon. I am encouraged that we are coming up with new alternatives like that. I still don't know how to effectively pull off the things I want to do and also monetize them. But one thing I am clear on is that I would like some things to be freely available because I don't want some things only available the The Haves. I think that increases the divide between The Haves and The Have Nots. And I think that is one reason monetizing art is a hard problem to solve: Because it shouldn't just be for the rich. It should enrich the lives of many. Yet, no, the artists should not all be starving artists either. I am not a fan of martyrdom.
davidgerard 12y ago
Macroeconomics, supply and demand: the problem for artists is (1) that they are not the slightest bit scarce (2) amateurs can do it too, and do (3) the ensuing macroeconomic race to the bottom (4) the public mostly aren't aesthetes, they just want something good enough to fill their subcultural needs. So art goes back to being for trust fund babies and people with day jobs. Successful artists need to find a cultural niche and work it. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...

34 points by acangiano 12y ago

“We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to pay for it anymore." This is utterly and painfully familiar to me. Before I dove into retraining as a programmer, I was a self-published tabletop roleplaying author. Tabletop RPGs are an incredibly small space, and part of the reason they are a small space is that no one pays anyone for anything. I wasn't even self-published because I didn't have publisher interest in my work: I was self-published because when publishers approached me and I sent them quotes asking for less than a penny per word, they would still balk and tell me it was too much money or just stop responding to my emails. And yet, when you talk about this publicly, when you discuss that maybe the reason so many of the industry's most legendary designers all leave and write for video games is because they literally weren't making enough to live, people react to you with hostility and derision. You may as well be spouting Marxist propaganda on the street corner, all for the crime of suggesting that someone actually be paid enough for their work to make it worth doing. You hear new ideas, things like pay-what-you-want, or free-ebook schemes, which conveniently all seem to involve giving them something for free with the understanding that somehow this will magically turn into more sales. It rarely does. IF you're big enough and visible enough, or when you first make a splash on the scene, some of these tricks can work for a short time. What actually happened in all but one occasion was that a whole hell of a lot of people just decided they were more happy to get something for nothing and my sales actually went down (though downloads of course, went up.) Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. They're still all too happy to watch/read/play the hell out of it, and tell you how amazing your thing is. Just don't ask them to give you any money for it.

eropple 12y ago
All of this, end to end. We're seeing the same subsistence-level "success" phenomenon in video games now, though. The giants make money, the occasional odd hit turns into something, and everybody else had better be happy with selling too few copies to pay your staff at $3 a pop during a Steam sale, because paying $5 is Just Too Much, Ha Ha Ha. I guess we could all go make free to play games that are designed to exploit consumers and get them on an addiction treadmill. Because that's ethical.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution. In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers. I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.

Pxtl 12y ago

Welcome to every artistic endeavor ever. You go into a field for love, you have to pay for the privilege by competing against an overcrowded market because everybody is making a labor of love. To me, the real solution is not go pay more for labours of love, but to institute a shorter workweek so everybody can pursue their own labours of love on the side.

dnautics 12y ago
that makes it worse, because you'll increase the supply and drive the price down.
- Pxtl 12y ago
  Yes, but then everybody can participate instead of the tiny elite select few that achieve a living wage.
- Flimm 12y ago
  Are we trying to maximise the number of people creating good art, or the number of people making a living out of art? It's not the same thing.
  - tunesmith 12y ago
    That's really the heart of it. Everything has moved so fast that I don't think we understand the first principles of the system. For a while I believed that all the new music production tools out there meant that the market is flooded with crappy music released by hobbyists giving it away for free. The system affects of that sort of thing is that the listeners are bombarded, they shut down, they don't have the opportunity to reliably discover "good" music, and that therefore people writing "good" music fall through the cracks, don't earn money, eventually stop writing, and culture is worse off. But... I'm coming around to the view that the market is pretty much flooded now with "good" music. I'm being hand-wavy, defining it as merely music that deserves to exist alongside other "good" music. If that's true, then it's a different model. Great for the consumer, they can probably subsist on a healthy music diet received for free. There the only path through for a musician is to try and invite fans into the "family" and hope fans will pay a premium for that. But still, you're going to have artists that write good music fall through the cracks and stop writing - it's just that in those cases, culture isn't necessarily worse off.

rcarmo 12y ago

I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items. Would it have been any better for them to hide how much they paid for various parts of their show? (So what if they paid X for lights? If they wanted _those_ lights... etc.)

eropple 12y ago
> I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items Because it discredits them. It isn't far off from when Fox News dismisses the problems of poverty with "but they have refrigerators" or when people (often around here) yet to reorient reality so that the cause of poverty is buying $5 quality-of-life improvements instead of societal economic intent. It helps folks sleep at night.
mgkimsal 12y ago
Well... there's a difference between wanting things and being able to afford them, for starters. And... it's weird that they 'lost' money, but were able to pay themselves as well. Cut back on the lighting expenses a bit, and/or pay yourselves less, then ... bam you're profitable. But given that they got the lights anyway, they (individuals) could afford it, just not in the context of paying for things from the tour revenue. Paying yourself... $15k (?) then complaining that you 'lost' money... just seems a bit weird.

bitwize 12y ago

This is why virtually every small-time musician I ever spoke to called for some sort of unobtrusive, universal DRM -- and if you care about music, you should too.

nkurz 12y ago
I think this is a matter of perception. I feel like I've known quite a few small-time musicians, and I think I've only heard one express a desire for better DRM. Obviously there are more, since presumably you and the people you know are examples, but I don't think those who desire better DRM are anywhere close to a majority. If anything, as stereotypical lower-income music lovers I find the minority who are familiar with the DRM express a desire (right or wrong) for greater access to free or low priced music, both for themselves and others worldwide. The general desire is to increase the ease with with those who love music can access it. Many wouldn't object to better DRM (if they knew what it was) but the emphasis would be on better modes of distribution with less economic discrimination.
_almosnow 12y ago
I don't see the reason for the downvotes. Maybe because "DRM is bad". But I agree with you, there has to be an open dialog about a way to control (yes, orwell-lovers, CONTROL) the way intellectual property gets shared on the internet. The internet may (and should) be free but that doesn't mean that you should be free to do whatever you want in it; just as the guarantee of being free in the real world doesn't entitles you with the right to go kill or steal from someone else.
- smosher_ 12y ago
  > > called for some sort of unobtrusive, universal DRM -- and if you care about music, you should too > I don't see the reason for the downvotes. Perhaps because this reads like "you have to want DRM if you care about music" with no supporting argument. I don't believe profit is the best motivator for artists and much of the music I listen to (and all of the music I make) is made by unpaid producers. With that point of view DRM is entirely uncalled for. I'm not trying to argue that point of view here, just presenting it as a contrast to reveal the hidden assumptions in the assertion made above.

zephl 12y ago

a response: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-ed/ http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-ed/

ForHackernews 12y ago

> “We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to pay for it anymore. Of course, please keep making it – but you’ll have to find another way to do it." Ok, so this is going to be controversial, but...do we really need people to keep making art? At least as a profitable venture? There's already more art, music, movies, books existent than I could ever experience in a hundred lifetimes, and there's no reason to think that recently-created art is better or more interesting than older art. It's not like it's getting stale. Would it really be that bad if artists stopped making art? If people don't want to pay for it, maybe artists should stop? Eventually maybe society would want to pay for it again?

waterlesscloud 12y ago
That's fine. Just don't consume any new art then. If you do, pay for it.
tszyn 12y ago
People do want new art. Just look at the most torrented works of art -- far more people download Game of Thrones than I Love Lucy. One major reason is that societies change and today's audiences are different from audiences of 30 years ago. The reason people don't want to pay for art is not that they assign a value of zero to it; it's that they have figured out a way to get it without paying the artist.
tunesmith 12y ago
Art reacts to culture and creates new culture. Culture is always changing, so new art will always be able to say things that old art has never said before.

teddyh 12y ago

Since we don’t have a “Basic Income”, to survive in society you have to provide value to others¹, i.e. make money. If you want to spend your time being an artist, you still have to make money. The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. A non-rivalrous good with zero marginal cost will therefore trend towards a price of zero. Digital copies of things fall under this category. Therefore, you cannot expect to be able to make money by having a profit margin on each item sold on these types of products. You cannot make money this way. You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. You will have to make money some other way. There will probably never arise a perfect substitute. The worst case scenario is that the modern but pre-digital age was a golden age for production of these kinds of now-digitizeable things, just as ancient Egypt was a golden age for the production of pyramids. But you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and you can’t complain that there isn’t any substitute business model to cover your situation. Reality is what it is. ① http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/ http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...

wwweston 12y ago
> The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. This is really the problem that copyright was meant to address in the first place -- once industrialized publishing hit, marginal cost of production was always cheap compared to investment required to produce the first work. Digital changes the degree but not the character of the problem. Of course, that's really only half the equation. > You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. "Reality" is a pretty fluid concept when you're talking about money, markets, or value, all of which are largely cultural concepts. It's arguably accurate to say that right now we're tending towards a culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media. That doesn't make it the only possible reality.
- teddyh 12y ago
  > […] marginal cost of production was always cheap […] Yes, but it wasn’t zero, like digital copying is today. > Reality" is a pretty fluid concept […] Sure, there are laws like Copyright which change the normal market forces, just like any other country can have laws changing society. But the principle, the trend for the cost towards zero, is the same, Copyright notwithstanding. Copyright sort-of worked when the marginal cost was small but non-zero, but when it actually hits too-cheap-to-meter zero, then it starts being ridiculous. > […] culture where people don't pay for digital copies of media. This isn’t a “cultural” thing. It’s a “normal market forces” thing, which was my point. If it were a cultural thing, we could influence culture to turn the tide and actually affect things. But it isn’t, so we can’t.

coldtea 12y ago

That's the problem with lots of other professions, in an age where tons of skills become obsolete, either because tools, knowledge and opportunities to learn become too widespread (e.g. recording music, video making, photography, journalism -- millions enter a market that can only sustain 1/1000 of them because the barriers to entry are now much lower), or because they got automated / migrated to China, etc. The usual BS about "being creative", "practicing hard" and getting a leg up the competition is also not really helpful. It's just advice for the individual, not a systemic solution to a problem (that might not even have one).

tunesmith 12y ago

One thing I'm really happy about regarding this article and the accompanying blog post from Pomplamoose is that it pretty much devastates the argument of "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!" People can quibble about how much they spent on lights etc but none of it would have made an order of magnitude difference. Plus, Pomplamoose is comparatively huge - I've seen that touring/merch argument made against the indie that only has 1-2 CDs out and simply wants their cd/recordings sales to cover the production costs of recording the CDs. I wish Pomplamoose had broken out their "merch" number - how much was from selling posters/t-shirts, and how much was from selling CDs? The fact that they were even bundled together almost as an afterthought is another indication of how devalued it has become.

wwweston 12y ago
> "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!" Yeah, I hate this argument so much. Touring is labor intensive, often risky, and scales badly except for the biggest acts. And there's also a degree to which it's competed against by any amount of freely released music (yes, they're different experiences, but ask yourself why the live band market labor became considerably tighter when recorded music came into its own). Merchandising is another way of saying musicians should have other jobs besides music. And saying that is another way of saying you don't really care if musicians can use more of their time to either improve or increase their output. (Which I guess is fine if you really don't care, but own it, don't pretend we're in some kind of new magic economy that makes those fundamentals go away...)
Pxtl 12y ago
At the same time, look at how we comics do the same. Their primary output is free/ad-supported and their main source of direct income from customers is side-projects, merch, and donations.
- tunesmith 12y ago
  What do you mean by comics?

quadrangle 12y ago

Nobody explains the situation better than Corey Doctorow: http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free Making a living as an artist is a dream only the tiniest fraction of privileged people have ever been able to do. Of all the economic injustices in the world, the fact that it's a lot of work to scrape by providing some awesome entertainment is not one that justifies a lot of sympathy and certainly not one that we should destroy cultural freedom and technological freedom over. It's nice to be transparent, and I don't mind Pomplamoose's original article. The artistempathy.com article is hyperbolic and out of touch.

Animats 12y ago

When we see a shortage of rock bands, then there's a problem. There isn't. At one point there were 13.5 million bands on Myspace. With Band-In-A-Box and AutoTune, anyone can make music now. All music worth hearing is on line, so anyone can listen to a band that's better than you. The musician as star concept dates from the vinyl and radio era, when manufacturing and distribution of records, and getting airplay, created a mass market for rock stars. That was a brief historical anomaly. For centuries, almost all musicians were nobodies, outranked by bartenders. Now, with the tools for making and distributing music available to everyone, we're back there. You are in a business where, unless you're really good and really well promoted, you don't matter. Deal with it. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_your_garage_band http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_yo...

Grue3 12y ago

The bands who know what they're doing, even small bands, do make money from tours: http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-tour http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-t... The problem with Pomplamoose is that they spent a ridiculous amount of money on silly things. Their loss.

ForHackernews 12y ago

I find a little bit telling that HN has basically no sympathy for cab drivers, whose job formerly paid a living wage (protected by that reliable bogeyman "government regulation") but whose livelihoods are now under assault from any number of "disruptive" startups. But as soon as creative class workers are threatened, HN is falling all over itself defending copyright law (a government regulation!) as just and right and natural.

Mz 12y ago

Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759 They are a business. If they didn't make money, or even lost money, then they didn't take care of the financial side of things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405 I have a problem with both of these ideas (from different comments here, and I did cite them). First of all, I think it is in the best interest of the world to make a lot of stuff freely available to the masses. I think the world is a better place when some things are readily available. It is a form of public education. I don't want culture to be something only rich people can afford. Having said that, yeah, if you are doing something creative, it takes a lot of your time and you should be compensated but that doesn't mean business stuff comes naturally to creative types. I have a done a lot of stuff over the years that I have reason to believe benefited other people. I don't feel I have gotten enough financially out of it. I don't think that is just a case of me being stupid and not business-savvy. I think some things are just hard to monetize and I also think some things are hard to accomplish at all and may be impossible to accomplish if you have to worry about how to also monetize it. I am encouraged that we now have things like Patreon. I am encouraged that we are coming up with new alternatives like that. I still don't know how to effectively pull off the things I want to do and also monetize them. But one thing I am clear on is that I would like some things to be freely available because I don't want some things only available the The Haves. I think that increases the divide between The Haves and The Have Nots. And I think that is one reason monetizing art is a hard problem to solve: Because it shouldn't just be for the rich. It should enrich the lives of many. Yet, no, the artists should not all be starving artists either. I am not a fan of martyrdom.

davidgerard 12y ago

Macroeconomics, supply and demand: the problem for artists is (1) that they are not the slightest bit scarce (2) amateurs can do it too, and do (3) the ensuing macroeconomic race to the bottom (4) the public mostly aren't aesthetes, they just want something good enough to fill their subcultural needs. So art goes back to being for trust fund babies and people with day jobs. Successful artists need to find a cultural niche and work it. http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/ http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthe...