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Comment by pat2man | Hacker News Reader

It seems incredibly hard to "discover" an artist these days. There are so many musicians out there that aren't quite good enough. To be able to pick out the good ones pretty much requires dedicating your life to it: http://www.npr.org/people/2100252/bob-boilen

Its much easier just putting together a dream team of writers and musicians that have made hits in the past.

That being said there is still an amazing amount of great music out there that doesn't hit the charts. Live music seems to be the best place to discover and contribute to those artists. Too bad its mostly focused in a few major cities.

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     There are so many musicians out there that aren't quite good enough.

I disagree with you. There are more good enough artists than ever. Pop music orchestrates the transition from childhood to adulthood. It helps structure sexuality, make it more predictable. In order to fulfil this function, the musical quality is not too important, as long as a certain standard is met. And modern production technology can help just about everybody to achieve these minimal standards. What is much more important is achieving a critical mass of fans, which is to a substantial degree a question of marketing, and hence access to capital. Even though modern production outfits like Max Martin's are highly skilled, most of their artists fail. But the 1 in 10 who make it big recoup the loss by the 9 others. The music industry's main business model is thus this: find 10 young (hence cheap) musicians, try to make all of them a star, live on 1 of 10 unicorns.

As you can see, that's the Y Combinator business model. The music industry got there first. I would not at all be surprised if Y Combinator were consciously following in the music industry's footsteps.

"There are more good enough artists than ever."

also more bad ones.

Maybe. So what? Even bad musicians are better these days, because of improved music technology. In terms of recording, production, distribution, learning music you can do with a laptop today what Beethoven and James Brown couldn't dream of.

I was supporting the claim that there are many artists out there who are not quite good enough.

University radio playlists http://www.earshot-online.com/charts/citr.cfm?intChartTypeID... this is the most played this week http://faketearsmusic.bandcamp.com/track/second-wind

Or follow independent labels you like, let it be their F/T job to find artists. I follow Warp, Asian Man Records, Mint Recs, few others.

There are more good artists today than there ever has been, but the issue is that the Jimi Hendrixs of today are typically tossed to the "not quite good enough" -pile by those who professionally discover new artists. It's unfortunate that nowadays to listen to good new artists you'll need to be active and follow genres where an artists become popular through word of mouth and good music.

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