Independent Music Is Big | Hacker News Reader

Independent Music Is Big

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47 pointsjeanlucas23 comments

The situation with "Music Industry" and "Majors" gives rise to this parable:

Imagine that we would consider "Eating Out Industry" as consisting of McDonalds, KFC and the like - drawing elaborate charts on how they divide market.

And then shove everything else, from falafel shops to Michelin rated restaurants, as "Independent Eating Out". The package includes barely mentioning those "indie" offerings in any media, magazines, etc.

We don't do this for some reason. But we actually could.

We don't do this because competition doesn't work that way in the restaurant industry. Location in most cases trumps content. When I look to eat out, I choose amongst the restaurants close to me. Occasionally there's a restaurant I might drive more than ten miles to eat at. But it would be foolish for any restaurant to specifically cater to the long tail when 90% the money is in a 5 mile radius.

Believe it or not, people actually travel half the world to experience genuine eating out. Example: Argentinean steaks.

Anyway, you can fit a lot of diverse restaurants into 5 miles radius. The mainstream music selection is much narrower.

As a musician, I would tentatively suggest that it is unbelievably difficult to build genuine connections with large numbers of fans.

Call it the data deluge or whatever, the sheer volume of attention seeking content out there just swamps timid voices.

Perhaps this is nothing new, however.

Just to play the other side of the argument - does this really matter? Most of the major label music industry now is based on, at best, flimsy (if not outright false) connections between fans and artists. Genuine connections are very different things. If, for example, you could get every fan to pay £1 a month to their favourite musicians you'd only need a few thousand fans to be doing well. Contrast that with the millions of "fans" you need to succeed via traditional, major label routes. I imagine artists who really love their job would find that pretty attractive.

I'm no expert on the industry, but Ben Horowitz has been thinking about this sort of thing for a while afaik - I only know of it through Ryan Leslie, but this article's worth reading: https://pando.com/2014/11/20/with-the-help-of-ben-horowitz-r...

"The internet renders business models focused on scarcity and litigation obsolete."

Translation: The whole concept of intellectual property is kind of troublesome for the content aggregators that I invest in and we'd prefer not to pay for any of the media that we sell advertisements around.

To make this litigation actually obsolete it will take a constitutional amendment to repeal the Copyright Clause.

The whole point of royalties is to reduce the amount of litigation by having an organized and honorable system of compensation.

The reason YouTube and Pandora have spent the last decade in the courts is precisely because they don't want to have to pay. Instead of being respectful members of society, they decided to hide behind lawyers and put a burden on our publicly funded civil justice systems.

There is nothing in our legal system that will ever allow someone to use someone else's intellectual property and profit from it without compensating the original author. That means that every time someone is selling advertisements on a website around content that is not being compensated, they can be successfully sued for damages, with hundreds of years of common law precedent and statute.

There is no doubt in my mind that intellectual property and copyright have changed drastically from the author-centric in to the corporate-centric form that we have today.

What's needed is reform and a return to an author-centric model, not the wholesale abandonment of copyright.

> The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

"Shall have the power", "to promote the progress".

As far as I see it, that's all we need to drop every single copyright law now founded on actual research (just about all of them) and swap them out for something else entirely, if we find something that has a better effect for society.

And I disagree entirely on the view on Youtube and Pandora. You may not like their position, but as far as I can see they haven't destroyed anybody's creative career. We shouldn't be building intellectual minefields and be petty and territorial.

How would you know? How would people whose creative careers have been destroyed be visible to you?

I don't dislike their "position", I dislike the fact that they're essentially even more parasitic on musical creators than the old majors used to be.

Have you ever heard of a streaming service paying a talented band/singer an advance? Or taking out ads? Or setting up press interviews?

They should be visible SOMEHOW through all the research done on the effect of piracy. How would they go under? Sales displacement, which studies can't prove are widespread?

Spotify pays about the same per play and listener as radio does. How is that worse than the labels?

>The reason YouTube and Pandora have spent the last decade in the courts is precisely because they don't want to have to pay.

Pay for what? YouTube, at least, only hosts user posted content.

I've come to the same conclusion: the call to abolish copyright is just a bullet point on the cost-saving wish list of content aggregators and content mills, and the people who support it are hopelessly naive ideologues who have not thought through the likely outcome of the position they are advocating. If there were no copyright, the big aggregators and vertically integrated giants like Apple would just "monetize" everything and pay the creators of content nothing.

BTW, open source -- the darling of the "information wants to be free" crowd -- would also be toast. Proprietary vendors would simply take all open source code, strip off its authorship and add proprietary features, then 'extinguish' by leveraging vertical integration and UX to make it 'theirs.' Independent OSS ecosystems would cease to exist as no-one would dare release open source code... it would just be appropriated without even giving credit to the original author, let alone any form of compensation.

Intellectual property law is indeed broken. That brokenness probably starts with a flawed bit of reasoning by analogy; trying to extend the concept of physical property into the intellectual realm is an ugly hack to shoehorn intellectual value creation into ancient frameworks of property and contract law. Its brokenness also stems from self-serving lobbyists taking it over, e.g. the endless "Mickey Mouse protection acts" that have extended copyright terms to infinity.

That being said: abolishing it without replacing it would simply abolish writing, music, art, journalism, etc. as primary disciplines or careers. Without copyright the only way to make money in these fields would be to turn all of your work into advertisement; Buzzfeed would be the future of all art. That's a hellish dystopia if I've ever seen one.

I wonder if the solution might not be technical. Google "homomorphic encryption."

When was copyright invented? Why? What were things like before then? What would prevent that from still working today?

Independent OSS ecosystems would cease to exist as no-one would dare release open source code... it would just be appropriated without even giving credit to the original author, let alone any form of compensation.

Which is why SQLite doesn't exist. [ http://sqlite.org/copyright.html ]

This also assumes there's no distinction made between copying and attribution.

That being said: abolishing it without replacing it would simply abolish writing, music, art, journalism, etc. as primary disciplines or careers. Without copyright the only way to make money in these fields would be to turn all of your work into advertisement

For music at least, I seem to recall hearing that most bands already get the bulk of their money from live shows?

Copyright stemmed from the invention of printing--although as is often the case, the law trailed the technology. In the prior world where books had to be copied by hand and performances couldn't be fixed in a medium, there was no real need for copyright. What would prevent that prior world from existing today is that technology has advanced to a level that many things can be replicated with essentially zero cost or effort.

I agree with your point with respect to open source code however. Open source software licensing, especially permissive licenses, is largely divorced from attribution--especially in the context of those actually using the software.

In simpler terms, copyright was created as a legal hack to prevent a tragedy of the commons that would result in a total devaluation of intellectual labor.

There may be a more elegant and fair solution, but no solution and pretending the problem does not exist is not it.

> When was copyright invented? Why? What were things like before then? What would prevent that from still working today?

We've had copyright almost as long as we've had technology to easily reproduce artistic works.

>For music at least, I seem to recall hearing that most bands already get the bulk of their money from live shows?

Because they sold their copyright on their music to record companies in exchange for funding their studio recording and promotion.

The entire idea that only the internet introduced "post scarcity" for copyrighted materials is pretty hilarious.

The entire reason we even have copyright is because it was already so cheap to make copies several hundred years ago.

This was bad and dumb.

Thank you for the feedback, that helps the author and the community to grow, also is insightful, showing your respect towards other people.

This reads as parody. Fawning over some self-important VC, doing 'analysis' that amounts to nothing more than shooting the shit with words and graphs that he doesn't understand. Decrying mistakes startups apparently always make, and using Buzzfeed as an example of some apparently satanic definition of success. Pushing a worldview, not a thought.

The music industry is immensely inefficient; the value of a piece is independent of it's economic value. It's smaller than the porn industry [3], and the top earners are not too distant from it artistically. It's a tenth the size of Apple, though much of the money is concentrated on zero-sum executives lacking a moral compass[5]. My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, Pitchfork's best album of the 90's, never went gold, even in their home country [1]. It bankrupt a studio and broke up the band, and to this day is about 1/100th as popular as Drake albums on Spotify [2]. Still, there is a vast swarm of people for whom Loveless means the world, in a way Drake has never meant to anyone. It's a stoic, effervescent, and unmonetizable titan.

It would be fallacy to assert that the developed world is improving emotionally [6][7], and for many in it music is a mood-regulating sidekick, thereby providing added value where TV et al. provide replacement. It is a levee against the disgusting world neoliberalism and tech utopianism has built for us. Final thoughts:

* Never use the word 'consumer' non-ironically.

* Or write that "there are in fact multiple paradigms that exist within the music universe, all of which operate according to very different rules." Amongst a few other choice phrases.

* Or, in your profile bio, "Lover of Art, Poetry, Startups, Music, Journalism // Tech Founder and Deadpan Humorist".

* Walled-Garden doesn't exist on streaming services; your demented Grandma has recordings of her playing piano on her Soundcloud.

* Streaming does work... if only because nothing else does. And no, no one will tell you 'community'/'live' will work for artists who have enough integrity not to become a living meme.

[1]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveless_(album)#Certifications

[2]: look it up. There are a few reasons for this, including that MBV listeners probably skew towards torrenting, and that those who stream tend not to leave it on as background music.

[3]: nbcnews.com/business/business-news/things-are-looking-americas-porn-industry-n289431, statista.com/topics/1639/music/

[4]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

[5]: celebritynetworth.com/richest-businessmen/ceos/lyor-cohen-net-worth/

[6]: monbiot.com/2014/10/14/falling-apart/

[7]: nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html

monbiot.com/2014/10/14/falling-apart/ is an interesting link - it is about about how we become more and more lonely.

By the way if the problem is that we are lonely - than all community solution like musicians relying on a community of supporters instead of 'music industry' is a step in the right direction.

I agree with you and there is plenty of room for technology to address some of these problems, both in facilitating the creation of music and getting it to the right audience.

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