Comment by wanderr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wanderr | Hacker News Reader

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Former Grooveshark employee here so my opinion might be highly biased but I believe that the genie of free music is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back in, whether that is fair or not, it's just reality. I don't pretend that Grooveshark had anything to do with that change, we recognized that it had already happened and tried to find a way forward for the industry.

Older people, especially those with money, will certainly pay for music either by buying the music or paying for subscription services or both, and I don't see that changing but kids, the ones who I know at least, won't pay for music they can get for free, and they all know how to get it for free. Streaming services try to bring that behavior into the light and at least try to monetize it, but eliminating free streaming is only going to drive them back to the shadows. I really think that efforts to stop people from listening to music for free will be about as effective as prohibition or the war on drugs.

They used to say the same thing about PC games until Valve came along with Steam and made it easier and more convenient to buy games legally and install/keep them updated and enjoy the network experience than it was to download them illegally and steal them.

The music industry needs something they can really get behind that's good for both the consumer AND the publisher, and I don't think any of the services right now have really come out enough on top to say that's the one. I would say the big contenders right now are Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music. We'll have to see what happens.

What about bandcamp?

A few weeks ago I discovered the Analog Africa label[0], which is all about old school afrobeats. The label lets me listen to any album for free on their bandcamp page, puts in effort to track down the original artists, write great liner notes and blog entries on the process[1], etc.

I don't think I've spent as much money on music as I have on this label in ages.

So yes, I'm very much agreeing with Gabe Newell's claim that piracy is a service problem.

[0] http://analogafrica.bandcamp.com/

[1] http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/?view=classic

It's a service problem that none of the current distributors of mainstream music seem willing to solve.

They're just trying to milk the old model as long as possible while also having profits with the new one.

Apples to oranges.

PC gamers are tech savvy. They understand the real danger of running random crack.exe files and pirated software from the internet.

You're not going to get a virus from playing an audio or video file.

The value of services such as Spotify or SiriusXM is really dependent on listening habits. I drive very little, so no matter how cheap SiriusXM offers their service to me, it's still not worth it. And I love their service, too. It's a fantastic service. But it's not something I'm going to pay for.

PC gamers are not universally tech savvy, and cracking games (especially newer ones) usually involves a lot more than just running a cracked exe. Games that are licensed through Steam are exceptionally difficult to pirate. Not impossible, just difficult, and most gamers once they reach an age with disposable income would just as soon pay the $60 bucks and enjoy the multiplayer/ranking/etc.

I agree on the second point, I have a 7 minute commute so a streaming service just isn't a huge thing for me. I'm a collector and my music tastes are admittedly fickle, so I stick to managing a library in an ownCloud instance that I control. It's just easier for me.

I'm not actually sure that Valve has solved that problem. I don't follow the video game industry very closely but a little googling turned up some articles claiming that game piracy is on the rise and represents a real threat to the industry...whether those are remotely accurate or not, I can't judge. It certainly wouldn't be the first time an industry made a lot of noise about how terrible everything is while actually thriving, so let's assume for the sake of argument that Valve has largely solved game piracy.

I don't think the two are directly comparable, given that playing a game necessarily requires running code and games can easily require an Internet connection these days, in fact it seems like more and more popular games are online multi-player types. It is significantly easier to make it too hard to be worth pirating a game, so I would argue that Valve offers some nice carrots but the sticks are sufficiently pointy. Meanwhile, with music, all you need are the bits or the sounds which you can then turn back into slightly lower quality bits, I don't think there is a reasonable means to make pirating music more difficult.

The problem there is that what has been in the best interests of both the consumer AND the artist has been the death of the old, crooked, music /distribution/ industry.

That used to be just because they were crooked and cooking the books (how else do you explain millions in sales again and again without any substantive profit to the artist to show for it); which is still true.

What's true now is that they simply aren't necessary. Digital distribution offers a far more efficient and direct distribution method.

Bringing this back to Valve; publishing physical copies of games/etc is now far more something to do for collectors as a bonus. Access to the games themselves are handled via Valve, GoG, humble 'indie' bundle, etc.

> The problem there is that what has been in the best interests of both the consumer AND the artist has been the death of the old, crooked, music /distribution/ industry.

I don't suspect music distributors have much longer to go really.

I'm in my thirties, when I was younger I was certainly more willing to put in the effort to find the music I wanted for free. At the time it seemed much easier to find, for me. Now I pay 10 month for spotify and my effort is much less, but so is my interest.

Same story. And I was at it a couple of years before Napster showed up and made it easy. Searching through ratio-ed FTP sites for the "Flavahood Sexual Healing Remix" of Keith Sweat's "Twisted" (cause that's the one they played on the radio and it was impossible to find anywhere) all while on dial-up, was a badge of honor! But I did buy a ton of music as well... which I promptly would pop into the CD-ROM drive on my linux box, and CDRip and LAME-encode for later usage. But, just like you, somewhere along the way, I didn't feel like it was worth the effort once services like Last.FM/Rdio/Spotify started showing up. $10 a month is little to ask. Sure there are times when I can't find a track or even an artist... but a few minutes later, I'm cruising along listening to something else.

I agree - it's too much effort to be young :(

Me too, actually...but I believe we are a minority, we're certainly not going to sustain the music industry.

im broke so i don't pay, currently using 3mo apple music subscription. that said even when i get a mediocre salary i would pay 9.99 for apple music (or spotify). at most states minimum wage this is ~1 hour a month. since the movie/media companies either have shit teir stresming (hulu, hbo go) i still watch on primewire, but i could imagine with a halfway decent salary for $100 i could have internet, netflix, hbo go, anytging on itunes, prime, and some money left over for an online rental or 2, that strikes me as a good deal.

sure i could torrent, see if the seed health is decent, check if commenters gave positive feedback, and then store a 500mb - 2gb file. but a la carte streaming is actually much better. cable just needs to die but it wont when the internet & media companies enjoy 2 monopolies & gov subsidies

I'd happily pay more for spotify if they raised the price, but yeah, buying music is pretty much a no go at this point. I've tried to support artists by buying music in the past, but the UX is just so far inferior to spotify that I won't do it anymore.

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