The music business is growing again | Hacker News Reader

The music business is growing again

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38 pointsprostoalex49 comments

The power of convenience.[1] It doesn't really work for me personally with music. I already had a big collection of music ripped, digitally purchased, etc. before streaming got big. And I have limited interest in discovering a lot of new music. But if you grow up in a world of subscription services where at least enough stuff is just available in the ether...

Of course, one of the big questions is how the dollars work out for everyone. But the overall trend seems to be toward convenient non-ownership.

[1] http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/12/19/convenience/

I feel precisely this way, but my taste in music has always been odd. I would imagine that for the middle of the preference bell curve, streaming is ideal. Of course that still leaves a significant market at the margins.

I don't see why convenience has to be conflated with renting and not allowing you to buy music or other digital goods. Bandcamp sells you DRM-free FLAC, but you can as well stream music from them.

TL;DR: convenience has nothing to do with non ownership, they are artificially conflated.

I don't think it has to be. But I've also had the exact same argument with people claiming subscription streaming is more convenient and, from their perspective, it absolutely is because of discovery/seamless availability across devices/etc. Personally, I mostly prefer to just own music and I only use "free" Amazon Prime for streaming. But there are a lot of people who don't want to deal with the overhead of ownership, however (from my perspective) minor.

If Bandcamp sorted out the UI and made it easy to discover music and create and stream playlists then they'd kill it.

You can make your own playlists, and stream them with mpv if want. But sure, they can make tools on their site for that.

It would be nice if their search was actually useful in the mobile app. I can type in a band name verbatim and pages of completely unrelated bands. Not sure if it's as bad in the web app.

Convenience in the modern music industry means being able to access virtually any song for virtually free on virtually any platform.

Bandcamp rules but it's missing like almost all music.

Digital renting isn't convenient for me. I like buying music in FLAC, and then encoding it in Opus for playback.

Also, why getting any music should be easier for renting only services? There is no rational reason here, except may be their uncompetitive influence and pressure they put on music creators to sign some nasty exclusive deals.

I know Bandcamp is missing some music that I want to see there, but I'm not into mass market music anyway. I can't say it's missing "almost all" for me.

> Digital renting isn't convenient for me.

You are the anomaly. I am in a way too; I listen to all my music via SoundCloud, because most new artist without deals are on there (especially in the rap scene, almost exclusively SC). If SC went away I'd be screwed, so I'd love to buy a lot of the music but I can't.

I think you’re conflating something you like with something that is convenient. You may like to walk several miles to work, as an example, but that is certainly much less convenient than driving to work.

The edge streaming services have in ease and convenience is that you never have to go through any kind of purchase or check-out process to start listening. You simply click the play button. That’s not to say that buying from Bandcamp and other platforms is difficult, but not as easy as clicking or tapping a single button.

> The edge streaming services have in ease and convenience is that you never have to go through any kind of purchase or check-out process to start listening. You simply click the play button.

In my experience, that's the case with most albums on Bandcamp as well. Only some of them require you to pay, to be able to stream all tracks (in addition to downloading after paying, which is the base service).

Try it out: https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/album/neverhood-songs-d...

Also, I find ability to back up music that I bought a major convenience, especially in case when the store you bought it from shuts down (and you lose access to the music that remained in the store only).

I don't like renting music, either. Anything that I'm going to listen to more than once often ends up being something that I listen to a lot, and I'd prefer to pay for it once, instead of over and over. Then there's the issue of portability. It goes on the iPod in my car, the tiny MP3 player in my pocket, or spread among the PCs I use (work blocks most streaming sites, and it's convenient to maintain connection to my library when traveling).

I've got a phone, of course. I miss the playback control buttons, and the dedicated nature of a single-purpose music device. I've been told that my preferences are pretty rare, though.

I am utterly old school in that I only buy my music on CD.

I've got about 1,100 CDs in my collection, all ripped into a lossless format. The problem for me with streaming is that you never know if that album you love to stream will still be there on the streaming service, or whether the rights have expired and it's now gone, whereas once I've bought and ripped the CD, I can play it forever. Some of my CDs are over 30 years old, when you consider the cost of purchase, and the number of times I've played those tracks over those years, that's amazing value for money.

Streaming also has variable audio quality, at least with my CDs I know I've got a standard quality, mastered for playback on a proper music system, and not optimised for headphones, or computer speakers.

So streaming maybe convenient, but it's definitely not for me.

While I stream a lot, I also like to buy vinyl records.

I love the physical act of putting on a record, sitting back, and listening to the whole album. The fact that I can't skip a track makes for much better deep listening.

I like streaming for discovering new music. There's no Spotify in my country, but Google Music is pretty good (and extremely cheap - it's like $1.5/month).

Surprisingly, the best new music I've discovered has been through YouTube recommendations. Never would I have imagined that my favorite new song would be from a Thai-English band

(The song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTBPPSNGYi8)

About 3,500 albums on vinyl, and just over 6000CDs last time I counted. These days I pretty much stream everything - even the stuff I own and have ripped on my home network.

I still buy vinyl and cds - but almost always directly from artists at gigs or from their own websites, and less often in 2nd hand record shops/markets.

I love owning the objects with music on them. I just don't actually use them very often...

(obligatory snarky reaction: "CDs??? _Old school?_ Please..." ;-) )

I bow down in envy at your collection. :)

What are your preferred musical genres?

Pretty much everything except country and show tunes. And I'm softening on the country lately, kinda enjoying a fair bit of alt-country and sad-core... Still can't get into the "YeeHa! My wife just left me, my dog die, do si do your partner girl!" kind tho...

(Oh, and don't envy it _too_much, it's mostly a result of me being _old_...)

This is interesting because the music business is usually the canary in the coal mine for other entertainment businesses. It's the first to change because it is lower bandwidth than films for instance so we see what happens in music before film, television, etc.

Just curious, do you have any data to back this up?

I wonder what must it be like for the streaming generation to not have the concept of an "Album".

I used to love buying albums and going through the artwork, reading footnotes, the familiar smell etc.

I get that we still have vinyl but for most streamers that's not a thing.

When you pay a streaming service, you get access to full albums, and thus can listen to them, beginning to end if you like. I often do...

You can but I'd be willing to wager that's the (vast) minority approach. I'll deliberately listen to an album now and then but the vast majority of the time it's some sort of playlist, even if it's a playlist from a single artist.

I'm not sure it's much different than in the 1990s and people buying singles of their favorite songs instead of the full album. I may even go as far as to say that more people have access to the full albums today than ever before.

90s I'm not so sure. I was probably mostly buying CDs then--at least before Napster, etc. in the late 90s. I was thinking about more the pre-digital download eras when albums were the default through long play vinyl, CDs, and cassettes.

I agree that initial per song digital downloads definitely favored buying individual hits even given some discounts for buying entire albums.

There were tons of 'Various Artists' compilations too.

To be fair, I don't see heaps of albums lately that're composed/curated into specific orders of their songs - which might not be true, it might just reflect that I used to listen to a lot more of "that sort of music".

You don't just listen to a single Pink Floyd song in isolation - or you can, but you'll miss out on it's context which might be fine for Great Gig In The Sky, but many of their songs loose heaps of the "art" in isolation. Same with Yes, old (Peter Gabriel) Genesis, King Crimson, Rush even some less "prog rock" groups like Supertramp and Queen had albums that mostly told stories - Meatloaf as the canonical classic example I guess.

I think the only thing I've listened to recently that had an "obvious order required to "get it" is Petrified Forest by Biosphere. I don't hear or notice artists doing that so much these days.

I kinda feel like "an album" is gonna end up a strange relic of the '70s through maybe the 90s from a future music historian point of view...

Yeah, but you don't queue up at the store to buy it and then sit on the bus ride home checking it out excited to get home and loose yourself in the music...

I am an apple music subscriber. My atomic unit of music remains the album.

I would think that if you're more than a "casual listener" of music, then you stream entire albums.

I'm pretty involved in my local music scene and I don't know many, if any, who selectively stream songs.

I find that when I buy an album I end up listening to it a lot more than if I streamed it on Spotify. Something about investing in it, or maybe the fact that my library doesn't even crack a six figure song count.

I wonder if the constant possibilities of millions of songs to choose from keep people from settling in on particular pieces of work, or if it's just hard for me to grasp that it's possible on that platform.

> I get that we still have vinyl

Last year was a bumper year for vinyl sales [1]. FWIW I've seen multiple new record stores open up in my current city (Oakland), and in my previous city (Portland) I had like 4 vinyl/cassette shops within walking distance of my apartment. A few bands I'm into release exclusively on cassette. One of the first things I see when loading an artist page on Spotify is ads to purchase vinyl.

The physical medium is still there.

[1] https://www.economist.com/news/business/21722232-only-two-fi...

Cassette is such an interesting medium. Bands, fans and labels have told me they like it because it's analog not digital, portable (unlike vinyl), cheap and quick to manufacture (vinyl isn't economical for small runs or quick turnarounds between recording and tour, which small bands need).

But if you started designing a medium around these requirements from scratch today, would you design a cassette?

I'm not sure what you'd design because, honestly, I have trouble understanding why analog is a feature rather than a bug. Because it's a little harder to replicate and distribute further?

One aspect can be that it turns the audio itself into a physical medium that decays with environment. There are related factors to how audio is reproduced from analog formats as well that change the character of the sound. Perfect fidelity is one goal for music listening that digital was taking to the ultimate end. But there's an opposing goal of having individual character, slight warping of a vinyl creating modulation wobbles and similar for tape.

For me I liken it to how people find electronic music more interesting when dynamic articulations are added to the parameters of the sounds. For example, varying the amplitude of the hi hats will make it sound more natural and appealing versus just playing the sample back perfectly at equal amplitude every time. Variation can add detail. It's a bit different in how it happens with a vinyl or cassette, but still within those bounds.

I would guess that it's because you don't need any kind of computer in the play back device. It can be mechanical and therefore very simple.

Simple as in easy to understand, yes. But probably more expensive. An mp3 player doesn't cost much.

For a tape player? I feel like my old sony radio/tape deck was like $15.

I've always wanted a service that lets me have something like an RSS/JSON feed of new artists, albums, etc added to a streaming service during a timeframe (day, week, etc).

Does anyone know if Google, Apple, or Spotify provide any such APIs or services?

nusic finds new releases of artists in your library https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.schnatter...

Apple Music offers me a "new music mix" every week, and I'm happily impressed by it's algorithm, there's almost always something new I really like that I'd quite likely never have heard of otherwise... Some particular highlights this year have been Die Young by Sylvan Esso, Shruggy Ji by Red Baraat and Black Mesa by Biosphere (I probably would have found that last one, but not nearly as quickly...)

i used to love spotify but now i do all my music streaming from youtube. youtube just have more selections and it's free, even comes with music videos for times i'm bored.

Yeah, but the sound quality.

But are artists making more money? I'm sure for the biggest artists the answer is yes but for indie artists the internet is still the place where you get buried, discovery of new music is even more controlled than the pre-internet era.

It's complicated. If you despecialize at the "star musician and corporate schmoozer" skills and become more of an independent brand manager/marketer where the music is just one element of the business plan, you have many opportunities to practice your craft online. But as we all know, it's way more plausible that you and I and the aspiring kid down the street can't pull off the kind of hustle and vision necessary to make it work.

In most of modernity, independents haven't, on average, made much money. Given the rise of creation and distribution tools, I suspect independents have gained more (proportionally and as a group) than mainstream artists have.

Historically, the group wasn't making a whole lot. Now, some of them are doing well with things like Patreon and YouTube monetization, as well as selling through streaming services.

Those routes weren't readily available to them while production, distribution, and advertising were largely controlled entirely by the big production houses. Now, the independents are able to produce qualities on par with the larger houses and able to reach the same audiences.

So, numerically speaking, they've probably benefited much more than the folks on the major record labels. They are no longer just playing for 50 to 100 people in a bar, they are having their music listened to by that many people in an hour, across multiple streaming services, and making a few dollars they'd have never had the chance to make, even thirty years ago.

One of my friends does nothing but make music for online distribution. He's developed quite a following. He doesn't even have a garage band, he makes all of the music himself in a spare room in his house. That wouldn't have been an option, just thirty years ago. Even a decade ago meant he still had a regular job.

I imagine there are many similar cases and that, in aggregate, the independents have benefitted far more than the major studios - at least proportionately in terms of growth.

production, distribution, and advertising

Don't forget sale of merchandising. If you can gather a bit of a following on YouTube, even if the monetization is still low, you might be able to make a decent income just selling personalized caps and tshirts online.

I'll have to ask him about merchandizing. I don't believe he has done any. I'm not sure how much income it might add, but it's worth bringing up.

Thanks! I hadn't even thought of that for people who don't do live shows and only do online stuff.

Does the streaming services have finally started to pay artists ? Musicians always complained they received almost nothing from streaming... Looks like everybody is winning except the artist...

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