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Comment by ZenoArrow | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that Bandcamp is relegated to a passing note at the end of the article, but the service that Bandcamp offers is better than almost any record label contract in the "good old days". You get a much higher cut of your profits, and you almost certainly keep the rights to your own music.

The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that.

In terms of human connection, there's still plenty to be had in the act of performing music.

When it comes to starting to learn an instrument, I agree that there are fewer role models around than when I was young. However, popular music moves in fads. Where I'm from, guitar-based music was last "in" in the late 00's, I'm sure it'll come around again.

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>The downside in the new arrangement is that you're expected to do more of your own promotion. However, as your visibility grows you can hire someone to do that.

The real downside is that with no gatekeepers there and so many acts (orders of magnitudes more) you can make and release albums that nobody hears at all.

Whereas in the past, if you made it to have an album out, you had a small following almost guaranteed.

At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company, you could blame your failure to those A&R guys that failed to appreciate you, or get your lack of contract as a sign that you're not good enough to begin with.

Now that you can easily make an album, everybody both feels more entitled to success, but also gets to see firsthand how the audience just doesn't care.

At least back when you couldn't even make the album without being picked by a record company

Though I get what you’re driving at, there have been companies that will press your basement demo onto a vinyl LP almost as long as vinyl records have been made (and later cassettes and CDs, of course). They’d do the artwork, too, from “we’ll have an in-house artist do it for lots of money” to “we’ll put your camera-ready art on it for a little extra”. But pre-internet, that meant selling the hard copies at shows and maybe the local indie record store. What one is missing, of course, is the promotion from a label. But the production of hard copies of music hasn’t been a barrier for a long time.

"...the production of hard copies of music hasn’t been a barrier for a long time."

How many copies must one have ordered up front? I'd guess it was so many as to have been prohibitively expensive for a fledgling artist to handle.

Meh, you’re asking me to dig up memories of 20 years ago. All I remember is that if you an okay day job, it’ll be a stretch but you could swing it. It seems to stick in my head that about 1000 copies was where the setup fees didn’t take up the majority of the cost. After that, IIRC, they kept the masters around and you just picked up the phone: “send me another 500”.

You can do as little as 100, but I think most small artists get 300 made cuz that’s where the price per unit gets low enough that you can at least hope you’ll make your money back.

Prices have gone up a lot in the last 5 years. I think it’ll run at least $2,000 to get an LP pressed. Plus a year wait. Probably half that or so for a 7”.

Depending on the label youre with (theres a ton of 1 person labels), you can split the cost. If theyre bigger, they’ll just pay for it.

500 was the minimum. We pressed up 2000 because we were hopelessly optimistic.

This was 1980, 7 inch 45, we sold about 800, gave away the rest over the next 20 years.

Total cost of production and pressing was at least $5,000, which wasn't a sum any random garage band could muster up. We broke our piggy banks and hit up our friends because our success was a sure thing.

The good old days, I guess.

Yeah, they’d press it, but they had no distribution. Rendering them meaningless.

The real downside is that with no gatekeepers there and so many acts (orders of magnitudes more) you can make and release albums that nobody hears at all.

Whereas in the past, if you made it to have an album out, you had a small following almost guaranteed.

Taste seems to be a commodity that no one wants to provide anymore. Because it isn't a commodity at all. It's a craft. It's something that specifically requires human attention, and until AI progresses some more, attempts to mass produce and make it a commodity will just produce annoying doppelgangers of it. The difference is still like those pink styrofoam grocery store "tomatoes" and garden grown tomatoes.

The former is only pleasing to those who don't know what the real thing is actually like!

There’s no lack of “tastemakers” in music. The problem is the absolute flood of garbage produced in bedroom studios. Cutting through the noise to find what’s good has become near impossible for everyone. Popular music used to focus on scenes, the internet made sure to stomp that into the dirt.

During the rise of Napster we all liked to paint the record labels as evil. What we all failed to realize was how important labels were to seeking out and developing new talent. We’ve seen the last Bowie or Radiohead for a very long time.

There’s no lack of “tastemakers” in music.

But the next thing you talk about creates an environment not conducive to developing really tasteful ones.

The problem is the absolute flood of garbage produced in bedroom studios. Cutting through the noise to find what’s good has become near impossible for everyone. Popular music used to focus on scenes, the internet made sure to stomp that into the dirt.

Given an environment like that, how is someone going to develop good taste? There are still music scenes, BTW. They are distinctly non-mainstream, however.

I don’t think we disagree. There’s plenty of tastemakers, just an overwhelming amount of noise to cut through.

That overwhelming amount of noise might well interfere with the ecosystem of tastemakers itself.

In other words we are now optimizing for people who have talent AND are good self promoters....rather than just talent. Record labels, at one point, excelled at identifying and developing talent. I’m not convinced that this brave new world for the music industry is any better.

Artists were still expected to be self-promoters back in the pre-Internet era. I'd suggest, with only a few exceptions, the artists that got signed were the ones that knew how to play the game of self-promotion. There were artists that bucked this trend (Nick Drake springs to mind first, and I'm sure there were others), but for the most part the act of getting signed required some level of hustle. If you don't believe me, how many 20th century music artists can you think of that didn't have a distinctive appearance?

As for developing talent, we may have lost the multi-album development deals that allowed artists to take risks whilst still being supported financially, but the development of artists doesn't have to be confined to music studios. Artists get real-time feedback on their music when they play live, and they can still make a living doing so.

The last point I'd like to make is that the services labels used to offer are still available, and there's greater flexibility for the artist when it comes to picking and choosing which services to use. Want someone else to handle distribution? It can be done. Want someone else to handle promotion? That's possible too. Want to hire a studio and a music producer and an engineer? All fine if you've got the money. Previously, if signed to a major label (some indie labels had different business models), you gave up your song rights and part of your creative control in order to secure a loan to make an album, a loan which you'd then be obligated to work off. Nowadays you have no obligation to go into debt in order to release music, it's completely up to the artists to choose how much they engage with the labels.

"Record labels, at one point, excelled at identifying and developing talent."

There's a bit of survival bias in that observation. Of course we all think the bands that we like and know about are talented. But how many among we don't know about were talented, and of those how many were passed over by record companies?

For reasons of cost and access, as a consumer I certainly have the opportunity to listen to and discover far more bands myself than in the pre-internet days, and do so without needing to rely on curators and gatekeepers like record labels and reviewers. I can go directly to the source and sample the music from bands directly, without all of these middle men.

I'm a much better judge of what I like than any record company could be, because my own taste in music will never perfectly match up with anyone else's. So at least as far as discovering "talent", I'd trust my own taste far more than that of any record company... as long as I make the effort to actually seek out new music.

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