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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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