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Comment by sideshowb | Hacker News Reader

I agree publishers were incompetent (in clinging onto old models rather than adapting), but has streaming really helped the average artist?

Having the option to distribute music for free has been good, for sure

Setting the expectation that music should be near enough free, less so

You could argue this is one of those public good situations universal income is designed to address, but it certainly hasn't yet.

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For the vast majority of history, musicians were not some of the wealthiest members of society, far from it. Music has traditionally been “near free” and only ceased to be during a brief period necessitated by tech. That period has long since ended.

I don’t see that an artificial value placed on music, rather than the previous real value set on its distribution, is necessarily a good thing.

Being a musical artist is not easy business for pretty much every artists except for a few outliers, though we do appreciate and consume music.

If you made a graph with the x axis being percentile and the y axis being the amount of money made, on the far right side of the x axis there would be a huge spike where a tiny fraction are making a fortune. (I think) I'd prefer the spike to be smoothed out.

What's interesting is that Apple/Google/Pandora/Spotify could test this. Adjust the distribution curve and then see how demand for music services changes over the years. With more artists able to live as pros, would music as a whole be more in demand? I'd venture that music as a whole would be more in demand due to increasing the number of (quality) trials in the musical search space. And if you flatten it out too much, you would reduce the motivation to continue to try to "hit it big", so you're looking to optimize the distribution curve.

If you want to redistribute wealth, why stop at oenly musicians? I'm thinking universal basic income, then let robots do the work.

I think what you're doing (seeing this as an optimization problem) is asking the right sort of question

A related point is the FOSS-style model of "give away music for free, make money on tours/advertising/movie soundtracks" biases the search towards music that works well in live performance/in advertising/in a film. So we are missing huge parts of the search space.

Not even then. Musicians as a group weren't wealthy even in the heyday of physical albums. As with so many things, it's only a handful of top names that make a bundle.

Can we ignore any question about whether 21st century tech/economic changes are helpful to us by saying "for the vast majority of history, we lived in caves and many died in childbirth?"

That’s an excellent point, but I’d say that death during childbirth has always been recognized as a bad outcome. I’m not so convinced that the same can be said for the history of music before the modern mass market. I don’t think that the history of music is akin to the history of premedical chikdbirth; the history of music is in fact replete with positive outcomes we enjoy to this day.

Sure, but the question of whether or not streaming has helped music or musicians overall has nothing to do with the economic model of the 19th century and prior. It's about the change from 20th to 21st century.

I hope in future we come up with something better than any of the three.

How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development?

At any rate, rich, world-famous artists are the least harmed by changes in the music industry.

How would you feel if someone were applying this argument to software development?

I'd ask how much FOSS software is running on your machine right now, and how you intend to pay for it...

How much FOSS software is actually funded by big companies that are either trying to upsell support or non free offerings, trying to get others to contribute for free to help them,or by companies who are trying to "commoditize their compliments"?

Most major open source software is not done as a labor of love.

Whereas most music is clearly the muses working through mortal souls, right? Come on...

Whereas most music is clearly the muses working through mortal souls, right? Come on...

I'm saying just the opposite, he seems to implying that the majority of well known, popular open source software is done by starving programmers as a labor of love. Their is usually a financial motive.

I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not a software developer so it may not hit as close to home as you hope. Having said that, I would point out that programming isn’t an art, but engineering. You’re not performing, you’re building something. Traditionally it’s been easier to earn a living by making something people want to buy than making art which may or may not be popular.

I don’t have a problem with that, and as I said, I don’t think anything other than a brief moment in the history of art does either.

I'm now imagining a disenchanted musician spending 8 hours a day at the cubicle making "business music."

Well you don't know anyone in the advertising and incidental music space

Sounds like session musicians, or maybe the composers of advertising jingles.

Centralized billing is not the most lucrative method for creators.

It's only good for the middleman.

I am not casting the old label system as a Utopia for artists but it seems like the brave new world is even worse.

> but has streaming really helped the average artist?

Sure has helped most of the artists I know, who would never be lucky enough/know the right people to be among the chosen elite that got to participate in the record system.

Streaming services and the internet means that 100000s of artists can have a following of maybe 1000 people each and still make ends meet doing what they love. They won't get filthy rich, but they'll make a living.

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