A graphic illustration of music industry madness | Hacker News Reader

A graphic illustration of music industry madness

pcpro.co.uk

28 pointsarihelgason11 comments

And it is still a simplification: If I read this correctly it is only for the UK. Try to do this for the whole EU (27 royalty collection societies) and their partly overlapping, partly distinct right systems. Good luck.

A spiffy, modern infographic would actually be really useful here. This one is a bit messy.

    This one is a bit messy.

That's the entire point: the flow of rights and royalties in the music industry is a mess.

Making it "spiffy" and "modern" may make it more aesthetically pleasing, but it's not going to make it any less of a mess. That's a problem with the underlying data, not the infographic.

It could certainly be cleaned up a bit because the text is rather hard to read, but I don't think doing that's really going to change anything.

Is there a startup opportunity here?

You certainly wouldn't be the first to try.

Yes, and I have a patent pending on it.

To be truly disruptive here you need to remove the performing rights organisations and (most of the) record labels.

The large record labels have an entrenched position and they use there cash to stop the business being changed. It is happening slowly though. The performing rights groups have an interest in gathering royalties and not promoting music.

Some record labels really do know their niche and are managing to stay afloat (just) through diversification and begging people to support their artists (and thus them). They are normally very small (<10 people) companies.

Spotify is a great product but it's moving too slow for me. They need to invest in revenue streams for artists ASAP (as they have hinted they will so) but I feel they are hampered by their investment partners (large labels) who don't want to see revenue streams for artists that they can't plunder. Without the labels you're not going to get the Lady Gagas that most people want to listen to though so I understand why they went that way.

ah here we go again - society bashing!

if you actually spoke to the artists, you'd realise they're pretty happy with the PRS. it does send them cheques after all, which can be a nice thing if you're a struggling artist.

if you fundamentally believe in the role of copyright, then the collection societies have an important role.

If a shop plays a radio the radio station pays to play the song so why should the shop pay to hear the song? It's free advertising for the music after all. The collections agencies do a poor job. They try to maximise revenue to justify their existence but hamper exposure for artists.

If you want to move the industry on they are a keystone holding the old business model together. Remove them and the large labels that monopolise shell space, distribution and negotiations with new technology companies and we might get somewhere where more artists and fans are happy.

The startup opportunity I see is not removing anyone in the process to make it easier to acquire content. Rather, the opportunity I see is a framework that makes it much easier to navigate the legal necessities required. Most legalese is boilerplate after the first couple uses, right? A webapp could take inputs for who's involved in the process (with auto-complete fields) and then have a checklist with buttons for sending legalese and paying license fees.

I doubt whether a similar graph for any other equally sized piece of our economy would look any different. Many people profit in many ways from many things. Nothing in the article supports the assertion that the flow is unusually complicated.

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