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Comment by imperio59 | Hacker News Reader

Explain how it's an outdated business model? Content creator (musician, film studio) makes content. They must make money to recoup the costs of making said content so they can (at least) make more of the same content.

Are you saying all musicians should just go back to only doing live shows and concerts and give up recording music altogether?

This kind of comment just blatantly ignores the fact that there are very real issues at play, especially when big names in music are taking their music down from places like Spotify because they're just hardly getting any reward for it.

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For the big labels, most of the money is not going into the costs of making the content itself - most of it is going into marketing, executives, etc. The musicians themselves get a small portion of it.

The model faces some threat due to the shift of musicians moving to do their own marketing themselves without a label, and releasing the music themselves onto services like Bandcamp, or even directly to services such as Amazon, iTunes, etc. The internet has provided a powerful medium to fight against the entrenched interests of the big labels that don't feel like they need to do more for their artists.

The business model relies upon the scarcity of copies and that the copyright owner is the only person able to make copies. That was reasonable many years ago, but today copies can be made and published by anybody with a computer in milliseconds. The business model was overtaken by technology a long time ago, but instead of shifting to a different model, they rely upon the law enforcing a kind of Ludditism where we all pretend that this amazing copying and publishing technology doesn't exist for anybody but the copyright holders.

There are alternative business models – you mention live shows and concerts, but there's also things like the street performer protocol. But as long as the law artificially props up the old-fashioned way of doing things, there's no impetus to try other things. They aren't intrinsically entitled to this specific business model and it makes less and less sense to keep up this weird fiction for this reason.

I just bought an album for 9 bucks off of bandcamp. What are the record labels for again?

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