Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians) | Hacker News Reader

Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)

freakonomics.com

124 pointsingve125 comments

It seems to me like musicians have always been in a precarious relation to the economy, same as all other artists. The only difference is that for a brief time in the 20th century the average person was willing to spend money on music, unlike every other time in human history.

Nothing will ever stop people from making music, and 99% of working musicians are making a meager living doing what they enjoy, just like always.

That strikes me as dismissing "progress" as a mere blip in human history. The reason the average person was more willing to spend money on music is because we improved matters having to do with copyright and licensing. Good copyright and patent law serves a useful purpose in encouraging people to create or innovate in a system that would otherwise discourage doing so.

Complete nonsense. Physical media played a part. Before the walkman you had to share music with everyone in the room. The identity association that began in the 60s. The rise of popstars, the Beatles, cds, etc.

Nothing to do with copyright.. more people were breaking copyright during this period. In fact the people who broke copyright spent the most on music. Everyone broke copyright by recording songs from the radio. The first mass market recording devices were everywhere.

That's nonsense. What improved are means of communication and distribution. I.e. Internet. You can reach a lot more people. Copyright and patents have nothing to do with it.

It wasn't progress, it was change.

> Nothing will ever stop people from making music

The funny thing is how true this statement is, and yet how often it's deployed as if that means nobody needs to further consider or negotiate the present economics.

How would one establish the idea that average person wasn't willing to spend money on music before the 20th century? Because I'd expect as long as there's been instruments and money, there's been some form of economic participation.

But let's say it's true -- does that really direct a normative discussion on current economics? Because a hell of a lot of things about human society after industrialization have only been true for a brief time in human history, and that's no clear indicator of whether or not they have value.

Here's a better standard: how well does what we're doing support people who are in a position to make musical contributions that people value?

Recording sales fared pretty well by that standard, although there was the problem of predatory middlemen. Streaming revenues seem to have the same problem, and don't fare anywhere near as well.

Before recorded music, there was sheet music. It was a big business with "superstar" composers like Scott Joplin. It was common for a middle class house to have a piano in the parlor.

And as I understand it, even before the recording era, there were predatory middlemen exploiting the sheet music composers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Pan_Alley

You dare not whistle a tune before it had been published, lest someone steal it.

The great musicians of 5he 19th century and earlier didn't make a living selling recordings and concerts. The price that would get butts in seats wasn't enough to cover the cost of living for all the performers, the composers, and the house.

Back then, musicians fed themselves using a system of funds that has popped back up again now that selling records isn't economically realistic anymore: patronage.

Back then, musicians were patronized by monarchs, feudal lords, aristocrats, churches and schools. Nowadays it's media conglomerates, bourgeois philanthropists, and patreon users.

> The great musicians of 5he 19th century and earlier didn't make a living selling recordings and concerts.

Actually they did, certainly in the 19th century which was the era of the concert hall. Without recording technology, music had to be performed to be enjoyed. The market for live performances was much, much bigger. Because the market lacked the 'winner-take-all' aspect of today, the opportunity to make a living wage as a musician was easier than today.

It's not a matter of whether musicians get paid, it's where the money comes from. Even in the golden age of concert halls, ticket sales barely paid the rent. Orchestras and composers were reliant on donors and patrons.

Even Beethoven, superstar of his time, couldn't make a living on his own, he was reliant on Archduke Rudolph, Prince Kinsky, and Prince Lezkowitz to keep food on his table.

> how well does what we're doing support people who are in a position to make musical contributions that people value?

This is the best possible time to support an artist you enjoy. You can buy physical and digital copies of any artist in the world, artists can set up Patreon accounts, and you with a small amount of ingenuity can probably even mail your favorite artists a check directly.

The issue is that people don't do this, because they don't value the music enough to do it. It is not a great argument to say that Apple Music is mistreating artists, the fans are mistreating artists.

As a final point, the way most popular (not just pop) artists get popular is through marketing, advertising, venue promotion, radio deals, etc. The record company probably deserves the majority of the money produced by such enterprises because without their intervention no one would be that famous to begin with. Kanye West is a brand, just like Ford and Dockers.

Only indie artists can do that. Record companies are now signing musicians and bands to what they call "360" accounts, meaning that the company controls every aspect of how the musician might make money, from digital presence to merch to advertising to touring. By staying independent, they can make their own deals, but then they have the problem that they can't get on the radio and have a hard time getting known.

On the flip side, it's easier to be an indie artist now than it's ever been.

Do those deals have expirations, or are they "for life"?

I feel like once a musician is established, the label should have to justify their ongoing role in that musician's career, and certainly in the past lots of musicians have switched labels or started their own small labels later on in their career.

5-10-15 years and more is not unheard of. In case a musicians becomes established they will just say it's the result of their support and their investments, so that's when they push for max returns (see the many stories of rushed albums which labels forced out of the artists while trying to ride the wave of initial success).

> You can buy physical and digital copies of any artist in the world, artists can set up Patreon accounts, and you with a small amount of ingenuity can probably even mail your favorite artists a check directly.

> The issue is that people don't do this

People did do this. From the time legit outlets like iTunes appeared to up through around 2013, revenue from digital recording sales rose into the billions, on the road to matching 90s CD sales. But then they fell dramatically over the last 5 years, and we shouldn't talk about this as if it's a law of the internet or there's a big mystery why. Streaming services offered on-demand listening of huge catalogs for a fraction of the price. Consequently, the demand for purchased recordings dropped, and artists get paid a fraction of a fraction.

Patronage is nice, I'm glad the option exists, it's one of the rays of light.

Still it lacks one of the virtues of retailed recordings: you know how much you're supposed to pay to make a meaningful economic contribution. Do you want to listen to this song again and again? Great, pay an asking price for a single or album, you have done your part. Or decide it's not that important and listen to it when it comes up on transient music services like terrestrial radio or shuffle-streaming. Or decide it's kindof important and pirate but you know in the back of your head you haven't really meaningfully participated yet and you'll need to decide to one day (which is another thing services like Spotify work against -- they grant an imprimatur of legitimacy which erases that sense in the back of your head that you might owe something).

This statement reflects wearing a certain kind of blinders, where you think the current pop-music industry is what the word "music" means.

I can assure you that people were spending plenty on going to operas in the 19th century, for instance. And in the 18th century. And of course world-class orchestras have been making money for a few centuries, as well.

You are correct that there were those making money in music for the last few thousand years. However they were a minority: the vast majority of music was made by someone who did something else. You farmed all day, and when the day was done you made music.

Um, well yeah, those doing music professionally have always been a minority and still are, which has no bearing on this post, or this thread, or what I was talking about.

The thread is about professionals; those making money from music. Mr. Bach and Mr. Handel weren't farming all day, I can assure you.

No, they were getting wellfare from their government!

artists deserve to be paid more than technology companies that deliver us the art.

Spotify isn’t exactly rolling in money. They aren’t even making a profit.

unlike every other time in human history

This is not true. People have paid for music for centuries. Before it was recorded on discs, tapes, wires, or cylinders, people bought and sold sheet music. It was a massive industry.

Before everyone had an electronic music player there were pianos in almost every middle-class home. Pianos were a huge industry with some cities having a half-dozen local manufacturers.

And before pianos became mass-market, people bought sheet music to... get this... sing! People would get together in each other's houses to sing. Companies had bands and choirs, and would compete against each other.

Spending money on music is not something new.

Being in a band, even a low level band, is a great way for young men to get laid, and hence they are highly motivated to do it.

A friend of mine once had a conversation with the drummer of a nationally known band. The drummer was an ordinary looking fellow, who said he was a "high school loser never made it with a lady" type. After the band became known, he looked up and hooked up with every woman who'd rejected him in high school, including the married ones.

That's completely anecdotal and isn't typical, at least in the current culture. More often than not this is just a myth that musicians themselves spread to boost their ego and perceived status. Although, there's of course some basis in reality.

Read a history of about any band and you'll see the same effect. For example, see "The Dirt" which is the history of Motley Crue. The lead singer was recruited from another band, explaining that the only reason he had joined the other band was to get laid.

1. This may be a case of Survivorship bias. The most successful bands really take all the girls and all less successful just say they get laid constantly to boost their status. 2. Mötley Crüe started almost 40 years ago! Come to any gig of a really loud local band playing their instruments with attitude (don't really want to say "Rock") today and estimate the gender proportion in the crowd.

Ask the drummer in the next local band you see live.

You know, I am the drummer (besides other things).

Sorry it's not working out for you, dude :-(

I was just trying to be serious, honest and objective, sorry it was lost on you.

The thesis here is that more people are paying for music than in that golden age of music. Spotify in theory has enabled access to a diversity of music at a more tolerable price point which has grown the pool of music payers but not necessarily equated to more money for artists.

It's interesting how different types of music have thrived through the streaming economy.

Hip hop is huge on Spotify, where it struggled for radio play and sales before because commercial radio is so conservative (in the sense of risk-averse). Then there's the whole Billie Eilish thing: huge on Spotify, almost no radio play at all.

On the other hand, there are Billboard 100 artists who are more or less absent from the streaming landscape. Some sell lots of albums but aren't on the streaming charts at all.

It's probably not as simple as saying that streaming is only good for established artists, but bad for the long tail. For some of the previous long tail, it's been very good. And for some of the oldies, it's been phenomenal - Spotify enables them to monetize their back catalogue with near zero promotion or distribution costs, year round.

> Hip hop is huge on Spotify, where it struggled for radio play and sales before because commercial radio is so conservative.

What? See how many rap albums are in this list [1].

1: https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/2000/top-album-sale...

There's a bit of cherry picking going on choosing a year where Eminem and Jay-Z were at their peak. 2000 was probably one of the top three years in the last 20 or so for hip hop.

Scheduling Eminem for radio play while he is arguably the biggest artist on the planet is not really going out on a limb.

I picked year 2000 because it was well before streaming. There were dedicated rap/hip-hop stations for well over a decade at point.

> Scheduling Eminem for radio play while he is arguably the biggest artist on the planet is not really going out on a limb.

I mean, you can't be the biggest artist on the planet without some level of main-stream support in the first place.

To say that hip-hop became more popular due to streaming is just obviously nonsense.

In 2017, hip hop surpassed rock to become the most popular genre, according to Nielsen, and crucially that was reflected in streaming rather than album sales:

> According to the report, R&B and hip-hop are now responsible for 25.1% of all music consumption in the U.S., while rock claims 23%.

> Looking at the rest of the numbers listed that dissect how people are consuming these styles of music, it’s clear that streaming is to thank for the swap in ranking. Rock is far and away the winner when it comes to album sales—the genre claims 40% of all album sales in the country—but the total number of records actually purchased dwindles every year, so while that percentage may remain steady or even climb, it’s not representative of how Americans are truly consuming music. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2017/07/17/hip-hop...

[2] http://www.insideradio.com/free/in-a-streaming-world-it-s-r-...

So what? Your original statement that rap is popular because of streaming is nonsense.

Rap popularity was steadily increasing before streaming, you can't credit streaming for it's popularity.

Rap/HipHop sales have been growing since Napster compared to rock. The people willing to pay for music changed. Rap isn't more popular in general but the ability to pirate was much lower in this subgroup. So Rap sells more.. but rock concert's out sell rap concerts where indy rap isn't as celebrated as the superstar.

It had nothing to do with the subgroups availability to pirate. By that I’m assuming you mean the “urban youth”.

Sale of rap and even “gangsta rap” has been dominated by White people for two decades.

https://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/06/really-listening/

Hip-hop has been on the mainstream radar for about 30 years, dude. If Spotify had come out in '90 (that's a "Wonders of the World Wide Web" video begging to be made), you'd have a point. But as it is, for a while in tge early 2000s the Billboard 100 was consistently topped by R&B acts, or as Chris Rock liked to call it, "singing over rap beats".

Where Spotify comes into play is granting exposure to artists who are still trying to make it, or whom mainstream radio won't play. But that's cross-genre and diesn't affect the mainstream viability of hip-hop itself.

Spotify has had a severe and negative effect on musicians who make what I term 'peak experience music'. Amazing music, but not something you listen to every day. Say you listen once a month or even just a few times a year.

Before: 2 listens = dealer price of a CD in UK = about £7.5 (on a good UK indie that's split 50/50 with the artist).

Now: 2 listens = income from 2 streams on Spotify = about £0.0006

I'm thinking of artists like Autechre.

Spotify is starting the shape the sort of music that artists can be successful with, in a bad way.

If you care about an artist, buy things from them. Records, tee shirts, posters, concert tickets, etc. Streaming revenue is essentially a rounding error.

This is not true/unfair interpretation.

An artist does not get paid after the first payment from the label from the sale of a CD. If you play the CD on repeat, the artist does not benefit, nor does the label.

/Labels/ get paid for every single listen on Spotify.

There is also Spotify Direct, too, and the artist can directly benefit more than if they went with a label.

Maybe pay per play is not fair, payout shouldn't be linearly proportional to number of plays!

huh? is label revenue unrelated to artist revenue?

You appear to have missed the point. I'm singling out a genre of music where you might only listen to an album a few times. So repeat plays are irrelevant.

I spend less music in streaming than before, but surely a lot of people didn't spend US$20 each month in music

In 1999 at the peak the average person spent $28 now the average person spends less than 15.

As an amateur musician I still make most of my monthly sales from iTunes. Streaming pays so little, unless you're a big name – which incentivizes the big labels while squeezing the smaller artists.

Early platform like Lala (bought by Apple) had a cool model – $0.10 per song, but you can only stream it. Ownership was still there, and artists were paid equally per sale.

Nevertheless, getting your music distributed is easier today than ever, and I'm sure all artists are grateful for that.

> Streaming pays so little, unless you're a big name

Are you saying big acts get more per stream?

Also, I'd love to hear what you think about how the incentives from Spotify et al are changing music itself. From what I understand, a play isn't registered until a certain portion of the song has been played. This hurts songs that have a slow build and so hooks are being pushed right up front. Do you think it's homogenizing music to any degree?

>Are you saying big acts get more per stream?

The big acts may get more per stream because of 2 factors:

1) the Spotify allocation algorithm of subscription payments works top-down from the most popular artists' percentage of total streams instead of bottom-up from individuals' play logs. (The top comment of a previous HN thread discusses this.[1])

2) Some record labels have (had?) negotiated sweetheart deals with Spotify for different revenue share and stream payouts. So a Universal/Sony/Warner major label with a roster of desirable artists that Spotify wanted may get slightly more per stream than an unknown indie label with no leverage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226497

> Some record labels have (had?) sweetheart deals with Spotify

That reminds me of something else I've been thinking about. The labels all have substantial equity stakes in Spotify. It feels like that could be a massive conflict of interest or maybe a collusion problem. Why should the labels push for higher streaming fees when that could hurt Spotify's stock price which would hurt the label's own balance sheets?

I thought they mostly exited by now. I know Sony and Universal sold significant amounts of their stakes.

I don't think Spotify (streaming services) are influencing the composition of new music – listening habits are mostly unchanged since popular music in the 50's. The 3-minute song with the initial hook is a product of 50's AM radio. Whereas Radiohead/Sigur Ros/Slowdive artists with long builds do so intentionally, and their listeners enjoy that about them.

But.... what has changed is the frequency in which artists need to release content in order to compete in the algorithm arena. Some artists understand this, and more singles, EPs and early album previews allow for more "touch points" with their audiences throughout the year.

> what has changed is the frequency in which artists need to release content

So, the album is dying? Could something like Pink Floyd's The Wall be released today? It's a two CD package with gapless songs.

The Album has always been a weird thing. Yes, the album as a concept has largely fallen off. It has very little advantage over a 2-4 song EP at this point. You no longer need to package weak b-sides in, because they're not going to get plays anyway. More bangers, less chaff.

But yea, you can still do a concept album like The Wall or Sgt. Pepper's. Kids doing drugs and laying around listing to weird noises for an hour+ is still a thing these days.

I don't quite understand this claim that the concept of Albums have fallen off, Metal still puts out quality albums today.

The album maybe is being transformed into something like TV series. When you wait for the next week to hear the next verse. And to fully understand any particular one, you have to listen to previous 2 or 3.

It could be released today. And it would be nothing like the event it was at the time.

It's not about the physical delivery format, but about the social rituals around it and the impact they make.

Streaming cheapens and commodifies music and turns culture into wallpaper. Likewise subscription video on Netflix, etc, which seems to have become a home for trashy potboilers about zombies, vampires, superheroes, and soapy post-apocalyptic dramas. Likewise Amazon's all-you-can-binge-on KDP for fiction readers.

Culture has always had the potential to be an event. In the past, the arrival of a stand-out movie, album, or novel literally left a generational imprint.

It's hard to imagine Spotify, Netflix, Apple, or Amazon, creating an environment in which that's possible. There will be products that have millions, maybe billions of fans, but there won't be many creative projects that keep the interest of those fans for more than a month or so, and even fewer - probably none at all, in fact - that will continue to have cultural power decades after their release.

Listening habits almost unchanged since the 50ies?? Nowadays almost everyone (young) walks around with headphones on in public, in school and at work, even at home, listening to music of their own choosing.

Compared to the 50ies, 70ies or even the 90ies, several things have changed significantly: How many hours of the week that people listen to their own music has increased tremendously. The number of artists and genres that people listen to over a year increased massively. How long an average song is in "the rotation" has decreased massively.

If something hasn't "necessarily" saved musicians, then there's not much of a defense of whatever else it's done for the industry.

And any idea that services like Spotify were just the only way forward to revenue is one that thoroughly ignores the growth of digital recording sales that took place independent of it (not to mention what they may well have been like if it'd never happened).

Buffet streaming services marry the worst of piracy and the old-school middleman capture. They give the illusory impression that you're actually rewarding value.

> Buffet streaming services marry the worst of piracy and the old-school middleman capture.

You have an interesting perspective... as a consumer for me Spotify marries the best of those two worlds. I get the music I want and discoverability, quality, and ease of use is extremely good.

You're talking experience rather than economics. The consumer experience of Spotify is certainly much more convenient and pleasant than the experience of P2P piracy.

And it turns out that can be true even while the economics of buffet streaming services simultaneously effect the drastic cuts in first-order revenue that piracy brought directing it instead to distributor and label.

Short-term experience anyway. Long-term experience requires remaining a subscriber ad infinitum. I admittedly come from the perspective of someone who prefers to own music that I care about. Which, in turn, is very influenced by the fact that I had a very large digital/digitized music catalog before streaming came along so incremental purchases aren't very expensive.

I think there is a difference between collectors and people who just want to listen to music. I gladly pay Spotify each month to NOT have to manage a collection of physical or digital music.

I gladly pay HBO and Netflix as well, but it seems no matter what I pay, I cant get the same movie/series coverage that Spotify provides for music.

I don't really think of myself as a music collector. I just like to know that if I decide tomorrow I don't want to pay for a streaming music service any longer, I'll still have all the music I care about. That said, given that all the major music services have at least most non-niche music, having subscriptions to some things is just the way things are these days and you're probably not realistically going to drop a music streaming service.

Video is, of course, much more fragmented but it's also different in that you're not going to rewatch most video content. There never were music rental stores (although libraries did/do have music) but video rentals were a thing pre-streaming.

Platforms like Spotify, YouTube, etc, are a marketing channel - not a revenue channel. They can be used effectively to develop an audience, but not to monetize it.

For example see Pusheen the cat. Started off as a tumblr web comic/character and now generates millions in merchandising revenue:

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/how-an-internet-cat-craze-be...

Not true for Spotify, if you are regularly racking up millions of plays ie you are hitting editorial playlists, then Spotify is very lucrative. Good Spotify stats also signals to promoters that you are a good to book, so it boosts live income.

I'd agree on YouTube however, artists I work with see very little income from YouTube, which is quite sickening and problematic for artists given how much of the younger demographic use YouTube as a primary source of music.

> Platforms like Spotify, YouTube, etc, are a marketing channel - not a revenue channel

Which would be cool, if Spotify wasn't meant to be a replacement for a revenue channel.

You can't replace something that is dead.

Revenues from US digital recorded music sales steadily rose from the introduction of iTunes up into the billions through at least 2012. Maybe 2013/14-ish. I think at one point it'd actually matched 90s CD sales revenue, though I may not recall correctly.

That was hardly "dead." There's this narrative that goes around "oh, yeah, the internet happened, copies are cheap, no one was ever going to buy music again" ... and it's not true.

The truth is that there was a thriving digital recording sales growing up to take the place of physical recording sales. And buffet streaming kneecaped it.

Buffet streaming killed it because it's cost-competitive to the consumer, period. That's a triumph of capitalism.

At best that's like saying it's a triumph of capitalism when Walmart hollows out local retailers, or industrial agriculture hollows out smaller operators and with it communities. Sure, you get cheaper goods, but there are less pleasant externalities that go with it.

As someone once said about another triumph of capitalism: when you value McDonalds, you get McJobs.

Possibly McMusic, as well.

This interview sets up this false dichotomy where people ostensibly accessed music by spending $15 on a CD or not at all. The contention seems to be that piracy/Napster were a forgone conclusion because there was no real choice.

People listened to ad-supported radio or they listened to records socially or borrowed them. That’s how it worked for about 80 years.

I’m not defending the music industry, its practices, or its stalwart backwardness. But suggesting music was inaccessible is plainly false.

Or they made copies of friend's records ("ripping"). the CD-R drive has been around for 2 decades now, and came as a default option on many laptops and desktops in the early 2000s. And before that, people had CD/Casette Boomboxes where you could record CD tracks to the cassette. It was the only way to make mix tapes.

I remember the days of ripping CDs borrowed from friends on a 4x speed drive; back then, you could do 8x but there was a risk of file corruption/recording failure.

I completely forgot about this set of practices. Yes, a huge part of youth culture concerned itself with the creation and sharing of mix tapes. Looked at through this lens it makes me almost wistful thinking about the mix CDs I exchanged with friends in high school. They took a fair amount of work to put together and were often deeply personalized for the receiver. Makes you wonder who’s missing out, us or “kids these days.”

Yeah, those were the days of making mixes for actual events, like road trips, relationship anniversaries, etc; these would be highly personal mixes, with inside jokes and obscure references. Now the trend has shifted to becoming an influencer with public playlists.

So, Spotify pays 70% of revenue to labels. In the end it's labels who pay the artists.

Why does no one, literally no one ask: where the hell does that money disappear? Everyone is busy writing 20,000-word essays on how streaming is bad for artists. Maybe, just maybe, it's not streaming that's bad but the labels and their agreements with both the artists and the streaming services?

>For a company that doesn’t really make anything

People think technology just develops itself huh?

What technology are they developing that people are asking for?

People love to complain about nothing, eh?

Think about what the distribution landscape for musicians used to be like in the past.

You can literally put up your entire music catalog at almost no effort and and generate enough popularity to support your act through live plays. Live shows have always been the main source of revenue for artists.

People saying that the situation for artists is bleak have no idea of what they're talking about. It has never in history been easier to start a music act and get followers from all around the world. It has never been easier to concentrate fans of every possible little genre into their own communities.

What most people don't realize is that the live act scene has exploded all over the world. There a literally thousands of live music festivals going on every summer that just weren't there 20 years ago. Modern festival culture is fueled by streaming media, Soundcloud, BandCamp and Youtube.

I follow scenes where an artist's greatest hit gets 20k plays on YouTube and 500 physical vinyl copies. That's literally enough to make a living and tour around a little on your free weekends. How possible do you think that was before Youtube?

I prefer to buy, not rent music. Luckily we have enough DRM-free music stores around that simply sell you music files. FLAC is the best option.

Like what stores?

Beatport and Bandcamp, at least.

Though obligatory fuck Beatport, they only give you 24 hours to download what you buy and then the only way to download again is to rebuy, or beg. Even a FLAC is only ~30MB, there's no need to be this cheap.

https://bandcamp.com/ is really wonderful if you're asking about music in general and not artists hitting the billboard charts. However, as it supports free listening there isn't a barrier to searching around and discovering new things.

If you want some good coding music for the day I'd suggest starting with https://wanderband.bandcamp.com/

I love bandcamp. For 9 years now I've been getting almost all my music (I think maybe one or two albums from Amazon in-between) from them. I can get straightforward notifications, I can get whatever format I want and I can stream the whole album as much as I want before buying it (though I never listened to one fully before buying it – or deciding against it).

And not to forget that I can often choose my own price (when I was a student I sometimes paid less, nowadays I usually pay a bit more)

Yep, Bandcamp is my favorite store for music as well.

Bandcamp, for one. CDBaby used to offer flac downloads for 1.5x the cost of lossy, IIRC. Not sure what their role here is anymore.

As someone who (happily) pays for music and needs it in a high quality format, I really like Bandcamp. After buying say 10 tracks I notice on my credit card statement 3 or 4 transactions, one for each of the labels the tracks belong to, so I know the artist should end up with a fair cut.

I buy FLAC from digital stores pretty regularly and my favorites are (obligatory) Bandcamp, 7digital, HDTracks, and TIDAL. I also end up buying physical cd's pretty often and just ripping them to FLAC (this is actually my preferred method, I only go to digital if I have to). Alternatively, I've heard good things about murfie, but have never personally used it.

Often on Bandcamp and GOG.

* https://bandcamp.com

* https://gog.com

Some other stores that you can find DRM-free FLAC in:

* https://www.7digital.com

* https://us.7digital.com

* https://www.hdtracks.com

* https://murfie.com

* https://www.junodownload.com

* https://store.tidal.com

* https://www.prestomusic.com

* https://www.prostudiomasters.com

* https://www.jamendo.com

https://bleep.com/

Bandcamp for sure. The radio/streaming landscape is extremely bleak for anything that isn't Top 40 material. Fortunately, Bandcamp has become the go-to community to upload stuff that's more indie feeling. As a result, it's the place to go now if you're looking for music off the beaten path. Bandcamp also has a weekly newsletter highlighting artists across many different genres, from African guitar music from the '60s, post-punk and alternative rock, minimal electronic, indie hiphop, you name it.

It saved music labels from illegal p2p (maybe). But it introduced the shitty model pay-per-service and now you need 10 accounts to get 10 different things. The same applies for videos.

The unique true service that can centralise everything is still Kodi + plugins

Now can someone do Spotify for old movies? The online Netflix catalog keeps shrinking. Studios are cracking down on Youtube showing movies that used to be used as filler on late-night TV.

I would argue that most musicians should be salaried employees making 80-150k. The label would then handle everything else. The musicians only need to focus on creation and performing. I have always been interested in the problem Spotify is trying to solve for. However, I think they've only solved half the problem. The other half of the problem is solved by putting long tail musicians on a salary and then they can graduate out of that once they achieve a certain level of commercial success.

(Why is this being downvoted?) It is on topic and is not at all hostile.

This is essentially the pre-Beatles model we saw in Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building. Carole King's biggest hits were written for like $75/week. It declined as musicians started writing and recording their own songs and being self-contained creative acts, not to mention the, shall we say, "unfair equity strategies" the record labels used. That is, it's all well and good until the bosses take all the big money.

That's interesting. I didn't know this but I think this model should be brought back for most cases I think safe guards can be put into place to guard against "unfair equity strategies".

It was the dominant musicwriting business model from the sheet-music era until about 1962.

The problem with this is that it requires really successful artists to work for far less than the value they create, which they won't – because they know they could make far more money independently.

And without the top performers subsidizing the salaries of everyone else, the whole thing falls apart.

Top performers are already working for far less than the value they create allegedly. Usually, there are a whole host of people working on a project.

Right now you have fake writing and producing credits simply designed to generate a stream of income for the musician. I think going to a salary would allow people who are best at writing or production or something other than singing being able to focus and it brings the cost to produce a record down.

You may or may not be able to make more money independently. You never know when the public is going to move on to some other sounds and you never know the perks that are lost as a result. The top of the top performers probably could swing the independence but for many it may not be the way to go. The bottom line is that for the vast majority of musicians a salary system could be better to work under.

I think everything should be on the table as it relates to how the music business is run and that's what the Spotify CEO said he was interested in. He's just doing from one side instead of both sides of the equation. That's why the vast majority artists and content creators are on the losing end of Streaming.

The long tail is dead. The algorithm that was supposed to help you find it has killed it instead.

The long tail is more alive than ever, but algorithms have always been a bad way to find it. Instead, listen to personal recommendations on web forums etc. There are people who are passionate about any obscure micro-genre you can imagine, and they'll point you to the best of it. Bandcamp and Soundcloud are full of long tail music that's completely ignored by the mainstream music industry.

It's interesting, I've gone back to Spotify from Apple Music primarily because I can easily find more interesting playlists from curators.

I don't think Spotify has any kind of special algorithmic sauce, they just make it easy for people create and share playlists.

It amazes me how most of the other streaming services try to turn everything into an algorithm, via "special radio" stations, etc. And yet, the best way to provide a long tail for music still seems to be basic web 2.0 - let the people make the content for you.

In my humble opinion all discovery algorithms with all large providers are terrible. Instead of expanding they narrow down choices and never surprise me in a good way like some human curated playlist can.

I had been switching between Apple Music, Spotify and Google Music in different countries. Currently I have settled on Google Music simply because Google practically abandoned Google Music so they are not so in my face with curated playlists and stations.

On the other hand I think that there is opportunity for good (like in really working) AI engine for music recommendations.

What’s interesting is that these algos are trained on human feedback. What does that say about our revealed preferences in music?

As an anecdote I have left Apple Music after it had been suggesting to me at least 3 heavy metal playlists for 30 days. And this is the one genre I do not listen to.

I had been clicking 'I don't like it' buttons hoping the AI will get it but no luck. So after 30 days I had enough and moved on back to Spotify.

So much for human feedback.

Maybe you actually like heavy metal but won’t admit it to yourself ;).

(Just kidding, but this kind of thing will be more common in the future, especially as we learn more about how little the brain knows about its own desires and motivations)

If you let an algorithm script a movie, it would be a 2-hr superhero movie with extremely simplistic moral conundrums, that will cost $300m to make, but will gross $1 billion +.

If the algo scripted a TV sitcom, it would be 5-6 mostly white people who occasionally hook up, break up, get married, struggle to conceive, and then everything eventually works out.

Same goes for music. People have a habit of liking what's in front of them. Few are going to want to make the effort to find something that's more than "good enough".

The unofficial gmusic API is why I continue using gmusic. I make many playlists for work (teaching spin classes) and I use the API to aggregate the songs I use and clean out old playlists.

There's definitely some algorithmic shenanigans going on with Spotify on any of their auto playlists. Whatever algorithm they have decides that I absolutely love one specific artist and shoves them down my throat for months.

For a solid year, any time I played a Daily Mix or let one of my personal playlists runout and it reverted to "recommended music", Neko Case was always in the first top 3 songs. Before that it was Iron and Wine. I don't mind either artist, but I have never chosen to play either one myself.

I do like Spotify's curated playlists though. They are always a better source of new music than the automatic playlists.

Right, I'm not saying Spotify isn't trying out algorithms at all, but their algorithmic stuff doesn't seem much different from Apple Music, Google Play, etc. A lot of the "algorithmic" stuff enters into "lame" territory fast, where you see the issues like artist fixation, or "variations on a theme" where you get like 5 remixes or live cuts of the same song.

The main benefit of Spotify is that I can just bypass the algorithms, and go straight to people. And that's really where the "long tail" effect seems to thrive.

I don't know if this is (still?) true, but I've heard that user-generated playlists are their special algorithmic sauce, at least for "Discover Weekly". It's designed to take songs you're familiar with, look for them in other peoples' playlists, and fill the gaps between songs you already know about with songs that other people have filled the gaps with in their own user-generated playlists, but that you haven't heard yourself.

It sure seems like the a lot of suggestions on Spotify try to find "similarities" based on things you've listened to recently. Makes sense that the similarities are very likely pulled from recent popular additions ... from curators.

My sense is that is probably as good as it tends to get, unless you want to get incredibly creepy and start bringing outside personal information, e.g., associating that the 40-something living in Chicago may have an affinity towards Wilco. Personally, I'd rather deal with "meh" suggestions then have my music service track detailed demographic models of me.

> It amazes me how most of the other streaming services try to turn everything into an algorithm, via "special radio" stations,

I think they do that because it's the only way to keep people from switching to rival platforms. Spotify's selection isn't that different from Google Play Music/Apple Music/Amazon Prime Music etc. There's also little in the way of community interaction on those platforms beyond "sharing playlists".

SoundCloud at least has a system where you can comment on specific parts of a song. It creates a really interesting visualization of which parts of a single song people enjoyed the most.

Yeah, load in all your varied collection of interesting indie tunes and watch them spit out modern pop covers as recommendations. It's surreal... almost like the training set was, "what will.make us the most money to promote?"

I've always found the opposite, in that Spotify points me toward music I'm sure they are paying almost nothing for.

Can you substantiate this? Based on conversations with musicians I know in that long tail, seems like it's helped them get discovered but they're not earning a livable wage from it. It's not clear to me that they'd be any better off in the absence of Spotify, although I don't have strong convictions either way.

If you are part of the long tail today, then you are definitely better off now than in previous years where your market was local audiences and whomever you could reach via zines.

The thing that fascinates me about Spotify and other streaming services is that the people who weren't willing to fork out 15$ for a CD in the past are now willing to pay 10$ every month for... pretty much nothing at all, if you think about it?!

> pretty much nothing at all

Except for instant access to what is probably the biggest collection of music in the world. I don’t mean to be snarky but, have you ever used Spotify? It’s a godsend.

You're getting a service? I used to buy a CD a week and listened to less music than I do now with Spotify for a quarter of the cost. Yes, it's nice to have a physical collection but I'd rather discover more new music

> willing to pay 10$ every month for... pretty much nothing at all

A collection of 14 million songs doesn't sound like "nothing at all"

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