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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Music market is almost perfectly competitive market. Extremely low margins should be the norm.

The supply is endless. Talent pool is huge. Millions of amateurs are making music even if nobody is paying for them and are delighted if someone wants to listen them. People are willing to take huge pay cut to earn living doing music and perform in lousy bars.

I think the best model is patronage. Music online is almost completely free and works as marketing to get people to listen. If people like the music and want to hear some more, they will pay in advance for musician to produce it and perform it.

Superstars are somewhat separate category. It's a showbiz and fashion industry where people like what others like to connect. The product sold is famous persona with music.

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You have forgotten that most people like to listen to music they have heard before. That leads to music that is popular becoming more popular (since it is played in public places), and that music can then be sold for a high price because it is part of a small set of popular songs.

That totally stops working when people start YouTube autoplay or similar ML-based picker. It makes discovery of niche artists practically zero-friction.

Except the ML based picker soon learns that people like to hear music they've heard before too, so recommends popular tracks disproportionately often, amplifying the effect.

I used Spotify to find a bunch of great new artists with one of their "Made for You" daily playlsits. Now, either the shopping center near me has great taste, or they got the same "Made for Them" playlist I got. Because they are playing some great music, which has never been the case before. Normally malls, stores and other public venues have the same Top 40 playlist fed to them by a corporate subscription as everywhere else.

This makes me wonder if Spotify isn't a tastemaker, just like radio and television were. Not playing the hits, but defining what becomes a hit.

It also learns if you like rare music and somehow finds networks of people/videos that you resonate with. Every day I discover something interesting that I wouldn't have thought to click on (artwork + name), by just letting YouTube autoplay. Classic Zambian rock, Nigerian disco, rare 80s Italian or Japanese electronic music, some brand new French dub guy.

Invariably there are a bunch of other people commenting about how "the algorithm" surprised them again. There isn't a single algorithm.

Spotify’s decision to automatically go into “radio mode” after you reach the end of your album / playlist is the single greatest improvement to my life as a music consumer. It has exposed me to more new music in the past year than in the previous decade.

IMO it's more of a laziness and curation problem... I love discovering new music (most of my playlists are my own "finds") but it's incredibly time consuming, signal to noise ratio is extremely low.

Reading this, I found myself nodding along after I replaced:

- musician to developer

- online music to open source project

- performance to consulting/training/conferences

It’s funny thinking about all the similarities between the two.

Software business is service business pretending to be manufacturing business.

The main difference is that you can't easily substitute one piece of code for another leading to little reuse and huge demand for custom solutions. Songs on the other hand mostly substitute fine within genres, we could stop producing music entirely and people would still have more than enough music to keep them happy.

disagree. part of what makes art valuable is its commentary on the human experience. which is changing every day.

what a dismal dark musical world this invokes. I suppose this works for people who don't actually listen to music in any sort of appreciably observant fashion.

I get that some people basically just vibe along with music and don't hear the harmonic movement, the intervals, the tones of the instruments.

This point of view gives zero credence the possibility of any actually original music.

>the harmonic movement, the intervals, the tones of the instruments

Are you a boomer? These days nobody respectable listens to music where those things are present and IMO that's a good thing.

What music are you listening to that doesn’t have harmonic movement or intervals?

But there's a shortage of developers, and there's a big difference between building what FAANG wants you to build and what you want to build.

A better analogy is up-and-coming musicians and startups. You struggle in a garage until you're discovered, then you sign away most of your rights for bad working conditions and a three-year run.

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