Platform capitalism devalued the music industry
blog.usejournal.com
blog.usejournal.com
Also the graph in the beginning shows the long linear decline in non-streaming music sales that started decades before streaming became viable, hence not caused by streaming, and in fact streaming platforms are now propping up the mainstream music industry which otherwise would be really circling the drain.
It was downloads. Anyway the article specifically calls out "streaming platforms" and that's what I take issue with.
The big difference is the newer streaming platforms tend to be subscription-based or otherwise ad-based and share revenue with the music industry.
My point is the decline in music industry revenue is more due to rogue free download sites or user uploads to YouTube, etc. This generated no (direct) revenue to the music industry. Whereas the newer streaming platforms are working with the music industry and are turning back the tide.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-...
https://nowtoronto.com/music/features/artists-vs-spotify/
That music industry money isn't going to the artists.
https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-...
(Ironically, Napster's streaming service appears to pay the most out of all of them now)
No argument there! The artists have always been the last to be paid. It may be getting worse for the artists, but the situation for actual creators has always been bad ... on average.
Buddy Holly was revolutionary for the way he negotiated his contracts and set a precedent for better treatment for a time. There a lot more nuance to that history.
which not coincidentally is also related to another platform economy, the shift of advertising revenue from publishers and distributors to the large platforms, Ben Thompson writes about this all the time.
I think it's largely detrimental to independent creators, it treats the independent creator of artistic work as an afterthought in the name of aggregate consumer welfare and price. It's centralizing power in the name of efficiency and people talk gleefully about it because it robs the distributors and taxi companies, and movie studios and so on of their perceived ill-gotten power.
I think that's a huge mistake, the centralization of power streamlines all goods and removes all diversity, takes agency away from everyone but the large platforms, it turns open spaces into proprietary walled gardens because it's the only way for platforms to defend their content, and we're going to really regret it in a few years if we don't already.
I don't agree, because "the movie studios and so on" that you referred were actually the centralizing power, and that power was overthrown by these new platforms in a way that they no longer control and arbitrarily restrict access to the public.
This is partially accurate, but I think it's more accurate to say that journalism in general is struggling because the way the attention economy works now: firehose supply, fiercer competition for attention, consumer indifference to being the customer rather than product, and algorithmic/crowdsourced content recommendation. And the rise of platforms figures into some degree of every one of those aspects.
Music Journalists were the "Social Influencers" of their day.
They were given front row seats, overnight stays at 5-star hotels, lavish meals, and flights on private jets with touring bands.
Without Music Journalists, and their access to print, there was just no means to getting the word out. They could make or break any artist.
Techno is it's own beast, it's most surprising, that it didn't get flogged to death by commercialization. EDM had the stigma to be perceived as a fad by most to begin with, a non-sustainable stardom driven branch-off that has used up it's novelty quite fast.
Music rights themselves still seem super expensive, when they are not meant to lure in customers, when it comes to video games and how they are shut down left and right.
We can take bets on how long, either directly using betting markets or indirectly by founding or investing in companies which depend on the profitability of certain kinds of scalable thing, but there's nothing scalable which can magically only be scaled the right way by the right people.
If your generalization applies (and it may well apply), then that's something to consider for anyone who could find themselves as easily exploited by scale as its beneficiary.
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/10/06/445039871/...
Live is scaleable when it comes to the industry, festivals are international brands now, idol bands exist. Artists and performers find themselves again mostly at the short end of the stick.
I would be FINE with that, if it were sustainable.
If you could play one concert a week and somehow pay your 4 band members $50K per year each--that would be okay.
The problem is that it seems to be more typical that you play 3 concerts a week and lose money. You practically need to play every single day to even make ANY amount of money. And that's just not sustainable.
How quickly we forget the other platforms that used to dominate the music industry -- radio, MTV, distribution networks, music retailers -- that extracted maximum profit from listeners while excluding most artists from profits.
It's a similar story in other media industries. B&N is regarded as a victim of Amazon's dominance of the book industry, but 25 years ago it was regarded as a heartless juggernaut devouring the book industry.
Digital files have infinite supply. Draw a classic supply and demand diagram using that information and look at where the price should be. The supply curve is a vertical line at infinity on the x-axis. The demand curve crosses it at $0. Everyone knows and feels this intrinsically.
The artist is the thing with extremely limited supply. Something like Patreon will end up being the correct model.
I don't follow the EDM scene personally, so I don't know if interest has been on the decline in recent years.
Youtube created a world where distribution matters more than content because section 230 interpretations allowed them to steal content for a while. And now they pay for it, but that's a new development after years of piracy that drove down the price.
The viacom lawsuit has emails from senior youtube execs saying that stolen music content drove most of their traffic
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=*_NOUN+capital...
Imagine if we had a government board deciding what prices people could charge for App Store/Google Play Store apps. (It's not like we're talking about radioactive waste or something involving externalities, where government regulation might be justified.)
No, it's to fight for what they want (or perhaps think they are entitled to) to control.
“Property” is simply what the government says you are entitled to control.
Sure, everyone had their own theory of rights. And if by people acting to defend their property you mean “people will fight to secure access to those things to which their own personal theory of rights holds them to be entitled”, well, you’ll notice that's exactly what I described, but not at all what people mean when discussing “property” normally.
In the united states, the biggest things affecting the poor are healthcare and housing costs and remarkably those aren't what most people consider to be the 'rich'. They're systemically broken with corruption and waste.
And as for all business models are based on government, well that's absolutely wrong. For example the existence of black markets -- those in violation of the government seem to show that they they don't rely on the government. Let alone any type of service business.
If you want to argue that government is necessary for property rights to exist, that's a resource saving measure - people protect their property all the time when governments fail them.