Hacker News Reader

Comment by alchemyromcom | Hacker News Reader

I wish more people, especially tech CEOs, could understand the incredible sacrifice of time, money, and energy it takes to make an album people actually enjoy. Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle. I've worked both as a sound engineer and and a software developer. It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record. The way tech companies have abused musicians to get rich is one of the most shameful things to ever happen. Furthermore, I'm sick of these guru edicts about how everyone will need to work that much harder in the "new normal". I got into software to pay the bills, but the way geeks talk about the industry and people I love drives me right up the wall. Have some appreciation--even awe--for the art you enjoy. It requires more effort than you could ever imagine.

View on HN

> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.

That's apples-to-oranges. Obviously a "hit" anything is hard in any field, by definition. A hit app is just as hard (even harder, probably, since there are a lot less hit apps than hit songs).

But producing a single track? Seriously, it's not that hard. Yes, it takes a team of people and a lot of creativity and skill, but I don't know what this "incredible sacrifice" or "miracle" that is "more effort than you could ever imagine" is that you're talking about. It's a creative project like any other.

But that's not even the point of the article, which is simply to release tracks piecemeal and regularly rather than in an album only occasionally. There's nothing about everyone working "that much harder".

It sounds like you had a hard time in the biz, and I'm sorry. But I don't have any clue who the "geeks" are who "talk about the industry" that seems to bother you so much, and which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the article. I know a lot of software engineers who are also really into the indie music scene in Brooklyn and I think everyone does understand the work bands put into their music and their touring, and that most of the bands are never going to make it beyond attracting a few dozen or couple hundred audience members at any show, but they do it because they love it.

Not touching the whole heft of the argument, I would like to point out that the original poster didn't compare the difficulty of writing a hit song to a "hit app", he compared a creating a hit song with creating working software.

I can co-sign on this part of his premise. I worked for a music producer who has a number of #1 hits (Beyonce, Fergie, John Legend etc). He wrote >1 songs per day almost every day for over a decade.

His success ratio (hit vs placement vs nothing) was much lower than any mediocre software engineer trying to make working software over the same period of time.

It feels safe to say that in a 365 day period, a software developer can reasonably expect significantly more than one of those days to be used in 'working software' right?

But working software doesn't mean commercially successful software. It just means it runs and does something.

"Working software" would be comparable to "listenable music". I'm sure every song that producer wrote daily was listenable.

But even if you mean "working software" as something that goes up on the app charts, top 100 in a popular category? I mean, then no -- I could easily see a developer spend an entire year building 1, 10, or even 100 apps and have none of them gain any traction at all.

Sorry for the late response, I just mean to suggest that it's pretty clear to me that your average software developer reaps the benefits of his work, day to day, on a higher percentage than your average producer.

There are 4.4 million software engineers in the United States. I would imagine most of the work that is generated by them on a day to day basis moves the needle of their careers forward. I could be wrong, but I bet most of them are employed, and getting paid for it.

At the very least I bet that more than half of them get paid for more than 5% of their workdays, right?

I doubt the same can be said for music producers, at least the ones making hits that the OP was referring to.

The average income indifference between artists and software developers, and how many of those who make up those communities are able to find any sense of financial stability, are vastly different, so even under your logic that a “hit” is a “hit” no matter the industry, is still really misinformed and I’m sure we are all out here just doing what we are doing for the “love of it”.

Speaking as a producer and developer, they are not the same things in any way and I love doing what I do deeply, thank you very much.

You're still off quite a ways in your analogy. I get paid to develop software that someone else owns and brands and makes all decisions for. For nothing more than money. It's nothing like my passion projects, which I do not get paid for at all. Most of the time. Maybe 1 in a 1000 that I will get paid for them in any meaningful way.

This whole analogy between working software and music production is flawed from the start and elaboration on the theme does not help.

What's needed is to discuss artists compensation on their own terms.

Don't distort it by relating it to software development.

This tendency to hyper-analogise everything oh so sinks my boat.

I can’t think of even one example of the use of analogy that has helped me understand a subject better than if it were discussed and explained on its own terms.

It seems all analogies do is enable the analogiser to delude themselves in to thinking similar is equal to same.

Analogies may be less about equivalency and more to do with bridging ideas. They can help the analogiser draw someone closer in thought, like a shout in the dark to help your friend find you

Think of analogies as being like the windscreen wipers on a car. They help you see things more clearly.

But working/usable software takes months ( eg. Billing, authentication, DevOps, ... )

Profitability at least a year except if you can fall back to an existing social network/dev infrastructure, which is also based on a lot of work.

Eg. Only getting a decent ranking in Google could take months.

I'm not sure if it's that easy to compare.

Can you ELI5 what a music producer does? Was he also a writer or is writing part of producing? What is placement?

Everything from composing and performing the entire song, to contributing a couple of claps during the outtro. It's a very loose term.

So hard to put into words because the role is so varied but thinking of them as an artistic coach or mentor to the band while recording is perhaps accurate enough. Often hated or loved by the band and or fans of the band for the direction they push the music and the overall sound of the music.

As a part-time musician, even a single track can take tens of hours of effort - depending on the genre and the track.

Sure, you could strum a guitar and sing and have a decent song wrapped up in an afternoon.

But if you're creating anything more complex, you will spend hours finding the right sound, more hours creating the right arrangement, and even more hours fine-tuning the vocals, sounds, and final mix.

Something as simple as getting a snare drum right can take a ton of time. You don't hear it because you don't know what the bad snare sounds like.

I agree, but 10s of hours of effort isn't anywhere near "more than I can imagine" as the OP said. I don't think anyone here is claiming it's easy

Again, it all depends on what kind of music you're trying to make. If you're copying an existing style, it's not particularly hard. I can make a Drake-like beat in an afternoon - a quick search on Splice will even show me the exact drum sounds to use.

But if you're creating your own sound? That takes effort and experimentation.

Creating a song - easy. Creating music that's distinctively your own - tons and tons of effort.

+ 10 years crafting a unique sound.

Tons of amazing music with totally new sounds comes from people 16-20 years old. For the right person, it doesn't take a decade.

So these people just woke up one day and knew exactly how to make music?

And I bet they started at 10 or 12. I know I did.

Also, "tons" is amazingly overstated. Very few of those 16 year olds are producing "good" music that appeals beyond their immediate demographic, and that's to say nothing of how low of standards many youth demographics have.

It probably took me about 10 years to get good at programming. Sure, I could create programs pretty quickly---but making something like [1] is another matter altogether.

[1]: http://regent-lang.org/

But I'm guessing you were paid for programming during those 10 years.

I guess it depends on how you count, but not really, at least not for the first 6 years or so. The first two-ish were high school, the next four were college, and the next six were in graduate school (so on a grad student's salary). After that I got a "real" job.

For what it's worth, I do other artistic pursuits as well. I did music for about 15 years though I wouldn't say I was ever good. I've been writing for about 10 years. I would say I'm just now barely at the point where I think I can write half-way decently.

To be clear, I am very aware, and very grateful that one of the things I happen to like doing also pays well. I was responding more to the "you can't imagine the level of effort required to do this work" aspect of the ancestors' comments. Yes, I can imagine, thank you very much. While I don't like where we're going with funding models for art, that doesn't mean that understanding the effort is the limiting factor.

You think most developers learn programming from scratch at a job?

Key word:

> during

I've been paid far more for software than I have for music in the last 10+ years. Spent about equal time/effort on each.

ROI is better with software (I can afford more synths and records).

I don't think anyone is disputing that ROI is better with software.

That said, programming for 10 years before getting a job in the are is not uncommon. Most of my peers did it for at least five (I learned 15 years before, but I grant that's not that common).

Artistic endeavors always take me a long time, but then I read about people like Kanye who puts down a hit track in 20 minutes (he’s apparently known for working this way). You may not line rap or him, but he has a knack for hit beats.

https://www.okayplayer.com/news/heres-the-story-behind-kanye...

This is probably similar to the apocryphal story about Picasso:

A woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”

“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.

“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

Yeah. Many don’t realize he was making beats for well known rappers before the general public knew who Kanye was. I still think his best talent is as a beat creator/producer.

RIP cohesive bodies of work or concept albums in your new publish-or-perish hellworld

But if you put out a concept album, do you expect it to pay your bills for three or four years? I don't think that's a reasonable expectation. If you want to make a living off music, then you might need to put out more music, or do other things like playing in a cover band or being a studio musician.

Compare it to actors/actresses who do hollywood movies, but also do indie films. If you want to make a living, you might not be able to do whatever it is you want, and might need to put out some more mainstream stuff.

Only a few people really get to do what they want in the arts and make a living.

That was already gone when people stopped listening to music a CD at a time.

Wasn't that also the doom scenario that was forecast when iTunes launched?

Have you ever composed music that others have liked? I strongly doubt so, otherwise you would refrain from comparing developing a hit app to a hit song, to save yourself the shame of looking like a fool. apple-to-oranges, as you said.

Last year the founder of Shazam told his story at a conference. That‘s a hit app. The effort that went into it is mind boggling. Far more than ever could possibly go into a single hit song.

I'm not talking about complexity but about the creative process, which is totally different. You can't apply SCRUM to the composition of a song. You can't set a deadline to it. You can't hire a junior musician and have him write parts for you. It is a much less rational and plannable process than software dev. Hence apple-to-oranges.

A good way to draw that line would be “what level of success is required to make a decent living, house, and typical luxuries of life” compared to your peers. For a software developer, this is not as hard as making a “hit”. A regular 9-5 job at any one of a thousand companies is enough. I don’t think that is the case for music industry though.

It sounds to me like you're making his point. You offered no insight into the process of creating music whatsoever.

What is the relevance of offering insight into the process of creating music?

With or without insight, it's obviously apples-to-oranges to compare "working software" to a "hit record".

Most "working software" is rarely used and makes no money, look at the long tail of apps in the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, etc that didn't become hits.

It's comparing effort to get to the same monetization.

Software is easier to create, doesn't need to be a hit to be used, and you can be paid to write it and to sell it.

Music requires much more creative work, the production is often unpaid, and the work product usually doesn't make much unless it's a hit with millions of plays.

What instrument do you play?

I find that in software, it's much easier to anticipate change. Companies are more open about their future plans and long-term goals. For example, GitHub just publicized their roadmap. This entire website is predicated on the fact that people like to share their latest ideas, inventions, and solutions to problems that everyone faces.

I've never seen Universal Music post their "roadmap" of how they plan to sign new artists, or what new social media marketing ideas they might have up their sleeve. This is because the music industry is, by far, more competitive than the tech industry. Record labels, publishing groups, etc. are not very willing to share their "trade secrets". If the tech industry was like the music industry, there would be absolutely no such thing as open source.

Also...

> I don't know what this "incredible sacrifice" or "miracle" that is "more effort than you could ever imagine" is that you're talking about. It's a creative project like any other.

Your second sentence answers the question in the first sentence. :)

Well,in a way, software industry is very similar: "Aaaa, Britney!!Oh, wait, who's that?Lady Gaga!!!" and then "Java is cool...I mean JavaScript..No,no,I mean Golang... Did I say Rust?"

> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.

True, but hardly apples-to-apples; it's orders of magnitude easier to make music than it is to make a viral app. In either case, the barrier to entry is low, the standard for doing it professionally is surprisingly high, and making a hit is a huge undertaking.

Yes, there are orders of magnitude of scale in both fields.

In software it can cost $10k to build an app but Google Search costs $10^10: a six orders of magnitude difference.

In music there’s got to be a big dynamic range in effort involved as well. (I doubt it’s 10^6 though!)

But comparing the best music to the lowest end app is apples to oranges.

If you have an orchestra with 100 musicians who receive something like $10^5 per year, you pay $10^7 per year. You need several years to practice and to form the orchestra into a team with a repertoire. If it takes 10 years, then that is $10^8.

No you don't. Orchestras come together and perform completely new works with, if they're LUCKY, 1 or 2 rehearsals. Years of practice is completely ludicrous.

Presumably a well-paid professional orchestra could record more than one decent song a year, or at least one "every 3-4 years"?

Your numbers are grossly off here. I would bet that zero orchestra musicians are making anywhere close to $100k just from playing in an orchestra - the absolute top of the top might make that across all of their engagements. Most are making far, far less.

> I would bet that zero orchestra musicians

That'd be a losing bet.

https://www.pennlive.com/life/2016/10/highest_paid_orchestra...

In good orchestras in the US and western Europe, $100k is actually fairly standard, perhaps even on the lower end. You need to be highly skilled, the competition is fierce, and the job is very demanding. I don't have a good source, but a quick Google search should confirm that $100k is not exactly wild.

This might approach 10^6 if you consider the largest band tours going around the world and filling stadiums with 50 000 people.

Don’t you mean 5 x 10^5 ? ;)

They just need to fill 10 stadiums and it's done. The Rolling Stones did this in Buenos Aires, for example.

As a musician and programmer I find the bar to make money on apps way way lower than on music. Being a good programmer brings you much closer to making money on an app than being a good musician does to get a record out. For one you don't need luck, money and the right contacts to release an app. It isn't even in the same ballpark IMHO. Pro musician is closer to "race driver" than "viral app creator".

In the same way you can just put your music on YouTube if want to 'release' it.

You can ofc release apps, that doesn't mean people will ever use it. The cost to acquire a user isn't anywhere cheaper than a finding an listener.

Just curious if you've ever released any music?

There is a musician equivalent of app creator. Where do you think music in TV shows, movies and YouTube comes from. A human musician creates it. Atleast for now...

20 years ago you needed all of the same stuff in software engineering, as you described in music.

Things change... It costs as much to "release an app" as to "get a record out" today.

But I don't need to "release an app" to make money as a programmer. I just need to work on small parts of an app that already exists and I can have a comfortable salary with reasonably good job security.

As a musician you can also be a wedding band, sing only covers and make a living off it.

It's really not that different...

I don't know if it's reasonable to compare apps--which often address economic problems--with music. Probably a more apt comparison would be between music and entertainment apps (games?).

I highly recommend The Song Machine (Inside the Hit Factory) by John Seabrook. The author describes the modern reincarnation of the Brill Building that pumps out pop hits using methods that we would not call songwriting (Max Martin, Dr. Luke, etc.). The goal is to get you to listen to 30 seconds of a song (that counts as a spin on digital streaming services). They've decomposed the process into mass production of backing tracks (using pro tools) which then get handed to so-called topliners that add the "hook" (the catchy part of the song). They stick the famous artist at the beginning of the song to get you past the 30 second threshold.

In a similar way, back in '88 KLF wrote tongue-in-cheek "manual" for writing a top pop song, a hilarious and cynical view into how a musical sausage is made:

https://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/

Dubba Jonny made a whole track as a semi-satirical "tutorial" on dubstep production back when it was at its peak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJzfTZlEl40

It blows me away how much ranting people managed to write in the typewriter era when it wasn't very easy.

Still hilarious.

This book is a fun read and goes a long way toward explaining why so much of today’s music is crap. It’s the difference between mass production and craftsmanship - and mass produced music just isn’t very good. Not to me anyway.

I think what the CEO is saying, and it has been an increasing trend in music for a long time now, is moving even further away from large LP releases every few years. The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music.

The way to keep fans engaged involves releasing EPs and Single on a regular basis, releasing a whole album only really makes sense in the context of trying to produce it for artistic value, not fan engagement value.

LP's or long form collections by artists capture a moment in that artist's creative point. Typically, the cycle was release a record, tour a bunch, write new music, and repeat. This meant by the time that next LP came along, the collection of songs on there could sound fairly different as the artist changed, got better, heard new songs and got inspired etc.

Then there's the recording and engineering challenges around mixing and mastering an album. Albums need to sound cohesive even if the songs aren't necessarily the same genre even. The best albums are those ones that flow between softer or more upbeat music but still feel tied together as a whole.

Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs diminishes music as an artform. It takes away the format that's allowed some of the best modern music to be created that likely would never have been created if artists were just constantly pumping out individual disconnected songs.

Even today, you can still find some pretty amazing albums that are being made where each song individually would stand as less, but together as an album they come together to make some great art.

I agree with what you said about albums as a cohesive piece of art, I will miss that for sure.

> Forcing artists to pump out strings of singles and EPs

But who is forcing the artists? The market? It's clear people don't want to listen to LPs released every 3-4 years, they want singles and EPs released frequently. If it is indeed a market effect, then artists need to evolve or perish. If you want to make money selling art, you need to make it in a way that people want to buy it. It's that simple.

Just because there is more money is chicken McNuggets doesn’t mean they are better than fine dining.

This is just the death of another art form.

Death?

One of the things that happens when consumers have options they didn't before is previously invisible preferences become expressible. What if the bulk of consumers never cared much about albums as coherent pieces of art? What if they only did so financially because it was the only way to get the separable pieces they did care about?

The advent of fast food has not exterminated fine dining. What's changed is that consumers have more choices. This did not signal the death of fine dining.

It's not death, it's evolution. Few things stay exactly the same over long periods of time.

Can I ask how it's clear that people don't want to listen to LPs? I think there's a percentage of people that will listen to what's popular in their playlists but there are also plenty of people who listen to LPs and are fine waiting 3-4 years. I believe more records were sold last year than in history.

I completely agree with you from the perspective of being a fan of music for music's sake. Listening to a well put together album is fantastic, but that isn't the be all end all of music.

Music in the current age is equal parts pop culture as it is listening aesthetics. For an artist to thrive financially they have long had to take the first path rather than primarily focus on the later.

The artists all producing the top songs on spotify are doing so through the release of singles here and there and it makes total sense given the cultural context for how music is consumed and discovered in the current year.

You just need to be creative with the release cycle, there is nothing stopping capturing ah moment in time and then releasing a serial, indeed it may allow for a more iterative process wrt to mix and mastering

These full-length albums have long turned into the exception though, which is kind of sad. Zeppelin IV, Sgt. Pepper or Dark Side of the Moon would never become hits today under these artistic limitations.

Only with certain kinds of music. Dance and club music has always kind of been like that. The whole culture of that music is around singles and EPs. I think the thing is, that kind of music is the 'popular money making' music these days.

But even amongst that music, you can still find some albums, being produced as such, with the intention of it being an album. It's harder to find and I doubt it makes money through services like Spotify, but on places like bandcamp, or independent label storefronts you can find plenty of albums in a wide variety of genres.

The best thing we can do is support those artists and keep buying that music if that's what we want. As long as there's a market for it, it can keep existing despite Spotify.

> The existence of that medium of music doesn't make sense in the current year given how people actually go about consuming music.

I'm not convinced. The standard 3-4 minute pop song came about because that's what could fit on one side of a 78. Albums came about because an LP (33 1/2) could fit roughly 40 minutes of music, or 10-12 of those songs. These formats proved to be a popular and effective even though the technologies that created them are long obsolete.

Interesting to note that the play duration of an LP was not seemingly the result of intentional design decisions around sound quality, speed, physical size, ease of manufacture, etc, but rather a bit of a historical accident arising from technology changes, and marketing missteps:

"When initially introduced, 12-inch LPs played for a maximum of about 23 minutes per side, 10-inchers for around 15... Economics and tastes initially determined which kind of music was available on each format. Recording company executives believed upscale classical music fans would be eager to hear a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart concerto without having to flip over multiple, four-minute-per-side 78s, and that pop music fans, who were used to listening to one song at a time, would find the shorter time of the 10-inch LP sufficient. As a result, the 12-inch format was reserved solely for higher-priced classical recordings and Broadway shows. Popular music continued to appear only on 10-inch records.

Their beliefs were wrong. By the mid-1950s, the 10-inch LP, like its similarly sized 78 rpm cousin, would lose the format war and be discontinued."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record#Playing_time

Over 80% of my music listening is full albums, even though I haven’t played a record or CD since 2015.

I really hope the medium of the album survives, because I much prefer listening to a coherent and deliberate group of songs than any other method.

I don’t understand how an album wouldn’t survive if singles survive. An album is a collection of single songs.

That's a bit like saying that a movie is a collection of single pictures.

An album is a playlist of songs selected by the musician. They can be consumed as a playlist, or individually.

A frame of a movie won’t make sense without the whole movie.

> A frame of a movie won’t make sense without the whole movie.

Why not? It means exactly what's in the frame and what you can derive from it alone. The movie in its entirety may have a more profound and precise meaning, sometimes entirely different from what disjointed frames will tell you, which is the point of my analogy.

Perhaps songs-scenes make a more fair analogy. Some albums are basically collections of singles because the collection itself doesn't represent any meaningful overarching theme or creative process. I feel the same about movies. I'd bore myself to death watching another Marvel movie, but I'll happily enjoy some disjointed highlights from them on youtube.

Wouldn’t say frame, but more like a collection of scenes.

> An album is a collection of single songs.

Releasing songs individually is a serial process. Releasing an album puts all of the songs published into the same context, and everyone’s first experience of all songs occur at the same time.

A band that makes a successful album produces something greater than the sum of the individual songs inside the album

I meant that there’s no technical reason a musician can’t release multiple songs at one time and call it an album, meaning as long as there is demand for an album, they should exist.

At this time, I would argue that the main reason that the album continues to exist is because it's woven into the fabric of the music industry. As long as there are Billboard album charts and Grammy's are awarded for best album, there will be albums. For many modern artists, they'd be just as happy dropping a continuous drip of singles.

a proper album is not a miscellanea of song, it's crafted on a theme or with a specific journey in mind

Price bundling for one - even without any synergistic benefits like telling a whole story over an album.

I love the album format. Long live albums.

This is sad and feels to me like a dumbing down of everything due to short attention spans.

I still prefer to listen to full coherent albums, and one of the highlights of my week is my Sunday run, which gives me time to listen to an album start to finish with no interruptions.

I hope some of my favorite musicians will continue to conceptualize albums that have a 45+ minute arc, even if market pressures mean that they'll initially need to release the tracks one at a time.

Even before streaming music, I don’t think many people listened to whole albums. I distributed a lot of custom CDs to people in high school because they wanted various singles off of different CDs and I had access to a CD burner and could rip and record them in custom mixes.

I personally find it too tedious to even work out the lyrics of the song because most of the time I can’t figure out what the singer is saying, or whatever cryptic message it is. I just listen for the sounds, mostly, and that scratches my itch sufficiently to not make it worth my while to look more into it. But I can understand if some people do have an interest in it.

I listen to whole albums. I still buy CDs primarily because I don't want piecemeal "hits" when there's gold in the material that will never see wide promotion. You'll never hear that without buying an album. Live albums in particular don't work at all in the streaming era where tracks are discrete units that can't flow into each other. When I rip a CD I know with 100% certainty the gaps will be seamless.

There was once a time in popular music when you could actually understand the words coming out of a singer's mouth, as they weren't digitally over-processed, enhanced with autotune, and mixed into a zero-dynamic-range soup of loudness. Maybe I'm just old and out of touch, but I often can't tell the difference between modern pop song singers--many sound more like the output of a DSP than human.

My impression is that there was actually some benefit to having really long streaming albums, at least if you were already a hit artist. You'd rack up more individual plays and thus more money. This only works, though, if people are coming to you and playing the album rather than being sent to a song via an algorithm. If that's the majority of your usage, a constant drip of new singles makes sense.

I absolutely agree, and that's what I think the CEO is referring to. Slowly dropping 6-12 singles over a two year period is more sensible nowadays than taking two years to write, record, and release an album or EP.

In fact, leaving out the few niche bands that release albums as a cohesive whole, the concept of an album seems terribly anachronistic in this new world of streaming. It's now the era of the single song, whether we like it or not. This is, of course, just considering popular genres of music.

How much of that falls to user experience though? We're not constrained by physical media, but aren't we by Spotify design?

I almost exclusively browse my library by album, but Spotify generally pushes me towards tracks. The release radar, for example, offers no way to filter to full album releases.

I hope artists aren't pressured into releasing tracks one off purely due to design decisions vs artistic choice. Software can easily cater to both.

I blame this on iTunes, not Spotify, when I first got into music because I didn’t want to spend all my cash on an entire album for just one or two tracks I really liked. Up until the last 5 or so years I rarely took the time to listen to a album of a song I heard on the radio or in a mix.

This is controversial for some reason, but I don’t think there’s ever been a significant demand or market for music production. The entire notion that musicians get paid to make music is a false premise.

There was a market for records, not for music. What people were actually paying for was the technology to play music, and the distribution of music. When that became digitized, no significant market formed around music production for reasons that seem pretty obvious to me: 1. It is absolutely impossible for the market to ever reach a state where new music is not produced, regardless of the existence or absence of any monetary factor; and 2. I will be just as happy regardless of what is produced because my brain naturally adjusts that emotion to the scale of whatever I am perceiving.

There was a huge market around distribution and licensing and technology related to music, and a lot of that went away. But that doesn’t mean musicians are entitled to a 50-billion-dollar industry around music production that never existed to begin with.

This isn't "controversial", it's just a kneejerk contrarian position from an armchair expert. It's actually hard to understate the demand for music production. You walk through any major retail store, they're playing music that is generally designed (and proven) to make you purchase more. Advertising, movies, basically any form of audio-visual entertainment would be devoid of life without music. And people demand novelty. Just because you don't personally see the value because of your "automatic brain adjustment" problem doesn't mean it isn't there. These of course, are consumerist arguments, let alone the fact that say, personal expression has been a major feature of popular music for over 500 years, and that people from all walks of life have proven time and again that they are willing to pay for the experience of live entertainment, even to change their entire life to accommodate it (think festivalgoers, Deadheads, other diehards, etc.). I mean you may as well be arguing that the economy doesn't exist—like, yeah it sort of doesn't, because currency is all just an illusion we have to agree upon to grease the wheels, but acting like that invalidates the clear societal value of music... is some willful ignorance. The music industry has grown over the past decade. I implore you to do some reading on this, maybe start with Tin Pan Alley.

I think his comment is insightful and thought-provoking. You might be dismissing it too eagerly. To me, the argument primarily revolves around the notion that music's supply is unquenchable regardless of demand since people naturally want to produce music. They will do it even if there is no financial incentive so there will always be music to listen to.

You should be wary of things that are said confidently by someone with no expertise, for example, this is a flat out lie:

> There was a huge market around distribution and licensing and technology related to music, and a lot of that went away

As I pointed out, distribution and licensing has not gone away, that segment of the industry has grown.

Likewise, you have to ignore everything but the direct-to-consumer parts of the market to have that comment begin to make any sense. Video games, commercials and movies are all being produced with increasing efficiency as well, and thus, sync placements and licensing are more important than ever.

I actually think I disagree with your premise here as well, which is still more cogent and direct than GP, who said "the market doesn't exist". Yet, I think demand has kept up with the supply, I mean, I think the demand is almost infinite. Yes, people naturally want to produce music, much in the same way that some people want to make delicious meals for their friends, and when their dinner parties become popular enough to warrant pop-up level sizes, they might consider commercializing and commodifying their product because there isn't an option to continue doing it at a loss for most people. The financial incentive, in most cases is—how do I keep creating a thing people enjoy without dying? Likewise, people might want to eat at the same 5 restaurants their whole life, or hear the same 5 artists, but even that latter group are going to be enthusiastic when one of those 5 artists releases new content. Think about the fact that whoever happens to own The Beatles catalog can release a remastered version of any of their albums and have consumers ready to buy, what is to the layperson, a nearly identical product. Now, remember your favorite meal you've had out? Have you ever tried to recreate that experience?

I guess what I'm getting at is, you can't think of music in purely economic terms, because it tends to behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways that don't align cleanly with the dry notions "supply and demand".

People prefer novelty. They don't demand it.

This is absurd. Why are people who insist on couching everything in economic terms refusing to believe that new music is a commodity that people demand? People don't need cars with new features, and yet the market exists for it. Loads of people throw out their wardrobes every 3 months and buy a whole new set. If that's not demand, what is it? If you can only apply "demand" to basic necessities, and literally no luxury goods, then what is the point of the term? That's not to say the commodification of art is a good thing for artists or listeners, in my estimation, in fact I'd say the artificially induced demand of mainstream music is feeding into the current crisis. Marketers push a homogenized sound and then the force of the industry moves to capture that segment of the market. In fact I'd argue there's unmet demand that exists for quality alternative music that won't be satiated by these models.

Isn't it just the age old problem that most people like crap and people who like art aren't willing to pay for it?

not too long ago you were considered a sell out musician if you actually made money out of licensing deals and the like.

to my memory, the mantra was that money corrupts the art.

It's market valuing things based on scarcity. Music is in abundance right now due to lower barrier to entry for distributing and producing it than ever before. You have to provide more value than someone producing music as a hobby for free on youtube.

Good music - electrifying, change-your-life music - is still extremely scarce.

But Spotify has made it even harder to find by swamping it in mediocre burger+fries music.

Huh, this is an interesting take to me. I'd say that my using Spotify has definitely increased the amount of "bad" music I listen to, but it has _drastically_ increased the amount of amazing, life-changing music I find. There are _so_ many artists I enjoy now because Spotify threw them in my Discover Weekly. By increasing the sheer amount of music I listen to, thanks to Spotify, I've increased the number of bands I love that I stumble upon, and bands I hate. It's a net win though, because I forget the shit stuff, but really, really cherish the gold I find.

I'm just surprised that you feel it's _harder_ to find good music because of Spotify.

There's more shit to wade through.

I really miss the days when Youtube's "related videos" were seemingly based on a graph data model -- populated like: other people that watched this, then clicked on that.

Honestly, it was far more accurate for new, niche music. My browser tabs would grow exponentially.

Now it's all sorts of weird shit like US news coverage of sentencing serial killers. Which I didn't ever watch before...

I disagree. Music is subjective. In fact, the lower barrier to entry and discovery has enabled me to find my favorite music that 5 years ago I had no idea even existed. You would probably hate the music that changed my life, and I would probably not enjoy yours.

I do agree that bands are getting screwed though. That's why I use Spotify for discovery and buy lots of merch when a band really lands with me (and go to live shows - pre COIVD of course).

I don’t buy that. Much of my favorite music is video game fan-made music; and, while that is hard to make and their skill is great, there’s a lot of that music.

I love music (and am a musician), but I disagree that good music is scarce. Part of the issue here (among many others) is that music is fairly "evergreen", and certainly much more so than apps. Zillions of people are still listening to the Beatles and Bob Dylan (two examples of "good music") more than half a century later. I worry that the ever increasing catalog of recorded music is making it ever harder to gain mindshare as a musician.

> But Spotify has made it even harder to find ...

Compared to what?

I grew up with music heavily filtered by radio promoters. That was rarely "change-your-life music".

On the flip side SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Music and websites like http://everynoise.com have made it even easier to find more obscure music, of which some is electrifying, change-your-life music.

It doesn't follow that "more people making music" means "same amount of good music"

Music ain't changing my life.

Help me have a good cry? Sure. Make chores less boring, absolutely.

But for me life changes are life-changing; music's ultimately just what was on, the soundtrack.

Music is life-changing when you hear something that your mind cannot conceive at first, but finds particularly striking. The memory of hearing that song gets embedded in your memory. It's likely that you'll remember where you were when you first heard the song. It becomes part of your history.

Functional music, like what you describe, is easy to listen to. It serves a purpose: reduce boredom, be a companion in sadness, lift the awkwardness of sitting next to strangers in silence. It fits in the genres you are used to listening.

This is, of course, just my experience. But it's clear that for many people, music becomes their life.

The kind of music that I paid money for in the past hasn't been released much recently. So in my opinion, there's a lot of potential for growth by making good music.

> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.

I think the same could be said of any (good) art. Art and engineering are fundamentally very different things that just can't be compared, even if there may be some mutual overlapping. (Audio/mixing/mastering engineering definitely crosses the streams more, but for the sake of argument let's just consider the entire end-to-end process of making an album, which I think is almost entirely a matter of art.)

There is some degree of art involved in developing software, but if it's just getting some business app working for BigCorp, it really can't be compared to writing amazing fiction, painting a beautiful painting, directing a fantastic film, making a great album, or any other artistic endeavor. Anyone who scoffs at artists because they're not doing [technical thing] just shouldn't be paid any heed.

Art isn't the kind of thing that can be solved with a clever hill-climbing algorithm, is it.

We don't know yet.

Counterpoint is record companies are creating pop music or using audiotune without the artist quality a classic painting has.

Artistry != Singing in tune

In fact art != artistry

It's entirely possible for somebody relatively lacking in technical ability and/or any great insight into their craft to produce something wonderful.

> It's entirely possible for somebody relatively lacking in technical ability and/or any great insight into their craft to produce something wonderful.

100% that. Thom Yorke (Radiohead singer) has composed dozens of godly songs without even being able to read the notes (in fact, his band members are calling him the idiot savant and are asking him NOT to learn the notes at this point, as it might spoil the magic). Tricky composed some good songs without being able to read notes OR play any instrument.

> without even being able to read the notes

Most pop/rock musicians historically have played (and composed) by ear without notation or formal music theory.

It's only in the past 20 years or so that large numbers of pop/rock musicians went to music school.

Even so, virtually all pop/rock is composed by ear today, even for music school graduates. Typically composers start by humming or singing a melody, "transcribe" that to an instrument by ear, and then embellish that further if they know music theory.

You can see from above why most pop music consists of the same 4 chords, with the addition of audience/gatekeeper familiarity (don't mess with a formula that works.)

Yeah the CEO’s take reminds me of Jobs’s “you’re holding it wrong”. So it’s not that Spotify is not paying artists enough, it’s that artists aren’t working hard enough. And even though artists have been complaining about the money they make from streaming for years, “in private” some of them are happy. Sure.

I don't think he was saying that artists aren't working hard enough, I think he was saying:

1. Albums don't maximize artist income - musicians should be steadily releasing new tracks. (Ironically, this is how things used to be up until the 70's, when a new technology, the LP, changed the dominant form of artistic expression.)

2. Nobody reads rolling stone anymore, mtv doesn't play music anymore, if you want a successful career you have to actively market yourself.

Even so, he's wrong according to every thing I've read on the subject.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you're a musician the primary way you're going to be making money is through touring and selling merch at shows. Not by cutting more tracks for spotify to make a buck off of.

Jobs never said that, so maybe avoid putting it in quotes.

"Just avoid holding it in that way,"

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/06/25/iphone.problems.re...

Does "just avoid holding it that way" satisfy you?

Of course. If people are going to make poor analogies and mock a quote that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, at least get the quote right. It's not asking too much, is it?

That’s fair

The thing is: there is more talent available than there is available attention, and especially _shared attention_, to go around. Success means outcompeting other musicians for a finite amount of attention. It's a gamble - and there's a good chance you won't get the attention. Even if you did the last time.

Nobody is saying that it isn't hard work to create a record. That is a straw man.

But someone did get up on a stage and point out that monetization of your work will require a strategy that is adapted to reality. If you want financial success you have to do different things than before. You can get angry at it and wish this was 1983 again - or you can get cracking.

> I wish more people, especially tech CEOs

Well, you can't really blame the tech CEO here... Spotify charges people what they're willing to pay to listen to music. I think it's a minor miracle that they've worked out a way to get people to pay anything for music considering how easy music piracy has been since the internet came along. (Not taking a moral stance, just stating a fact).

Speaking as another sound engineer and software engineer:

I believe the effort and risks involved with piracy are -- on average in well-off places -- simply "worth it" compared to owning physical media and "not worth it" compared to paid streaming subscriptions.

It's not just about dollars, but the value proposition of the total experience. The average pirate doesn't streamline their rig with all sorts of automation to pull things into a slick xbmc derivative heuristically; rather it's a time sink and less on-demand.

On the other hand, the more restrictive back catalog does keep piracy relevant for those who want less common selections.

The arbitary nature of contracts also keeps piracy relevant for people who get exasperated at the "now you hear it, now you don't" problem with playlists.

If you pirate something and make a playlist, it won't be full of holes after the next round of contract negotiations. With Spotify -it very well might.

For me the time sink for finding new music is enjoyable. Listening to something that I've put a minimal amount of effort on acquiring makes the experience worth more. That's in comparison to letting algorithms play one song after another( which most likely will either repeat the same songs or just play top hits which are boring to me).

I don’t want to own physical media of anything, anymore. Just the thought of it feels constraining to my and other people’s lifestyles.

Absolutely agree. I've been playing music for basically my whole life, and am now, finally working on producing my first record of solo singer-songwriter material.

Every time I thought I've been "close" over the past 18 months it turned out I still had so, so far left to go. My "scope" is creeping, sure, but it turns out there's so, so, so much work in-between "recording & mixing one voice & one guitar" and "having a really well arranged song with just the right musical details" etc.

I've done a bunch of big, original projects in tech over the years, but I've never worked as hard at anything in my life as I have on this music.

And I'm still barely scratching the surface of where I want my music to go long term, and I know that the closer I get to recording the music that's in my head, the more ambitious my future records will be.

Ugh I wish that anyone would understand that "just work more" is a HORRIBLE outlook on things.

Demanding a "deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past" from people whose profession you've already made more difficult is pretty galling.

It may be the case that their careers were going to get more difficult anyway; nevertheless, Ek is in fact one of the main drivers and beneficiaries.

While I don't deny that the Spotify CEO is the best person to send a message like that, I have to ask myself what life was like for musicians before Spotify (or any other low-paying streaming service).

30 Seconds to Mars made a documentary about the album they recorded in 2008 and the lawsuit they had to deal with at their record label (which had been recently purchased by a larger company that had zero music / talent experience). Their contracts seem to put them almost $1 million in debt to the record label for each album, despite the fact that they sell (err sold?) multi millions and they do worldwide tours.

Sure, Spotify's CEO is a strange vessel to make more demands on musical talent, but he's also in a position to know how his customers want to consume their music and what gets them engaged in his product. I would take it for what it is and no more.

Music is a winner-take-all markets. It makes it really hard for new musicians to break in. It also tend to be a sticky market, so those that have several hits remain relevant for a long time. Winner-take-all markets are reinforced by feedback loops.

I'm sorry that people dismiss the work it takes to make good art, that must be frustrating.

It's silly to compare the ease of making "working software" with a "hit record". Just like probably most of the music you worked on as a sound engineer, most "working software" made little money and got few customers, look at the long tail of apps that aren't hits in the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, etc.

Even comparing "financially successful software" to "financially successful music" makes no sense. Far more musicians have made six figures or more from a song that took tens of hours to make, than indie software developers have made six figures from an app that they only spent tens of hours on. Is that because music is easier? Yet far fewer technically competent musicians are able to make a living using those skills than technically competent software developers. Is that because music is harder?

It's almost like two things can require different talents, have different factors that go into their financial success, and still both be hard.

I think what he is really saying is : if you want to make money, you have to be on the clock, produce every month,week, day. Welcome to the newest rat race addition (which works wonders for creativity /s )

Just as we are pivoting away from unsustainable energy, we need to pivot away from unsustainable value structures. We have the tech, we have the brainpower, now we need the will to work on that.

> we need to pivot away from unsustainable value structures

I think it's a category error to expect the CEO of the music distributor to be the one that stands up for the sustainability of music artists. Even if you did get a "benevolent dictator" figure in that position, it would likely crumble to a competitor who is focusing more on optimizing the value+experience for the listener.

Probably, yes. It’s more of a political proposition and societal debate. How much do we value culture? I do agree he is probably on some expectancy rail that he cannot or doesn’t want to forgo.

Would you be more open and accepting to commentary if there was more kindness, more love, more empathy and compassion in discussions of how the old normal is gone? Expressions of admiration and awe coupled with opining that the old multi-year release cycle doesn't work anymore, and legions of hard-working humans making sacrifices for what they love may need to change?

Thank you for sharing. The world is always a better place with more human warmth.

The message itself is wrong.

We live in a world of plenty. We should be working less, not more. We have created more music in this century than all of the last combined. We have the ability to listen to thousands of years of music at the touch of a button. A concert that would have taken hours of work for 50 people to entertain 200 now takes nothing - a million people put on their headphones and listen to a recording made 20 years ago.

And that is just music - the same plenitude is available in almost all aspects of our lives. And yet, people insist on ever more growth, on ever more work.

Hopefully in the next decades, as the reality of global warming and worker empowerment gain traction, we'll realize that in fact the work week can be drastically reduced without affecting our material needs, as long we let go of this level of consumption.

> the same plenitude is available in almost all aspects of our lives.

To be fair, there's orders of magnitude less plenitude in certain necessities like food and housing - still more than enough over all, but not by so large a margin that you don't get local shortfalls (especially in housing).

It's there, it's just not evenly distributed- or evenly zoned. As a species, we can probably produce enough to cover everyone's basic needs if we wanted to.

> > still more than enough over all

How do you think the world of plenty came about in the first place? A hell of a lot of growth and work to provide for the demands of broad consumer bases instead of the whims of some head honcho who wanted pointless setpiece folly castles or grand monuments.

The world of plenty mostly came about from technological advancement.

In my opinion, we're way past the point where we should have stopped trying to grow, in most fields. In particular in music, we're at least 2 decades past the point where the music production industry is being helpful.

Also in art in general, it's interesting to think about what this world of plenty has cost us. Even if we have incomprehensibly more music available to us than any generation before say 1920, most people have actually lost the pleasure of producing their own music.

In the times before recording and playing back music were common, a much larger proportion of the population would be learning how to sing and play themselves. Many more people would be composing and sharing their own stories - the almost dead world of folklore.

This can also apply to a lot of crafts - we're more and more becoming dependent on industry for simple things that we would have done ourselves in centuries past.

If all of this had been a way to help free us pursue other passions, it would have been good. But it seems to me that it's mostly a way to free us to do more work for other people, and that, for the average person who is not working in a job capable of using their creativity, it has started stunting a lot their creative potential, which would have found an outlet in some of these domestic pursuits in the past.

Platitudes about humanity coupled with inaction. You should run for Congress.

It's how you tease apart if someone cares more about presentation of ideas or the substance of said ideas.

I am curious what you think the optimal solution for music in today’s world with massive storage and high bandwidth. Spotify is paying 70% of revenue to artists.

You have factor in piracy if the price is to high or the solution is inconvenient. The public has rejected DRM and songs are easily give away to their friends. Lastly, No one wants physical media.

Spotify is distributing 70% but $10/month is too little revenue for infinite music.

If they multiply it to what artists are demanding, I will just turn to FM radio with ads.

The way that 70% is counted is a huge scam

Agreed, it's also not what an artist gets paid, it's extremely hard (read impossible) to get a direct relationship with Spotify. You require distribution.. that alone takes anything from a flat delivery fee per album per year (the worst prey on independent artists who will rarely ever recoup that per release from spotify, apple and Amazon combined) to 25% of that revenue and a dozen or so other business models inbetween, then if they have a label, the label gets 50%, publisher is taking 25% of the mechanicals or worse you aren't registered at a PRO and that money gets left on the table. Those ~£0.005 per stream (US, UK rates) aren't looking great for most people but that's the reality of what your getting.

So after you've pumped out 6 singles a year, spent £100 a pop promoting those said singles, £50 mastering each single.. how much do these people think 98% of artists are making these days and can be sure of what they may take home every 2 months from these singles. At least with an LP you have a fixed cost and a revenue projection that can be worked out by price per copy.

Artists/creators should be able to determine what they want to charge for streamed songs.

They do. It's their freedom to be on Spotify.

They can go back to the olden model of no streaming as well.

No it's not their freedom to be on Spotify. That's not how the music business works. The record labels own the master recordings. Spotify negotiates rights to stream the records labels catalog with the labels. The artists have no say. The exception to this are artists who have negotiated to retain ownership of their master(very rare) or they have acquired their masters back through a contractual clause called a reversion(also rare.) Taylor Swift, Prince and Metalica are examples of people who own their master recording and can dictate whether streaming services can license their catalogs and at what cost.

This is a pretty narrow take IMHO.

We all have the freedom to do whatever; the issue is the consequences.

The question I think is more about if as a society we think it’s important for musicians to be able to make a decent living at their work and if so do we want to use our collective tools of law or government (or if someone gets lucky and innovates a better business model) to help that happen?

And if Spotify’s current business model is good or bad for our culture, if we believe that having musicians being able to make a decent living is important for our culture.

> it’s important for musicians to be able to make a decent living at their work

I think this depends on a great many factors. Do you mean possible for some musicians, everyone who wants to do music in some capacity, or somewhere in between? How do you define a decent living?

I'm reminded of the "No farms, no food" bumper-stickers I would sometimes see. While obviously true as written, it's subtlety different in practice and politics. Food comes from farms. Farms are needed. Yet this may not the same as all farms being needed, important, or significant to keep functioning. The person with that bumper sticker may not agree with the distinction I've drawn.

Music is absolutely critical to our ongoing cultural life. No musicians, no music. Yet... to what extent should a society with limited resources devote them to the promotion and enablement of musicians, bearing in mind that there are other uses for those resources? Even with an abundance mindset and in today's world of plenty, this key question does not go away.

For sure. I agree with you. And I'd say maybe music education - kids learning how to play an instrument, etc - is one area of focus. However I don't think it's supporting the arts that's sticking point when it comes to America managing it's limited resources ; )

We, as a society, have already decided that musicians have to be "all in" and "exceptional" to make a good living... and if the rest want to make a living - then private events is the way.

We cannot support a million Beyonce's, a million Gaga's and millions of other musicians - we don't live in a Communist utopia.

Now as for Spotify - they are not a monopoly, in US they are neck and neck with Apple Music. So... Why should we intervene with heavy handed laws* - when there's still a fierce battle happening in the market?

Also - Let's not have the government decide how culture should progress.

* - laws are always conservative and change slowly

I think they should combine Spotify with a Substack subscription model to provide exclusive tracks or live sessions for insider fans.

How does that work for a streaming service that charges a flat rate? Do you think public has an appetite for a pay per usage model/micro transaction model or would it drive users back to piracy? Micro transactions in online news media hasn’t managed to get any traction.

It doesn't work for a streaming service which charges a flat rate - which is the point.

Spotify is not the same as Netflix etc, because Netflix etc is commissioning and promoting new work - something Spotify has no interest in.

So... you sell units, not streams. You buy a perpetual license to play a unit as many times as you want. The artist gets a royalty for the unit sale. This frontloads income around unit release, which encourages new creation, but units generate a perpetual royalty stream as part of the artist's back catalog, so artists are less likely to starve.

Preview streams are available for free as tasters. Or perhaps a full taster can be played X times before it has to be bought.

The player is tied to an app, but most music is now consumed on phones or in a web player, so DRM is irrelevant and there is no real loss of convenience.

This model worked (more or less) for decades.

The point is popular creators should be paid for full-time work. That's how you get the best work from artists.

And it's not as if the economy can't support this. Operating in any other way is entirely down to politics, not economics.

iTunes offers purchasable music. And it could be argued a better deal for consumers who only listen to 100 songs or less a year. Market doesn’t want it. It is inconvenient to force people to go through a checkout flow for every song they want to listen to.

People always forget that storage and distribution of music is a relatively new concept and a new revenue channel for musicians. When did records become main stream? And how old is music? Technology gave artists a means to sell their work besides live performances. Technology also makes the market more efficient which leads to the costs being drive down. Physical media has been replaced with digital media. Physical stores replaced with digital marketplaces.

Without Spotify or other streaming services , piracy would be even more rampant with the ability of people to transfer 1000s of songs between other people in a matter of seconds. Only way to fight it is to lock down the devices which public doesn’t want and would require the government intervention.

What model? Which model had free storage and replication of albums you purchased and free delivery of said albums to your door at no extra charge?

Are you missing the multi-billion dollar infrastructure here, maybe?

< Spotify is not the same as Netflix etc, because Netflix etc is commissioning and promoting new work - something Spotify has no interest in. >

Possibly not anymore since there was an investigation into what they did years ago, but they've probably just got better and hiding it:

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-creating-i...

And I predict that would result in a race to the bottom like it has for mobile apps.

> It requires more effort than you could ever imagine.

Unfortunately that applies to pretty much everything. Of all the things in my life, I only even know how to provide the raw materials for some of them. And I could probably replicate a lot of the software given time.

Modern life is a series of miracles and all of it requires more effort than people imagine.

> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.

It is order of magnitudes more difficult being in the top 0.1% in Y industry. Then, being in the bottom 99.9% in Z industry. Giving that roughly the same number of people work in each industry.

> I got into software to pay the bills, but the way geeks talk about the industry and people I love drives me right up the wall. Have some appreciation--even awe--for the art you enjoy.

I probably agree with you about your broader sentiment of the commodification of music for the principal benefit of tech investors is not in the interest of society as a whole; however, I don't think your bit about software/geeks served to support your point. Some people appreciate software the way you appreciate music, and perhaps they appreciate music as a sort of commodity. People have different preferences, but sometimes that creates an economic environment that isn't optimal for your own preferences.

Couldn't agree more. Of course Spotify would say that. The reality is much more complicated.

One idea:musicians could organize around federated servers, operated at cost-plus by tech helpers. One avenue to liberate themselves from the mass-market vultures.

For a recent, nuanced view of what's happened by music historian Alan Cross, try:'Ongoing History of New Music' podcast 'Trying to be a Superstar in the 21st Century'.

https://omny.fm/shows/ongoing-history-of-new-music/trying-to...

>>> It's orders of magnitude easier to make working software than it is to make a hit record.

That couldn't be further from the truth, it's extremely easy to make a hit, large labels consistently release hits again and again.

It's all about distribution and marketing network, not about the music.

Sames goes with tech, good luck trying to make a product and garner any amount of traction, whereas the same product released from microsoft/google/aws would get millions of eyeballs right away.

Thinking that good has much to do with success is a recipe to be disappointed. Go spend some time promoting your creations instead of trying to make them better.

> The way tech companies have abused musicians to get rich is one of the most shameful things to ever happen.

Compared to what, the records major companies? I clearly remember artists were complaining about those, too. So which one is it?

>Everything you listen to, unless you are willing to listen to raw demos, is a miracle.

I'm more than willing to listen to raw demos, even a single guy with a guitar or a synth and a drum machine.

Instead we get over-produced turds...

For electronic music producers the barrier is definitely lower and releasing one EP every other month is not uncommon. I listen to an artist that has released hundreds of songs this year alone (God's Warrior, check his Spotify or SoundCloud if you don't believe me). Every song is of incredibly high standard as well.

> but the way geeks talk about the industry and people I love drives me right up the wall. Have some appreciation--even awe--for the art you enjoy.

It's the same way with software. People will just vomit up anything up there and truely good, and tested, libraries and frameworks are hard to come by.

Creating a "hit" in the software space would be more of an apples to apples comparison.

Both music and software are crafts that take years to perfect. But adoption by an audience is never guaranteed.

The Beatles at the height of their fame put out two albums a year, while making a bunch of movies on top of it. That pace is inconceivable in 2020, but I've never understood why.

It was inconceivable even back then, and probably had a lot to do with the Beatles burning out and parting ways after a few years in the U.S.

It was the norm.

The current streaming renumeration system favours solo singer-songwriters to an almost unfathomable degree.

Multi writer bands (what you need for high output) are fucked by the revenue share model.

It's inconceivable because the Beatles were hugely talented with two and a half very prolific song writers all playing off each other, they had enough money to stop touring and to live in the music studio, and they hired outside talent considered the "fifth Beatle". Not to mention that experiment along with the pace did not last.

They weren't unusual in how often they put out albums, it was the music industry norm at the time, and had been for years.

Source? I think you'd also need to account for how many big acts had song writing factories working for them back then. Lou Reed for example worked as an in house song writer for Pickwick Records before he went on to form the Velvet Underground.

I don't think this is disrespectful to musicians.

The way people consume music has changed and for the right reason.

Music now is a commodity that can be obtained in secs. This is totally different the old days when people buy tapes and CDs and use dedicated equipments just to listen music. If you are buying a CD for 15+ dollars, ofc it should contain more than a handful song.

Now you can literally release any number of songs at any time, and test the water as frequently as you want.

Tell us why (it is so hard). It's possible we won't be able to imagine but let's give it a go.

In agreement. Musical creations and musical creators won’t obey you, Spotify. You obey them.

The market does not necessarily optimize for hardest sacrifice or how much energy it takes to make something. It optimizes utility and in some cases scarcity. In other words, there are many situations where how hard something is to make is not that important, what is important is the utility of the final product.

then you see movies like '24 hour party people' that have a different view...

tl;dr: Spotify performance royalties paid by PROs used to be fairer than other revenue streams, until independent labels + artists got screwed over by the major labels.

------

Story time.

The streaming point values PRS for Music assigned to Spotify used to be higher per play value than many radio stations in the UK. Someone I worked with actually analysed all this and we were really surprised to discover it. Low Performing royalty revenues were not Spotify isn't paying money fairly to artists, rather Spotify knew exactly how many people streamed any given track and the royalty payout model paid based on % of total streams.

So it was actually a fairer model -- if you assume number of streams is an indicator of performance copyright value.

Compared this to the Radio model. A typical track played on BBC Radio could earn something like £80 for one play (depending on the time of day and the station). But that was because radio audience figures were estimated from sample data for the entire nation. And those samples changed something like every 1-2 years. 10 people in the country might actually be listening to the station at the time -- but you'd still get £80 regardless.

Of course the actual total license value then becomes the big point of issue -- was Spotify being charged enough...?

EMI, Sony, Warner et al. all thought no. They went and cut their own deals with Spotify. Not only was their music being treated as equal to everyone else (they didn't like that), they thought they could get a larger license revenue by dealing with Spotify directly.

So the we ended up in this really weird position: PRS for Music wasn't licensing the majority of UK royalty revenue from Spotify (the majors were) but PRS did all the processing for them (eventually GEMA took over). Leaving PRS for Music with the same workload and less bargaining power during license negotiations.

I bet you all £10 in my wallet that the artists Ek referred to as "happy" were on those major labels' rosters.

------

Source: I used to work for PRS doing usage level data analysis.

Note 1: This was correct as of 5 years ago, certain things may have changed recently.

Note 2: I'm only talking about the Performing copyright. I stayed the hell away from the mess that was Mechanical rights as much as possible.

PRO: Performing Rights Organsiation

streaming point values: 1pt = 1 stream for Spotify. 1pt = 1 second of music on Radio.

royalty payout model: total points in a quarter * point value = total available license revenue for the quarter

> Have some appreciation--even awe--for the art you enjoy.

Haha, no.

Artists aren’t some gift from God here to bestow the world with joy from the heavens that we should all marvel at.

They are people who chose to learn a skill capable of outputting something suitable for consumption as entertainment.

As such, it is their job to be putting out these works regularly, just like everyone else.

Appreciation is nice, but doesn’t matter. Everyday people do mundane things that you have no idea how to do and probably go unappreciated, yet they are more necessary than any sort of “art”. Take art down from the pedestal please.

>As such, it is their job to be putting out these works regularly, just like everyone else.

This framing of human creativity purely in terms of "outputting", "consumption", and mere "entertainment" ignores possibilities outside the sphere of the market, and outside production-for-sale. Art may well suffer from the compulsion to "put it out regularly". I think the fact that art lived through patronage for much of human history is the only reason we have so much good art today.

you're conflating technical ability with the rest of the creative process: intuiting narratives in the collective unconscious & channeling inspiration from a much, much greater source to make something wholly outside of the artist.

that's not to say that artists are "geniuses" who should be put on pedestals, but it's a fundamentally different thing than a vocation

I agree that "art" isn't some kind of a uplifted thing.

Certain pieces of art are uplifting. Art itself is just human expression.

Art is the highest pinnacle of human achievement. Perhaps, not everything you call art was made with artistry or is artistic.

All non functional human expression is art - PERIOD.

Just because you may not like my perfectly polished cube and don't see the meaning I put into it - doesn't make it "not art".

I understand you believe that, but art is literally that which flows from a creative expression. Creative action or expression is the definition, the etymology, and the realization of art.

Artistry is that which finds expression in the creative act of expressing art.

That is not the same as all non-functional human expression.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com