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Comment by mlboss | Hacker News Reader

Probably 80% :)

Except how hard is it to learn to code, write a actual app, pay money up front to even get in the exclusive store and have your stuff vetted, versus just record and upload an mp3 to some music service.

The distribution might be much worse in music land than in commercial software repositories.

(Edit: changed "spotify" to "some music service" because apparently it's not so easy to upload to spotify as an independent artist. It was more about the general idea.)

Edit 2: y'all are making a good point about making music not being easy either (I did underrepresent that), but there is no point posting the same reply five times. The subthread where I replied to that is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25352484

You can't even pay money up front to upload to spotify, you have to get a paid subscription to a service last time I checked.

Paid subscription? As an artist you pay to be on Spotify? Tried finding it just now but it just says

> To get your music on Spotify, you need to work with a distributor, or with a record label who already has a distributor. They handle all the licensing and distribution, and pay your streaming royalties.

Kinda odd, why would Spotify not just let you enter an IBAN and send you your share as soon as you accumulated a minimum of €10 or something? Regardless, I see this is not as easy as signing up for YouTube and making money off of adds there.

I suppose I didn't mean Spotify very specifically, it just happened to be the example and I figured they'd rather have a broader selection of music for their subscribers; the point however works just as well with YouTube or other services.

I don't get it either, but there are distributors out there that make the process fairly cheap and painless.

I used CDBaby[0] since I had only one album and don't expect the 9% revenue cut they take to amount to more than the one-time $30 fee.

If you're more prodigious and commercially ambitious, Distrokid[1] charges $20/year and takes no revenue cut at all. (It was even endorsed by the founder of CDBaby on this very site[2]!)

[0] https://cdbaby.com/ [1] https://distrokid.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519175

There’s no “just” in “just record”: this comment either overestimates the difficulty of learning to program or underestimates the difficulty of music production

I am curious if you have tried to learn a musical instrument or learn to sing? Learning to play a musical instrument (or sing) at a level were someone would want to pay you, is probably equally hard, if not harder.

You don't have to actually play an instrument to mix things together.

But I take your point. With that analogy one can probably find an "app maker" that similarly is just drag & drop for some basic CRUD app. Just not sure that anyone actually makes those and tries to publish them to commercial repositories whereas I did get a lot of mp3s sent via MSN because half my friends were making music, and honestly many of those tracks were hard to distinguish from what I'd expect from a professional. Nowadays there wouldn't be much stopping them from signing up for a random music site account and uploading the songs there.

And yes I did learn to play an actual instrument, I know it's shit^W painfully slow (that's why I stopped taking lessons).

I think there is something about my brain that just wasn't meant for music. I found it really easy to teach myself programming but after years of trying to understand music I was never able to progress past learning other peoples songs.

There is tons of info online about music theory and such but if you follow it literally you end up with something quite uninteresting.

I recently took up drawing after quitting music and found it somewhat easier. I guess it makes more sense to my brain when the target is "Replicate what you see with your eyes but with a pencil" instead of trying to understand the complexities of why music sounds good.

Learning to play music and paying for recording equipment isn't exactly easy either.

I wonder the portion of apps by solo devs versus songs/albums/whatever music units by solo artists (who also didn't have anyone else involved in the process). I definitely don't have a strong prior for which has a lower barrier to entry.

We aren't talking "hello world" nor "row row row your boat."

Not to mention that you need an upfront investment to buy an instrument, followed by putting in the hours to learn it.

There's very little upfront investment in learning how to program. There's some investment in distributing a finished product, but it doesn't come even close to the investment of recording a single song.

> Except how hard is it to learn to code, write an actual app, pay money up front to even get in the exclusive store and have your stuff vetted, versus…

… how hard it is to learn to play an instrument, write an actual song, pay money up front to go to a recording studio, and have your stuff "vetted" by a curator after pitching it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com