Non-Fungible Taylor Swift
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
For example, I experienced (preferentially) buying, in the 1970s, LotR paperbacks with Tolkien's picture on the back cover with his authorial economic plea -- see his statement, below, in this citation ...
from "Tolkien: Lord of the Royalties" at https://ansible.uk/sfx/tolkien.html > Eventually the authorized edition appeared with Tolkien's stern message: "Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other."
This was bad publicity for Ace, who eventually caved in, paid Tolkien royalties, and promised not to reprint. <
also referring to this circumstance is a Library of Congress blog post: J.R.R. Tolkien – Paperbacks and Copyright November 24, 2014 by Margaret Wood https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/11/j-r-r-tolkien-paperbacks-a...
> Nilay Patel wrote in Vox:
> "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.'
> This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcity: there’s an endless amount of everything available to everyone.
How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! If you tell your mom "I made a song" she will be quite unimpressed if what you actually mean is "I made a digital copy of a song." A book or a song or a movie is more than the bits that make up any individual copy of it.
There is a like-with-like comparison in there, but it actually hurts Patel's argument. There is no scarcity of music on the Internet--not referring to digital copies, but because the Internet has made it trivial to create and widely distribute original music (often for free). If consumers were unwilling to pay much for Swift's music because of the vast quantity of alternatives available on the Internet, Patel would indeed have a point. But consumers still want Swift's music, not other peoples' music. Even in the face of huge amounts of free alternatives, consumers still want Swift's music. That only proves Swift's point!
I used to be a fan of her and her persona but now comes off as spoiled and unappreciative!
Look at how many of us got hired as an employee or who got investment to try doing a startup and that relationship ended poorly. Are we, because we are not famous, obligated to always speak kindly of the person who paid us? Even if we perceive that the relationship turned out to not be good?
Just because someone is rich and famous doesn't mean they don't have the same human emotional responses as the rest of us; it just means theirs are more visible and open to attack.
I will never claim to know what Taylor Swift truly thinks of the Big Machine purchase of her masters. But, having made art of my own before, I do very much understand the emotional attachment to that art and the incredible difficulty in separating the art from the business transaction of making money from that art. That's something that the "money men" in the artistic endeavors don't usually seem to get.
And if you aren’t opposed to the WhatsApp or Instagram founders criticizing Facebook but you are opposed to Taylor Swift criticizing various stakeholders in the music industry you might ask yourself why you’re holding Taylor Swift to a different standard.
I have never would never spat on any or would spit on any investor of mine even if we didnt see eye to eye. The acquiring company sure as they bought something valuable my investor help me create.
No double standard here and if Justin Bieber did the same thing I'd feel the same way ... so no gender double standard here.
Most people can't afford to stand up for themselves, I'm glad she's doing it.
So hang on, why should Taylor Swift be demanding more then?
There are 1,000s and more artist out there that want to be in her shoes and those who had the cash had confidence/believed in her outside of the other 1000s. I would be gracious, humble and appreciative!
Also, I'm not aware of any startups on the level of a Taylor Swift who publicly spat on their investors (not the companies who bought them)? Can anyone name such startup now mega-popular companies (as big as Swift) who publicly spat on it's investors?
Two things she does right:
- she is always fighting on behalf of every artist, not just herself
- her beef is always with much larger companies (Apple, Spotify, record labels) so it's easy for people to take her side
Your quotes don't support this analysis. There's plenty of original music available on the internet. Enough to call it an endless amount. Weirdly, you point this out yourself immediately after accusing Patel of a fallacy.
The fact that people will pay for Taylor Swift's music against a landscape with other music does not actually support the idea that Taylor Swift's music deserves to be paid for, either. People will pay for all kinds of things. https://satwcomic.com/clean-living
Look, I can record a song and release it on iTunes (and all the others) using Distrokid.
This doesn't mean it's good music that people will listen to, or would sell at all.
Art is subjective obviously, but when you like something you know you like it, and when you don't like something you know you don't like it.
But just because there's a ton of music out there doesn't make it good, or therefore valuable.
720,000 hours of new content is uploaded to Youtube every day, and none of it is the 90 minute movie I want to watch right now.
Hard disagree. There's an endless amount of that too. It's just filtering it out from the rest that's the difficult part.
Record labels often try to stand up rando pop groups - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but those groups that manage to stay around for more than a few months do have talent that supports the large marketing campaigns being thrown behind them - they may not be the most talented out there, but a large number of people genuinely enjoy their music.
ie 4-chord songs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
And I'm not sure I'm convinced by what you're saying, I think people mostly pay for Taylor Swift because she has a brand with a lot of marketing and everything that comes with it, you hear her on the radio, on TV, then you're familiar with her work and style so you buy it to hear it again because it's convenient and music discovery is hard, the art is just the minimum requirement to enable the marketing. That's only my opinion as a consumer, I have no industry knowledge.
Yes, they are two different things.
The problem is that artists (and record labels) want to get paid for the non-scarce thing: the copies, and not for the actually scarce thing: the artists time and effort. This is why people don't see pirating music as stealing, while at the same time they are more than willing to pay a small fortune for a concert ticket.
The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music.
I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans.
After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running costs?
https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators
* Chapo Trap House, 3 hosts - 170k/month
* The Tim Dillon Show, 1 host - 121k/month
* AdeptusSteve (I couldn't figure out how many people, possibly 1 guy making some sort of porn game?) - 103k/month
* Flagrant 2, 2 hosts - 98k/month
* Tiny Meat Gang, 2 hosts - 82k/month
* Cum Town, 3 hosts - 81k/month
Note that the dollar amounts of most of the people on that list aren't visible and I cut them off at 80k/month.
People are willingly chipping in to help creators making 1M/year, not including sponsorships, live shows, etc.
And there are some multimillionaires that could likely make it work. If the Spotify deal hadn't happened, Joe Rogan almost certainly could have.
Unrelated comment about the list: of the Patreon categories, podcasters are predictably over-represented. But I am surprised by the number of "adult games" on the list. I didn't realize how popular these were.
* "support them" would also include leaving them with enough money to retire on after their career, if they live in a country where retirement savings are important to have, or otherwise are a strong motivating factor for those who are considering this as a career.
Millions of people currently support many televangelists in precisely this way, so this isn't rhetorical.
Well, that or it’s just more user friendly. It’s hard to plan my finances if I don’t know how much I’ll be paying (since I don’t know, and have no control over, how many creations someone will make next month).
But this method would be anti-consumer for many buyers of music because the final quality of a song does not always correlate with effort.
- low effort but high value: a musician can have a flash of inspiration and come up with a catchy chorus melody and great intro hook on a synth in 15 minutes. They then record the vocals in 2 or 3 takes and thus the whole song is done in less than a day. This ends up being a hit song.
- high effort but low value: an artist struggles for weeks and months on composing a song with many rewrites. The producer brings in a dozen other co-writers to help finish it. When they go to record, they record 100 different takes of the vocal and then construct the final vocal by splicing in syllable-by-syllable from the different takes. Very laborious. And yet, the final result is music that's heavily produced but lacks an addictive chorus and does not compel repeat listens.
A lot of movies and its sequels are like that. The original on a shoestring budget had a better story and a magic quality but the new sequel with a $200 million budget and an army of special fx artists ends up creating a dud.
It has a freeloader problem, though.
An alternative is to drop price over time but give refunds/royalties to earlier buyers, so they always lay a little less than later buyers.
The alternative solution doesn't address the above commenter's problem that you shouldn't charge for copies of music, but for the creation of it in the first place.
[0] And yeah, I realize expecting a high bounty is kind of hypocritical for an indie musician. I've made maybe $50 from my music sales/streaming over the past decade, so why should I be asking a bounty bigger than a few dollars for any song? Well, because with the bounty model I'm setting a ceiling for what I can earn from my work, which doesn't exist on a pay-each-download model. Maybe over the next 10 years I'll only earn another $50 from music, maybe I won't, but I don't want to lock that in.
Also, I am going to make my music regardless of any sort of bounty. The payment is just for whether or not I release the music. Open Source projects typically use the bounty to pay a developer to work on the project. They don't develop an entire project and then withhold release until they get payment. Software doing it feels necessary. A musician doing it feels stingy. It just doesn't feel like a comparable model to me.
That's literally what charging for the copies does, though. People just want something for nothing.
Claiming you want to "take the copy for free but pay separately for the time" when you aren't willing to pay for the copy so that there is some reimbursment for the time is an exercise in wankery.
(You aren't just paying for the time, anyway. You're paying for talent, etc. A genius who creates something better in 5 minutes than someone else does in a year is still someone you'd rather compensate...)
I happen to resent the use of legal force to do so, and I'm not alone. I belong to the Napster generation, where the muscle arm of the copyright industry destroyed one of the most promising new applications for the Internet, instead of rolling with it and reaching some kind of mutually-beneficial arrangment. We're all still pretty mad about that when we think on it.
Like it or not, NFTs represent a way out of this. Taylor Swift has trufans, she could easily cut a limited-issue NFT for her new recording of Fearless, with a smart contract which pays a residual every time it's resold.
If she wanted to. Probably not the right time in the hype cycle for her to get on board, there are unsolved questions in terms of user experience.
But the option is there, and if it becomes sufficiently widespread we can do away with the whole tawdry cycle of DMCA requests and randomly penalizing music enjoyers with ruinous fines and lawsuits. That would be all to the good.
How is this anything other than sociopathic?
That's a weird spelling of "people who want to listen to music -without- paying for it". Napster started a conversation about IP and copyright, but I for one am glad it is dead.
DCMA is monumentally stupid in its -implementation-, but the idea is not a bad one. There need to be protections for people who make a living by creating music, art, etc. Yes, that means repercussions for people who reproduce digital content and redistribute it without a license. I think that we can all agree that how these things are currently enforced via the DCMA is rather bad, though.
What I'm saying is, we need to pay people for their work. This includes artists making music that you want "to enjoy". In 2021 there isn't really an excuse, with spotify/apple music/etc existing for streaming, and things like bandcamp for outright buying cds/lps, and discogs for the secondary/used market.
Most musicians don't get paid for their work or get paid a token amount.
I don't see what the point is in fighting for Taylor Swift's right to make millions from making music if the average person can't make a living.
It's not about quality either. It's about distribution channels.
This is the part that gets completely glossed over when talking about creative output. I’m not convinced that the difference between an artist who commands eight figures in annual revenue and one who commands five figures is a simple matter of talent or dedication to one’s craft. Pop superstars, in particular, are the product of a promotion and distribution machine without which the actual artist would probably enjoy only a small fraction of their reach and popularity.
As with most political slogans, “pay people for their work” is in fact an extremely nuanced idea in practice.
This is a strawman argument. Obviously I would like to see -all- artists get paid a living wage at least for their work. The fact that life isn't fair and TS makes millions isn't my fault, and is not what I'm specifically advocating here.
So no, I don't think it is such of a straw man.
It's not the average musician who is affected by pirates. Spotify will send them $90 / month instead of $100 / month, maybe.
I pay about 10€/mo for Spotify. A significant portion of my use of the service is devoted to artists that are dead. They can't put time and effort into producing music. They can't be reimbursed for the time and effort they've already put into it. I could bury the gold with them, but they wouldn't have any use for it because they're dead.
The difference is especially important because options are cropping up for actually funding artists and other creatives by paying for their work, not copies of the results. Kickstarter, Patreon etc.
Consider not; the majority of that money just goes to Spotify. If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money. (If I remember correctly, anyway.) Of course, this assumes you can get the music elsewhere.
If Spotify's too convenient to give up, there are several Spotify download tools you can use to get the music onto a device that doesn't support Spotify (e.g. MP3 players). Lots of them seem to actually grab from YouTube, but perhaps if you use the Spotify API, you might be able to do it?
https://qz.com/1660465/the-way-spotify-and-apple-music-pays-...
I should probably mention I haven't really looked into Spotify's business model in about a year, so if something has changed and my information is outdated someone please let me know.
Last I checked, Spotify's cut is 30%. That's a lot, but even with a significant error it's nowhere near the "majority."
> If, every month, you paid 10€ to a random artist you liked (or split 10€ between all of them), the artists would receive probably more than two orders of magnitude more money.
That's a function of how popular your favorite artists are and how much you listen to them. No matter how unknown they are, if you listen to an average number of streams per month then they'll get at least 70% of your 10€/mo -- a far cry from two orders of magnitude. If your favorite artists are much above average popularity then they'll make more with the Spotify arrangement than if you gave them cash even if you don't listen to them at all.
There's still a kernel of truth in what you're pointing out -- at some point in the fairly recent past you had to buy the music outright no matter how often you would listen to it, so if there exists a long tail of musicians who aren't listened to much but whose music would have been paid for in a record/tape/CD/itunes market (and I suspect there does) then Spotify is going to be much worse for them.
It is in fact way way more than the majority because the remaining is split among artists while the cut is kept in totally by Spotify. Spotify is taking 3€ while any given artist would get a few cents at best.
- You probably watch more artists via Spotify than you would via other methods, so each individual artist is paid less. Note this is less of an issue than it seems because on average there will be proportionally more people watching each of those artists.
- Artists may have cut other deals so they're getting much less than the 70% being distributed to "not Spotify." Note this isn't much different from pre-spotify, but it's a real effect.
- Something I left out completely in my original comment is that you very well might be paying less per month to Spotify than you would for other forms of media. I vaguely recall a stat saying that the opposite has happened mildly (but we pay a lot less for merchandise), but my memory is fuzzy on that point, so somebody who knows more should step in.
That isn't to say that Spotify is better for all artists (it's not), better for most artists (given typical pareto distributions my gut says that's probably also false), or that it's a "net positive" in some ill-defined way (maybe, maybe not, that's not an argument I want to try to make) -- just that Spotify's payment model isn't super complicated or super unfair at a macroscopic level, and it's super easy to construct reasonable scenarios where your dollars would have more positive impact on artists via Spotify than if you just paid those artists cash.
From what I understand the number of listens that month is pooled globally/in buckets for the purpose of distribution. So if you listen to your friend's band once and nothing else, and someone plays a 31 second song on repeat 83612x over 30 days nonstop, your friend's band gets {{payout rate}}*1. And the other artist gets {{payout rate}}*83612. Rather than both artists getting ~70% of their listener's $10 subscription.
And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets. Some regions earn more/less than others, some account types (free trial, free with ads, family plan) earn less than others. Some specific labels or artists even get their own special buckets. 30% take overall is still correct. If you check their 2020 Q4 "Cost of Revenue" was about 73.5%, which is almost entirely royalties.
In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively. Or if they do, it's probably a pop or children's music artist getting many streams already. But in the rare case of some person listen to one specific relatively unknown artist as most of their streaming, I'm pretty certain that artist does not receive an equal majority of that subscriber's money.
Yep, exactly. Views are pooled per stream rather than per artist, which is its own can of worms (I mentioned that somewhere in this thread), but if you watch an "average" amount that already accounts for such an artifact. At least 70% of your contributions go to the artists you listen to in such a scenario (that money has to come from somewhere; many artists _don't_ get paid much).
> And then the payout rate is a bit complicated because it comes from a variety of buckets.
Yep, that's why I simplified it as much as possible in the context of the net effect of your personal actions. Your paid listens will impact one bucket and not the others, and that allows them to be safely ignored when evaluating the difference in an artist's pay with you watching them on Spotify or just giving them cash.
> In practice though, I don't think it matters too much. I don't think many people listen to one artist exclusively.
This is a point I'm seeing crop up a lot, not just from you. I think we might be talking past each other; I'll lay out why I don't think that matters, and I'm curious to know what you think.
In particular, if you're comparing spending X per month on Spotify or spending X per month on other forms of music, in both scenarios you would be splitting that between the artists you actually care about. I'm pretty sure people spend more per month on music than they used to (still haven't found the original source, so maybe that idea is wrong), so IMO it doesn't make sense when comparing Spotify to alternatives to point out that in _both_ instances your money doesn't all go to one artist.
There is a point to be made that you'll probably listen to a broader variety of artists through Spotify than otherwise (why not? that's one of their core value propositions), so your individual X payment is split further than it would have been. However, everyone else is listening to more people too, and on average assuming everyone listens to the same distribution of music as in a pre-Spotify world those effects actually cancel out.
There is still an open question of whether that distribution is the same -- does there exist a pool of artists being listened to via Spotify who would rarely have their music purchased otherwise? My gut says "yes," but I don't actually know. Is it a bad thing for those artists to be paid?
Spotify plays a lot less per play, on average, than most albums sold. From this POV, artists are pretty hard done by.
If you're a fan, buy the album (i.e. pay even for the music you don't like as much). If you only listen to the music ambiently, stream and don't feel too guilty about it.
Charging for copies to cover effort sounds suspiciously like a leaky abstraction.
The degree of silliness to artificial scarcity becomes apparent when you try to apply it to any other labor. If an investigative reporter uncovers corruption at city hall, does he deserve a royalty every time you tell someone and hence copy the fruits of his labor? Does a meteorologist when you freely share his forecast? Should the doctor who invents a new surgical technique get a percentage every time it's used to save someone's life?
No, it does not do that at all. If you sell 200 copies, you get paid twice as much as when you sell 100 copies. Artists should make a decent hourly wage depending only on the amount of work they have done.
Imagine if other professions worked the same way as the copyright industry does. You have a plumber install a new toilet in your home, but instead of charging you for his time and effort, he charges you 5 cents every time you pee, and 10 cents every time you poo. Or you have someone pave your driveway, and instead of paying for his work you pay $1 every tine you park your car there.
Would you accept that ? Why should artists be different ?
of course one could argue that the way to gauge the value of the artist's time and effort is by how many copies people want of what they produced.
I am not arguing this is a good way of estimating value, but there are lots of people who do make this argument, and it should be addressed.
note - I guess it should be time and ability, effort is generally another measure of time.
I know a lot of musicians, and virtually all of them who earn a decent middle class living earn more than half of their income from teaching classical music to children. The other half comes from a spouse with a day job. ;-)
It’s a kind of inside out or upside down economics that I have been thinking about a lot lately. And personally I think this can be done in a totally voluntary way without a state drawing taxes and paying a UBI (though a UBI may help cut a path towards this future).
Which is the "labor theory of value" of old man Karl Marx, one of the most thoroughly debunked theories there is.
In this case, I can spend 1000 hours recording a song that no one wants to hear, and I should not get paid for the labor I put in to it.
I didn’t read it as such, I read it as “art” - new, good music I find enjoyable - being produced by so many artists in such quantities to not be rare anymore. There may be only one Taylor Swift but there are hundreds of pop artists around the world who continuously produce music I enjoy comparably (sometimes with the help of the same team that produces Swift songs) and many thousands more with 1 hit or so I enjoy more.
People want Swift’s music at a price, but not necessarily at more than that because they have alternatives to listen to that are cheaper. Demand at a current price doesn’t prove that the actual value of something is higher.
I think where Swift is unique and rare has just as much to do with the timbre and size of her brand.
Because Swift is not talking about music (by your definition). Swift is also talking about digital copies of music.
And with your differentiation you've made Patel's point very well: Swift is taking a valid argument for paying for music and through conflation of the two, she is arguing that it should also apply to digital copies of music. This is the actual fallacy here.
This got me thinking: in a post-scarcity civilization, what would people do? Probably invent new ways to create artificial scarcity.
However, just because something isn't scarce any more doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Lots of people want to support artists whose work is important to them. Platforms like Patreon may be much more important in the future.
(To be honest, if all someone does is take an unlimited good and make it scarce to extract rent, I consider that to be deeply immoral.)
And that hurts Swift's point - if music implies art, and art implies important and rare, and important and rare implies valuable, and valuable implies it should be paid for - that doesn't explain why so much music is not paid for. It also doesn't explain why some people create music for free.
The abundance of meh on the internet makes it harder to charge for mid-level stuff that you used to be able to make a living off of, but the money still finds the trancedental stuff.
The other problem for music is 4 fold. 1) many people use 'radio' basically spotify or some streaming service like it. 2) Most people buy songs not albums 3) many times people 'age out'. 4) I can choose from a catalog that is decades old all of the previous years of top 100s and get something good to listen to.
Now there are exceptions where there are collectors in that they must buy everything. But most people are not collectors they are renters or listeners. Many people just want that one song they like and maybe a couple of others. So you can not make 10-15 off them, you make maybe 1-2 dollars, and depending on your contract much less. Also people 'age out'. For example most of the artists I like most are 'done'. They have either disbanded or just not making anything new and going on concert sales. I also have little interest in newer stuff (because I no longer have the inclination or time to devote to it that I used to). Sure I buy a bit here and there or listen to something from streaming but nothing like what I used to do and own hundreds of CDs.
Increased supply of music via Bandcamp/Spotify/Soundcloud has almost no impact on artists that already dominate the charts. They can simply pay Spotify to blanket their app with ads for their new music. Spotify took some flack for their OTT promotion of Drake's 2018 album [0], but long term, Drake and the other 'market leaders' came out on top.
Some small band hit languishing in the middle of a 100-song playlist is never going to be able to win against that.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/03/spotify-users-push-back-at...
No one wants Swift's music as an original work; that doesn't even make sense, because it's not possible to retroactively make someone else the creator of given song. They want digital copies of Swift's music, the thing that is not scarce.
1) "Music is art," ...by definition.
2) "Art is important and rare." A particular piece of art may be important and rare. The quality of being art does not make things either important and rare.
3) "Important, rare things are valuable." Tautologically. Valuable things are important and rare. Value is defined by relative scarcity and relative desire.
4) "Valuable things should be paid for." My mother's love is valuable (and important and rare - I can't get it from anyone else.)
Patel is stating the obvious - the scarcity of Taylor Swift's music is a government-granted monopoly aided by technology that is largely unenforceable on the internet. He's being patronizing in even pretending like Swift was making a coherent argument, and he's not addressing it, but ignoring it.
> If consumers were unwilling to pay much for Swift's music because of the vast quantity of alternatives available on the Internet, Patel would indeed have a point. But consumers still want Swift's music, not other peoples' music. Even in the face of huge amounts of free alternatives, consumers still want Swift's music. That only proves Swift's point!
Not really. The mean price paid to listen to a Taylor Swift song has got to be at the sub-cent level. The average price paid to listen to obscurities that 99.99% of people have never heard of is going to be significantly higher.
Pans out just fine with Taylor Swift because I figure she might have a modicum of respect for her fans as opposed to someone like Jake Paul who treats his like dirt. The difference between the ages is that fans that were gatekept by organisations had many levels of PR, admin and marketing to wade through, today we have direct, raw and visceral which also can result in corrupt, unethical and even evil.
This is a pattern that could define the coming decades as society coalesces around a few chosen figures and lends them their might directly. Many of them will be found undeserving and the debris they leave might be impactful.
Sure, the remakes are competent and perhaps even better technically, but after listening to both side by side (song by song, new then old) - to me there is no comparison. I went online looking for reviews of the "new" album and I only found critics gushing over how great the remakes are. Did they even listen? Did they compare? Sounds like it was just a money grab justified with a healthy dose of moral outrage.
I found the same thing on first listen, because a few things were subtly "wrong" (different). On second or third listen I love the new version, the production and vocals are just that little bit more polished in a fair few ways and I've gotten used to the slightly different mix. The new bonus tracks are pretty decent and it's nice to rediscover one of my favourite albums again.
It wasn't at all dissimilar to the effect I get when trying new headphones - I hate them for a little while, invariably. Then I get used to the new tonal balance and I learn to love the sound (if they're good headphones)
It gets weird when you buy the import (for the US) versions of some songs. A lot of the Seattle bands sounded better to my ear on the versions sold in Europe. Japan is always an odd duck.
Is there any software that would allow the minimal speed-up to make it enjoyable to listen to again? Also, maybe check some of the live versions. I get the feeling those might be a bit faster.
Every time I fire up my calibrated color profile for my pc screen the colors look all wrong for a few minutes, even though I know they are the absolute "right" colors. So when it comes to topics with no rights or wrongs it's even more subjective, try with wine or whisky, TV screens, driving sensations in a car, sitting on a chair &c.
You'll always find someone to argue X is right and Y is wrong but in the end it's 100% subjective, you know you're in for a ride when people start talking about missing "soul", "magic", "unquantifiable and unmeasurable qualities"
Not one review I found had the guts to say "eh, 15 is abysmal on the new record, especially compared to the raw energy and feeling of the original". It's OK to like the new version, but to say it's brave is really stretching belief.
It's like if a bunch of art critics fawned over Da Vinci making an exact copy of the Mona Lisa again. Sure, he might knock it out of the park the second time, but it's not the same.
Amusingly enough someone like Apple could get answers over time by watching play counts of both for people who have both versions.
How dare the people who supported, developed, and promoted a young performer get a return on their investment.
There is a common sequence of events in creator-driven popular entertainment, where an author or musician becomes too big to edit (or produce, if you prefer). The later works have a tendency to be bigger, looser, and lacking the focus that characterized the earlier works.
Oft-cited examples: Steven King, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, Alanis Morrissette, Tori Amos, Maroon Five, Aerosmith.
I don't know whether this has happened to Taylor Swift, but it's certainly a plausible explanation.
I think it's more of a giant, public middle finger to Scooter Braun: "you won't sell me my masters? Fine, I have enough money and spare time to re-record them AND it won't hurt my career a bit, because my fans love me enough to buy something I've literally already released."
edit: TS probably worries some about money like most rich people, but it's likely not her primary motivation
People at the top of banking are likely motivated by things like status and winning as much as by how many millions they have.
But you're right that she can regain licensing rights AND screw Big Machine at the same time by re-recording. I'm sure that crossed her mind.
It's definitely about the money to some extent - she wasn't willing to pony up what it would take to buy them.
Which she wouldn't do, and I wouldn't either: never agree to nondisparagement without substantial consideration.
She wears high heels
I wear sneakers
She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers
There's such a difference in a young up and coming begging for a guy to acknowledge they love the outcast, to Taylor Swift singing the same song.
They always tell you in vocal lessons that so much of a song has to do with feeling. For people like most of us on HN, that makes absolutely 0 sense, and for many decades I've never been able to understand that... until now. Same person, different life experiences tugging on the same song, and it hits like a ton of bricks.
One example I'm familiar with is the Catch-22 album Keasbey Nights. This was a ska-punk album recorded in 1998 and is one of my favorite albums of all time. The songwriter and lead singer from the band, Tomas Kalnoky, left the band shortly after the album was released. He eventually formed the group Streetlight Manifesto. In the mid-200s, Victory Records was going to re-release the album. Instead, Streetlight Manifesto re-recorded the album to fix all the things Kalnoky didn't like about the original. It's still very similar but has less charm to me than the original.
I still couldn't tell you which one I like better. I'm very glad they both exist.
I haven't listened to the new Fearless, more of a Reputation guy anyway, so I don't know if it's directly comparable.
But what she's doing is smart. More power to her.
But those companies can and will fight back with legal means. For example, if I'm a label, non-disparagement clauses are the norm going forward. You don't bring our business in front of (from my perspective) the mob on Twitter. Also, I don't sign a deal unless I get the copyrights, the mechanical rights, the sync rights, the performance rights, and the songwriter rights. I need all the rights. The artist can keep the a perpetual, non-transferrable license to the performance right, but that's it. I bet this won't even cost them that much more, because until Ms. Swift flipped the script, this was kind of de facto understanding of what the master rights meant. This lateral move by Ms. Swift (apparently) caught everyone off guard.
She is a genius, though. I'm not sure if what she did was fair, but apparently this was war, and there's no fairness in war.
It might seem intuitively strange-- "He signed the contract, he knew what he was getting!" But when I consider it through the lens of the professional business world, that doesn't make sense. If a company hires me at a salary of $X but I underperform, I get fired. In entertainment, the show gets cancelled. But if I vastly over-perform, things like bonuses, merit increases, and promotions are pretty standard: It's a renegotiation of the original terms of employment, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'm glad that it's becoming a less novel concept in the entertainment industry as well. (especially in a streaming age where limited air-time is no longer an issue and all old shows can be available, allowing for massive resurgence in demand for given show that might not have been aired at all previously)
And Dave was very astute to go to what he says are his real bosses-- his fans-- to address the issue. That is a somewhat unique dynamic to the entertainment industry, where the value that a solo entertainer brings to the table is much more easily quantified than the specific value of many employees at a 10k employee company.
Her reputation underwrites the transaction; any transaction contributes to her reputation.
I don't think re-recording albums for the purpose of attacking former business partners, who priced the intellectual property at roughly all the money that she had been paid in their previous arrangement, indicates a willingness to keep re-recording things.
It's probably even truer for NFTs as often the NFT itself merely represents a JSON payload which itself references URLs managed by a third party and trusted to continue referencing the original work. Once that third party goes away, the reference chain breaks. The value is not only reliant on everyone agreeing that the third party "owns" (whatever this might mean) the "work" (whatever that might be) but also that the NFT continues to represent this ownership by proxy even when the proxy goes away.
There's nothing stopping a new middleman claiming authority over the ownership of a work and issuing an NFT for it. But its value entirely hinges on a shared understanding that this claim is valid.
Of course this would break down if an artist really did devalue earlier NFTs for the same work by issuing new ones because the value largely comes from the expectation that the non-fungible token's authority is also non-fungible, i.e. permanent.
Some masters are guarded jealously by their owners. For example, I've heard that some of the Stevie Wonder releases aren't even from the masters, because he won't part with them. Some masters may truly capture something irreproducible; say, John Lennon's hoarse voice in "Twist and Shout."
In this particular case, at least, Taylor Swift has put the lie to the uniqueness of the masters. If she has the right to rerecord everything, the old masters aren't so special. But I think the article is also right. After this exercise, she may have made her point, and may force Shamrock Capital to make a deal.
I suspect for lots of "hearing but not listening" as long as you hear the "normal master" version you don't notice, but if it were subtly different it would be noticeable (perhaps only subconsciously).
I wonder if you could do studies on Muzak at stores (original "radio" masters vs live versions vs lounge vs remaster vs ...).
I've been listening to a few recordings of Little Feat's Rock'n'Roll Doctor [1] - a wonderful song but one where I'm convinced by far the least interesting version is the 'master recording'. How many songs languish because the master is not that great?
But I think you missed another aspect, the real value is the original master plus the tweaks and additions to make it into what became popular. That production of the song probably wouldn't sound the same if you applied those processes to a slightly different version, say the singer or band's best efforts later.
In contrast, Jazz vocalists don't get taken as seriously if they reproduce their recordings too exactly, and Jazz instrumentalists don't get taken seriously at all. In that genre, you're expected to bring something new to each performance.
Now there will be no middleman to take on the small risks of many unproven artists, and because of the relentless greed and ego of Chapelle and Swift many young artists will never have the opportunity that they did.
It takes an exceptionally bright young artist to REALIZE they need those things and go out of their way to find and pay for them. Neither Patreon nor Youtube is going to provide an editor and certainly not force you to use one - no matter how valuable it may be.
If our technology allows us to now distribute media in a post-scarcity environment, isn't that a good thing for culture? It's absolutely ridiculous that artificially reintroducing scarcity is seen as a good thing.
It also serves as yet another example of the reliance of profit on artificial scarcity, and the irrationality of the system- as well as the lengths to which people will go, just to desperately preserve an outdated model.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/def-leppard-re...
The reason artists who believe in the value of their own NFTs get paid more is because they're nominating themselves as NFT spokespeople and attracting the attention of marketplace investors with skin in the game.
If you're the CFO of one of these marketplaces and you're faced with a choice of which NFT to buy, do you choose the guy who just tweeted "trying out this NFT thing lol", or the guy who acts like he's the next Andy Warhol and constantly pushes the NFTs-have-value narrative?
Note that nowhere do I mention artists. Certainly (some people) also pay for art because they want to compensate for what the artist did but I think that increasingly, people pay artists to keep doing what they are doing. Not for what they did.
So, no, I don't think the value that people pay an artist derives from a work that exists today, but derives from the value (speculatively) they will create on the future.
And ultimately, I don't think any contract can enforce this, even a smartone.
Further, the new version isn't on some new platform or anything. It's not like Taylor Swift asked fans to fork extra money to listen to "Taylor's version" so nothing is really proven here regarding Taylor's so called power. In terms of accessibility, the tracks exist side by side with the original on Spotify.
The idea of NFTs is incredibly appealing to artists because the technology could allow for artists to sell music that can only be played by some client if the NFT for a track or album was authentic. Ultimately this is bad for consumers and you bet your bottom dollar that some new form of music piracy will be born if music tried to go this direction.
If you have a good source, I'm very interested.
Considering that it was released only 3 days ago it seems like the number of plays for the "(Taylor's Version)" is quite incredible.
That's nonsense. DRM is just DRM and there's no way to stop piracy. If one person can listen to the track, that person can copy the track end of story.
A difference from old-fashioned patronage is that it's easier to lie -- you can pretend to support artists while secretly enjoying their music for free. Happily, it seems like only a minority of people are satisfied by that.
I'm not in the industry, so I don't grok it too well. Why would an artist with an established fan base need a record deal?
They handle the marketing, merch, venues, social media, distribution, retail relationships, deals with studios, relationships with radio, relationships with personalities to do interviews, all the video production staff for music videos, like this could on forever.
The NFTs
Also the card will stay in this world for a long time if protected from weather and light, I assume, where as the NFT needs to be constantly kept alive by "mining". I agree it's similar, but it's also different. And interesting. At least to me. :) Also value is relative, of course. I mean: One man's collectible is another woman's trash. It probably needs a certain shared set of beliefs/illusions to agree that something like that has value.
I think the latter is responsible for the overwhelming share of the value of a sports card, and the former is only a historical coincidence that creating rare and difficult to counterfeit items was only practical by fabricating physical items.
for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself.
Here is one idea, for how we intuit value:
As a fraction, in which non-fungibility (~= "authenticity") is the denominator; nominal value (whatever that is, a function of context etc.) is the numerator.
In the sports card example, a physical object with a provenance has intrinsic guarantees of uniqueness.
Low uniqueness means high intuited value.
In the NFT case, a hash has non-intrinsic guarantees. They are provable; they are not perceptible.
Uncertain uniqueness means low intuited value.
It's not that it's not provably unique; it's that if we don't perceive it, no one cares.
Perceptible and provable for us monkeys is a serious and real difference.
That's the general idea. The edges are full of corners, for sure, e.g. a counterfeit or reproduction can be exacting enough to create a new game for us to play (I am reminded of the rabbit hole of reproduction collectible watches...)... the quest of authenticity has a fractal quality in the case of mass-produced but limited goods (what edition number? What pressing? The one with the misaligned cyan?)...
...but in the 80% case, I think it's simply, we monkeys like objects; ideas remain a hard sell.
My own belief is this is so deeply baked into the relationship between our world modeling that it will not be overcome through culture.
A lemma might be, non-fungibility is less important than materiality.
Authenticity for fungible goods, like gold, is persistent, in part because they are fungible. It's their material (perceptible provability) that reassures us.
I believe this is rooted in intuitions about the scale and durability of consensus on value containers, which appears until recently to have been in the long view winner-take-all, in the case of things without pragmatic use-value.
Even for physical objects like paintings or sports cards, the matter of provenance is extraordinarily difficult to ascertain. Counterfeiters are really good at what they do, and determining authenticity of very valuable items is presumably impossible for all but a few experts, to the extent that what you’re buying can really be thought of as a physical object along with some easily-verifiable (often through digital means!) claim of authenticity from a trusted group. In cases like this it’s pretty silly to place such emphasis on the provenance of the physical object itself!
Love, truth, justice, honor, patriotism, status, etc.
So long as there is consensus that a thing exists (tangibly or intangibly) and is desirable, there will be demand.
This feels like a pyramid scheme. What makes it different?
The problem there is that culture, social conventions, shared fictions and so on can be manipulated/twisted/adapted to some agenda or interest, and that includes what we feel valuable or not, without minding of what is really behind (like with bitcoins and similar). Once we took this route, all kinds of mirages can appear. And they can vanish into thin air as fast as they appeared.
It is. My Google-fu is failing me but there was a famous art dealer in the early part of the 20th century who promised that he would buy back the pieces he sold at least for the price the buyer originally paid less some minuscule percentage if the buyer could not sell the pieces to someone else. It made paints he sold significantly go up in price. He died. Buyers tried to get his estate to pay for the paintings and failed.
I'd argue that everything you listed can be reproduced, almost identically. But there's no value in doing so since it is not the original or was never authorized by the creator. Why does this change all of a sudden once we go digital? Is it because it's so much easier to reproduce something that originates digitally?
Suppose I'm an artist that releases a limited digital run of an album and that NFTs are used to attribute ownership of the digital release. Would this have more, equal, or less value than an artist doing the same thing but with a physical limited run album release?
The actual music content can be pirated and made available just the same, whether or not it was physical or digital. The cost of the physical goods themselves is negligible. However, I feel like many people argue that the digital release via NFTs would be worth less because all you have to show for your ownership is a digital token, and not some sort of limited release physical item.
Surely it depends on how much you like the music?
> However, I feel like many people argue that the digital release via NFTs would be worth less because all you have to show for your ownership is a digital token
Correct. I value my vinyl copy of "Live Dead" by The Grateful Dead because I have had it for nearly 50 years, have played it countless times, rolled joints on it, and even like the scratches. It's also something that cannot be exactly copied, given current technology.
Having said that, most of my music is on MP3s, but the idea that referring to them via some block chain crap will give them "value" is just silly.
> Having said that, most of my music is on MP3s, but the idea that referring to them via some block chain crap will give them "value" is just silly.
I think the point here is that verifying ownership of digital goods is hard, because they are so easily reproduced identically. Blockchain technology and NFTs are one way to solve this problem because it allows you to have a verifiable chain of ownership which cannot be modified or faked. (ie. if a music release was as simple as the artist distributing an MP3 to 10 people, it would be impossible to tell who actually owned the "original" MP3).
Is it unreasonable to think that in 50 years, someone might look back at the limited digital release they got of their favourite album as fondly as you look back on your Live Dead record, and then pass that digital ownership down to their next of kin? It's a concept that's been explored time and time again physically but seems weirdly uncharted for anything digital.
But not identically. I can get a very nice print of the Mona Lisa, with very accurate colours. But it isn't at all an exact copy of the original. And I defy you to produce anything like a near-exact copy of a specific slice of bread.
So the work has no value in and of itself? It seems to me like an unauthorized reproduction of a work of art has just as much intrinsic value as the same bits labeled "original". It evokes the same emotions and forms the same memories.
I don't think this is what you actually believe about art; you probably have your "investor" hat on. In that sense you are right, there is far less liquid value in an unauthorized reproduction than there is in an authentic original. But the actual value of the work in the eyes or ears of a beholder is the same regardless of the legal, historical, or social status of a reproduction. There are probably lots of great works in art collections that owners and viewers believe are original but are in fact illegal counterfeits. But a Rembrandt is still a Rembrandt, and Bach is still Bach, even if the source is The.Well.Tempered.Clavier-xxxWAREZLORDxxx-BEST.QUALITY.torrent.
It seems like a blockchain-based technology that only works when backed by the threat of lawsuits combines the worst aspects of the art market and the cryptocurrency market.
Physical art, which people have historically paid for, is much more difficult to credibly reproduce than NFTs.
Edited to add:
Moreover if the argument in favor of NFTs is that they're not worse than what preceded them, then what's the point of introducing them? If the same problems in the traditional art market (especially for digital works) are recapitulated with NFTs, I don't see the point.
For most of these famous digital art NFTs, the digital work itself is widely distributed online. But of course there’s only one of each NFT.
"Look how many people paid money for this/look how much money was paid for this, it must be worth that money! The actual efficacy of any product sold is secondary to the amount of money I've been paid"
I understand the 'tom brady rookie card' argument but it falls apart in the digital world. A digital image of Tom Brady as a rookie is worth nothing. A print of that digital image is worth less than cost of printing it. The value of the card is that its official merchandise of limited run with no way to create 'new' old cards.
Stop pretending NFTs are physical items, stop pretending they can't be infinitely reproduced.
Yeah but let's be clear it's often just because 2 people say they agree it has value, and for all we know they're often laundering money. I can look at a motorcycle and understand why it has value to someone even though I wouldn't buy one myself even for a penny. I'm afraid I'm unable to do the same with NFTs and cans of feces from an artist.
The trick is to buy some art at a reasonable price, store it in a dark warehouse for a couple of years, then anonymously buy it from yourself at an exorbitant price through shell companies with dirty money.