Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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In the old world the business model made sense, it no longer does.

Part of what gets distorted by Taylor Swift and Dave Chappelle is the larger context. Similar to VC the vast majority of label supported musicians are economic failures. The big winners pay for the rest of the failures.

With modern distribution this is mostly a bad deal.

Since the 'Non Fungible Taylor Swift' [0] is really in control she can subvert this (until contracts get updated), but generally people can just go direct now and do their own marketing or negotiate better terms for investment.

I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the rare breakout artists is similarly warped and one-sided. You never hear from the failures the label funded that didn't make it.

[0]: https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/

What is truly enraging in the story about major music labels and copyright is how they essentially pushed through massive law changes in many countries making breaking copyright crimes (not just civil cases) and going after some file sharers with absolutely outrages claims of lost earnings (and often won).

At the same time they got caught red handed disregarding copyright themselves multiple times (Sony's rootkit which used some linux copyright IIRC, or the case of several major record labels releasing compilation albums of music without artist consent and copyright in Canada are just two examples). By their own calculations used against file shares the damages should have amounted to billions, but they got away with not so much but a slap on the wrist. I wish some judge would have really made an example of some of them.

In France they managed to make the country pay for the hunt against P2P.

There was a governmental agency (Hadopi) that costed millions of euros and due to the stupid law managed to won I think one case for 2000€.

They got merged into another useless agency and was forgotten. I am not sure whether they still exist, nobody really cares.

This is how pay of our tax money is spent in France, on subsidized sandboxes for politicians.

Interestingly, I had a CD that I owned go bad. I found it on a torrent and started downloading it on my laptop. It was taking weeks to finish. I forgot that it was running and then went on vacation to Paris, taking my laptop with me. Within the first hour at our AirBNB the torrent finished.

No disagreement with me there, the copyright laws are a disaster and have long lost their way from the 'means' to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The purpose is to incentivize creative works for the public benefit with the limited time exclusive rights, not retroactively extend copyright years after the death of the author to enrich their rights-holders in perpetuity every time expiration comes up.

As it is, you can't even make something public domain yourself - the best you can do is add a permissive license since all rights are reserved by default without registration.

But this is getting somewhat off topic.

Copyright has always been a means of control by publishers, stretching right back to mid 1600s.

The specific wording of the US constitution was (is?) a nice little bit of fluff but it didn't really change the nature of copyright at all when it was published.

I don't think it ever made sense. Steve Albini wrote an article about how fucked up it all was back in 1993: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

I think there's a reasonable argument there, but I can understand the model better before the internet (since distribution was way harder and more expensive). The terms were definitely bad for talent because early talent had no leverage before the internet (and couldn't coordinate).

After the internet whatever argument the record companies had was way weaker and their unwillingness to update (instead attempting to fight everything legally) cost them enormous returns.

"I prove to you that I am bad enough to get into hell, because I have been through it! I have seen it! It has happened to me! Remember: I was signed for Warner Brothers for eight fucking years!" - Zappa in '79

During the Napster era Courtney Love made a similar argument that record labels are the real pirates. [0]

https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

Not entirely related, but one doesn't necesarily use the advances as cash in the pocket -- you dump it into assets that pay you money (e.g. bonds).

Taken to an extreme, you see David Bowie who floated the royalties of all his records as a financial instrument that you can buy. [0]

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bowie-bond.asp

> compare to free to play videogames

What's the music equivalent of abusive lootbox and gatcha mechanics? Those seem to drive a lot of the free-to-play profit..

In games its give away the game and pay for the skins, characters etc.

In music its give away the songs and pay for the merch, shows, access to artist, etc.

The market for the latter is huge. The music is the viral hook you can use to take advantage of the internet's distribution in order to get the attention to create fans and drive them towards the other stuff.

With the internet you don't even need to rely on mega-pop stars, there's enough people at scale for a lot of niche audiences.

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