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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

What the fuck are you talking about?

Music is one of the most powerful elements of the human experience. It's common to all cultures across all periods of history and it has the capacity to inspire people, enrage them, and cause them to fall into tribal affiliation with each other. A large percentage of the largest mass gatherings of humans that have ever occurred have had music as their draw. Entire generations are defined by their music choices, or even a single music festival.

It's something our soul needs, it's as essential to to being alive as love, or sex. Pretty sure the business of music is driven by that need.

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I would exercise a little humility and allow for the possibility that you don't understand what parent is saying, before slinging obscenities.

You are absolutely right about music being fundamental to the human experience, universally. But parent isn't denying that at all.

Parent is talking about the BUSINESS of popular music -- not music full stop. The business of popular music absolutely _has_ co-opted music itself as a means of marketing other products. That's how the money is made and it's the only reason you are aware of any popular music artists at all.

Yes people listen to popular artists because the music makes them feel certain ways. But from the business' perspective that only matters insofar as it enables the business to capture the attention of the listener, to sell things. Are you aware of how many product placements litter nearly all popular songs? Why do you think country music -- which is a massive market -- is hyper-focused on getting drunk, drinking beer all day, driving pickup trucks, etc.? Do you know how much money there is in that?

I think I understand it fine. The comment said this:

> The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol

That's nonsensical. The business of music essentially started as a way to sell music. Music is staggeringly popular and people have shown a willingness to pay vast sums for it. It's a core human need.

It's like saying "the food business essentially started as a way to sell airline tickets" or something, it's just word salad.

It isn't. Churches and bars would comission people to perform in order to attract patrons/contribute to ambiance. This is before record stores.

When did this start? The first paid admission concert in history was apparently held in the 17th century at the home of a violinist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert#17th_Century. I'm no expert, but it looks a lot like people paying money to hear music without any ulterior motives from anyone involved.

yeah, that's not when "the music business" started, though. that's one particular subcategory, thousands of years after it started.

calling that the start of the music business was just ludicrous. it's an overly specific example for an overly general topic. it's incoherent.

“Music” has been around for a long time, likely from hundreds of thousands of years ago. The “music business”, where people can own music, the distribution and modern incarnation of “the music business”, has only been around for a a little over a century.

People have been buying sheet music for a lot longer than that.

Of course it's true virtually by definition that the "modern" incarnation of the music business has not been around for very long.

yeah, if you move the goalposts, then you score every time. and the original post in this thread said nothing about modernity.

but even if the original ranting comment was only talking about the modern music business, that starts with sheet music publishing in the 19th century, not this made-up nonsense about churches and bars.

and the 19th century sheet music publishing business was itself founded on hundreds of years of sheet music publishing that came before it, just at a smaller scale.

> made-up nonsense about churches and bars.

The first sheet music printed (15th century) was almost exclusively liturgical (i.e., religious).

Similarly, it's no accident that the first popular work of the printed word was the Gutenberg Bible.

Sure, but the sheet music was a straightforward product. Certain people wanted to perform certain music, and the sheet music helped them to do it. Music has been part of religious observance since forever. It’s just inaccurate to analyze the situation as one where the sheet music business is only profitable because it’s being indirectly used to “sell preaching”.

Anyway, whatever the beginnings of the industry, there was a very large secular sheet music market shortly thereafter. I’d love to hear the cynical analysis of the madrigal industry, but I suspect the truth of it is a lot simpler: people enjoy singing songs.

From Wikipedia:

> Jacques Arcadelt (also Jacob Arcadelt; c. 1507 – 14 October 1568[1]) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music. Although he also wrote sacred vocal music, he was one of the most famous of the early composers of madrigals; his first book of madrigals, published within a decade of the appearance of the earliest examples of the form, was the most widely printed collection of madrigals of the entire era.

No clue why you're bringing up sheet music, modern music industry is recorded music, not sheet music. OP was discussing recorded music, ie "the music industry", not the "sheet music industry"

It's not entirely clear to me what the OP was talking about, as the claim in their original post is quite vague.

I just wanted to point out that people have been able to "own" music since long before it was possible to record music. So there is a long history of music being a product.

Honestly the grandparent comment reads like a bunch of learned wordbabble. It's easy to understand why parent got it wrong. I think the thrust of the violent reaction to GP is that it is clinically picking apart a thing which is fundamentally about human expression in music, which is primal and precedes capitalist notions of "selling yourself" or optimizing some crap "vertical" that could only be uttered by a business and economics graduate.

My favorite band, Crystal Castles, didn't become a global success because some brand-guy figured out how to sell weed-pops emblazoned with "CC" logos. They were playing shitty dives in Toronto and smaller venues and almost suddenly became a global success because they made something that was really fresh and much needed by the disaffected youths of the time like me.

My love for that band was never tied up in any kind of notion other than the one that spoke to my heart. Any attempt to dismantle that in verbiage is going to make me angry too.

yeah, the top comment in this thread is just utter nonsense and meaningless trash. try telling Skrillex that you can't make a living with music and all your revenue's going to come from your side hustles. side hustles are great, but revenue from live performance has gone up during the same era that revenue from recordings went down.

Skrillex is a dated example, maybe, but that fits, because this happened a while ago.

this whole discussion is just filled to the brim with people with no serious background in the topic, saying wildly inaccurate things. this is usually what happens when HN talks about any kind of show business, no offense.

Important disagreement, thank you.

I make music. What we do isn't a commodity business, it's an art we practice and explore, like math. Products are totally different. Extending your simile of music being as essential as sex, the way people make that a business is with porn and services. Music may be the porn and services of what are essentially math noises instead of sex.

I had also looked at white lablling some, er, intimate products to go with albums but was too bourgeois to pursue it. Basic idea was a crossover between music and firmware for the, um, device. Immersive experience. There is a future in which a Trent Reznor of vibrators will emerge. We will look back and laugh that people just used to put things in their ears. Insane, but this is the kind of thinking it's going to take to make music a viable living.

> I make music. What we do isn't a commodity business

So do I. Yes, it is. An incredibly popular one:

https://www.google.com/search?q=aerial+photo+of+woodstock+fe...

https://www.google.com/search?q=areal+view+of+glastonbury+mu...

https://www.google.com/search?q=aerial+view+of+Donauinselfes...

I could post 100 more of these of course. The product being sold here is people coming to hear and see the performance of music. It's one of the most popular things there is. Millions and millions of people spend time and money daily just to be in the proximity of people making music.

It's also art. It's also a hobby for many. It's many things. But my point that it is, all by itself, a tremendously popular product for people, seems inarguable.

I'd say the disconnect is about what a Product is, which is the eternal question on HN and in startups.

Music isn't really a product unless you are on the publishing/licensing side, and even then a license is just an insurance policy against being sued. Spotify and Apple Music sell distribution services, not music.

Further, artist compensation on streaming services is so poor that most artists lose more money from inflation against their savings in the time it takes to choose and listen to their album than the platforms pay out for listeners. This is not an economic characteristic of something that is in high demand. It's a different kind of economic good.

I agree that music is beautiful and universal. What I'm saying is, a Product is something else, and the business practically depends on musicians not understanding it because it trades in them.

Business doesn't run on truth and beauty, it's a trade in desire and money. This is even harder for writers and journalists to accept, but it's the same dynamic.

> Music isn't really a product

Yes it is. It's a business transaction that's about as simple as it gets.

I go to a place and play the music. You pay me money to be allowed to come to the place.

This thread is profoundly confused.

Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite different. Case in point people who are asexual.

That some people are asexual does not invalidate the immense importance of sex. Likewise that some people are apathetic towards music doesn't render music any less important. Certainly none of those people who don't care about music are spending oodles of money on merch either.

yes, however I was responding to a comment which treated it as a universal thing for everyone with phrases like "It's something our soul needs" and pointing out that not everyone feels the same way they do.

Which was in turn responding to a comment saying that music is a sideshow to selling pieces of plastic. Yes, not literally every single one of the 8 billion people on this planet will die should they go an extended period of time without music, but that's clearly not what the comment you were replying to meant. To claim the two statements are equally hyperbolic is absurd. You brought up asexuals as an example of how if you're sufficiently pedantic the need for sex is not really universal, and I was reaffirming that the comparison was apt.

>"Case in point people who are asexual."

Whole 2 of them (relatively speaking of course)

As has been pointed out already, some people don't feel the need for sex or love. Also some people don't care much about music. I'm one of those people. Music doesn't generally do much of anything for me. It always feels really weird when I see people declare such strong feelings about music. I commented [1] about this a while back after someone (the person I'm replying to) pointed out that musical anhedonia is a thing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17926998

Yeah, and to extend on this: simply because music has been used in capitalism to make other industries more profitable doesn't imply that music isn't valuable on its own. Music is life enriching for an uncountable number of people, no matter its profitability. Same with Free Software, for that matter.

But just because it's valuable doesn't mean that there are straightforward and reliable business models available for profiting from its creation/curation/maintenance/whatever.

Air is that way too.

And to come full circle back to the original topic: that capitalism itself can enhance discovery. I was introduced to Etta James's music through a Jaguar commercial. In fact, there are quite a few artists I'd never heard of before their music was featured in a commercial, or a TV show or movie.

The first time I heard Imagine (Beatles), was in an advert for Natural Gas. John was probably spinning in his grave.

Can you buy/sell/monetize love?

What is love?

Baby don't hurt me.

Parent is talking about the "business of music" which is an entirely different thing.

The crux for artists that want to live from their art practice, is to know the difference, accept it, and control as much as they can of the two activities.

I think both what you said and what the op said can be true at the same time.

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