Comment by ivancdg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ivancdg | Hacker News Reader

The Earbits guys (frighteningly prolific bloggers) wrote about Spotify recently:

http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/spotify-replaces-piracy...

"The service may do a good job fighting illegal file sharing but it also does a great job of eliminating any motivation to buy an album that you can listen to through the service."

In Europe Spotify's been available for a while. I was in on the beta when their catalog was a lot more restricted, and it was already impressive. With the majors on board, it's hard to see the freight train stopping.

How can one reconcile how wonderful it is for consumers with the payment statements that make us musicians cringe? I think of it as all-you-can-eat iTunes for very little per month; the recent competitors/alternatives pale in comparison.

They deserve a lot of credit for building a workable model that makes iTunes look like a rip off (I hate that software).

But they further dilute the value of recorded music, which is a huge paradigm change for the music industry that will ruin the viability of many musicians.

Perhaps we can re-educate the public to value music again by taking a pledge to pay for it, à la pg-patents? Something tells me this new, 'recorded music ~ free' paradigm is here to stay.

To anyone who had a computer in the past 5 years, recorded music is not worth anything. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.

If you want to make a pledge to keep paying for buggy whips, go right ahead. I'm sure there are people who would argue that buggy whips have intrinsic value -- but the market for a buggy whip right now is basically nil.

Same thing with recorded music. If you want to make money as a musician, you don't make it through recordings, you make it through extortionate "public performance" licenses, by doing concerts (and selling $30 t-shirts), or by offering experiences that people can't get elsewhere (pay $50 a year and get access to my website where I post about my tour and post unreleased samples and occasionally mail you a trinket, or whatever.)

I also don't understand the undertone of righteous indignation at Spotify's existence. I can listen to the radio, where songs are played gratis. I can record those songs (legally!) for my own personal use as much as I want. The only difference with Spotify is that I don't physically push "record", and that's the kind of semantic difference only a lawyer would love.

> To anyone who had a computer in the past 5 years, recorded music is not worth anything. Sorry, but that's just the way it is.

It wasn't always that way, and it doesn't need stay that way either. If no-one values the music, then maybe it will; if people do value music, then maybe it won't.

> I also don't understand the undertone of righteous indignation at Spotify's existence. I can listen to the radio, where songs are played gratis

The difference is that radio play was used to promote albums, which people then bought. Recording a song on the radio came with many disadvantages: DJ interruptions, missing the start/end of the song, lower sound quality, no album art etc.

With Spotify, there's no need to purchase the album, as there are no such disadvantages, the whole album is usually online, and you can play songs whenever you want to listen to them, not when the DJ feels like playing them. This makes in less economically interesting to be an artist. The righteous indignation against spotify is probably due to the fact that artists actually make very little money out of their content, whereas the spotify owners are probably going to make a lot of money out of the artists' content.

I am actually trying to find it but there is a country in Africa that is having a worldwide day where all radio stations are encouraged not to play music, and to instead play talk radio and other educational broadcasting about the importance of copyright protections and the need to support the arts, specifically music. They believe by taking music away for a day and educating people about the impact their consumer choices are having on the artist community, they can start to create significant public awareness about this issue. I think it's a great idea.

Imagine Pandora's site down for a day: "Take this moment of silence to think about how important music is to you." That seems like a win for Pandora anyway, since they have a net loss of about $20,000 a day right now thanks to overpriced royalties.

I think one of the issues is not that file sharing has reduced the general perceived value of music to 0 and the best you can sell people now is convenience and ease of use which is what people are really paying for on things like Spotify rather than the music itself.

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