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Comment by eck | Hacker News Reader

I am sort of surprised that pg chose movies rather than music. Movies are hard. You need a lot of things to make a movie. I liked Avatar. You can't do that kind of thing on the cheap. Actors, sites, makeup, lighting, special effects, etc. For music, you need the band, which are essentially founders from an equity standpoint, and own their own instruments already since they know how to play them. You need like $1000 of recording gear and some dude to hit the "record" button.

Eventually movies will be democratized, but killing the RIAA/iTunes cabal seems like the obvious first step.

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A $1000 recording won't give you great sound quality, not 24/96 K. It easy to marginalize a recording engineer until you try to record an album yourself. To get the the sound you want there are number of things you want to get right, the right equipment, the right space, mic placement, recording levels. Still not as expensive or hard as making movie, but not so easy either.

This is true, I know some indie musicians and they usually own a minimum of $10,000 worth of equipment themselves and on top of that hire other stuff when they record or play live.

A lot of things that people think are "done in someone's garage" are either done by someone with very rich parents or produced by a relatively well funded company.

And, even if you get something recorded, mixed, and mastered by really talented independent professionals, the label will sometimes ask you for the stems (or even to re-record certain parts) so they can bring in "their guy" to put "their sound" on it.

Luckily with the labels fading as a distribution mechanism for independent music this is not happening as much anymore.

games used to cost a lot of money and used to be hard. now they cost nothing to make except your time, and you can do it in your garage.

let people have the opportunity to access the distribution channel, and they will figure the other problems out.

people in this community seem to think that they're the ones that are going to solve all the problems in an industry to move it forward.

colleges have access to expensive equipment - if students have access to quality distribution channels, they'll take time to produce high quality content.

my first company made software and hardware; we started in my dorm, used electronic equipment (scopes and power supplies and stuff), and build a product and company that made money. if I can do it with technology, someone else can do it with cameras, recording equipment.

music has itunes, software has app stores, artists/painters have the web, online retail has warehouses without floorspace (and in some cases, not even warehouses). there is absolutely no reason movies don't fit into the equation.

> games used to cost a lot of money and used to be hard. now they cost nothing to make except your time, and you can do it in your garage.

Let's not go overboard here. Just because there is a growing market for indie games like Minecraft does not mean big budget productions like CoD, WoW or Skyrim is at all feasible for a single person to design, code, test, and support from a garage.

Good games are still very hard to make. They dont have to cost a lot of money but if you want to make the next WoW, you better have a big budget.

you missed the point. the point is that the distribution model has changed and parties interested in participating has increased. this doesn't mean that the larger parties with deep pockets no longer participate. but if you are implying that competition has not increased and won't increase because making games, good or bad, costs less then you would be wrong.

the average game does cost less to make, because there are a lot more low-budget games out there.

the game changes when the distribution model changes.

Large games are still costing an enormous amount of money to make. Think in something like GTA 4, Skyrim, COD Series, WOW. Indie games have their market and can even become massive (Rovio?), but console and pc games in general are at a whole other level. I wish I could make Skyrim in my garage =) !! But that's not going to happen any time soon.

As you said, I think that there are platforms already here to distribute music. What we should start to put our focus on is in how to finance TV series, and eventually Movies (that are much more expensive).

Indie movies have itunes too. Still, just getting your game in the app store or your music or movie in itunes, doesn't mean it will sell well. Angry birds cost over $100,000[1] to make and those Modern Warfare games cost tens of millions of dollars market and produce. The big budget production typically dominate mind share in these markets.

[1] http://mobilewebgo.com/how-did-angry-birds-become-blockbuste...

This is true for some music genres, but not all. Same way you can just press record on your camera phone, you are unlikely to film the next blockbuster on that.

Commercial quality polish (generally) takes expensive engineers and expensive equipment, and a lot of time, and this is true of most multimedia fields, with exception of Indy sub genres.

iTunes isn't in a cabal with RIAA, Apple just needs to use the RIAA to make iTunes usable. Actually it's partly because of iTunes that RIAA is so vulnerable; iTunes cuts out the marketing and distribution part of the business.

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