Obviously as this article mentions its not great for the artists themselves, but perhaps the cutthroat nature of the industry makes it so that only the best of the best rise to the top, even if it means it comes from an independently wealthy musician.
So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anything artistic.
I say this not to be a dick, but simply to point out the economics. When a million other people can do what you do, and live in the same city, then don't expect to make much of a living at it.
Sure there are exceptions (hi Taylor) but that has less to do with actual music and more to do with other factors.
They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means.
You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
Playing music well in a way that is liked by millions is an unbelievably valuable thing. Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
I'm actually a big fan of pop music, but that doesn't mean that non-pop is financially unsuccessful because it's "bad", it's just not put into the marketing machine because it very well may be too good.
It's not really about marketing. Everyone thinks that and they're wrong. You learn this instantly when you are actually in the business and see all the artists and projects that get the exact same amount of marketing effort as the massive hits and go literally fucking nowhere.
It's like home run batting, even the best in the world at picking and promoting music are lucky to have like a 10-20% success rate.
Audiences have a mind of their own, they like what they like. The problem people have with understanding this is usually that they don't like the same thing that mass audiences like, and they consider what they do like higher quality. So in their minds the masses are being duped, marketed to.
Which is true to a point, they are being marketed to. And having resources and labels and monopolies behind you can definitely expose you to more people. But it's not enough, at all, if people don't respond to it. And conversely, if you have no resources whatsoever it's way harder, but it's not impossible at all and stuff that really has wide appeal most of the time really does bubble up and catch attention pretty quickly.
It's not really about the quantity of marketing effort, it's a butterfly effect. Of all the marketing effort that is put in, it might be the tiniest thing that makes the difference, it's not a linear relationship.
Mass market success is basically a crap shoot and doesn't really reflect the quality of the musician. You said:
> Playing music badly is utterly worthless from an economic standpoint.
And that's not true at all, being a virtuoso is pretty much worthless from an economic standpoint. It's pointless to try to equate skill to economic success because in pop art they don't have anything to do with each other. It's all about marketing and distribution. Not to say that the studio musicians that make the pop music aren't virtuosos, but they're definitely playing simplified songs.
My point is just that some music is incredibly valuable economically, and most is not worth anything at all.
Which is clearly true.
As such, music is not an interchangeable commodity it's an extremely idiosyncratic and heterogenous market.
I've heard the argument about how nobody cares about "better" music and so on my whole life. It's like the thing people like to talk about. But it's kind of boring, there's no definition of better that everyone is going to agree on.
For example I think Pitbull fucking sucks, deeply and profoundly, and objectively. When he rhymes Kodak with Kodak in the song "Give Me Everything" I want to throw rocks or other durable objects at whatever speaker is subjecting me to that fucking song. Somehow, 12 years after its release, this is still happening to me on a regular basis, usually within the first 2-4 hours after entering the state of Florida.
But people seem to like it. So that's the only actually objective way to determine the value of music. All the other ways are just people talking.
I agree. Part of that is that economically successful music also isn't "better", it's just making money. I like Madonna but she's an objectively crap singer. Just because something is popular, it doesn't make it good. That's like saying Coke is the best drink in the world because it makes the most money. Commercial success is due to marketing, distribution and luck.
But we're back here. I still disagree with this, it's a poor analysis of what's actually happening.
In music, commercial success, more than any other factor, comes from making music that is liked by large numbers of people.
If you can make music like that you'll probably have commercial success.
...and from another post
> will bubble up...
Excuse me for being blunt but this is way too simplistic and the world does not work like that. Artists (= suppliers in over-crowded markets) don't just "get discovered". An artist has a job, and that job is definitely not marketing, sales, public relations, or really anything other than doing their thing.
If artists were left to their own devices they would happily rot in their basements, attics and/or garden sheds and die in anonymity. The (potential) audience needs some way to actually discover said artist _before_ they can even form an opinion on likes/dislikes. And, the market is over-saturated with extremely good artists, globally. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artists. Only, 99.999% plus is not known by anyone except perhaps their near social circle and/or relatives.
An artist without an agent or an agency* (proper marketing and networking etc) is just a random person with a creative hobby.
* added: Or patron
Most bands never have a chance to see if their music is liked by a large number of people because they don't have that kind of distribution. Through the 20th century the labels created a distribution network into which they pump hand selected artists (that match their marketing channels demographics). They, like you say, have roughly a 1 in 10 chance of success with this model (like vcs). Most bands will never know if their music will be popular because the won't get signed to find out.
Most bands never get signed because nobody likes them. They play a gig to fifty people in March and when they play the same place in June twenty people show up. By fall it's just girlfriends and siblings and by the following year they're working as a roofer or something.
Artists make demos of their music and send them to people and those people don't like them, and don't play them over and over and don't share them with friends, and it never reaches the ears of people with influence because nobody cares, because it has no real connection or mass appeal.
Conversely, artists that do have mass appeal get attention very very quickly. I've been around awhile, I started working professionaly in the music business in the late 1980's. So much has changed, back then it was true that distribution mattered a lot more. In the 90's corporate radio mattered a lot more. In the 2010's you had a much clearer shot via Youtube or similar. So yeah there's substantial change in how it all works.
The basic core part is the same though. Most music doesn't even have a small chance of being genuinely popular. Because it's the kind of music that isn't really liked by mass audiences.
You're saying this:
> Most bands will never know if their music will be popular because the won't get signed to find out.
That's not true. Those bands do know that their music will not be popular. They just don't know why.
I've been to tons of packed clubs with unsigned bands. I've seen absolutely amazing musicians who don't even play live, just give lessons...
The "band as a brand" is a 20th century anachronism that equates commercial success with "goodness".
Commodity has a very specific meaning in economics.
You can very easily tell that a Taylor swift song and a local jazz song are not the same song. They are not interchangeable. If someone replaced some songs in your playlists, you would notice. Therefore, not a commodity.
I don't think this is true.
In the Spotify world, people have playlists where the songs sound similar to a certain song or band, rather than a hand curated one.
Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else.
Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking about a career in music, realistic goals are going to be in education, maybe session musician, live music at entertainment venues (theme parks, cruise ships), maybe symphony; maybe something in support of music like a sound tech at a venue, etc. Being a headlining act is a career, but not a lot of people get to do that.
> You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically.
I mean, I typically listen to a specific internet radio station and it feels like they have let their playlists stagnate, but I still listen to it. So I wouldn't say nobody does. They've been down for the last two days though, currently listening to a local radio station with similar tastes (but they're constantly adding new music to their catalog).
Commmmodity:
"In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them."[0]
Fungibility:
"In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts are indistinguishable from any other part" [1]
"Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another."
Music _is_ a commodity when one item (a song) is _perceived_ so similar to another item that their value _in_the_given_context_ is _perceived_ as equal by a consumer (the case for one poster below).
If a consumer assigns equal value (not preference, value) to Song A and Song B then these two are commodities because they are _interchangeable_ in some context. Both are "fit for purpose"
On the other hand, if the consumer does not want to replace Artist A with Band B then these are not interchangeable, and as they are not interchangeable they are not commodities either (the case of another poster below).
So, the customer is always right. Ie, commodity or not is a matter of context.
I hope this helps.
An apple (or type of apple, to be specific) can be a commodity because I don't care or who which orchard made the apple, and I am completely indifferent to the apples of various orchards when I go to the supermarket.
Recorded music isn't like that, at all.
I care if the song is Fly Me To The Moon sung by Frank Sinatra or Stairway to Heaven sung by Frank Oz using the voice of Kermit the Frog.
Some products are commodities. Some aren't. The word has an actual substantive meaning.
I think it's useful to bisect music into commodity/non-commidty categories.
Category 1 is things like Taylor swift's music which is not a commodity.
Category 2 is the music playing on lofi hip hop radio[0] is a commodity. 28,000 people are listening to the music on that channel as I type this and and approximately zero people know or care who made that music. The specific song basically doesn't matter so long as it fits the genre and meets a quality bar. They're analogous to handmade rugs - all slightly different but not in a way the consumer cares about.
So far as I can tell, most music that gets made is treated like it's in this second category: Generic Genre X song. Producing something that manages to break out of this commodity status is deeply unusual.
In anecdotal support of this, I often go to venues to listen to "bluegrass" (category 1) in much the same way I go out to buy an apple. I want the bluegrass to be good, just as I want good tasting apples, but the particular purveyor does not really matter unless it's someone special like the Punch Brothers (category 2).
It's like saying Michelin-starred restaurants are a commodity.
They aren't.
Once they are on that list they might be sort of interchangeable to a specific sort of person who just wants a generic "nice" restaurant and picks one off the list when they get to a city.
But they're all unique and different in really substantive ways, and also different from non-Michelin starred restaurants.
Your example of venues that hosts bluegrass works the same way. You trust the guy who books the bluegrass bands. If they just offered a gig to every band that asked you would hate going there and they'd close soon. Have you seen genuinely bad bluegrass? You don't like it, I can assure you of that.
You're just talking about curation. And the fact that curation is even possible proves what I'm saying.
If recorded music was a commodity there would only be one playlist because you would not be able to tell one playlist from the other.
Can your car tell Exxon from Sunoco? Can you drink a glass of milk and know which dairy it came from? Of course you can't.
THAT is what a commodity looks like.
Corn is a commodity too, but I buy my sweet corn exclusively from one of a few vendors growing varietals that I enjoy more than what I can get at a super market (the varietal can be sold on the futures markets).
One definition of a commodity is:
> a mass-produced unspecialized product
My claim is that most lo-fi hip hop (and other genres) really looks like it fits this definition. The songs are produced in their thousands and have differences in the same way honeycrisp apples have slightly different colors and sizes, but ultimately are interchangeable.
Any further than this feels like it's nitpicking at technical details. I cannot tell the difference between lo-fi hop hop playlist A and lo-fi hip hop playlist B because the differences in the songs are not meaningful to me.
Recorded music just like isn't a commodity. It's not close.
In fact, if you took a spectrum of all mass consumer products and ranked them from most like a commodity to least like a commodity recorded music would probably be on the side of least like a commodity.
It's not really an argument. Recorded music is not "kind of like" a commodity. There are tens of millions of recorded songs and literally every different iteration is wildly different, people consider some of them literal core elements of what gives their life meaning while other examples of the exact same product they have a visceral and intense hatred for.
We have a basic disagreement on facts here. My experience of the world is that very few songs have any substantial difference from the world as 1,000 other songs. With a small number of songs having the properties you describe. They are different in the way the patterns on the skin of an apple are different. Utterly unique, but not in a way that matters to consumers.
Diamonds are, perhaps, a good analogy here. Diamonds below a certain carat size are a commodity. They're ground up by the ton and sold for use in a variety of products at a cheap price (category 1 songs). Larger diamonds are not a commodity - a 45 carat diamond might be considered a national treasure (category 2 songs).
No, because ...
> Can your car tell Exxon from Sunoco? Can you drink a glass of milk and know which dairy it came from? Of course you can't.
I can't, and yet Exxon and Sunoco both exist.
You're not understanding how some people use music. Does the supermarket care who the artist is? Not really. Do I care who the artist is? Not really, I just need dance music to keep part of my mind occupied so I can get into the zone easier; saccharine vocals help too, no substance please.
Every movie, every scene. Same song in the background.
Every first dance at a wedding, same song.
Before a baseball game, standup and put your hand on your heart, same song.
You’re indifferent right?
I'd probably just stop listening to music at that point. Or find some work where they're still running large collated copy jobs; those copy machines make some good beats.
In fact if you told me that my understanding of physics was wrong, and that I had in fact only eaten one banana ever in my life, which had been reconstituted and delivered to me each time, I wouldn’t have anything to say. Because I wouldn’t be able to tell if that was true.
Because bananas are all the fucking same from a practical standpoint.
That’s what a commodity looks like.
I'm not particularly partial to what comes up. There's obviously a degree of quality that I'm expecting in order to keep the experience smooth and a set of genre and musical conventions I'm expecting.
I wouldn't say that's exactly commodified, no, but I definitely feel like my engagement with the difference between Taylor Swift and some other well-produced halfway reasonable pop artist is pretty minimal. At least in that act of listening.
I used to care a lot more about this. I used to keep up with my favorite artists and look forward to their releases excitedly. Now, I feel everything is such a continuous stream of mild-novelty that I'm less attuned to these differences.
So in that sense, I think I agree with the grandparent in that something feels interchangeable and indifferent about music. I don't want to pay a ton for it, even as someone who used to love buying albums. Or, at least, the times when I engage with music in that way seem fewer and further apart.
Music seems to serve two purposes. The majority of my listening is unintentional, background listening. Much more rarely am I more engaged in the experience. Only in those latter times do I feel all that attuned to a difference in quality.
Now, instead of using an algorithm of music selected by a mass market service that is playing you an endless stream of songs that are proven to have a large audience, try listening to the raw feed of uploaded music to major services.
Like the literal feed coming in that is just a firehose of every major label, all the indie releases uploaded via Distrokid or similar, and so on.
You'd find it instantly unlistenable. Nobody wants that because it sucks. Most music, even music people have taken very seriously, has almost no appeal to anyone at all.
I don't know a term for that other than commodity, but sure, it's not the strict definition in economics. Please suggest an alternative word if you know it.
Which is to say, it's not.
That's the point.
There's no fashion choices in West Texas Crude or Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Those are commodities. Each producer of the product produces an indistinguishable result from each other producer. You are producer indifferent. Most of the time you don't even have a way of knowing who produced the commodity you're consuming.
Fashion, music, cars, hotels, laptops, and many other things aren't that.
You care if it's Chanel, BMW, Hilton, Apple, or Taylor Swift, versus H&M, Honda, Motel 6, HP, or Metallica.
If an option were removed, something (not a random substitution, but eventually a substitute would be found) else would take its place and fulfill the same function even though it isn't the same it's close enough to fulfill the purpose.
That doesn’t make it a commodity, words have meanings.
The distinction is important.
The original thread here posited that music wasn’t a lucrative field because it’s an interchangeable commodity.
That’s just flat wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s not lucrative because it’s very highly differentiated and the popularity follows a power law distribution and you’re probably not in the top echelon.
But you could be. Which is why people try so hard.
That’s an entirely different analysis.
You could've avoided this whole digression by providing the word people were searching for and doing a mental search/replace then moving the conversation forward.
Something many musicians don't understand is that music is not primarily artistic nor technical but cultural.
I feel like these conversations often ignore the middle class of musicians that make a decent living gigging, touring, doing studio work, publishing with small labels, etc., but are not making huge money pumping out top 40 hits and filling stadiums.
Between ww1 and ww2 military planes had a lifespan of a few years, tops. The Spitfire was conceived in the 30s, obsolete before the end of the 40s. [1] Today military planes have much longer lives, B52, F15, F16, A10 are all still in active service since the 70s or earlier.
I was lucky enough to have a career in the golden age of computing. The next generation will oversee the consolidation, and in 40 years time work in hardware, and software will be commodity jobs for a small handful of multinationals.
[1] prototype 1936, production 1938, 24 major upgrades in 9 years production ends 1947, retired by the RAF in 1954.
Frankly, at some level, software is already a commodity. Some markets have matured and it's increasingly unlikely you'll make a living there[2]. I needed a compass app on my phone the other day, there are a million to choose from, they're all free, and there's no way to differentiate one app that shows North from another.
We are currently in the phase of new platforms, and that helps. I've worked on DOS, Windows, Linux, Web and Mobile. Each platform asks for the existing work to be redone.
Once platforms settle down, once the library of work is big enough, and feature-complete enough [3] then the software development market will become very unvaluable. Itll exist, but it won't be a high-flying job.
[1] I use the term commodity here in the sense that it's interchangeable in use , not that they're identical. Cars are a commodity because they all perform their function (transport) while differentiating on more-or-less irrelevant details (Cup holders). Sure a 2023 car is "better" in a million ways, but a 2012 car does the transport job perfectly well. There was once 50 car manufacturers in a single town in the UK. Today there are a handful globally. It takes a new platform (Tesla) or a new market (China) to make anything new in this space.
[2] outside the odd viral game, which has its 15 minutes of popularity, you can't make money with a soley mobile app. You can make money with the app as an interface to a big backend system, but its the system making money not the app.
[3] in some cases it's already there. How many times are upgrades basically a collection of visual updates coupled with features nobody uses? We fiddle around the edges but most languages are interchangeable. Good luck making money in developer tools these days - novelty is not enough. Yes tool x is better than everything else, but so is tool y, z and a. Sure everyone has their favorite editor, but the reason we can't decide on vi or emacs Is because functionally they both do the editing job just fine.
Sure if your definition of value is "income generated".
Of course there are other benefits to playing music (it's fun!) But the post was about doing it for money.
Taylor is where she is because of an extraordinary amount of hard work (not sufficient by itself) an extraordinary amount of writing skill (not sufficient by itself), supporting parents who moved etc to maximise those skills (not suffcient by itself), an understanding of her audience (not sufficient by itself), some element of luck (persistence) and so on. Its not one thing that makes you stand out in music, its everything.
I think that's proven false, by the existence of Marketing as a field. Deep pockets achieve that it's not the "best X" that reaches places, but whatever they are pushing is reaching places. Not 100% the case, but still, music production is so an industry, and it's arguable whether this is good for the artists - or the public, for that matter.
TL;DR the deeper the capitalism, the more exclusively the capital prevails