Comment by Hermitian909 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hermitian909 | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's some talking past each other going here.

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).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfKfPfyJRdk

Just because they themselves have outsourced the selection of the music doesn't make it a commodity.

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.

Curation happens all the time in commodities. Tomatoes are clearly a commodity, but blemished or misshapen tomatoes (a purely aesthetic concern) are often worth far less and may even be discarded. Much of this process is done by hand (I've done it).

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.

Exactly this. OP is needlessly beating the horse to death. I have enough graduate microecon credits under my belt to happily declare music is a commodity. You don't have to tick off every single i and t from the microecon literature to meet the standard definition of commodity. Its the intent. I have a curated playlist in the 10s of 1000s, probably way more than the average music listener. I'm listening to music pretty much all the time. Its a commodity. Its a generic song. Its something that I play in the background to block out the pain. There's a lot of pain in my life. So I listen to music to block it out & get on with work. And that's music. Whether its this album or that artiste or whatever is immaterial to me. Its just some background noise that sounds pleasant & blocks out the mental pain of work.

I have a degree in economics.

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.

> literally every different iteration is wildly different

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).

> 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.

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.

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