* You'd want to know that David Lowery was the lead singer for Camper Van Beethoven (of "Take The Skinheads Bowling" fame) and Cracker (of "Low" fame). You'd quickly learn from this that Lowery was trained as a mathematician and worked as a quant near the CME, and worked with Andy Mason at his pre-Groupon company. He's a punchcard and packet radio chat nerd.
* He's tired of people telling him that musicians need to "embrace" technology. They were embracing technology in the '90s. They paid to have people run complicated websites. He's tired of people telling him to sell more t-shirts. Bands have sold t-shirts since the '70s. It's shitty money. And people pirate t-shirts too!
* Concerts are also shitty money for most artists. People thought otherwise because we inadvertently cherry pick stats from artists that happen to do crazy well at concerts. Lowery runs a serious recording studio, his wife is a notable concert booker. Musicians aren't making money at concerts. Many are living out of their vans.
* Recording albums is deceptively expensive in ways that technology doesn't address. ProTools can get marginally cheaper but the mix engineer doesn't get any cheaper. Mix engineers are expensive skilled professionals. Recordings sound like crap when you don't do them professionally. The mix engineer doesn't get to sell t-shirts at concerts.
* He's going to lose a lot of you by sniping at the industry for "defending software patents", as if that was a double standard. Get past that to his real point: technologists work in an industry that is supported by protectable IP. Even if you work solely on NetBSD, you'd make a lot less money if no software was protectable. No music is protectable anymore. There is a serious double standard.
* He gets it: you can give to get. He's been giving away music for decades. His shows were all recorded and given away for free; his bands organized CD burning trees. But that was his choice and he did it on his terms. The new terms are dictated to artists: your stuff will be available for free online.
* The old system was better for artists. Not because the labels were better. It was probably an accident. Editorial aside: or maybe tech companies are just better at squeezing surplus value out of systems.
* People tend to remark about how low artist royalties were in the label system. That didn't tell the whole story! Artists received sizable advances calibrated for "modest success" level outcome for their recordings. The overwhelming majority of artists never recouped those advances. So the effective royalty rate was much higher; possibly, for most bands, over 50%.
* Not only that, but artists received a mechanical 70-95 cents every time their album sold, even when they hadn't recouped. So no matter what the economics of a given contract were, when you download a pirated album instead of buying it, the artist loses nearly a buck.
* Artists don't talk about how good they have it because it's not cool to talk about how good you have it.
* Music distribution in 2012 is lockers, streaming, and stores.
* Lockers are straight-up piracy. They make huge revenues (ed aside: "MegaUpload Considers IPO" revenues) from "accelerated downloads" and from ad placement. Musicians get zero of that money.
* Speaking of piracy: recorded music sales are off over 60% since the advent of piracy. There are studies that try to show that musicians are better off in the long run. But many of them are playing games. Some pour game revenue into the same bucket as music revenue. Others use sleight of hand to equate 99 cent single downloads with album sales. One suggested a successful indie musician had seen increased revenues recently, but it turned out that musician made only 34k/yr. People circulate wildly inaccurate stories and infographics about how labels screw artists and accept them without question.
* Streaming tries to pay artists but not by viable amounts. Moreover, streaming pricing isn't transparent. Some artists get better deals, paid on different scales, than other artists.
* Stores are reliably paying artists. But the economics don't totally add up.
* The 1980s value chain: artist < store < label. The artist got the least, yes. But stores took on inventory risk and were compensated for that. Labels financed recording and distribution and were compensated. All three links in the chain provided significant value.
* The 2012 value chain: artist < iTunes < label. The artist makes marginally more. But iTunes does't add significant value: unlike the stores, which were paid to take inventory risk and predict demand, iTunes takes no risk and performs almost no service other than dealing with card processing fees.
* BUT HE'S FINE WITH THAT. He's a market guy. More competition would fix this problem.
* Except: how do you compete with Apple, Google, and Facebook? For a little while musicians could make decent money selling music on their websites. 100% of the revenue less processing fees. Then Facebook and Youtube took all the traffic. Visitor stats plummeted. New content has to be released on Facebook or Youtube; that's where the audience is. But he has no control on Facebook or Youtube. He has to fit into their revenue model, or swim against a tsunami to try to find an audience for a standalone web site, hoping to be one of the few people with outcomes like Louis CK.
* Again, he says: the old system was better. You could make a living more reliably as a musician under the major label system than you can today. The label system at least cared about music --- not in the "have great taste, prefer The Kinks to The Turtles" kind of way, but in a "our incentives align somewhat" kind of way. But music is just a footnote to Facebook & Google. The new players don't care at all about the music industry, because they're in the tech industry, and the only thing that matters to the tech industry is turning software into money.
You don't have to agree with any of this (I happen to buy all of it, wholesale; maybe it's because the rest of my family are musicians). You also don't have to believe that the tech industry owes it to musicians to change anything so that people can make a living as musicians (that's not what I believe, but I believe a lot of things you don't). But you should probably engage fully with what Lowery is saying before you try to claim that startups and tech companies are making things better for musicians, because this is him calling bullshit on you directly.