If the Internet was around before recorded music would we have record labels?
lewisflude.tumblr.com
lewisflude.tumblr.com
If any musician would have taken the Internet and ran with it, I truly believe it would have been him. He really didn't give a rat's ass about the music industry, and I think he probably would have started releasing music for free and circumvented the record labels. And since he was the biggest star at the time, circa 1994/1995, in typical fashion, other bands would have copied him and it would have changed things forever. I really do believe he would have been the catalyst for change in the music industry.
Instead, we had Metallica that wanted to keep the status quo, and instead of having a music revolution, we had an emboldened RIAA suing people for hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading MP3s.
My understanding, but far from any form of authority on the subject, is that the artists get very little from music sales these days, and most of their money comes from touring, which is why ticket prices are so high these days. I would understand a Red Hat-like model where the artists distribute their music for free, but charge a lot for performances, this would be fair. But since we're paying $1/song, and the artists aren't getting much of that, what it means is that everyone is getting screwed except for the middleman, ie. the record label.
The objective of the RIAA lawsuits isn't to kill the Red Hat model for music (although perhaps they would if they could) -- it's to preserve the Autodesk model for music as an option. I don't think they're going about in in the best way but I can see why they are doing it -- they believe that the Autodesk model is as economically and morally legitimate one as the Jonathan Coulton model of distributing music for free and then making money on touring.
A lot of them are very passionate about what they are doing and are as music loving as their listeners. They act as a curator by selecting and developing artists, a ability that becomes increasingly underrated in times of services like EchoNest - while I really like what those guys are doing, as a user of various music services I tend to notice that all those discovery features provide very similar results - probably due to the fact that they are using the same APIs by EchoNest. That makes it hard to find new quality music.
Therefor it's good to have a curated selection like the catalogs of small and caring labels that give a human touch to a selection process that is a refreshing equivalent to the popular "You might also like..."-feature. Of course I can only speak for my personal interest, but being on the release schedule of labels like Morr Music, Kranky, Secretly Canadian, Domino, 4AD or Sub Pop is usually a very good indicator for music I might enjoy. Surely there are examples from other genres too.
Nevertheless things can also work out without labels: I'm a big fan of bandcamp which has a lot of talent to showcase and does almost everything right for listeners and artists alike. From the wide range of lossless formats to the flawless iOS audio player or the flexible pricing configurations - if you want to offer your music without a label, bandcamp is the way to go.
Both approaches offer benefits and I'd like them to co-exist.
Content curating is an ubiquitous trend in the internet. Startups are built every day, focusing specifically on this problem. And the fact that you're posting here on Hacker News makes me assume that you think it's working.
Yes, record labels also curate content. But that's so easy to replace. If curating music is the reason why you think record labels are useful. Then that's just one more evidence they're useless.
Why do you think record labels can't provide value by curating content?
> And the fact that you're posting here on Hacker News makes me assume that you think it's working
I don't think merely reading this website means that anyone agrees every aspect of the startup ecosystem.
Yes there are a lot of really bad record labels, but the hard working people at Sub Pop, Domino, Mom+Pop, and dozens of other indies are integral to the success of artists. Marginalizing them or even playing devil's advocate claiming all they do is content creation is silly. It's akin to saying all Facebook does is "make a website."
The music industry is far more complex than people assume — so while massive change is certainly needed, thinking that a simple HN upvote system is remotely related to the work of a label is silly.
Vilifying all labels based on the majors is like vilifying all startups on the behavior of only Oracle or Google.
Other things labels do well is marketing and artist support - again, we're talking about the smaller, passionate labels here. While I am very involved in music and may find and listen to your bandcamp releases, others rely on third-parties to get recommendations. Now try getting your bandcamp album reviewed by Pitchfork - it can happen, but it's not very likely.
With easier access to production tools and simple ways of sharing and showcasing your work, there is a lot of noise when it comes to searching for music. Bandcamp won't mind as that's of course the nature of the service and absolutely ok. However there's value in a place that filters out the noise and provides the good stuff only.
As others have pointed out, labels are far more than a middleman. To market music as a product requires just as much business infrastructure as any other modern media. Which is to say a lot!
In addition, a major label will front the money for the project, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Since most of their acts come nowhere near recouping, the contracts are structured aggressively in the label's favor. They hope to cover all the production and marketing costs of all their acts from the few that make money (hits).
One problem for both fans and musicians is discovery. It's trivial to make your music available to anyone in the world, whereas it used to take a huge capital investment to get product distributed. On the other hand, the marketing and production costs haven't significantly changed. Getting a significant amount of people to discover and like your music is a daunting project for any entity, large or small. On occasion a viral hit breaks through, but the acts that represent the bulk of economic activity are actively created and pushed by pros.
Spotify is providing the most promising alternative distribution system I've seen yet. But they are more of a hybrid between radio and a store. They don't provide anything to the creation or marketing of artists.
In fact, it's a very common thing for musicians, once they achieve some kind of success (whether financial, or in terms of their following) to start a label so that they have an organization they can use to promote acts they like.
So it's worth asking, is the thing of value here the actual sheet of paper with the music written on it, or the grooved metal cylinder, or the vinyl, or the mp3? Obviously yes, to some extent.
But imagine if you were around in the 1850s and one of your buddies stops by and bangs out "Old Folks at Home" on the piano, totally by heart. And maybe after a couple of times, you kinda figure it out yourself. And then you go to somebody else's house and do the same thing.
Is this the 1850s equivalent of peer-to-peer file sharing?
You start to realize, a song has been bound to a physical object for so long, we've begun to confuse the music -- the actual information -- with the physical object that holds the information. Maybe back in the 1850s there were renegades who ran around teaching people Stephen Foster songs and the publishing companies took a hit and sent the sheriff after them. It seems ridiculous but that's basically what's happening today with the RIAA and file sharing.
1) I'm paying for a formal education, not the books and the audio of the lectures. Those are often available for free, but the formal seal of approval of a university (not the sheepskin + ink) has market value.
2) I pay for The New Yorker, not the pages it's printed on.
3) A startup pays its programmers for software, which is really just ideas.
4) A company pays for the design of its building, not the drafting paper and pencils.
5) A company pays a manager (at least theoretically) for leadership, not for the transferring of ink to post-it-notes and calendars.
6) Millions of people pay for iPhone apps, which are not physical goods.
7) I'm paying (through insurance) for medical advice, not the negligible fraction of square footage I occupy while sitting in my doctor's office.
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Buying recordings is a voluntary transaction. If you don't find them valuable, don't participate. But you are still no more entitled to the sound of an artist's voice than your employer/customers are entitled to the value you provide.
Open Source is cool. Public broadcasting is awesome. Band Camp is amazing, and I agree the mainstream record label cartel is nasty. I hope we move away from it. But just as hating Walmart doesn't make shoplifting okay; disapproval of the music industry doesn't make piracy okay.
Yes, the witch-hunt is too much, but wherever did we get the idea that intellectual creation shouldn't be worth anything?
But I'm curious: what is your opinion about the guy who doesn't buy sheet music and just memorizes the songs and teaches them to people? Do you feel he is in some way guilty of piracy?
This doesn't threaten artists or deprive them of money you otherwise would have handed over, it just creates new ways to promote and engage with the artist's creation. See also Spotify, music blogs (IMHO not really piracy, but shouldn't be done without the artists' permission), radio, Pandora, last.fm, etc.
Pirate Bay is the guy who prints his own scores of someone else's work and leaves thousands of free copies on the street outside the sheet music store.
Abstract objects -- i.e. informational goods -- certainly have value, it is just that they have practically zero price now.
Price, and paying for things, is a way to regulate how limited resources are shared out. But abundant things do not need a price -- there is plenty for everyone.
The idea that creative work be paid for through copies of it is only an artificial convention. It was just a pragmatic economic arrangement to make it possible to pay for one thing by paying for another.
In the end, we need to pay for scarcity -- creative effort and resources -- but should allow abundance -- copies of informational-goods -- to be free. That recognises the value of abstract/informational-goods by maximising the value that everyone can get from them.
I have been making electronic music for almost ten years. I have participated in many netlabels in that time. I like the idea of making music and letting it spread online. I have yet to achieve any level of success. I can not compete with major acts. My marketing budget is zero.
Record labels have a function. They curate music for people who do not have invested interest. I would not be happy if my music became popular. I like my little niche. I like being free of record restrictions. Some labels are amazing like Kranky. They do things differently than most, very strong aesthetic choosing.
I miss Napster's community aspects. I learned a lot from sharing on Napster. It opened my ears to music that was different from my status quo. I wish it was still around. Music as a whole would be in a different place.
Essentially as an artist, you need to make money
As a person, you need to make money. As an artist, you need to make art. That doesn't mean you 'll get rich.
(Apologies for self quoting)
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s say that BitTorrent, or something like it, was invented before the phonograph. Civilisation passed straight from live music only to ubiquitous copying without ever passing through the age of controllable mass reproduction.
That is, every time some wandering minstrel composed a new melody on their lute, the entire world would be able to listen to it again whenever they wanted. Would people still describe that as “stealing music?”
I think they wouldn’t. In fact, the whole concept sounds pretty awesome, doesn’t it?
I think if we’d never passed through the copyright age we’d rightfully see BitTorrent as one of the greatest advances in history. All of human culture available for free! The only downside — and it is a big downside — is that it’s cut off the main income stream for all the people who actually produce this culture.
Separating these functions might be the big thing the Internet does/is doing for music. Why not separate out marketing, and have artists come to and pay music marketing companies? In a way, this is what already happens, with major labels getting signed artists into debt. This would eliminate conflicts of interest with artist development and curation. For that matter, separate out artist development, so big companies aren't motivated to turn everyone into a machine for producing mainstream genre music. Also, by separating out the function of curation, tastemakers can concentrate on being great tastemakers and be free of pressures from the marketing department.
Fandalism could use competitions to select raw new music, Kickstarter could fund quality production, and Pandora could inject and A/B test the candidate songs?
Manufactured stars were natural with broadcast radio. Labels and DJs could A/B test few songs, so they choose artists and songs carefully by a formula. Feedback came as phoned-in requests and sales of singles, heavily biased by the labels' initial choices. iTunes and Bittorrent haven't done much directly to improve A/B testing bandwidth.
If the problem can be solved for music, the experts who choose the movies and shows that get made could be the next to be replaced.
Furthermore, feedback collection is trivial. Very few of the actual listeners would ever bother to call a radio station to request a song. Online however, I give "thumbs ups" all the time on Pandora, because there is a solid incentive: it helps to train the music selection algorithm to my personal preferences.
- How can club owners learn what new bands to book? How can they inform all the nearby fans?
- How do we get the full feedback loop going all the way back to artists?
- On Pandora you only year professionally produced music. How do we get music production crowdfunded effectively?
Maybe Fandalism can collect that data from the streaming providers and make it available for musicians and club owners?
I would spend a ton more money on concert tickets if I could always see a list of upcoming concerts by the musicians I hear on Pandora. Surely we can do a better job then record labels of getting musicians paid.
That being said, the post itself is not really about record labels or the Internet. It's actually a pretty thought-provoking article.
I'm personally glad that the 1800's, the 70's or the 2000's are gone and will never return. We have something different today and it's important to understand that it will be gone by tomorrow. We never really understand the present, it's much easier to evaluate a bygone era in retrospect. We don't really know if Spotify, Facebook or RIAA has any impact on today's music (or culture in general) and we won't know until any of these won't matter anymore. So my suggestion for the author is to follow the advice of his last sentence; stop worrying and enjoy the music.
In Beethoven's time and onwards, when the music became more commercialised through selling sheet music and making more of an enterprise from concerts, we saw an explosion of creativity and also virtuoso talent, and audiences started to appreciate the music more as a permanent artefact, valuing the composition as well as the interpretation. Seems like commercialisation supported by copyright made for a more optimal appreciation/demand for music.
Boy, do I feel old.
Most people that make music or write software don't have the skills or the time (or they just aren't interested) to also manage the marketing and many other of the business aspects.
So there will always be a need for this sort of service.