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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Still better than some rich guys choosing young people to have them take out a huge loan, feed them a bunch of lyrics some dudes wrote across the sea, match it with one of the 200 ready to go beats their "label" has in the drawer and make a single with a music video to pump tiktok ads on.

There's very little romantic songwriting and true exploration going on in mainstream music. AI productions if anything to me are more honest if done with an open model by a person in their home. At least it's just a person fiddling with it until it sounds as something they like and not a megacorp. Until spotify makes these themselves.

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The fault in this logic is that exact same people will be leading the way of mass manufacturing more soulless garbage and dumping it to the consumer as mainstream music. AI doesn't actually fix the problem, it just makes it easier to do.

If you read my comment you see my last sentence is there to acknowledge this!

Right, if we reductively summarize any process then nothing really matters. Its sort of like saying "hendrix operated a string instrument"

What do you mean "take out a huge loan"?

I assume they mean an advance. Advances given to artists upon signing with a label are paid back out of proceeds from sales/royalties.

So in other words, not like a loan?

"like" aka "similar to", aka "shares some features"

An advance is "like" a loan because in both cases, the money is expected to be paid back by the person or group of people who receives it. There's lots of differences. Repayment terms. Exit clauses. Interest rates etc. But seems pedentic to say that the advances offered to musicians are not like loans they take so that they may have a claim on the future revenues of the sales produced by their work.

Well yes, but flippantly describing the arrangement as "rich dudes convincing poor dudes to take out a huge loan" makes it sound far more exploitative than it actually is.

It’s astounding how often people conflate advances and loans when talking about the music industry. If anything it’s closer to seed capital than a loan.

Given the low ratio of “making it” to “wanting to make it” I would assume that there are many people who DO actually take out loans.

Joe Satriani famously self-funded his first album by taking on large amounts of credit card debt.

I'm sure there are many, many other musicians who took a similar risk that didn't pay off as well as it did for Satriani

Don't you have to pay back advances? Never heard of that happening for failed investments outside of fraud

Advances are recouped from the sales of your albums or tickets. Assuming you’ve made a good faith effort to fulfill your obligations you don’t need to repay the advance or pay interest on the advance if your album doesn’t sell.

> Assuming you’ve made a good faith effort to fulfill your obligations you don’t need to repay the advance or pay interest on the advance if your album doesn’t sell.

It depends on your contract. Usually, poor sales won't result in needing to repay an advance. However, there are plenty of other clauses that the contract could contain that would lead to the contract being canceled and potentially the advance having to be repaid (due to delays, editorial disagreements, poor quality, etc.)

Mainstream music has been saturated with commercial influence for decades. We've had many, many broad revolts against this, that more or less immediately got picked up by the entertainment industry, commodified and commercialised.

Spoken like a non-creative

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