Hacker News Reader

Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

It just comes down to the fact that music is cheap. Outside of a very small cohort of star artists, musicians just don't create anything that people at large value to any significant extent. Only a very small portion of your fans would be willing to pay for a CD or a T-shirt; most just have a song or two in a playlist somewhere, and if you make your music unavailable on that steaming platform, they won't even notice.

View on HN

People value music; subscriptions are widely successful. However, the platforms (aggregators) have a stronger market position than small artists (content producers). It strikes me as comparable to the Tivo problem, where they built something of real value but had their margins squeezed to nothing by stronger players.

> steaming platform

Please tell me you meant to do that? Either way, I'm using it from now on!

How about this. Take away all the musicians and their music and see what Spotify and all its software developers are worth by themselves.

Now do the opposite.

Figured it out yet?

Music is one of the most universal and important things in our culture. People define themselves and their identity with it, and most certainly value it and will pay for it.

How we structure our economic systems determines if it’s “cheap” or not and who gets the profits from it. It’s certainly not an intrinsic quality.

Society is growing out of all that egotistic nonsense. We have built a large corpus of music. We don't need no more music. That problem has been solved. That area has been explored. All the good chord progressions, songs, sounds have been found and are in the corpus. It is quite clear musicians are no longer needed or wanted.

Perhaps there’s some sort of emerging trend in the usual community of rapacious sociopathic nerds out in San Mateo County that will soon take over the world but last I checked new music still fills stadiums.

Not to mention that the most successful and fastest growing digital network of the current generation was built on the back of people dancing to recorded music, almost exclusively newly created music.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com