How the music industry learned to love piracy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, honestly. With the invention of home recording and all the attendant production tools, the lower barriers to entry, broader exposure due to the internet, etc., there was always going to be a vastly larger amount of music than there was 30 years ago. If the old model had not changed, we'd still be in a world with a glancingly small number of slots on the radio charts for each genre—those are the people the average person knows about, and spends money on—and most other musicians would be broke.
I assume. I could be wrong. But my two points are that it's not like the old model was friendly to artists either, and that it's not actually very easy for me to imagine a coherent model for music that would work be equitable for all artists in the world today, given the other changes that've taken place.
I don't think it's just to pretend that if there are 4-5x more people releasing music today, we would all would be spending 4-5x more on records and concerts than we did in 1996. And I am not saying that's what the author is saying, I'm just trying to work through the consequences of what I inferred from this article, the economics of which were a little hand-wavey.
By and large, the only way to make a living as an artist is to continuously produce and perform copious amounts of work, or to have another source of income from a day job.
Prior to that anyone with enough time on their hands and skills could legally reproduce any text, music, painting, etc for profit. Artist where largely compensated for performances or for original artwork. There was more relative demand for live performances because of the lack of other available entertainment options.
Now the primary issue with being a successful artist is the attention economy is incredibly competitive, and the barriers to entry are incredibly low.
Yes and no. Technical barrier to entry is low. It is also relatively easy to do something that your friends will say: wow that sounds great. It is totally another thing to make something good enough that they will play it several times a day on their own. Look at rushes and jams released by amateur musicians: the average quality is super super low. Not super low as being painful to listen, but super low as "sounds unfinished/incomplete/dull, I have no desire to play it again".
I know this comes off as get off my lawn, but that's just how a performance art works. Only the best make it no matter what you do.
If the most popular music sucks so bad, I can only conclude that either I am from another planet or pumping huge amounts of cash to promote a label's "artist" actually works.
Most popular food in eg Singapore is surprisingly good. And the singe most popular fast food in eg Germany is the Döner Kebab from your local Döner place, and that's usually pretty decent.
Of course, for food popularity price place a large role. All recorded music has approximately the same price, eg when played on the radio.
I know a way: universal basic income.
Which is coincidentally how you can also fund open source, and serious science (as opposed to the scam-filled journal/grant system we have today)
Maybe some would coast and be happy with whatever the basic income is, but I suspect many others would strive and do more. If not for survival and the privilege of having food + a roof (like it is now), then mostly for the satisfaction.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that giving everyone a basic income would instantly turn everyone into a couch potato. That’s just not how a healthy person thinks/functions. At least not in the long term.
First, I admit, I believe in certain stereotypes that X people are more hardworking than Y people. (On average)
I believe so, because I believe that upbringing has tremendous impact of how an adult lives, commits and achieves things, and different cultures have different styles of life, and consequently guide kids differently.
UBI most definitely would not change things over night, but it could (I mean that it’s probable) start the shift towards “couch patato” like end of culture spectrum.
People glorify artists.
I think the misconception here is that you can easily categorize and find quantifiable qualities for things as subjective as music or art.
Very broad strokes, IDS is basic income, you have to fulfil a number of gigs to renew a fixed guaranteed income for the following year. Sacem is more or less proportional to success.
Not a perfect system by any means but it's something.
(sorry, links in French)
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_du_spectacle
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_des_auteur...
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_des_auteur...
But they also don't have to.
In 1996, the primary way for people do buy music involved it being pressed in a factory and then delivered on a truck to a store that had to pay for retail real estate and checkout clerks. The percent of the sale price going to the artist was tiny.
Today the distribution cost is you send it over the internet, the cost of which rounds to zero. The dominant cost ought to be the 3% the credit card companies take. And if you give the cost savings to the artists instead of the record companies, they could very easily be getting 4-5x more of every dollar customers spend.
The problem is, the record companies would prefer that they get the cost savings from digital distribution, and we need a system that ensures that they don't.
There is also the question of what it means to make it. The artist at the top of the charts is making many millions of dollars, but suppose we didn't have a system that props up superstars. Then instead of having a tiny number of artists who make many millions, we would have a thousand times as many artists who make many thousands.
such a system does not exist.
Superstardom is a natural phenomenon in the industry. Just like sports or really, any mass entertainment. The only way to achieve the "thousands times as many artists making many thousands" is to have separate communities of music markets that do not overlap.
I dont think that's feasible on the internet, and i certainly would not support any laws that tries to bring that into effect.
There's nothing wrong with a tiny number of extremely famous, extremely successful artists.
I think Mr Mouse's point was that we should imagine for a moment that the natural order of things was upset and we instead had a system that was a bit more organic in promoting good musicians and the implications that would have. Ie, a counterfactual.
i see no evidence that the profits of the superstardom is spent maintaining the "system".
My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success. If the argument that it's the promotion that makes them successful, then the argument is less correct today than ever before - the advent of the internet means there's no more strict radio slots etc, which is unavailable to an amateur or starting musician.
Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person).
That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.
In fact it's demonstrably wrong. Take any aspect of musical talent, from innovativeness to musicianship, and measure any top 100 chart musician against it. They'll do worse than a typical Berklee or Juliard Grad. Measure technical ability / virtuosity, and essentially no mainstream pop artist will rival the guitarist in one of a hundred thousand unknown speedmetal bands.
You're working from the fallacy known as the 'just world' hypothesis rather than reality.
We may be at point in post WW2 history where the lines of talent / ability and fame are most divergent in the music space. There absolutely are fantastic musicians with large audiences, but extremely few at the top of the industry. Meanwhile the production line of safe, marketable, utterly conventional pap - from Taylor Swift to K-Pop is operating at maximal efficiency.
I don't have a solution to this problem (outside the wholesale destruction of consumer capitalism), but to pretend its not there is ludicrous.
Making music is something people enjoy so much, that many do it for free, and many would do it professionally for very little pay. Predictably, the average musician ain't paid a lot. Even the top, say, 0.1% of best-paid musicians are paid very little compared to eg the top 0.1% of lawyers or surgeons or programmers.
(I am not trying to make an argument about whether musicians _should_ get paid nor how much. I'm just following the context of the discussion.)
For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable.
Seems reasonable?
Of course, there's plenty of ways to make this system terrible. But I think the objectionable thing, if any, is the royalty payments in the first place. Making them transferable is just efficient. And eg would allow parents to pay for current expenditures they have because of the kids.
See https://www.msf.gov.sg/what-we-do/maintenance-of-parents/abo... for something that comes close to a real world example:
> The Maintenance of Parents Act allows Singapore residents aged 60 years and above - who are unable to provide for themselves - to claim maintenance from their children who are capable of supporting them, but are not doing so. Parents can claim maintenance, in the form of monthly allowances or a lump-sum payment.
Raw technical skill isn't enough for success, you also need an audience for that skill. It doesn't matter that your skill at the guitar is divine if you only play technical pieces only other expert musicians appreciate.
Take Minecraft for instance. A graphically unimpressive game made by nobodies before it got famous. It didn't get so big because it demonstrated the pinnacle of game development.
There's no parallel for musicianship. I don't disagree that there are fantastic producers working in bad pop music - they're not the musicians who's names mast the tracks, they're folks like Max Martin, RedOne, Boi-1da. Their skill is not in making music better. It's in producing prototypes that the factory of the industry can mass produce and tweak for different demographics. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of music. It's more akin to propaganda or marketing. The talent at work here is manipulation, not artistry.
Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics.
(Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)
The objective measure is commercial success. If's commercially successful, it is "good". Just because someone's musical skills and/or other aspects deserves your respect and admiration, it does not make them "good".
I'm arguing that this success cannot be made into a model where many musicians gets a very small slice of the entire pie. There's gonna be mega successes, unless you artificially restrict it (to nobody's benefit).
I have no reason to believe the masses are suddenly no longer influenced by ... (paid) influencers.
i dont think you can buy it as easily as you claim. I'm also not claiming meritocracy, but popularity, as success metric. They are different. The quality of popular music is that lots of people resonate with it - so much so that people become fanatics about it. While marketing helps, it's but a spark. The actual music has to be "good" - where good is defined by the metric i mentioned above, not by some theoretical framework of music taste, skill or some other academic measure.
But I think in your mental model of the internet, you removed all the marketers and influencers!
People whose business is marketing artists have the ability to get orders of magnitude more exposure for an artist than people who are artists. To deny this would be to deny the importance of concepts like SEO.
People who market music select for the musicians who are the easiest to sell. This includes not only "musical goodness," but also image, age, and all kinds of other attributes that aren't part of the music itself.
There are even famous record executives who have famously stated publicly that they wouldn't support an admittedly "musically good" artist because of her looks. And looks are just one attribute that adds noise to your metric.
There's also a rich history of recording studios paying money to gain popularity for their artists. So unless you have an enormous corpus of evidence it appears that your metric is extremely noisy in the non-musical sense.
If you are actually trying to argue that we cannot have a music industry where people are rewarded more evenly, you have provided absolutely no justification for it. You just said that since success attracts, it will naturally pool to a smaller and smaller group. Well why is there more than one artist, then? Why is it distributed in exactly the way it is now? When the distribution changes, why does it change?
It seems obvious that the world we are in is not the only one that could possibly exist, and that changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it. Do you want to have that argument, or no?
which i also argued, is at best pointless, but at worst harmful.
I don't really think it a problem that there exists superstars that take the majority of the money spent on music. The only argument for changing it is that there are musicians that "deserve" to receive more revenue than they currently do, rather than an explanation of why. Equality of outcome is not sufficiently good to add regulation or restrictions to prevent what occurs today.
You are responding to an interesting statement that unpacks to "Economically high-performing musicians are more a product of industry effort than an indicator of technical skill ("good at music"); You will find abundant technical skill distributed widely in economically unproductive musicians."
You're staking out a semantic position, to wit: "technical measures of musical prowess are not valid, and I refuse to use the word 'good' to describe high rankings in those measures. The only meaningful metric of worth is economic productivity. Therefore, a tautology: Economically productive musicians are economically productive". This is a reasonable semantic usage, but is a less interesting statement.
Good musicians are successful != successful musicians are good.
Like all tautologies, this isn't a good or bad argument, it isn't an argument at all. If you're trying to make the point that successful musicians are successful then no one can rationally disagree. If you're making the leap to inferring quality from success, then please reread my original post. I wasn't arguing for my 'taste', I was listing a few aspects of objective musical accomplishment. Feel free to substitute your own. Sales isn't one.
Even from a (literally) tone deaf, utterly venal perspective modern pop stars don't do well in the musical marketplace. That's why a) charts exclude legacy sales - real sales charts consistently show 'classic' albums outsell new releases and b) charts include merch and other non-musical play / purchase sales. One factoid I often think about is that the first Counting Crows record massively outsold the first Brittany Spears record. Brittany of course, with her t-shirts, dolls etc was a greater source of revenue, and hence massively more highly promoted in the corporate media.
Good here doesn't mean the music is to your tastes, or has some subjective level of sophistication or technical prowess.
The objective measure of how good it is can only be compared using commercial successfullness. If sufficient people are willing to shell out for the music, then it must mean it's good.
It’s similar to what we see in the Olympics: Algeria getting a gymnastics gold in a historic first for the entire continent didn’t mean it’s somehow impossible for African kids to train up to that level but rather that no matter what raw talent you’re starting with, nobody gets to the top without expensive infrastructure and training which aren’t even distributed. Music isn’t that extreme but there are still a lot of advantages to the artists who can hang in the right scenes in a few cities compared to equally good performers who can’t swing the rest of the career-making package.
There are absolutely segments in the industry that address and include taste and quality, but they're long tail stuff next to the pop machine.
There's a certain level of skill required to compose and produce a song, but beyond that the genre/style of the song is more important, and which style is better is very subjective.
The best opera singer in the world will not take much business away from a techno DJ who merely presses a "play vocal sample" button, and both genres have their fans.
In a system where people listen to songs based on recommendations fitting their individual taste (where the recommender doesn't assume popular is good) you can have people listening to individual songs from the long tail of many artists.
This is an unimaginative way of looking at things. For one thing, many people do still listen to the radio, where slots are still limited. Those who don't listen to the radio often listen to equivalents of the radio--Spotify or Apple Music playlists that are curated and quite likely involve the same kind of payola issues that the radio had.
It's the same structure: musicians reach their audience through a middleman that has an interest in promoting a particular group. Spotify is only a piece of this, you also have album promotion campaigns, brand tie-ins, and so on. (For example, did you know that the artist who plays the Superbowl half-time gets paid a pittance for it?)
> Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person)
The whole premise of this is that there's a universal quality of "good" that you can assess for a particular musician. That's nonsense. Some people love Taylor Swift, others can't tolerate her. Some people find a Bartok string quartet sublime, others think it's just noise. There's no universality to appeal to here. At best you can create an average over the population--but that changes from time to time, place to place, demographic to demographic.
Popularity involves skill but also luck. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders": musicians who happen to be in the right place at the right time but are never able to repeat it. For every musician with a steady career, there are many of these.
> That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.
This is already the way genres work, with the difference that these segments are voluntarily chosen. There are people who listen to, for instance, modern classical and almost nothing else, or death metal and almost nothing else, etc.
I think a good system would be one that works like ours, but with more to cushion artists from the random contingencies of the market. A lot of this already exists--grants given to artists in areas that are deemed culturally valuable, for example. Laws placing minimum prices on music licensing for film, TV, etc. Probably there should be laws forcing Spotify to be more transparent about royalties and promotions as well.
This is not true. All you need is to have multiple buyers with different tastes and a functioning discovery system that allows each individual to find what they like.
The latter is the opposite of what the industry provides. They promote what's popular, regardless of whether you'll like it.
And then they make it difficult for anyone else to do otherwise, because artists who want to be The Rolling Stones sign the record contract thinking they'll get promoted, and then they don't get promoted but the record company owns their songs and charges prohibitively high fees for streaming so independents can't afford to play it and let listeners discover it.
This is how they destroyed internet radio, for example. Before the industry lobbied to change the law law, there was a vibrant set of internet radio stations. Then the Kill Internet Radio Act passed and set the fees higher than most of the independent stations could afford without taking payola, and now "internet radio" is dominated by iHeart Radio, AKA Clear Channel, the same company that owns all the terrestrial radio stations that play the Top 40 on loop.
"Discovery Mode" is a transparent attempt to pit artists against each other. The one that gives the middle man a bigger cut gets more sales. The flaw here is the lack of alternative means for new artists to get discovered without signing a one-sided deal, i.e. we don't have enough competition for distribution. This is mostly because of laws lobbied for by the industry.
Artists have always been in competition with each other for the same consumer attention/dollars. Indie artists often undercut prices of popular artists on CDs or downloads to try to incentivize discovery. In the streaming era, the marginal cost to the consumer is zero (which is great for discovery!), but Discovery Mode is bringing back pricing as a means of competition on the supplier side, for better or worse.
The premise is that we want more artists, so the combined way we get this is that a) the artists get the savings from digital distribution, instead of the labels, creating a larger pool of money for the artists, and b) we have fewer superstars, so that pool of money allows more artists to exist, instead of just allowing the same number of superstars to pad their coffers even more.
The result is that the average artist gets less, because there are more of them. But less than Taylor Swift is still more than enough to make a living.
> Indie artists often undercut prices of popular artists on CDs or downloads to try to incentivize discovery.
This is fine if they lower the price to the consumer, because then the consumer's finite number of dollars allows them to buy more music from other artists, and thereby supports the viability of other artists. Or, from an individual perspective, getting a million sales at $0.05 is just as good as getting half a million sales at $0.10 -- or better, because more people discover your work and may then go to live shows or buy the next release.
The problem with Discovery Mode is that it lowers the price to Spotify, which is still going to charge the market-clearing price to the customer, and then they use the money to line their own coffers and shrink the pie for the artists.
My son is a drummer. Has been doing studio work and other stuff but steadfastly has refused to be in a band. On multiple occasions he's said the same thing. Not enough exposure and the insane amount of work you have to do to make even a little bit of money isn't worth it.
He says he would prefer to be a studio musician and do production work since its more stable, reliable and actually pays his bills.
With all of that work we managed to have 40k MySpace followers (some had to be bots), 100k streams on PureVolume, and a decent number of CD sales, at least to my mind (in the several hundreds). But the barrier was no longer whether or not an artist could get to a studio or a record deal, the barrier now is the noise of the internet.
I'm convinced (in particular by years of reading Bob Lefsetz's punditry [0], as well as working alongside multiple successful musicians, DJs, and industry agencies for many years) that Spotify single-handedly saved the aging and out-of-touch record business, that their payments to artists are fair, and that it's more accessible now than ever before by an order of magnitude to build a real, sustainable career as a musician.
You have to simply put in the work, and it is brutal, long, thankless, isolating work, on top of the Herculean task of creating something people legitimately want and connect with. And you should be attractive (not beautiful persay, but charismatic and authentic). And provide the illusion of access to you. And be kind to your fans. And maximize all of your potential channels (digital and IRL, from socials to tours to brand partnerships to merch/apparel to unpredictable, serendipitous syncs in film and tv (ex. Kate Bush "Running Up That Hill")), all the while cultivating fans like plants in a garden.
You have to travel and perform, and be present, and be the soundtrack to their lives, always meeting your fans where they are, however they congregate, and and and and and! For years and years. It takes a long time to enjoy a tree you've just planted.
People do not have the bandwidth, mentally or financially, to support or patronize more than a few artists that mean something significant to them. Just because the amount of people making and publishing music has exploded doesn't mean that listeners have available slots to add you into their mental playlist, until you keep doing what you're doing long enough that you appear, almost seamlessly, into a moment in their life that awes and delights and converts them into a believer.
There is no "right place at the right time" -- you have to be in the right place ALL the time, and eventually your random times become other peoples' "right time".
If you never give up, if you're always there, you'll also eventually be a staple on the scene -- you'll be, literally by default, "old guard" that people look up to. You'll have earned your respect, you'll have put in your dues, and the money / fame / power will come as an after-effect.
Any other situation where it's overnight success, those acts are created as nothing more than products to be sold. Both can make a lot of money, but money isn't the goal. Craft, legacy, driving culture, these are what artistry is supposed to be about. Money is secondary, and always comes if you take the time to learn the business and take your fan stewardship seriously.
The amount of shallow takes on Twitter, Threads, or god forbid LinkedIn about poor musicians who "deserve a living wage", who are "gamed by Big Tech", who are "slaves to the algorithm", who aren't living the dreams they weirdly feel entitled to, they don't deserve anything if their music and persona are nothing anybody wants, if they haven't put in the work, haven't shown up and met people continuously, haven't failed over and over, haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to their guns until they eventually get lucky -- not because the universe chose them, but because they made sure they were already all of what I wrote above when opportunity came knocking.
Like, sorry, the world has become hyper-connected, super decentralized, insular, tribal -- MTV can't break you anymore. None of us are paying attention to the same things as anybody else. It's harder than ever to get attention, and what you're selling had better be damn good -- but if you succeed, the rewards are richer than they've ever been.
Most plants get choked out on the jungle floor by the canopy, or end up adapting to quietly survive in their environment. Some defy all odds and break through the top. Chances are you're not going to the top, but you don't have to get choked out either.
Anyways.
I never understood complaining about touring/being a musician being a hard job. You are living someone else's dream, stop complaining. If you don't like it, simply don't do it. My 9-5 soulless work is hard as well...
> haven't failed over and over, haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to their guns until they eventually get lucky
Isn't that true for most endeavors if you want to get good at something? Including cs.
Most musicians, at least in my experience, often don't understand, that it takes more than a good music to speak to people. And people feeling addressed by you is what usually results in someone making it. However, this is hard to fabricate, if you are gonna spend most of your creative process how to address certain group of people and then fabricate your art to fit into that, it probably won't feel as authentic as someone who actually lives their lives, lives their struggles and socially acts like them. It will be hard for a 45 year old person to address Gen Z for example
What Spotify actually does is give these two artists some cents per play. Let’s say $0.01 per play, they each get $0.20 from my subscription and the rest of my $10 goes to Spotify.
It's really unclear whether an artist-centric model would make any real difference to artists - under an artist-centric model the more an individual user streams the less the artists get per stream, so if you have a small number of fans who listen to you a LOT the artist-centric model means you get less money
That's why we are building MyPie (mypie.app) to allow fans like us to reward the artists they stream only. Check it out we are in open beta right now.
fees were around (per media) :
CD media : $0.35
DVD media : $0.56
Memory card : $0.80
They then managed to pass a new law in 2022 that expanded the original law to also apply to phones, tablets, computers, basically anything that can store data.
Hard drive < 128GB (SSD or magnetic, internal or external) : $0.59
Hard drive > 128GB : $2.34
Tablet / Phone / Computer : $6.59
No wonder the music industry loves piracy. For every tablet/phone/computer sold, they’re literally pocketing $6.59 without ever lifting a finger or even delivering any content (not even a bad U2 album).
For every hard drive, memory card, or SSD sold, they’re pocketing from $0.59 to $2.34, again, those are not preloaded with music content either.
Of course, having paid the fee does not entitle you to any form of piracy.
With "the music industry" presumably you mean record labels, or even something else? Surely this money doesn't go to artists — how would anyone know how to distribute the money. Even distribution among record labels is super unclear.
this is why I buy merch from the artists I love lol
The reasoning behind the levy is to compensate artists (mentioned as artists in the law) when people make “private copies” (I.e. backups, copying media from yiur PC to your smartphone, etc, not to be confused with pirate copies).
Allegedly artists are missing out when you purchase a song from some service, and then copy that song to a media player somewhere.
Considering that a lot of people stream music today, and rights holders are compensated per play, this makes it even more absurd that you need to pay a tax for every device capable of streaming media.
I don’t have any hard numbers for the streaming vs purchased music, but judging from the number of record stores now and when I was a kid, as well as the size of said stores, hard copies of music doesn’t look like it’s a thriving business,
Of course you can buy music digitally on iTunes/Youtube/Google/Amazon/whatever, and I’ve personally done just that for a couple of decades, but even I had to eventually give in when the kids wanted to listen to music. I still purchase “classics” that I know I will listen to over and over again, and I have a respectable music library that I own (DRM free), but for everyday listening it’s just streaming, and with a family subscription it’s also cheaper than when I was a teenager and was buying albums weekly (we did have better music back then though :-D )
I don't know much about copyright law for media, but wasn't the core issue commercial usage and distribution? I believe once I buy something, I'm entitled to consume it however I see fit, whether it's from a CD player, or a file on my computer. I love CDs as a physical artifact, but the convenience of digital files is superior.
> hard copies of music doesn’t look like it’s a thriving business.
Most people I know only do ambient music or party music. Focused listening is a rare thing. For the first two option, streaming is great, as you don't need to worry about where the files comes from and if you've synced them to the player. But once you've got a collection albums you really do like, the current state of streaming software makes it difficult to manage them there.
As for me, the albums I do like to listen to, I already have them in my collection. For anything else, I go to youtube.
Some only have one or two songs in them, and with streaming that’s fine. With record labels they’d have been forced into a record deal producing one or two good songs, and 3-5 mediocre albums.
Likewise, for pop music, streaming is great. Pop usually has a very short lifespan where a song is popular, and after that the majority thankfully fades into oblivion. I would hesitate to purchase pop music even on iTunes despite most tunes being $0.99, but with streaming i don’t think about it.
Scanner - 12.50
Inkjet Printer - 5.00
PC - 13.19
Tablet - 8.75
Mobile Phone - 6.25
MP3 Player - 5.00
TV with USB Recording Function - 13.00
HD TV - 34.00
Cassette Recorder - 7.00
USB Stick - 0.30
Smartwatch - 1.50
External HDD - 4.40
Business HDD - 1.30
Source (German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe#Verg%C3%BCtunge...
Sounds like someone's double-dipping on enforcement.
Legally speaking, no. Ethically speaking, absolutely.
"""
The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with.
"""
What is your reference time frame here? That's exactly how it was in the 90s and before. Feels like there was a tiny bright spot from the early 2000s to say 2010 or so, but then it was over.
Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't really have any other choice unless you fooled around with expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that kinda get what they deserve.
[1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?
I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?
Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.'
Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's birthday time, so let's sing it.
A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist has often poured intense personal energy into it, yet there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens consistently over decades or centuries, it's awesome and that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not necessarily the artist). Business models around particular arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon, other than possibly giving more people the ability to pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which they will have an innate need to do because it is a personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any surrounding business model or economic/religious/political system.
"Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.
By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.
The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we expect anything but an explosion in supply?
Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a lot of new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still quite a bit of new great music.
[1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it rather than other things, but it's well within an individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where the successful companies were larger than that.
That's what I have a problem with. Music hasn't demeaned itself. Music is just as meaningful as it's ever been.
And you can't charge me $100 to buy your album. I have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Basic supply and demand.
The gear is accessible - but the acoustics of a studio certainly is not.
That does leave some niches open for the value of recording live instruments in a sonically good space, so surely some professional studios will persist, of course.
And just for recording larger groups, regardless of the acoustics. Many home studios are fine for one person, or two, or three, but if you want to record a band or a choir or whatever you may just need more space.
Only if you insist on real drums does it become difficult and expensive.
Heck, "home recording studio" is now a minor industry of its own, post-COVID. A lot of voice actors have their own home studios set up now, doing top end TV work, because it was easier to do that then to travel.
You can upload music directly on YouTube, but they pay very little on short videos and music streams. And there's also sketchy management companies and MCNs there anyway.
We also have to keep in mind that the music industry loves complicated and unclear ownership structures over the music being produced. Nobody completely owns a music track; there's separate copyrights for melody and recordings, both of which get separated and broken down in extremely opaque ways. Remixes and sampling make the rights situation even more complicated, and at best, mean that the person who made the remix or used the samples has to share revenue. At worst, you get to deal with all sorts of bullshit claims (or lawsuits) from people who think they own more than they do.
Insamuch as cheap distribution has flooded the market, it's often either in the form of attempts to launder money through Spotify[2], or online advertising style click fraud of some kind. The problem is not that there are too many honest artists, but that nobody does proper KYC on indies. Either they don't care if you're legit or they don't want to work with people at the small end.
[0] In the case of Apple, long-standing trademark disputes with The Beatles prohibit them from representing artists directly, which is how management companies got their start for self-published acts. However, this would not bind Spotify or other streaming services.
[1] CDBaby, TuneCore, and DistroKid, if I remember correctly
[2] e.g. buy a bunch of Spotify subscriptions with drug money, publish a bunch of nominally unrelated artists on Spotify, listen to them 24/7, then the Spotify payments are clean cash
Spotify has a list of recommended distributors [1]. The first one on the list, DistroKid, charges $22/yr for unlimited uploads to Spotify, Apple Music with the artist keeping all royalties[2].
$22 is not free but is very reasonable.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-music...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x14kZTPA064
I access the web with 8yo phone or 11yo laptop and HN is great because it’s text only and does not require to arbitrage between loading speed and buying a new device each X year.
The difference in era was the ability to earn enough money to exist long enough to "Git Gud".
Sure, music is cheap to make today. However, that just means there are twelve zillion shitty bands that never progress past that.
Many of the bands that are heralded as "awesome" really weren't to start. They generally took years to gel and often the members formed, dissolved and reformed several bands before the one that caught fire.
Even the Beatles sounded like every other Merseybeat band to start.
Without the ability to make money at their craft, artists don't get better at their craft. It's that simple.
I don't have enough perspective to really know, but it seems to me the record companies were a lot better at identifying this ephemeral quality decades ago, and then pushing it into the mainstream. If the Ramones came around these days, they'd probably go nowhere, but back then someone figured out that people would like listening to their music and pulled the strings to get their music into the public consciousness.
>But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to.
Yep. I've even seen this with plenty of well-known musicians over the years. They achieve fame as part of some band, but then they join up with some other top-tier musicians from other bands as part of a "supergroup", and the result is completely underwhelming: technically very good, but just not all that interesting to listen to. So, many times, it seems that the "magic" came from a particular combination of people writing music together, at a particular time.
That puts most of it in a nutshell. If they -can- write music people want to listen to, they need to get it to people's ears.
My problem as a listener with dollars in my hand is: how do I find that music. (Else, I can make do with what I've got... but it's not fresh! or new!)
At one time, there was a system that got it to my ears. It was a radio with a great DJ who named the song and the artist after each track, so I could walk to the record store. Or else a good friend played their copy.
That system is gone. NOW those musicians haven't got a way to get to my ears. In case they find it, I'll keep listening around.
But there is a system, and it's better at hitting more people. They post it online to somewhere with a list of people who like that type of music (Youtube, Tiktok, etc). If it is something people want to listen to, they share it and it propagates through those circles - no need to go to a record store or bring it to a friends house. Eventually it hits the older "mainstream" channels - radio, your Spotify recommendations, etc.
This might interest: Who Are The Last Dinner Party? (And What We Can Learn From Their Success) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x20i1p3iwWo&t=251s
They have good original work, their Blondie cover of Call Me is more than worthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiCt0n-lqys
I might be being overly cynical but thing just don't add up.
:EDIT:
I just looked up the credits of their first album, it's produced by my current fav producer James Ford and mixed by the legend Alan Moulder, they even got a full orchestra. This is pretty much unheard of for a debut album. They don't even have a drummer!
Someone at Island records must really really really like them. It's all a bit bonkers, I'd love to see what their record deal is because the budget for that album must have been huge!
Damn, it was also record at The Church Studios.
We could argue that this particular girl band had a "cute" video that infatuated a connected producer, or ...
There are few positions in the spot light and they're taken up by a fortunate few who happen to hit a sweet mix of hard work, connections, and sheer luck by varying degrees.
I think it's a bit early to start claiming victory in a paradigm shift to streaming that makes pirating obsolete. The price of video and music streaming has quickly been increasing, and in many cases, we've come full circle to being forced to deal with ads again. It's entirely possible for the music business to price their customers out of the market again to the point that an on-demand pirate streaming service completely overtakes legal streaming. I think we're already approaching that for video streaming.
I don't understand how the tech crowd thinks Spotify is so hard to use. My 70 year old parents have no issues navigating it.
Active music discovery is terrible, tracking your "progress" in your weekly releases listening is actively being made impossible (the list is seemingly being re-randomized, at random), the obsessive emphasis on tracks rather than albums or artists is very limiting, UIs are not flexible enough, and I could go on for a while.
All streaming clients are currently hot garbage. Again, not hard to use, just extremely user hostile for anything more than click and play.
My "offline" songs are sometimes no longer downloaded. Trying to navigate to my saved songs takes me past multiple ads for podcasts I don't care about, and looking up an artist gives me ads for shows they're playing or their new albums.
I just want my collection of music and to be able to play it without wading through a sea of garbage.
It is crazy to see just how good things can be. And Stremio's UX isn't even great, it's just that it's not loading me with ads and bullshit, and the thing I want to watch is just there, and turns on with minimal fuss.
That’s why I’m happily paying for Deezer and not for video services.
Today, you can see this with live sports. Hardest thing to pirate for technical reasons, most expensive thing to legally watch. I get that it costs more to serve, but not that much more.
Anyway it seems that the industry is pleased with where it ended up, the link between then and now is a bit tenuous. However it's also on us that we willingly handed over control to streaming companies for the convenience. Think about the number of times we've justified something by it being the cost of a few coffees a month. TV, music, Adobe.
Guarantee you these are lots of bootlegs and other-region copies behind resold. So probably Amazon is worst for the artists because even the labels are getting cheated there.
>Bandcamp
As I understand it, this is (was?) one of the few places an artist could still get a good deal. Bandcamp positions itself more as a marketplace and takes (iirc) 16ish percent. Let me check that against their website:
"when a fan buys something on Bandcamp, an average of 82% of the money goes to you" (https://bandcamp.com/artists?from=footer)
So yeah, they get a lot of the niche weird music. I buy a lot of NWOTHM music off there for this reason.
I keep a list of music that I add to when I come across something I want to buy, then when the Bandcamp Friday comes around, buy everything on the list.
1. If an artist has a bandcamp, I buy.
2. there is no second rule
Many artists I follow are not on Spotify anyway.
And of course, there’s the Japanese where you are often lucky if they even release something on a public streaming platform, physical releases are expensive imports and even Apple/Amazon often don’t sell the digital files.
Go see those bands live and buy something from their merch table, they'll make a lot more money than if you just buy albums.
I would expect an artist to get a far larger cut off Bandcamp than merch or tickets.
Artists get like 85% of a zero cost digital sale.
I can't imagine a ticket being close to that after ticketmaster takes a cut, the venue takes a cut, and the band pays all the expenses of touring.
I got the impression the stuff the GP was buying was not a bunch of independent small artists that only have a Bandcamp page and no label. Ticket and merch sales are likely to make a label artist more than download sales. Ticket sales also help get artists more gigs. Bands tour because they make more money than if they only tried to sell records (in any medium).
But depending on the band, touring can even just be for the fun of it, where break-even is a victory. And then there’s the whole pay-2-play, where you get nothing of the tickets, and instead pay to be support.
It’s really not as simple or homogenous as people make it seem.
That really depends on the label.
I vividly remember the moment when I turned on them: as soon as I started to have income during the 90's I used it on music. I was buying at least 5 or 6 CDs a week, I was tracking new releases obsessively and was making it a principle to pay for music. When MP3 exploded I started to encode the music I was buying, because that's pretty much how and where I was listening to it: on my various devices. But when the music industry started to feel the heat from the Napster and Limewire alike they reacted in the stupidest possible way: being user hostile and considering their own clients as potential thieves. The various copy protection systems they came up with started to be annoying but the nail in the coffin for me was a Jay Jay Johanson album that I simply could not play on any of my devices because of this. I gave them the middle finger and started to download, right this moment, without remorse. I only came back to paying when streaming started to be easier and better than downloading.
The music industry is mostly just disgusting pigs only worthy of contempt and disdain.
Streaming music services are not perfect but at least for the most part I can move service and not lose access to the bands I enjoy listening to, whereas for video media the content is unique to the service. With the massive differences between music & video content financing & production costs, I wonder if there will ever be a consolidation to common video streaming services. E.g. you watch on Netflix or Paramount and the production company gets paid regardless.
I badly want an algorithm that I can say, "Find me artists that sounds like <example-song> that have less than 1,000 subcribers (or whatever metric)" but I can understand why they don't do that (because there are very, very few people like me out there). It sucks.
If you let someone else choose songs or choose song others like too for a party it gets messed up.
A random example: Dan Fogelberg achieved some success 40 - 50 years ago, his style of soft singer songwriter has very little relevance today and yet he is getting 1.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
It's really hard for contemporary artists to get to 1 million Spotify listeners even if they are critically-lauded. For example, here are some artists from the top of the Album Of The Year aggregate list of lists of the best albums of 2023 [0], together with their monthly listeners on Spotify. In other words these artists' albums were widely viewed by critics as among the best albums of 2023.
Lankum - 93k Anohni - 452k Wednesday - 173k Young Fathers - 461k
Sure, critical acclaim does not equal commercial success, but these numbers highlight how hard it can be to break through even if you are really good.
And with the already massive catalog of recorded music swelling further and further every year the outlook for new artists is scary.
The massive choice and availability of music on streaming platforms is absolutely fantastic for music lovers but the competitive environment for contemporary artists is one where they are trying to find and grow an audience in a massive glut of content. It's hard, and very different from the old music biz.
I came across a new artist yesterday, NIKK has just 112 monthly Spotify listeners at this time, and their debut album is really great! Described as "ambient glitchpop soundscapes" give it a listen!
https://nikk.bandcamp.com/album/you-see-me-through-your-eyes
https://open.spotify.com/album/7uPhwANGy9w6oJryJESh0f?si=vDx...
I mean, if you look back before radio, the amount of money artists made from recordings was $0 (Okay, maybe some money off of sheet music or player piano sheets).
So in the grand scheme of human history, the primary income of musicians has been from their performances. That was true before recordings, and that is true again now. For a weird blip there was a cartel propping up the value of their recordings (of which the industry profited more than musicians). But this isn't a collapse of anything more than it's a regression to the mean - the marginal value of a copy of something approaches to 0 over time.
When you hear about artists complaining about royalties from streaming, it was a very, very, very elite group of musicians who ever made money just from dropping albums. You are only hearing from the winners of the Label system. Most bands ended up "owing" money to their record labels.
(The way record deals worked, you got paid an advance for songs/albums. But you only kept ~10% of album sales. From which you had to pay back your advance + recording expenses + marketing costs.)
Another point is while the revolution in the distribution model happened, another one happened which is that the gate-keeping essentially disappeared. In any case, the industry has embraced that through for example DistroKid being targeted at making a small revenue from any aspiring musician without any musical barrier. Note that Spotify has shares in Distrokid, even though they have pinky-sweared this special relationship does not give either to Spotify nor Distrokid any advantage regarding access to data from other involved third parties (other marketplaces, labels, etc).
To round it up, even if the parameters of the financial equations are partly released, the creative industry is known for its "creative accounting" (also known as Hollywood accounting). The creative accounting lets the industry take advantage of the tax breaks that are offered to the music industry in basically all countries on some conditions, and stretch these conditions to situations that the spirit of the law normally excludes.
There is another incentive to lie about the numbers. It gives the possibility to undercut any viable competition to consolidate a monopoly (the Amazon method).
I believe that the only thing that can really improve the situation is way more transparency than we have. The complaints from musicians are often unrealistic, but it is not their fault as they cannot have a realistic view of what things really cost. So all they have is to try to strengthen their side in the tug of war. Ideally we would move away from that process towards a cooperative model, but this is possible only through trust, which cannot be obtained by obscurity.
I don't think there is very much commercial software nowadays that doesn't include a subscription model. A direct result of rampant piracy
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...
tl;dr: Just give artists with body of work a basic wage and ask for nothing in return. See what they produce.
We will see at the end of 2025/2026 some report that suggests either this is feasible or not to continue.
This author manages to say nothing about this well-known phenomenon. Maybe the NYT also just writes brainless LLM articles now?