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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

Nelson's faming here pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole ball of wax myself, a musician, and someone who started their career working for a major national concert promotor, worked for two streaming music services and who participates in a local music scene as performer, supporter and occasional promotor:

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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.

"""

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It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat. If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.

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?

> If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?

A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself; B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.

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.

It was always true that anyone could make music, since the earliest days of modern humans.

By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.

I think the point is the recording industry was a very different beast. Now it's not. What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording can record it with only a modest percentage increase in time and money.

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.

"If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place."

That's what I have a problem with. Music hasn't demeaned itself. Music is just as meaningful as it's ever been.

Why are you failing to read the context? Demeaned economically.

And you can't charge me $100 to buy your album. I have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Basic supply and demand.

"Music has demeaned itself" is nonsensical. Music didn't do anything. Music will be around long after the music industry is on the dustbin of history. The comment I replied to seemed to think music is worthless unless people can make money off it.

> What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing.

The gear is accessible - but the acoustics of a studio certainly is not.

True, but there's still a whole lot you can do with virtual instruments, synthesizers, direct-recorded guitars, and minimal (or even no) good room acoustics.

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.

Indeed, virtual instruments open up a whole lot of creative space. And not having to record everything in reverse order of importance while burning the previous version is a substantial benefit vs even professional recording gear of the past!

The acoustics of a studio isn't important anymore and I don't think was necessarily a good thing. Make your space completely dead and load the Abbey Road studio A impulses. Now we have infinite options.

Completely dead is surprisingly difficult. And acoustics absolutely are still important, as is microphone selection and placement…

You can record the standard rock band setup with minimal hardware. Direct input guitar and bass, processed with amp simulation. Electronic drum kit with some good samples (most modern recordings use drum replacement anyway even if they're recording real drums). A single close mic for the vocals, and maybe some basic room treatment, which is relatively easy in the vocal range. Convolution reverb with impulse responses for the acoustics. Most listeners won't be able to tell the difference.

Only if you insist on real drums does it become difficult and expensive.

Sure they are. People put together well-equipped car garages, woodworking shops, broadcast studios, all sorts of things all the time. Tens of thousands of dollars can get you where you need to be and people do that for their hobbies all the time.

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.

There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's minds with.

The ease of obtaining such sounds on the cheap makes it difficult to appreciate just how cutting-edge those sounds were in Kraftwerk’s time. Making electronic drums sound good requires a lot of processing, and they did all of that with analog equipment before we even had a complete idea of how electronic drums “should” sound. And that raises the bar for today’s musicians — doing “Kraftwerk” today requires pushing boundaries like they did, not just making the same sounds.

The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. For some reason[0], you can't just upload your music to Spotify or Apple Music directly, you have to have a middleman, and that market of "middlemen for unsigned artists" is just three companies[1]. They all suck in different ways, but there's a lot of creative-class wage theft going on, even beyond Spotify just underpaying indies on rights.

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

> The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally.

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...

[2] https://distrokid.com/

YouTube is chock full of musicians with endless complaints about DistroKid's practices and policies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x14kZTPA064

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuE3YQK1-Ng

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itYB2XSsLAc

Well they're off base because it's nearly free global distribution. Cry me a river or be so talented the entire world wants to pay you to perform live. No one pays to see mediocrity.

I appreciate the links, would you share the complaints here?

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.

Spotify is essentially the distributor now, not DistroKid.

> Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman?

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.

This confuses skill for song writing ability. There are 1000s of world class jazz players that can play back to you anything you play them. But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. That's the hardest part. The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that.

>The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that.

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.

> aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to.

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.

> 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.

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.

No idea what you're talking about. The system is still there. Instead of a DJ speaking the artist and song name to you, you can look at your phone screen and read it. Spotify weekly playlists are fantastic for discovering music. You can check forums or use the Google. You can talk to people. If you still want to be spoonfed what you're supposed to like, you are always free to turn on the radio for some brainless consumption, just like the good ol days.

There's a UK band that's risen from playing to 20 people at daggy gigs to being everywhere in roughly 18 months - that's been on the back of being individually not bad musicians and then workshopping like demons for much of the time the UK was in lockdown.

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 think something is off with those guys. Their ascension seems off to me, they aren't that good, there are plenty of better bands playing at the Windmill but for some reason these guy are the chosen ones.

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.

Yeah, call it luck if you like, IIRC the Violent Femmes rapidly ascended to fame on the back of busking in the right spot for the right person to see them

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.

> There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music.

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.

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