Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

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There is absolutely zero evidence to support your assertion - "My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success."

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.

Nah, you're just wrong about your quality measure. The production of "conventional pap" is very much a form of mastery. And so is good marketing.

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.

Minecraft was revolutionary in the openness of it's game design... It's a terrible example of 'technically bad'. The technical quality of Minecraft is in design, not graphics.

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.

Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world.

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 mistake you made is that you're measuring "good" by your own (arguably sophisticated) taste.

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".

So your original argument is "if an artist is [commercially successful] then they'll be commercially successful"?

that's not my argument - that's my statement of fact.

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).

The thing I take issue with in your comment narrative is the idea that somehow music labels don't need (have) marketing any more — that we've entered into a wonderful meritocracy for creativity. It seems naive to not imagine that there are huge sums of money being spent behind the scenes by the labels to push specific artists and buy their popularity.

I have no reason to believe the masses are suddenly no longer influenced by ... (paid) influencers.

> buy their popularity.

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.

> While marketing helps, it's but a spark.

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.

I think you have made your position unnecessarily confusing by bringing "good" into it. You have entered a conversation about changing the music industry so that it provides a greater reward to certain artists that it currently does. You then said "well, if they're good, they're at the top, so why do you want to change who's at the top?". That's a very confused thing to say, because everyone else in the thread is arguing that by their definition of good, the good people are not at the top.

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?

> changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it.

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.

That's not a statement of fact, it's a tautology.

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.

Do I even need to point out that you've committed a tautology. "If's commercially successful, it is "good"."

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.

No. That's tautalogical. You can't meaninfully say "good musicians are rewarded" and then measure goodness by whether they are rewarded.

why not?

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.

Because the assertion that good musicians are rewarded is unfalsifiable in that formulation. Your definition guarantees that you will always find it true. It proves nothing.

There was a classic study, https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full...., quality is pretty significantly correlated to success. It is not everything - there are random factors, marketing, etc. - but I would certainly say there is significant evidence that how good a musician is does in fact matter and contributes to their success. Besides "Friday" or the "so bad it's good" category, terrible song = terrible sales.

It’s a bit more complicated than that: being good is necessary but not sufficient. It’s true that terrible music will fail even if promoted but once you’re over certain quality thresholds there are many artists who are roughly comparable but most won’t make it big because they weren’t picked by the right label/promoter (not being in with the Ticketmaster/LiveNation cartel means you can’t even play at a high fraction of live venues), didn’t manage the right social media campaign, didn’t ace an interview with a music reporter or popular influencer, etc. or simply didn’t have the interest/stamina/wealth to keep cranking out posts and new material.

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.

This study is interesting, but it might as well have 'in mice' in the title for all its relevance in the real world. The study is measuring preference - and I'd definitely agree that all else being equal, preference would uplift better work (across artistic domains). But all else is most definitely not equal. Distribution is now essentially free - but all that demonstrated is that it was never the bottleneck. Marketing is. The music industry is a machine for creating what the kids call 'plants'. Groomed, quantised, pop creatures with a minimal bar for talent and huge appeal to their chosen demo (these days primarily young women). The industry is, contrary to what we might have assumed would happen - still the mediator. They negotiate the front page of spotify, book the tours, create the relationships with broadcasters and media outlets.

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.

Don think you need to destroy all of capitalism. Just abolishing copyright on music would be a surgical strike with pretty good effect I believe.

That wouldn't make more people pay for music.

It would not. It is not relevant either. Music is shaped into something you buy by wielders of copyright. Removing copyright as a weapon would leave them powerless to do so, allowing music to once again be some thing you primarily do.

That might be true, sure. But it wouldn't get musicians paid.

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.)

FWIW I agree with you analysis. I am making the argument that that is how it should be and that copyright gets in the way.

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.

> 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.

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