Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry | Hacker News Reader

Crowd Patronage: How A 400 Year Old Model Can Save The Music Industry

bryank.im

62 pointsschlichtm58 comments

Music without the music industry (labels etc) is the internet without aggregators (reddit etc)

What happened on the internet before content aggregators (or before you had access to them)? you'd see a cool website and tell a friend the website address or you'd send a link to a friend and they might pass it on if they cared enough, they might not. That's a few people, unless the website was seriously incredible it would never be seen by maybe a hundred people. Now with sites like reddit a "pretty cool" website can be seen by millions of people.

Music is like that. There are so many artists that produce great music but nobody has ever heard of them because their "network" extends to maybe a couple of friends and friends friends and some of their friends friends friends, unless they get a big break (like shared by an already famous artist) they'll remain pretty small, forever. I bet everyone here knows of an artist they like but who couldn't make a living from their music, whether that's a friend or someone they've seen in an obscure Youtube video.

The music industry (big labels) provide huge value to artists, so many artists would never have the reach they have now if they didn't have labels. Would Justin Bieber be known by hundred of millions if he was still making songs on Youtube?

The idea that sites like kickstarter are the future for creative endeavours is partly true, they can help fund some projects and open up artists to new ways to fund their work, but they can't replace the music industry. Very few people care enough about music to not need to be told who to listen to, or to invest in their favourite artists, they need to be given music to choose from (see: top 40) and decide what they like and buy it.

Things like selling a CD for $10 or a download for $1 are what fund the music industry, if the music industry dies so does the way we consume music. No longer will we be able to just consume, we'll have to find it too. I want the option to seek out new music, I want the option to fund artists I love that want to be independent, I don't want it to be a necessity.

    Music is so much more than sounds – 
    how else do you explain the Gathering of the Juggalos?

marketing

I think labels adding value as curators is an outdated argument.

Music aggregators are everywhere now. HypeMachine, SoundCloud, even iTunes and Youtube all help me find great music. Even Reddit itself has subreddits that aggregate great music. Sometimes that music is curated by a label, oftentimes not.

I think I explained my point poorly.

If you do not care about music enough to seek it out (which is most people) and music is just something that's in your life when you're driving to work or doing the cleaning you rely on the "music industry" to be your aggregator, they make/take music that they know the average person will like (yay formulas!) and deliver it to you through radio, television and all the other places people listen to music.

If that disappears and music becomes something you have to actively seek out, or find yourself disliking most of the music you're hearing on the radio ("this week on the top 40 from some website that people that care about music visit...") you're just going to give up.

music is a part of our lives, yes, but not because it's something most people are passionate about, it's because it's just something that is there. I've started to enjoy music a lot recently, but for the majority of my life it wasn't something I cared about at all, I would just listen to whatever was popular and I was happy with that. My mother is the same, she'll hear a song on the radio and like it and then go out and buy the bands album and listen to that, she would never sit hunched over a computer trawling through websites sharing different music, or flick through TV channels, or switch between radio stations.

I used reddit as an example of a website that delivers content of a specific type to people that want it. The example you're using (Soundcloud, Hypemachine) would be sites like Hackernews, they cater to a specific audience. Most people that use reddit are just idle consumers, they go to reddit.com click the top 20 links, laugh at the cute cat pictures and move on. How many ever subscribe to communities they care about? A relatively small amount. That's the amount that would ever seek out music. (edit: I think a good way to explain it in simple terms is: reddit is "my first internet content aggregator", the music industry is "my first music aggregator")

How the system works now isn't PERFECT, but it's pretty great. Popular music is distributed by big labels, they control what the average person hears and "know" what most people like; people that want more than just the popular music can seek it out and/or contribute through kickstarter (which is growing, which is great). I think what the article describes is fantastic and it SHOULD happen, but alongside big labels, not as a replacement.

Music should be paid for, music should generate revenue, artists should be able to use labels to get big, but artists should also be able to stay independent, make music for making music, have their fans fund what they want to hear. That sort of thing is great, but both can exist at the same time (and I think they will)

"If you do not care about music enough to seek it out (which is most people) and music is just something that's in your life when you're driving to work or doing the cleaning you rely on the "music industry" to be your aggregator"

This is already beginning to shatter. last.fm, genius on itunes and many more will just play music that you like based on some input. It works pretty well now, in five years it's going to be great.

They all require your input though. A lot of people listen to the radio- something they have absolutely no control over. It's interesting to think what will happen to them.

The music industry's disappearance won't create a void, things will move in to take their place.

You don't need the big labels to be the filter, there are plenty of other individuals and companies who will take that place as the arbiters of "popular" music.

Big labels aren't even filters? They're creators. Without them we'll have no popular music. Where were Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Britney Spears, Ke$ha, Justin Bieber, .fun, Taylor Swift all before a major took them on? Nowhere. Flopsville. They create mass market products. Without them nobody will have the budget or knowledge to do it. And that'll be a sad day.

Joustin Bieber was a youtube sensation before any label hired him. Great operas existed before the record labels... when they are gone musicians and theater and performance directors will continue to produce great art.

> If you do not care about music enough to seek it out (which is most people)

If most people don't care much about music, why should we as a society spend so much money supporting the music industry?

I view the music industry & pop music as an ephemeral buisness which took advantage of the particular technology & society present in the 20th century, in the same way that some species of animal might evolve to take advantage of some ecological niche that appeared as global climate changes and then dies out once that niche dissapears.

"reddit for music" sounds so much better than the current model, "play the same thing on loop 10 times an hour".

We have that. It's called last.fm.

You don't need to have to have your music reach a million people to make a living as a musician. The Grateful Dead for example had fans that numbered in the thousands, but those fans were actual fanatics that went to every concert and bought every piece of paraphernalia. Most artists today don't understand that model. They think success is about topping charts.

This overstates the case. The Grateful Dead might very well have had millions of fans; they just kept forgetting where they were up to in the count, and so started back at zero out of a basic sense of fairness.

You could market packaged dog poop, doesn't mean lots of people are going to buy it. There's a fundamental value there for Juggalos, and I personally think it's beyond ICP's music.

You'd be surprised at the market for dog poop. It can be used as organic fertilizer, as a weapon, as a training aid (for training puppies). Seriously, I've purchased a bottle of dog pee on amazon for $7.99 with free shipping via prime. I know this sounds crazy, but I'm dead serious. I used the dog pee to teach my dog where he should go. But I wouldn't have known that was even possible without marketing.

Almost anything that you think is useless has a way that it can be used that justifies someone paying for it.

Haha, I should have known... consider me educated 0_o

Reddit is not asking for 70% of the income the rest of the Internet gets.

TL;DR The arts used to be (like Mozart's time used to be) supported by wealthy patrons who commissioned works that were subsequently enjoyed by the public. The notion of music as a commodity to be consumed like sugar and paprika is a modern one, and, M Kim argues, a historical quirk whose time has passed. We should thus separate consumption from patronage, with the latter greatly enhanced by crowd-funding technology, e.g. Kickstarter. Artists should raise funds from crowds directly and then release their recorded music for free, with private perks accruing to the patrons.

My comments:

I like the structure, but am concerned about the separation of consumption and patronage. Our society has become far more consumerist since Victorian times and ignoring that cultural shift could be problematic. I propose fortifying crowdfunded patronage with a matching fund that would match crowd patronage dollars.

In college I was cheap and pirated music. Now I care more for convenience than a few dollars and so download my music via iTunes, where cover art, filing, and synchronising is taken care of. I suggest adding an optional (or maybe not) extra $1 (or whatever) to be directed into a matching fund. This fund would then match, at a ratio to be determined after further thought (would probably be a moving scale), crowd patronage dollars to artists. Thus, the consumption and patronage are joined somewhat.

One could still have free music for those who value dollars more than time. The downside is the iTunes of this analogy would be a power centre. That said, it would be naive to assume any such system wouldn't concentrate power. It might be good to have an iTunes figure opposing the Kickstarter one.

I personally hate anything that "feels" like charity to the artist, I don't think that's sustainable. Even though I call this theoretical model "crowd patronage", I feel it would only work if the fan "feels" like he's getting more than some altruistic warm feelings of supporting something. They should also feel the real value of relationship access. Just the illusion of having a closer relationship to artist will only enhance the feeling of supporting the artist. But at a minimum, there must be that value back of some sort of relationship reciprocation. Does that make sense?

Without subsidy crowd patronage will tend towards normal patronage as it exists in the classical arts (we still have patrons commissioning paintings and sculptures, for example). Pure patronage ignores consumer demand for music. Leaving money on the table deprives the artistic community potential income, which limits its size, as well as creates an opening for a competing, consumer-centric model to re-appear. I'm trying to find a way to merge those two sources of revenues (consumer demand and patronage).

Moving towards music distributors being required, as part of the licence, to divert a portion of revenues to matching patronage to artists would be an alternative. That way, person A, who would have supported one project for $100 000 can now support two, with $50 000 each of matching funds (assuming 1:1 matching) making up the other half. The distributors could also dis-intermediate the patrons, the difference between this model and the labels being that the artist would have the freedom to distribute their music for free as well.

Note that an un-intended consequence of this would be music losing mass appeal and catering to the tastes of the patron minority. Given the state of popular music I'm not sure if this would be a terrible loss :P.

I agree with nancyhua. I sort of use "patronage" as short hand, don't let it confuse you. I think to the fan, they must not feel like it's pure patronage... they should get some sort of concrete interaction or recognition back from artist. There should be real value there for fan for this to sustain as a model.

That's not short hand at all - patrons of the arts, going back to antiquity, generally got a private performance of the work they commissioned in addition to the opportunity to fraternise with the artist. They typically also branded themselves onto the work somehow.

My argument is there aren't enough dollars seeking that experience today as there are consumption dollars (which the industry has gotten used to). In the past, monetising that long tail of demand was prohibitive. Today it is not. As a single example, I would never contribute to support a musician yet my lifetime worth to the music industry is at least tens of thousands of dollars (including concert tickets).

There is enough money in that delta to fund the artists, lobby legislators, and enforce the status quo. That's the problem. If you aren't re-routing that demand you're proposing a nice but idealistic hypothetical.

I think they try to do this to some extent with "perks." As a crowdfunder and crowdfundraiser, I can see a divide between people who donate bc they want emotional pleasure and people who donate bc they want to receive something. It should be possible to segment patrons to address different donors' desires. Maybe if you're a music patron seeking stuff, you get options to buy particular tickets/seats or are the first to get songs or limited editions or something. If you're seeking status maybe they put your name somewhere on their website or send you a special Facebook logo, etc.

I thought that the patronage model could partly be a bit like a subscription fan club, with various perks and deals on gigs and limited artifacts and streamed studio access and other stuff like that.

Wouldn't a tax on paid downloads to fund a dollar matching system just discourage paid downloads even more? I think the entire premise here is that paid downloads of any kind are going to die and the only time you have scarcity and therefore can charge money is before you've created the art.

The concentration of power is a good point, it would be best to have a healthy ecosystem of Kickstarter clones or at least some model that avoids a single "hottest projects" page, those damn things bleed money from everyone else to create blockbusters.

My point is that there will probably be services beyond simply giving me music that I and people with similarly inelastic demands will be willing to pay for. Whether that manifests as a Spotify-like subscription or iTunes-esque pay-per-download has yet to be seen.

Ah, gotcha. I see those services dying pretty quickly actually and music just being shared and downloaded from all over and always free.

I guess there will always be a place for pay services dealing with recommendation or cloud storage but I'm assuming that the value of a digital copy of a song, streamed or not, will be zero pretty soon.

  One could still have free music for those who value 
  dollars more than time.

If the music can be copied freely, couldn't the cover art and other metadata also be copied?

There's no reason in principle that an ad-supported iTunes clone couldn't do everything iTunes does - it could be more convenient, in fact, as you wouldn't have to muck around with credit card numbers and passwords. The only reason piracy is inconvenient at the moment is because it's illegal.

The music distribution system today adds value beyond just getting stuff to my computer - it selects artists, curates content, stores it for me virtually, etc. These functions would all probably find a portion of people willing to pay for them.

I am thinking of Pandoras or Shazams, perhaps with features that let me say "someone make a song like this". One could see the emergence, as a counter-movement, of heavily DRM-protected "limited release" albums.

When you make something people value free strange things happen. The most likely is still the use of force to enforce profits, i.e. some form of copyright regime.

Don't you think any paid selection-curation-storage effort will have ad-supported competitors?

Google, Youtube etc are all free - it's obviously economically feasible to distribute media online for just ad revenues.

I've posted this before, but what Francis Ford Coppola said is very relevant to the topic:

http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O....

"We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script. This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money? In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it."

Did Coppola get his other job in wine before or after making tons of money from his films?

This is being done right now it's just segmented and no real platform has emerged as the place to do it. The real problem with the model from my perspective is that in artists (and their label/mgmts) desperation to remain relevant & earn a better living they are constantly on social media & watering down their celebrity. Combine that with the fact that any cute kid on YouTube can suddenly become a celebrity in his own right you have a) way more celebrities and b) way over exposed celebrities. The internet has basically commoditized being famous in some ways and in most artists desperation to try and get 'bigger' and make more money they make it worse. There will always be the massive artists where the masses go insane and people line up down the block to video chat with. Those artists don't have a problem now. The ones that are really in trouble are the every day middle of the road full time working artists (selling 50-300K records). This kind of platform will not work with enough scale & consistently enough to even begin a conversation about it replacing old record sales revenue. I think he touched on the real key to the long term music business which is embracing streaming and getting as many fans as possible to listen to your music and care enough to go to your shows. Any money a band makes from recorded music will forever be a bonus.

>I think he touched on the real key to the long term music business which is embracing streaming and getting as many fans as possible to listen to your music and care enough to go to your shows. Any money a band makes from recorded music will forever be a bonus.

Why do people keep saying that? About the shows, I mean.

The reality is that most bands LOSE money on shows. Shows are historically a loss leader for record sales.

Hey guys, I wrote this thing, and ready to discuss it here on HN. Come at me with your best shot!

Great job. I am probably biased since this is nearly exactly how I see things going (and want them to go) as well, but your explanation and the historical examples chosen make a great argument.

If you are demanding I take a shot then I have a nitpick: First paragraph has the Traditionalists, Incrementalists, Apologists, and Defeatists. What about the school of thought that the widespread ability to freely share music is inevitable and artists, as they always have, will find a way to make money because people love music? What school of thought are you and I in?

Do you think this model will turn the music industry into even more of a hits based business (like the app store model has done to software) or less of one?

I can see books moving to this model as well, but movies seem a bit more problematic unless budgets fall drastically.

hey freshhawk. first of all, I'm totally jealous of your handle. Second, I would say I'm not in any of those camps I define. I'm in the "crowd patronage" camp ;-).

I think music will always have hits and superstars, whether the gatekeeper is radio or internet. What we call "viral" today will be upgraded to how we think of "hit" today.

Overall though, I'm more excited about the "middle class" of musicians the new era of music industry can support. I personally think maintaining a profitable and real relationship with your fans will require a lot less overhead in the future. And, they can go direct to fan, which is beneficial for independent artists, imo.

Yeah, I don't think we'll ever get away from hits and superstars, that's just how humans behave.

I am excited about the possibility of a potentially larger middle class of musicians as well but I can also see pressure from the need for virality that works against a healthy middle class.

"You need to make the kickstarter music top ten page or else you make nothing!" is something I can see happening. At the same time, it's unlikely to be worse than the selling CD's model for those people so maybe that's just complaining about it only being "better" instead of "perfect", which is silly.

Awesome well thought out article. Agree on many points. Mike Masnick (of www.techdirt.com) has been blogging about very similar models for years now.

The fundamental point he gets at is that you want to 'Connect with Fans' more than anything. This is why people like Amanda Palmer, Trent Reznor and the Juggalos (oh my) have been so successful. People connect with their music and their persona.

The second part is to give those fans a 'Reason to Buy'. In your article you talked about things like close up access, neat events, and being added to the liner notes: these are all concrete reasons to buy.

That formula is sort of what you were hinting at.

Use the infinite goods (the smell of the food in your metaphor) to sell the finite goods.

awesome, i've never heard of Mike Masnick (fail!), but he sounds like a smart man ;-). Thanks for the heads up, I'll probably be digging into his stuff pretty soon.

http://i.saac.me/post/what-if-bittorrent-was-invented-before... I wrote an article discussing similar themes on my blog a while back, and I too think the Kickstarter model is the future of the creative industries.

(I might do a follow up to that article with some further thoughts. Basically, I think the reason the crowd patronage model is the future is because it allows the artist to cover their fixed, up-front costs. Since the Internet has made distribution costs effectively 0, covering your fixed costs is the way to go)

I'd like to think that this would rather make artists more independant and kill the music industry.

I personally define "music industry" as whatever generates revenue for artists and their managers. I do agree that there's a lot of old growth in the current ecosystem of the music industry that's inevitably going to die off.

You make some great points, but I think the "Internet Apologists" school of thought is closer to your "Crowd Patronage" idea than you realise. As you said, recorded music is fairly recent, but gathering around to enjoy a show goes waaaay back...and I think it's a great business model going forward.

One great example of this in action is Hoodie Allen. He releases all his music free on Soundcloud[1] and Youtube[2], where he funds/makes his own (pretty impressive) music videos to gain his audience. No record label required. His music is on iTunes, but I'm guessing the real money is made in concerts.

[1] http://soundcloud.com/hoodieallenmusic

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t431MAUQlQ

I actually agree with you, I'm an internet champion myself, so I didn't mean to pigeonhole anyone. My main point was to say that increased revenue in the concert and merch sector will not come close to replacing the gaping hole of content revenue. We have to go one step further.

As for Hoodie Allen, I've actually talked to him before on the phone about his Facebooking strategy! I like him, he's smart! He's definitely the type to succeed in the new music industry. Check out the song "No Sleep till Brooklyn"... my buddy Jhameel sings the hook on it!

TL;DR Artists can use the Kickstarter model to collect from their most ardent fans instead of trying to sell units to everyone.

I think this makes a lot of sense and can work in some cases, but it remains to be seen what happens when the market is saturated with artists looking to collect voluntarily from their fan base. I suspect people will fatigue from the euphoria of being generous and the model will fade, but I hope I'm wrong.

Each artist only needs a few patrons, so as long as the tail of patronage is as long as the tail of consumption each consumer only needs to patronize (is that the right word?) a few artists. I've seen this work for small indie bands with small but loyal followings (ex: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745015920/the-new-giraff...). Basically, it assumes that each band has a few people that like them a lot as opposed to a lot of people that like them a little.

I can only wonder what copyright law might do to such a model. Would patronage allow one to play the artist's music in a public space without prior permission/consent? Think about all the recent political campaigns that used songs in such a manner. Also, I wonder if the patronage model would make it that much harder for an artist to sustain his/her career.

This is just my opinion, but I feel copyright will be less enforceable in the future when it doesn't actually generate revenue. I have to think over time, artists will not want to gate their content, and provide distributors free access to their music to businesses and public spaces in exchange for them, well, playing it and getting exposure. Just like they're doing now with their fans. And all this will be accelerated when people stop buying music altogether. This is sort of a stretch hypothesis, I'm actually not super familiar with how ASCAP and BMI works.

Great article. Have you read Musicking by Christopher Small? If not, you definitely should.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Musicking-Meanings-Performing-Listen...

Also, it might be interesting to chat a bit more. Drop me an email - rob at [see profile for domain].

@aw3c2 - I think it all depends on how you personally define the music industry. In your mind, is the industry defined by the record labels or is it defined by the community of artists?

Great write up! This is exactly what we're trying to accomplish with Listener Approved - https://ListenerApproved.com

Bryan, you may get a kick out of drip.fm. It certainly satisfies the first two prongs of your model (access+exclusivity).

Aren't Kickstarter & Indie-Go-Go effectively patronage systems?

Yeah I, would agree they're modern versions of crowd patronage. I do think though that in the future, musicians will have a more fleshed out platform catered to their needs. With their music, community, CRM admin, etc.

Did you read the article? That's kind of the point he's making, that they're the start.

Last paragraph:

And a few great customers is better then

THAN!

Good catch! Thanks, and fixed!

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