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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, um, this assumes each stat to be the sole source of income, and to compare to minimum wage we must assume 40 hour work weeks.

Anyway, if you can't make it as a musician, I guess you have to do something else productive. Corey Doctorow gets it when he describes himself and other people who make a living in creative arts as being in the 0.001%, the extremely lucky few who get to have that as their career.

All professional musicians could disappear tomorrow and we'd still have enough great and varied music to listen to for all of anyone's lifetime and also have massive amounts of high quality participative music making by non-pros.

Incidentally, I'm a semi-pro musician myself but I long ago stopped fighting the I-deserve-a-living-as-a-musician battle and switched to figuring out how to be sure my contribution to the economy actually mattered.

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After some modest attempts and a fair bit of research, I concluded that creating [EDIT: recorded] music for people to enjoy listening to is almost certainly a horrible business plan.

That does not mean that it's a horrible activity; with modern technology, it's relatively easy for, say, a software developer to masquerade as a musician and crank out great tracks. Getting sales, though, is challenging, and getting enough sales to pay normal living expenses is very challenging. A lot of potential "customers" seem to increasingly not wish to pay to listen to music at all, whether if it was made by J. Random Hacker or The Beatles.

It seems more likely to be able to make money supplying production music: royalty-free tracks, custom music for productions, etc. But this isn't music create for the express purpose of people just listening to it; it's more utilitarian, something producers buy in the interest of creating another product altogether.

This might be the same path that software is on: lots of great software is available free of charge. It's presently still quite possible to earn a living selling software directly to individual consumers, but the long-term money may be in selling software to companies who use it to produce something else, and custom software development where off-the-shelf programs don't do quite what is needed.

In any case, I enjoy making music. I am open to opportunities to make money for doing so, but I expect to continue making music whether if I get paid or not.

I liken it to open source software: the intellectual property isn't the business plan/revenue source—rather, it enables a business model surrounding that IP (touring).

Pretty Lights, for example, is achieving some great success releasing his own music and everything else on his label for free. If your music is more accessible, and people enjoy it, then ticket sales are sure to go up.

And on that note, yes it's a terrible plan if you're just setting out to make money: these artists have INSANE touring schedules. Their passion for the music is what keeps them going.

As a way to combat the exact analysis you just detailed, I developed the gralbum platform. My hypothesis is that we need a medium change, something designed for music which is actually meant to be listened to, and which can take the economic role of the LP or CD.

gralbumcollective.com? Nice looking website, but you desperately need a clear and concise message on the home page that explains exactly what it is. I was heavily interested in figuring it out, but I had to click around several pages just to get an extremely vague idea that it's some sort of app that plays music and has an interactive graphical element.

Wishing you the best of luck!

Thanks for the feedback. I agree. The site is just a placeholder.

Yes, your statement is accurate given that you don't think art or music need to evolve with culture. That they don't play a vital part in human evolution: spiritually, emotionally, culturally, philosophically.

If so, yes, the music that has been made is more than enough. And we don't need any more music.

That's not what he said. The point is that even if all pro-musicians disappeared there would still be enough non-pro/semi-pro to create new music in their spare time.

After all, I doubt the first humans started playing music in order to pay the rent...

That isn't at all what he said. He said that if people stopped making music professionally, people would still make music. Professional, commercial music is a relatively recent phenomenon. Music wouldn't stop existing if it stopped being sold.

You completely miss the point: All professional musicians only account for a tiny fraction of actual music output. If they all disappeared it would not prevent art or music from evolving.

See my reply above. I doubt you, or anyone you know, voluntarily and primarily listens to amateur music.

He's saying professional as in 'all i do is make music'. There are plenty of local bands where the band members have 2nd jobs.

yeah, and that's who you listen to all day? Really?

Sure, I knew people in college who were part of the local music scene and listened to it primarily.

I don't see why it is so surprising. People choose genres and primarily listen to it all the time. The kind of music popular to make in your locality, is definitely not the same genre that's played nationwide no matter how close the similarities may be.

Actually, I do primarily listen to people who have never made a living out of their compositions. Most of what I listen to is niche electronic music including 8-bit "chiptunes" and demo-scene music which does not exactly do well commercially. Some of them do make a little bit of money from music, but frankly most of these musicians can't even cover the cost of their equipment from their sales.

Sometimes I think that musicians need music more than the rest of us.

And that's a good thing in my opinion.

Right, i did ignore the part about amateur musicians and their contributions to the lexicon. To all you who replied, i propose an experiment: go one month listening only to amateur music, or no music at all.

Amateur, non commercial, music must be music made by people who do not now, and have never, made their living as professional musicians.

For just one month.

Of course it assumes each stat to be the sole source of income, for the purpose of answering this question: how many plays on Spotify would it take for the fees to equate to one US minimum wage?

That's all this is, and that's fine. It would be weird for the author to start factoring in other sources of income, because the point of this story is simply to make it easier to understand what "$0.00029 per play" means, by its ratio to a more tangible figure. I don't think the author is trying to imply that all those musicians on Spotify with fewer than 4m plays/month are actually earning less than minimum wage overall.

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