The problem isn’t piracy – it’s competition
rocknerd.co.uk
rocknerd.co.uk
1) Competition is an issue. But competition isn't driving down prices. Despite all the music out there, people continue to gravitate towards the big record label stars. Nobody is competing by producing something people like as much as Rihanna, except cheaper. Instead, the "competition" is by delivering Rihanna for free by infringing copyrights.
2) Marginal costs of production of music are zero. But that does not mean music should be free, any more than it means iPhones should be $200 or whatever. The point about competition shows that music is not fungible. People have rejected indie music. They want Rihanna. Now, when you're talking about a product that is not fungible marginal cost is irrelevant. It doesn't how much each Hermes bag costs to reproduce.
You seem to be under the impression that people determined her art to be of greater value and thus a higher demand for it was created than all of Rihanna's competitors. That is only very slightly true. Demand for Rihanna's music is created mostly by record companies' aggressively promoting it and advertising it in various venues, not because people decided with no outside influence that her music is better than the competitors'. Rihanna won because her record company is better at salesmanship than her competitors. Now her popularity is soaring in a bandwagon effect, as is typical of popstars or really any popular phenomenon.
Your point that music should not be free because of its marginal cost of production being zero is an interesting one -- just as there isn't an expectation for the iPhone price to be $200, it does indeed make sense that music shouldn't be free. But, with all the talk about capitalism being a faulty economic system these days, a particular recipient of rage -- and rightfully so, in my opinion -- is that entity which charges bad prices [1] for its goods. Now, you might be wondering why it's music which gets all this drama about people objecting to its costs, and not the banking sector or something. That's because it's a thing that's close to people -- everyone listens to music, and naturally everyone wonders why it costs so much when the means of its distribution are effectively zero.
Personally I think we as a society need to first think deeply about corporations that operate essentially on a rentiering model of monetization (the recent wave of 'sharing startups' are a prime example) and then we should worry about what is a good model of music distribution. But hey, record companies are basically rentiering companies as well.
[1]: Bad as in socially or morally irresponsible. If some company finds a cure for cancer -- and that cure, it turns out requires only $2 to make for every pill, it would not be ethical to charge an exorbitant price like $20,000 for it, no matter how much the research costs were (people dying is a bigger concern than people not getting paid). This is obviously an extreme example, but you get the point.
Exactly nobody is harmed by an entity that charges $100 for a single song. Where does the "outrage" enter the picture?
Are you sure you're being rational here?
Speaking for a moment only about the everyday man's necessities of life (luxuries are not included; food, shelter - and music (i.e. culture) are), it seems to me that letting reign that tentative and fickle process of price discovery is an act that can potentially cost dearly. When biodiesel fuel was once thought to be a promising source of energy a few years back, prices of food promptly shot up and this resulted in the poor having difficultly affording food.
Now, I am aware this makes for a tenuous argument if we're talking about music, but I don't think it is outright inapplicable. Consider not the one-off luxury item, consider items you expect mass public to consume in large quantities -- consider itunes, a highly scaled platform which can now just sit and take in money. Indeed itunes bears a responsibility by virtue of it being a highly scaled avenue to buy music from -- unlike a local store which can only dream of seeing such business traffic, to charge reasonable prices. I think any such platform is obliged by social responsibility to charge a reasonable price. That in a purely capitalistic economy this is not a reasonable expectation, I think is one of its great faults.
tptacek, I'm sure I am being rational here, but what value is my confirmation of this to you? :) I have elsewhere on HN made note of my socialistic views, I recognize it is not proper of me to digress into vague political tangents (they're the worst), and I apologize for having done that, I'll stop here.
So even if we're reevaluating the basics of our economy, it seems to me like music and movies are among the last things that deserve our philosophical ire.
"Looking at the 44 concerts, U2 will create enough carbon to fly all 90,000 people attending one of their Wembley dates (in London) to Dublin," Helen Roberts, an environmental consultant for carbonfootprint.com, told the Belfast Telegraph. Put another way, U2's CO2 emissions are reportedly the equivalent to the average annual waste produced by 6,500 British people, or the same as leaving a lightbulb running for 159,000 years. [1]
> It doesn't con people into giving up personal information like Facebook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/arts/music/jay-z-is-watchi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...
> It doesn't take advantage of desperate third world labor like everything Wal-Mart sells.
Wal-Mart sells pop media.
[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jul/10/u2-world-tour-c...
Yes, and humans exhale almost a billion of tons in the same period. I don't think just measuring the total is very helpful; you'd need to analyze carefully the value of each things, and what they replaced. How many carbons were saved when teenagers start defining themselves based more on their smartphones that on their cars?
You point to a couple of privacy breaches versus Facebook whose entire business model is based on breaching privacy.
Sure, but being less bad than Facebook is not an achievement.
That could not be further from the truth though, pop media is trash. Would you want your children exposed to the misogynistic, sexist, racist content being pushed by record companies these days?
We have been talking about environmental sustainability for a long time... pollution is bad, rare material scarcity is bad - it is time we started caring just as much about social sustainability. Pop media 40 years ago had stars that partook in peace activism, the founder of the most famous band wrote peace anthems like 'Imagine' and 'Give Peace a Chance', the most popular stars today are all involved in pointless stupid drama- Rihanna (beaten viciously by a guy, still wants to protect him), Thickle (http://vimeo.com/64611906), Cyrus - the girl my little sister was a big fan of when she was younger is making videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My2FRPA3Gf8.
A lot of pop media content is anti-intellectual, a lot of it objectifies women, a lot of it perpetuates racism. It is markedly worse than it once used to be. And there is less of an expectation of a news program or a record company to place the interests of its consumers before its own than there used to be. This is a problem, because it is very much polluting the minds of our young (and old).
>Instead, the "competition" is by delivering Rihanna for free by infringing copyrights.
This is a problem for Rihanna and a Maserati problem once a musician become famous, but the author states this article does not apply to "the majors or rock stars."
The challenge faced by the indies is as old as the music industry, they have merely been exacerbated by technology. Even before the decline of music sales, the main challenge for an indie musician was discovery. I think we have a confirmation bias about the past. There have always been unsuccessful musicians, but we forget they existed. Starving artist is not a new cliche.
Have people rejected indie music or is there something else behind superstar popularity? Conventional thinking is that free music makes it easier to get discovered (but harder to monetize, once discovered) because it cost nothing for consumers to try new music. It turns out that there is so much content/competition out there now (because music cost less to produce + free distribution), consumers have choice overload. This makes it harder for people to try indie music.
Music is cultural, so what is popular follows the same power-law dynamics as social networks (in fact, it is driven by social networks). Hence, what's popular becomes more popular.
Agree that the fact that the product has a zero marginal cost does not mean people are unwilling to pay. The entire software industry is built upon a business model of building a product with high production costs and zero marginal cost.
Those costs shouldn't be underestimated. Finding gold amidst dross (even for subjective values of gold) is a Bayesian evidential process costing nonzero thermodynamic work. In other words, it is never going to be a free lunch. And right now it is very expensive. The charts are reliably more likely to carry something you'll tolerate, even if there are things out there, undiscovered, that you'd properly enjoy.
So fair enough, for now, the charts continue. But this is an informational cost, and if one thing has become clear of late it's that premising your industry on obscurity is a mug's game. Youtube and friends are indeed pouring machine learning technology into uniting you with your own personal chart; I expect a crossover moment will happen sometime in the next ten years after which you will be able to rely on getting better hits off a taste-learning algorithm than off the radio. And then we will really see if the masses want Rihanna.
They continue to gravitate towards Rihanna and the likes because those are the ones that get more airtime and more promotion. It's still a big machine.
Spotify data shows what when people are free to play what they want, off chart music is actually more popular.
Music that is popular has much more to do with culture than with the skills or ingeniousness of the product or artist.
So no the article isn't totally wrong, your criteria is.
What I am saying is that the listeners on average listens to more off chart music than to popular music but by definition of course the chart music will be most popular because more people will listen to the same.
And still, the income from selling tracks is miniscule. It is not competition doing it, it is just the ease of getting it for free on the internet.
I'm not sure this was the case to the same extent in the past. It's never been this easy to access the music of the past.
On the other hand, it's never been easier to reach fans directly and succeed in a niche, of which there are many more. I'm not speaking from experience on this last point, but I know it's true in publishing.
Consider that over 90% of radio is owned by Clear Channel, so the variety of music most people who are not hardcore listeners has been substantially decreased.
Finally, since access to music from the past is easier than ever before (remember that in the age of vinyl records represses were rare, so people would only have what was available to purchase at their disposable), most people prefer to continue to listen to the stuff they heard in their teens rather than continue to investigate different tastes.
Of course one can 'go commercial' and make pop-dance music, aka EDM, but not everyone wants to do that, either materially or artistically. 10-15 years ago a good artist could expect to sell a few thousand copies of an album in a niche genre like psychedelic trance or drum'n'bass, which wouldn't make one rich but would keep a roof over one's head and provide a similarly reasonable return for the label. Now it's very hard to sell 1000 copies of an album and many labels are wary of even releasing in that format, preferring the lower risk of singles.
When you've just got fans, to what extent can you make money via means other than sales?
It's not that anyone who picks up a guitar or drumset or ableton can be a professional, it's that these things are more accessible than ever and, much more importantly, the means of distribution is almost completely accessible to anyone. This means that there is a huge amount of music to choose from and a huge variety. Yes, a lot of it is crap, but there is still more that isn't due to the sheer volume of content (keep in mind that what is and isn't good is subjective. Even if you and I agree that musician X is terrible, maybe there's someone who likes terrible.)
What this all boils down to is that professionals are losing there competitive edge, quickly. Publishing no longer needs a guarantee of profit because setup cost has dropped to practically nothing and distribution cost IS nothing. They can offer more varied and nuanced music, but when it comes down to it most people just want something to play and don't have stringent requirements for their music. Amateur music is quickly filling in that gap, especially on the electronic front (not just EDM, there is a huge variety of music composed digitally that sounds nothing like your standard rave music).
In the end, music is becoming what it used to be, a cultural phenomenon.
No, you are completely wrong. I can't talk about genres I don't know about but for the electronic music I listen to there is a painfully obvious difference between amateur and professional stuff. To the point where I think it is harming the genre. The top artists earn almost nothing from sales of their music, but command large fees for playing 1-2 hours sets every weekend.
There is a real dearth of new talent because people getting into it just don't have the sound engineering experience to make their music sound good enough for people to enjoy. What happens is the big labels find producers would could have some talent, take them on board and teach them how to make the music and have the experienced engineers tidy up their work until it sounds good. What this has resulted in is the two major labels absolutely dominating the scene with a large majority of the big names signed to them and absolutely dominating the share of music listened to. One of the labels also owns the major online store that sells music in this genre.
And yet, they still make next to nothing from sales. This is why ghost producing is so widespread in electronic music- the only money to be made is in live performances. To get big there, you need good productions to get a name for yourself. So what do you do if you're only interested in making music but not performing? You make the music, put it out with someone else's name, they do the performance and bring in the $$ and you split it (or whatever your agreement is).
Now, competition might be more prevalent in other genres- but I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that in genres without significant competition, there is still no money to be made in sales. People listen to the top artists like crazy, they just don't pay for the music because why wouldn't you just download it all for free?
P-diddy never played an instrument. Plenty of popular singers are mediocre to say the least. And many many many very talented musicians make no money what so ever.
Musical talent have very little to do with whether you can live from your music.
For some genres of music yes, for others, no. There are genres where sound design is of the utmost importance. I'm not saying competition isn't a factor universally- I'm saying genres without significant competition still have the same problems, so it clearly isn't the dominant factor.
It is not because of their skills around sound design that they or any other become popular. It has to do much more with timing, culture etc.
Again there are many great great sound designers and and composers out there that will never see any fame at all.
It's much more complex than just the music itself.
My point is, a a lot of the indies make music which, while being solid and obviously requiring tons of work, still can't compare to the output of the few talented guys who made it. For the most part it's not luck, just skills gap. Almost nobody wants to listen to decent music if they can enjoy masterpieces.
Great bands are built over time, they are not inherently great.
(note: I'm not defending diddy here).
You don't need to be good with theory to be good with composition.
But again the point is that there is absolutely no correlation between being great a musical theory, talented performer or experienced composer and the ability to make money from music.
The ability to make music has to do with the ability to be an entrepreneur.
So much like every other industry then? :( </prolific indie software developer with no marketing skills>
Stop fooling yourselves. Piracy did seriously wound the music industry. CD-R drives in computers and the internet, filesharing on Usenet, Napster, Googling for mp3s. Then record companies were getting less because they were selling singles vs. albums (though they sold 35s decades before with no problems, but albums/full CDs brought in more than the singles, at least when there was only one really popular single on an album/CD).
The industry is not coming back either. The record companies have little incentive to put money into a loser, which means everything is candy, peanut butter, and honey. No gourmet. Dave Brubeck would be a homeless man in today's record industry.
I have to repeat something funny that Brubeck said -- he said the most common question asked by fans was, "How many musicians are there in your quartet?"
I'm not saying that it didn't. But you also have to recognize that the music industry betted against the Internet.
It took 10 years before I could easily pay for Internet delivered music. I'm not even saying that this is better than CDs, but they should at least have explored the possibilities. They deserved to go bust for all the mistakes they made the last 15-20 years.
This is a very common fallacy. You're mis-identifying "the music industry" with one sector of the music industry. The sector that is injured by piracy is a set of companies that rely on buying up copyrights from artists and selling (or only "licensing") copies of recordings for money (most of which never goes near the creators).
The music industry as a whole is healthy - precisely because the fading of the copyright-exploitatation industry has allowed music to be re-democratized. Musical instrument manufacturing and sales, equipment for recording music or amplifying shows, wide distribution of recordings, and associated activities are doing just fine (allowing for the state of the economy overall).
Edit: The decline of the copyright-exploitatation industry may even be a net social benefit overall, if it reduces political rent-seeking behavior [1] like copyright extensions and DRM, which keep the one sector's profits artificially high at the expense of everyone else.
Music and art has always been about competition. Let me talk about space I know better, Poetry - The Roman Empire produce a total of four major poets Horace, Virgil, Catullus and Ovid. That is it four. A thousand years of history you get four.
Anyways, everyone wants to be on top, but the top is only so big. And Art has a nasty winner take all effect (as clicks pointed out). That is the game deal with it.
As for Piracy, it is a side effect of making money. People only pirate things that have value. Otherwise the use of the word piracy does not make any sense.
For a substantial portion of the twentieth century, technological limitations made recording and distribution expensive. You could make a lot more money by promoting a star and making everyone want a small number of records than you could by recording everything under the sun! Some of those stars were just gifted amateurs who had mass appeal the moment they walked in from the wilds. Those were rare enough that we soon learned how to manufacture stars, and the methods have reached a level of sophistication where musical talent isn't even necessary anymore (see autotuning).
The internet has practically eliminated the costs and difficulty of distribution. The moment you record something, you can send it to the other side of the planet almost instantaneously to as many people who are interested in it exist. Recording still takes some knowledge, but the equipment required to do professional quality recording is now easily accessible to hobbyists. Natural prodigies are still showing up now and then, and stopping them from recording great music would be more challenging than allowing them to do so! It's the manufactured star system that's collapsing. It costs a lot to do research on what should appeal to teenagers in a few years, hire professional writers to design songs matching your research results, hire somebody who looks good in a latex bikini to record those songs, shoot videos, etc., and finally have a team of professional audio engineers digitally massage her horrid caterwaulings into something that doesn't sound horrible when blasted through iPod earbuds at top volume.
Manufactured music superstars are a dying breed, and good riddance. My playlist is devoid of them and full of gifted amateurs, and I couldn't be happier with the change! The global musical monoculture is ending and a diverse, global party is replacing it. We are working towards the point where music can be created by anyone, anywhere, to be shared with everyone, everywhere. Perhaps, as we listen to superstars less and to ordinary people more, the pressure to play like a superstar or not play at all will drop away and we'll reclaim the tradition of participatory music that we've been robbed of. Perhaps, one day, people will start bringing their instruments to parties again!
...completely missing the point. Lots of unique and genre musicians were making a modest but decent living from their music, now they're not. Manufactured music superstars are, if anything, doing better than ever. The author comes right out and says it near the outset:
This article is not about the majors or rock stars, but about the indie musicians and labels watching the waterhole dry up and wondering what the hell happened.
...but you totally ignored that and projected your own worldview onto his argument. This suggestion that it's all one thing or the other is an intellectual sleight-of-hand that I see a lot on HN - a classic false dilemma.
And not just the time it takes to make one album (which is more than people think unless they've done it themselves). Even more important is the time it takes to mature as an artist--years and years of doing nothing but writing and playing.
I've watched friends struggle to make art part-time, and I've seen the huge - breakthrough - difference that going full-time on the same art makes.
For some reason many people here have a god fearly approach to music.
Music is fantastic, it can feel like a whole other world, it can emote feelings, it can communicate, it can be a channel for it's generation.
But music isn't some magical unobtainable skill anymore than programming, design and so on. And it's not the actual skill of the musicians or composers that make music popular. It's a much larger discussion.
What's wrong with wanting to get paid for your time and talent?
>> That's a big win for culture, albeit not necessarily for the in-it-for-the-money indies.
There's music and then there's music. For example, you can go to your friend's house and sing along or to a Rolling Stones concert. Different tastes for different folks.
No one forced me to download their song.
The reality of recording and distributing music in 2013 did make it available to anyone for free. They recorded it anyway.
The reality of making and distributing software in 2013 did make it available to anyone for free. They made it anyway.
No, musicians don't enforce the rights that some of them claim. Those who do believe in copyright rely on a third party. Uncle Sam, let's say, has a preponderance of coercive force and demands payments according to the terms set by copyright holders. (Note: the copyright holders, for many generations now, have been mostly not the creators, but a middle-man industry that has hijacked copyright law to exploit other people's creations.)
The GP post is pointing out that this situation is inconsistent with libertarian/free-market principles. For intellectual property to be consistent with such principles, a musician would have to a contract with each customer, like "I'll sell you this copy if you agree not to give a copy to anyone else". Even then, a deal-breaker might transfer a copy to an innocent third party and that person might not have any obligation to refrain from sharing.
There's no reason that creators "shouldn't get paid for" their efforts, but to show that they are entitled to enforce such a claim, with the force of government, you have to show that the laws providing for such an arrangement are legitimate.
And to show that, you have to argue either (a) that intellectual property is a natural right or (b) that everyone is obligated to obey whatever laws the government chooses to make, regardless of their content.
The same way FBI goes after software pirates? http://www.fbi.gov/buffalo/press-releases/2013/former-suther... Or is this different and deserving since it hits closer to home?
It's wrong to assume you're entitled to be paid for something just because it took time and talent. If you're making something people want to pay for, great - but if they stop wanting to pay for it, that's your problem.
So if your boss could get away with not paying your at the end of each month he feels like you didn't perform up to standard, you would be OK with that yes?
a) it looks like the money won't be there in the long run, at least not for most artists;
b) those who want or need to get paid will quit if they won't get paid;
c) even if all of those people quit, there will still be an overabundance of new, great music, not a scarcity of it.
The vast majority of great current artists don't suffer from piracy, they suffer from obscurity. They don't have any sufficient income from music, but they still produce it. For every Justin Bieber there are thousands or more really talented singers, guitarists and songwriters who desire an audience, not a job. Remove 10% or 50% or 90% of the current artists, and still no genre will 'dry up', we'll still have a [slightly smaller] abundance of new good records that you don't have enough time to listen to.
I reject your implication that making music is 'not a real job.' Is graphic design a real job? How about journalism? Playing sports at a professional level? Do you consider musicians unworthy of payment because they seem to be having too much fun?
Those who were only in it for the money will quit.
This is not how it actually works in the real world, where unlicensed sampling and ghost producing have become the norm. I suggest you look beyond your model and consider some empirical data. I agree that the means of production are cheaper than ever (also true of cinema) but that doesn't mean production is effortless by any means - mastery of instruments takes as long as it ever did, marketing and publicity still cost quite a bit of money.
in-it-for-the-money indies
I don't know what this is suppsoed to mean/ 'Indie' is short for 'independent' and describes labels that are not affiliated with one of the large global music publishers (and to a lesser extent, bands signed with said labels.' why you equate this with 'in it for the money' is beyond me. I'm getting the impression that you don't know anyone who actually works in this sector, but are speaking purely as a consumer.
At University my mentor worked (and still works) at Sony, and this at the time was his big grievance - that the so-called 'indie' bands (in reality, larger alternative bands) were the ones being completely marginalized in favour of something that would be easier to sell on broad-demographic radio programming.
If you think about the UK radio market now, this makes sense - Global Radio owns everything, and it's the same playlist of forgettable pop music nationwide. I remember being in America a couple of years ago and finding a station that was playing things like Smashing Pumpkins, NIN and some modern math/post-rock stuff... apart from BBC Radio 6 Music (publicly owned) you just don't see that over here.
There's a big glass ceiling for musicians, and while it's not going away, it's still a difficult reality to face for those that are either semi-professional or say, tour a lot - in order to keep playing music they have obligations that stop them also holding down 'proper' jobs, and you see this taking its toll of great bands (off the top of my head, Reuben would be a classic example).
Copying technologies (first printing, then audio recording) have made such music available to the general public. Copyright has created the financial means to create such music specifically for the public's tastes.
It also protects amateurs or indie artists from exploitation, by preventing big companies from just stealing the songs and re-recording them with their manufactured stars.
Manufactured stars are not collapsing, by the way. Music piracy has been rampant for over a decade and we're still stuck with Myley Cyrus and Justin Bieber and One Direction.
The exact opposite is actually happening--piracy is hurting middle-class artists and their indie labels, while big labels just force their manufactured stars into 360 deals. So they don't care if they lose half their sales to piracy. They're getting a slice of everything else: every tour ticket, every sync license, every TV appearance, every endorsement deal, every t-shirt, everything.
Hypothesis there, I don't accept it, and there's little controlled empirical evidence for it.
Piracy is hurting artists is also a baseless assumption that is grounded really strongly in a bunch of reactionary people's minds who can't yet realize that the economic assumptions they had from an earlier time were actually flawed to begin with.
"Losing sales to piracy" is a tenuous hypothesis. Some evidence shows that piracy increases sales more than it reduces them.
At any rate, we have enough music now for everyone to listen to neat things for the rest of all lifetimes on the planet. There's no need to subsidize it anymore with these schemes to criminalize sharing.
So the big players still earn big bucks, but the amateurs earn pretty much nothing from their time and talent.
PS: I think piracy kinda supports the star economy as a wider circulation of the music results in higher appeal of the star. If the records by big stars couldn't be pirated, people would mostly stop listening to them, and THEN the star industry would collapse
Those two pieces (and other famous classical works) may not have been a product of participatory music, but they certainly were not products of some exactingly strict copyright regime, either.
See: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1336802
In fact, copyright appears to have had the wrong effect on classical music composers: it caused them to coast, to live from their monopoly rents. See:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8-4catWPy84C&pg=PA36&lpg=PA...
Once music notation was fairly standardized, artists and patrons could sell sheet music for their works, which allowed them to performed more widely. Sheet music was indeed protected by copyright.
In more modern times, copyright has enabled artists to find success by appealing directly to popular audiences. Modern music labels make their investment decisions based on what they think will be popular, not their personal tastes.
Granted, labels do tend to pick a genre, especially smaller labels--I would not expect Righteous Babe Records to sign Korn. But within their genre they are looking for music that they think will resonate with their fans.
Digital technologies make it possible to get this proving process out of the club and directly into recorded music. Owl City is a great example--his recorded music (which he chose to distribute for free online) got very popular, leading to a recording deal. That deal will allow him to focus on his music full-time, hopefully leading to more complex, sophisticated compositions.
Without copyright, the recording company could have just downloaded his recordings off MySpace, pushed them into iTunes, funded a huge marketing campaign, and make a ton of money without sharing any of it back to the artist. Copyright forces labels to sign legal agreements with artists in order to sell their works.
Now, let's move along to the real issue: copyright is a government granted monopoly. People generally regard monopolies as a bad thing, economically, they distort markets, they encourage rent-seeking (rather than actual production), they have a host of ill effects.
Does the high-quality, innovative, original music that we're getting from the Major Labels right now justify all the drawbacks?
That's a simplistic economic analysis: major lables mostly screw the artists as well, but still, I think my analysis holds a little truth.
But let's get back to the real question: are the market distortions, etc arising from the copyright monopoly worth enough to society in general (not merely some particular set of special interests) to justify it?
No, the reason for copyright monopolies was that it took significant investment to mass-manufacture and distribute everything even after the creative work itself was written. Starting with books and ending with CD mastering. Now a million-copy album is not the only way, as it's just as economically feasible to do 10 000 "prints" of albums that get 100 copies each, since distribution is free on the net.
The point is, usually market prices are set not by your costs, but by the costs of your competitors. If sufficiently many others can undercut you because they are willing to do it for less or for free... then no matter what your costs are, the market won't pay you anyways. Trying to change such basic behaviors is simply futile, it simply won't work even if the goal is good.
Only to the extent that the record company could convince the public to buy something that was being made available by the artist for free.
Your other concern (in a subcomment) of the music industry ripping off and selling artists' music in the absence of copyright merely demonstrates that there might need to be copyright protection against commercial resale, and perhaps commercial advertising or rebranding, as opposed to the wide net of current copyright law which criminalizes a significant portion of the population and puts an even larger proportion at risk of lawsuits.
Consumers will buy music even if it's available for free, because even with complete discographies of the most popular modern artists available for free online, those artists are still getting rich despite piracy and despite the music industry's creative accounting.
I think part of the blame for less popular artists not making a decent living lies with the major record labels for focusing public attention so narrowly on the music of a few pop stars, to the exclusion of other music that's less polished and perhaps less catchy, but (arguably) musically superior.
[1] https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/02/18/shakespe...
One Direction's latest tour has a ridiculous number of shows (130? over a hundred for sure), and I've heard the boys themselves don't make all that much per individual show (multiplied by a few hundred shows it definitely adds up, but nowhere near what the producers make!).
The producers/labels take the lion's share - OTOH they definitely are the ones that "created" the boys' fame, so it might be fair.
While I would also have liked to become a musician, for me the essential thing was composing music, not performing it in a perfect manner. As far as I know the famous composers of the past also were not necessarily the best performers (certainly the case if they composed for an orchestra, as they couldn't play all those instruments themselves). They had people who would perform for them.
Possibly amateurs who make music today have far better options for expressing themselves than in the old days. I am not convinced that it is a huge loss if having to practice for several hours every day of your life just to be able to make music is such a great thing. Rather, thinking about such a life makes me a bit sad. Even though admittedly many such musicians probably have a more fulfilled life than I have atm.
The satisfaction you get from sitting down, and play some music that express your current emotions exactly, or the emotional state you'd like to be in, is just great. I played the piano as a child, and for reasons out of my control I stopped, and have never really been able to pick it up again. I still hope I will some day - just have to sit down and play on that piano I have.
Before the twentieth century, and even today in some parts of the world, a simple bacterial infection was something you would die from.
Everything changes and refusing to change because 'in the past we did it this way' will only leave you behind. Records ate live musicians. Internet ate physical records. Everyone involved in music (business) should accept that.
By all current indications, this is simply not true. Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, et al., are still the biggest names in the world. Van Halen (!), by all accounts a musical relic of the 1980s, made over $20M on tour in 2012. [1] Katy Perry is the #1 performer on the iTunes charts right now, followed closely by Robin Thicke. [2]
In fact, something paradoxical may be happening in today's music business: the digital ecosystem might be concentrating sales and fame among a smaller handful of winners, at the expense of everyone else. Part of this is the competition effect described in the article. Because everyone can be a musician now, and because there's so much more music out there -- and so many more ways to discover it -- the primary challenge for any musician seeking to earn a living is to figure out how to get discovered. The landscape is noisier than ever, figuratively and literally. How does one stand out?
Skill doesn't seem to be the determinative factor. Instead, it's marketing dollars. The big labels, as much as everyone hates them, are still kingmakers. They still have the money to buy a hit. They still have the distribution partnerships to make something chart, or to book someone on a major tour. For everyone outside their system, getting noticed is certainly possible, and probably more possible than ever. But the room is pretty damned crowded, and everyone's playing an instrument.
This may change in the long run, but the change is most likely going to involve the replacement of old kingmakers with new kingmakers: i.e., Universal Music or Sony BMG will cede some power to Apple and Amazon.
Regardless, the power-law distribution is still very much in effect.
I'm as hopeful as anyone for a true revolution in music, and for the "dying" out of the "manufactured music superstars." Believe me, I wish I lived in a world where Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus weren't bigger than Jesus. But they're doing just fine, and they will for many years to come. Even if we stop paying for music. (They make a killing on tour; the record sales are nice, but almost incidental).
[1] Source: http://www.billboard.com/articles/list/1549704/musics-top-40... [2] http://www.apple.com/itunes/charts/songs/
As far as I can tell from this: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=6393116&whence=item%3f... only one album has sold 20M copies in this millennium.
http://www.katyperrylately.com/post/53310641303/teenage-drea...
Right or wrong, dying gasp or not, I think these are significant subgroups.
Piracy isn't the issue, though. It's a red herring. The effects of piracy on the music business have been massively overstated. Even if everyone in the world stopped paying for music -- even if all music in the world became by default free -- the artists at the top of the pack would still rake in the lion's share of attention and revenue, due to touring and merchandising. In fact, that's increasingly where the revenue in the music business is coming from.
In a world where the only way to make money off of music is to tour or sell merch, the winner-take-all dynamics would arguably get worse, not better. There are only so many venues out there, and only so many acts who can sell tickets and pack houses to capacity. The venues will bet on the sure things, placing increased value on the role of the sure-thing-maker.
The alternative is a lot more in-music or intra-channel advertising, and it's debatable if that's a better alternative for the consumer.
2. There is an easy way to make money: concerts.
3. The obvious answer is the destruction of neoliberalism. No it's not. The obvious answer is more liberism, because, believe it or not, less copyrights BS is completely in the realm of neoliberism. While what he hints too, planned economy and State, is exactly what has created these ridiculous music labels that cash out on monopolies instead than real value.
Then again, if one looks at the obvious, that musician have to make money from concerts, it becomes clear that marginal costs will never be 0 in the music industry. Competition or not competition.
For me the marginal cost is the additional song, not the
additional copy of a song.
Finally, we should be happy when marginal costs are 0, it means free for all, more for all. It is only who wants to go back to the State economy that can find flawed arguments against it.
However, the reason people buy works of good musicians and bands is that because it means something to them to own that particular cd or album. That's something you can't pirate because the point is to own something from the artist and through that bond emotionally liken yourself to him/her.
If someone's good, it doesn't suffice to copy his music for free because you can hear it in a lot of places anyway. And you've probably already copied his albums from same place or some friend by the time. But you're still craving for the only remedy which is to buy the album yourself so that you can listen to your own copy of that album.
People want to own things that they deem important, and nothing's going to change that. The market for that is smaller than the preplanned pop music market of today, but it's still a big market and it's also a market that isn't subject to whims of trends that come and go.
It's already obvious. We're very rapidly moving toward a world where a tiny, tiny elite capture massive percentages of all value through controlling a small number of convenience portals. The value of all other non-commodity goods tends toward zero, or the cost of whatever commodities they require.
This does resemble the post-Capitalist terminal state Marx described. Marx did not advocate a revolution, nor did he say "from each according to his ability" and so forth. That was Lenin and Trotsky. Marx was really talking about this-- about the fact that capitalism would eventually overproduce itself into obsolescence. He wasn't anti-capitalist so much as post-capitalist, sort of a sci-fi thinker talking about post-scarcity.
But I'm not a Marxist per se, and I don't think he had the right formula for "what do we do now?" I think that remains to be discovered.
This means that, while the indie market is growing and the communication for indie fans is better, the indie fanbase can't really effectively invade the mainstream until terrestrial radio dies its long-overdue death.
If you want to go out of your way to select your music streams, there's a lot for you. But for people who just want background music to some other task, the process of digging around and separating the wheat from the chaff is time they just don't want to allocate for 4-minute chunks of music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoodie_Allen#Fandom
I'd love to hear more detail.
In the 20th century, the "record companies" covered the fixed costs - recording, distribution etc.. They did so by offering only contracts that were economically very unfavorable to the artists, and using some of the revenue from the more popular acts to finance others that they hoped would make money for them (not for the artists).
Today, unless a musician is foolish enough to sign up for the old-style ripoff contract, it's DIY. But the fixed costs have declined - the musicians invest in practicing their craft at their own expense, and pay for instruments as always, but low-to-mid-quality recording and internet distribution are orders of magnitude cheaper than the old means of $100/hour studios and hauling boxes of CDs to stores.
The problem is simply that teenagers like to get stuff for free.
Your hand-wringing about teenagers is an insult to everyone's intelligence.
Yes, that's my point, and it is counter to the thesis in the article, which is that established bands are being out-competed by amateurs.
I'm not hand-wringing; it's also true that there is a correlation between teenage ages, and likelihood to download music rather than purchase it.
Thats funny because I sometimes download indie amateur stuff without paying and I am not a teenager, but I (and my many friends) are apart of the problem. So is the problem really teenagers getting stuff for free? No, not entirely.
Augments with absolutes rarely work and make you seem like you have an agenda.
You should target young adults who can pursue their hobby with money. When you can't make them part with their money it's your problem, not piracy problem.