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Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

> What kind of a refined musical appreciation talent do the label execs have that they can decide what I should or should not hear?

I think you misunderstand music as an industry, and you definitely stopped reading after the GP's first sentence. Label execs have very refined taste -- for one, specific thing: finding "artists" that have broad appeal to a target demographic. And even that's a Silicon Valley-esque "lost money on 99, made money one 1" kind of situation.

Music needs labels for the same reason startups need VC: they have resources, connections, and expertise not often found within (bands|founders). Yes, it is possible to bootstrap in both situations, and yes there are companies trying to disrupt that model in both spaces. But it's not the status quo.

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Heh, you are absolutely correct. I know nothing of the music industry beyond some very basic knowledge. That's why I'm asking these questions.

So you are saying that if I'm a kick ass singer, and have recorded a few original songs that I put on, let's say, YouTube, then to move on up I need to do a whole lot of marketing and hustling to get the right people to listen to me? Moreover, are you saying that it's a whole lot easier to have someone with all those connections to do it for me? And the way this someone gets paid is by taking a percentage of anything I create? I suppose that makes more sense than the view I had of things and explains why even today we still have music labels.

"then to move on up I need to do a whole lot of marketing and hustling to get the right people to listen to me? Moreover, are you saying that it's a whole lot easier to have someone with all those connections to do it for me? "

I suspect that's largely true. Even for the people who could do it, the more they do that, the less time they have for actually working on their product/craft/music/act.

It is true. As much as any other industry, the music industry is entirely about connections and who you know. This is an interesting article about the biggest new pop music station in the UK, and how they go about dealing with playlisting (effectively choosing who gets to 'make it')[0].

Especially at large UK festivals like Glastonbury with a broad appeal, it's the acts that are playlisted on BBC that will be playing the festivals. It's not just that that's where the audience is, but it's the echo chamber effect caused by the fact that that's where the industry's ears are, from the pluggers, to the PR men to the festival organisers.

The funny thing is that in my experience this pattern even holds true for niche scenes like math/post rock or metal, just with a different centralized power broker (be it a label, radio station, magazine or booker).

Like tech startups that are beholden to the VCs because they're capital starved at an early stage, the speculative nature of music (I think) is why power tends to accumulate in the places where influence and capital lie.

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/25/radio-1-playlis...

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