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Comment by paulhauggis | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand the culture of free. On one hand, everything digital is expected for free (or close to it). Even app prices have gone so low, that the majority of app developers would never be able to earn a living.

On the other, lots of hate for big corporations and further complaining when jobs go away (one of the direct results of the free culture). The ability to make a living online makes it so you don't ever have to work for a large corporation. The ultimate freedom.

I know plenty of independent artists that can't really make a living with music anymore because albums are now essentially worthless. Many of these people are now forced to sell out to big corporate record labels (and then, the same people that created this environment call them "sellouts").

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You're arguing "What's good for consumers is bad for producers, so why are consumers doing it?". The answer is that consumers, in aggregate, don't care about producers. In general, people are self-interested. There is no contradiction here.

> when jobs go away (one of the direct results of the free culture).

This doesn't make any sense. If people are spending less money on one thing, they are spending more money on something else. If I pirate all my music, maybe I have an extra $100/year to go out to dinner, "creating jobs" (although I am loath to use that misleading phrase) in the culinary industry. In reality, of course, those $100 are spread across a whole bunch of areas of spending, but the aggregate effect is the same.

It enriches our lives though. While free goods cannot be measured in terms of GDP, it makes us all better off. It also brings that enrichment to a much wider audience than would be if it had a pay barrier.

Yeah. The main benefit of digital technology is the ability to copy and transmit data freely. Nobody complains when the email I sent is still sitting in a folder in my mailbox. I don't have to hand write a second copy for my own records. This is progress. It's the same as buggy whip makers complaining that automobiles put them out of a job. Only in this century, the buggy whip manufacturers have a much larger and louder lobby.

If commercial content had been made obsolete by people using cheap production technology to put their own original content on Youtube, etc, then you might have a point. That'd be the internet's automobile to the big labels' buggy whip. But people don't want indie content, they still want the buggy whips. Technology just enables them to get the buggy whips for free instead of paying for them.

> That'd be the internet's automobile to the big labels' buggy whip. But people don't want indie content, they still want the buggy whips.

I generally want indie content to get a large user audience, I don't want the "buggy whips" people ostensibly are interested in to gain as much of a user audience, that is, things like, Anaconda, Wrecking Ball, Blurred Lines are supposedly what people want, I'd rather they not.

A friend of mine who had been playing the viola since age 6, took his craft extremely seriously, and played for about 10 years with an orchestra, recently decided he was done with it, he's not able to pay his bills. He's one of the nicest guys I know, it was depressing to see him finally resign. While our industry is rebuked for sexism, we see Eminem succeed again and again by repeatedly talking about raping, assaulting women in his songs, it's kind of disgusting really that this has sort of become his trademark marketing and branding strategy[1]. It bugs me that beautiful art perfected over generations is lost and left aside to shit made by producers with commercialization more on top of their mind.

I want to see the music industry to really just come to its knees (when I mean music industry, I actually really mean just the big record labels). I want it to become an unprofitable business, where it doesn't have much of a value, because that might be the last thing that deters record companies to stop making stuff that's formulaic and trite, using cheap misogynistic tricks and so on. Maybe then we can get back to having a piano or a guitar in the house, and making music ourselves, with friends and families.

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/11/12...

It is being made obsolete. Just look at the last 10 years. Cable subscriptions are way down. Youtube views are way up.

But people don't want indie content

Absolutely not true.

The postal service feels the same way about email as the media companies feel about digital files. But everyone laughs at their complaints or proposals to tax email.

As a society we no longer have to waste huge amounts of resources to make physical copies of information and deliver them around the world. This is an enormous benefit to society. It's staggering. All that wasted resources and time are now available to be used more productively. It shows you who welcomes progress and who only pays it lip service.

I really really hope we find a killer alternative energy source and infrastructure before I die. I will get to laugh my ass off at the insane fact distortion that arises. The loud arguments against these awful crimes against the noble oilmen and brave tanker captains who are struggling. How, oh how, will the pious House of Saud control their rebellious slave worker population with their income being stolen from them by this entitled Culture of Free!

We never spent all that much resources making physical copies of information and sending it around--or at least, that cost has always paled in comparison to the cost of generating that information in the first place.

Which is precisely why your energy analogy is inapposite. The Saudis didn't invent oil--they just trade in its scarcity. But digital technology doesn't address the scarcity of information and original content. Someone still has to create the first copy, and as ever, that's the hard part.

The cost of generating the information has also gone down by orders of magnitude. You no longer need a multi-million dollar TV studio to produce content for an audience of millions; all you need is a webcam and a youtube account.

Production budgets for AAA content are higher than ever, and the "webcam and a youtube account" segment has been supplementing rather than competing with those AAA products.

Do you have any data to back up this assertion?

Production budgets for AAA content are higher precisely because small players can now compete on quality with the old acceptable quality levels for AAA, so the spectacle has to grow along a non-linear curve (twice as amazing costs more than twice as much).

There's a good case to be made that rising amateur quality drives larger and larger mega-blockbusters.

For music distribution costs swamped the costs of generating the information for even small runs of CDs. Maybe for a smaller artist, if you included an amortized A&R costs and marketing you'd be right. But including market speculator costs in this calculation makes no sense to me.

In terms of costs to the consumer, a tiny fraction of a penny went to the person generating the information anyway, if they sued to get it. Once a song was recorded they traded in it's scarcity, just like oil. And now that scarcity is completely artificial.

It makes no sense to pay 99% of the cost of purchased music to a facilitator who prints CDs, vets musicians, and markets them. The internet makes the last one easier and the first two obsolete.

First of all, getting people to create music and want to show it off is not hard, stopping them from doing so is hard. It has never been hard. What was hard was trying to get massively rich off of popular music.

Do you really think that this massively stupid and inefficient system, hated by consumers and artists must be protected just to avoid figuring out a new way to pay artists? Artists are still making a good living these days, just more from endorsements, live shows and merch than sales of music. So that's not in danger. It's easier for beginner or smaller acts to get ahead and make a living now.

Sure, some artists who would be rich under the old system won't be under another system, and vice versa. But in aggregate there is only one loser - the record company middlemen.

This seems so obvious to me. Especially now, when it's already happening and plenty of people are "creating the first copy" undeterred, right now it looks like maybe there will be more successful artists but fewer mega-rich artists due to less of hit based business but that might change as the new way of doing things grows, websites are now an extreme hit based business and didn't start out that way.

> Many of these people are now forced to sell out to big corporate record labels...

Mostly look at the word "now". At what time did musicians not need to "sell out" to "big corporate" record labels?

You are looking at perhaps the central paradox of capitalism.

As workers we want as much pay as we can for as little effort as we can, while as consumers we want as much goods as we can for as little expense as we can.

I can give you a better perspective from gaming, since it was much more onerous for that to become nice, but it has already solved the problem.

Games tend, on average, to be on average about the size of a whole, uncompressed CD. Roughly 700 MB.

That means the first challenge is actually getting the thing to me. For a while i had two options: Either i could go out into the store, and buy it there (spending 2 hours + cash), or if they didn't have it, order it and come back later (another 2 hours). Or i could torrent it at home, spending no cash and 2 hours waiting for the download to complete while i do other things; and live with the possible risk of a letter from my ISP.

So now i have the thing. The next challenge is to get it on the computer and running. With the store-bought medium i have to hope that it is physically sound, and i need to ensure it stays that way; I also have to hope that my drive is compatible with their copy protection; and to add insult to injury, i need to keep the disc in my drive to play it, meaning i have to handle the things a lot, and have my drive uselessly make noise. With the torrent, i unpack it and install it, maybe needing to spend an extra 5 minutes to find the right crack; and live with the risk of contracting malware.

And the last issue: Software updates. This time the two options are almost the same: Find the latest update, download and install it. Torrent updates come with a risk of malware again.

Now, when i was young specifically the first and second thing led me to pirate most of the games i got. Not because i didn't want to spend the cash; but because i didn't want to spend cash, just to have to spend my own time to get the thing and live with the constant annoyance of keeping the right disc in my drive, constantly rotating.

This is especially borne out in current times. Steam is now here and while the prices are similar to physical game sales (the value of my steam library is estimated at $7000), i gladly and happily spend the money for it, since Steam solves these problems:

1. Games are downloadable.

2. The copy protection is either my online status, or a specific steam token. (In practice i've never not been able to access the games.)

3. Updates come automatically.

4. As long as Steam doesn't crash and burn, i'll be able to access the things i bought in perpetuity without needing to cat herd a gaggle of physical storages.

The "culture of free" doesn't revolve around free. There is a cost in any "free". Usually the risk of legal action or malware.

The "culture of free" is winning because people hoping to make money fail to provide solutions that actually address customers' needs. Steam has recognized and solved that issue. In the music industry things like Google Play Music, Spotify, etc. are starting to solve it.

Games are not a good example because - 1. Most games now have online activation and require continuous online checks to work - for example, none of my Mass Effect 3 DLCs work if Origin cannot verify the status of the DLC online every time I try to play them. 2. Something similar to above implemented for music will mean that you will be able to listen to a song only when an online service authorizes it - everytime you want to listen to it. Then people will start complaining how DRM is evil, and the big companies are ripping them off. I don't have a solution for this, but I don't think games is a good analogy.

P.S Most modern games requires GBs rather than an old-fashioned 700MB CD. For example, Far Cry 4 requires 28GB of disk space to be installed.

> 1.

"Most" is a massive exxageration. Origin is a small sampling of all that's on the market.

> 2.

Steam has solved this, and so has Google Play Music: Cached authorization. I'm not entirely sure how they do it, but on both services i've been able to access the games and music even when i was entirely without service for long periods of time.

Plus, there's always GoG.

> P.S

I said on average. Even in this day and age you'll have games that are around 50 MB and less.

Maybe you need to stop focusing on AAA titles so much. :)

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