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Comment by drcube | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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