Comment by latj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by latj | Hacker News Reader

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Lets say you are that artist. You have practiced, trained, studied. You have worked hard and have a rare natural talent. You sang the songs and played guitar. Now you have "this summer's big record". Two million children want to listen to your song (without paying any additional costs) 50-100 times over the next 3 months, and then never again.

How much is that worth to society? How much money should you make from that?

Consider an elementary teacher tasked with teaching 28 children to read and guiding them to becoming active participants in democracy rather than repeat offenders. $50k/yr. Compare a state university computer science professor who will teach dozens of new jacks this year how to measure and optimize algorithms-- setting them up for a life of full time employment while all their friends tread in the sea of shit and unemployment around them. $90k/yr. Consider a bus driver, a construction worker, a civil engineer, anyone who didnt have a chance to finish high school or College and still goes to work every day. Or those who went to ivy league colleges and resisted the urge to go into finance. Productive people.

We are all productive and we all add value, and we are underpaid. Our kids will have varying access to good education. We have less access to inferior healthcare. We spend too much time at work and not enough time with our kids. The lowest of us live in poverty and violence, relegated to feeding our children less healthy, life shortening diets. And thats just in the U.S., one of the wealthiest states on the planet.

Now how much is that song you sang worth?

Artists should be about art. If you dont like the fact that Apple wants you to be their slave, then distribute your music yourself. If people dont want to pay for your music, then keep doing what you want to do and starve or start doing what they want you to do and make money. But dont try to be about the art and say the faceless evil corporation should pay you more. It is disrespectful to the productive workers of the world.

That just seems to result in everyone getting underpaid. Keep paying musicians, let's just figure out how to pay teachers and bus drivers and everyone else more.

If we say that musicians should be paid less because our standard as society is that everyone else is underpaid and that's fine, that's really disrespectful to the productive workers for the world.

I think you completely missed the point. Using your own analogies of teachers, this would sort of be like a local government letting all the teachers know that they will be teaching kids without pay for the next 3 months. If this ever happened, any teachers that could would get the hell out of dodge.

It's really not like that at all. The teacher scenario has an opportunity cost: if they're busy teaching kids for free, then they're not available for teaching other kids for pay.

In the Apple Music situation, there's likely very little opportunity cost unless we believe that it's going to be so amazingly and instantly successful that it will cannibalize all current revenue streams.

    In the Apple Music situation, there's likely very little opportunity cost unless we
    believe that it's going to be so amazingly and instantly successful that it will
    cannibalize all current revenue streams.

You or I may believe whatever we like, but I’ll bet big money that Apple believes that it will be amazingly and instantly successful and further that their entire business plan consists of cannibalizing all current revenue streams.

I don’t think they’d be in this business at all if they didn’t think they had a shot at rendering the competition irrelevant.

That's a funny way of looking at it.

The reality is that most of the people you're talking about will "waste" their meagre salaries on trivial stuff like streaming music services and satellite TV. Taylor Swift didn't sell millions of albums to nobody.

Music is entertainment, and it makes people's crappy lives more enjoyable, and that's a pretty valuable service, which is why it can be so lucrative for some people.

Let's say you release a technical book that you've spent a year of your life writing (Not to mention the years of education and training to gather the knowledge to write it). It's for a hot new, but somewhat niche, technology, and you release it just as Amazon decides all ebooks are free for three months. It's a #1 new release, and the buzz from the new release publicity sells tens of thousands of copies in the first few months. Afterwards, everyone who wants it has a copy, and the sales months later are somewhat meager. The technology you wrote it for is later replaced by some new Ruby library, so there aren't a lot of kids picking it up that might be interested in your book -- sales flatten.

Sure, you didn't write anything that was going to join the ranks of "The Art of Computer Programming," but surely you wouldn't be okay just giving up the hundred thousand dollars or so in royalties you could have made? Without artists writing hit summer songs, there would be no hit summer songs. Without people writing flavor-of-the-month technical books, we wouldn't have those either. You might scoff, but people should be paid for these things.

"If you dont like the fact that Apple wants you to be their slave, then distribute your music yourself." That's exactly what Taylor is doing. What's your point?

> Lets say you are that artist. You have practiced, trained, studied. You have worked hard and have a rare natural talent. You sang the songs and played guitar. Now you have "this summer's big record".

You should read KLF's The Manual. For purposes of achieving "this summer's big record", there's quite often not a lot of correlation with training, study, talent, etc.

Not saying that's always the case and in particular, it's very different with artists producing more than two or three top10 hits, over time, or producing more than one successful full album with good sales. It's that consistency and prolonged creativity that really requires the talent and training. For the #1 big summer hit, it often suffices to just be lucky, hitting the right gimmick and vibe at the right time, just like a video or meme going viral.

Take a look at The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

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