peteforde

If monopoly laws were applied to Live Nation, who would pay the lobbyists? And if the lobbyists weren't paid, who would pay the politicians?

Your argument works on paper, but the ground truth is that the base price of tickets is 5x what it was when I was in high school. If you're a big enough artist to fill venues, trust that you've done just fine under this arrangement.

Recorded music is literally just a loss leader to sell tickets now.

And when you sell tickets, you can sell merch. Did you know that venues usually take a (large) cut of merch sales? The same venues that are owned by the same company that owns Ticketmaster, the venue, the promoter and the radio stations?

What monopoly? No monopoly here!

Several things can be true at the same time.

I truly believe that Pearl Jam and many others who have been harshly critical of TM and Live Nation genuinely want to fight back.

However, a person much more cynical than me could make the argument that a band can fight Ticketmaster, still get their bag AND look like folk heroes in the process.

Mea culpa: upon waking up and being challenged, I realized that I had conflated the Shannon Hoon story and the [very real] Oasis "piss bomb" story into one.

If I'm really and truly honest, I still remember this happening quite clearly so consider this my own personal Mandela Effect moment.

However, there's an unforgiveable gap between fans throwing urine bottles around and my claim [that I very clearly remember Liam as the brother who pissed on an audience at Molson Park but can't prove it and now look like a dumbass] so I do sincerely apologize.

I remember Oasis. They're the ones who literally pissed on the audience here back in the 90s.

The idea that they care if their fans live or die really comes down to whether they could get sponsors on board or not.

You're basically describing my idea of hell.

Many of the other commenters have explained how the ownership structure of Ticketmaster gives them near monopoly control because they also own the radio stations and the venues and the promoters. (I'm using "they" and "own" very liberally in this paragraph.)

The simple fact that there's an ownership link between Ticketmaster and the scalper I mean totally legit resale sites is so wildly corrupt that, well, it's textbook stuff.

What I haven't really seen discussed in the comments is that the role and objective of Ticketmaster is poorly understood. They seem like the people who sell tickets, but in reality they are "blast shield for consumer rage" as a service. Their role is to industrialize the conversion of anger into waste heat while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

They also do a lot of catch-and-kill; once competitors get too big, they use bully tactics to starve them until they can acquire them cheaply.

There's an app called DICE. I like it a lot. I'm rooting for them.

That is a common blockchain myth.

There were solutions before blockchain, especially in the field of Byzantine fault tolerance. The original Byzantine Generals paper was from 1982, and practical algorithms existed before Bitcoin. For example: PBFT - Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance - published in 1999.

https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/papers/castro-practical...

Blockchain solved a different version of the problem: how can a large, open, permissionless network reach agreement when anyone can join and nobody has a fixed identity?

Classic BFT is like a committee of known people voting, where the system survives some liars.

Blockchain is like letting strangers on the internet vote, but making votes costly enough that cheating becomes economically difficult.

> The lack of CS knowledge on this board is pretty staggering sometimes.

Right!?

My point is that regardless of who got rich, the web 3.0 pitches themselves did not pass even the most casual review.

I was asked to audit a few proposals during that era and in every case I had to go back to the person asking me to say that it was a technical architecture L. Ron Hubbard would have admired. Just straight up making up words in most cases.

Far beyond "wait, is this actually a parody? how is this not a parody?" territory. 80% of them were effectively "tamagotchis + pyramid scheme".

This is why I say that you don't have to love LLMs, but you also can't compare them in terms of also bad. Jay-walking is bad and Jeffrey Dahmer was bad; they are not "both bad".

Yeah, I didn't reply in anger. Pointing out false equivalency != angry unless you are deep in the "words I don't like are violence" camp.

Feel free to respond to what I actually said, though!

The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.

It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.

You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.

Ahh, gotcha.

Personally, I worry far more about guns in this regard, but I feel you.

What's funny about this is that it sounds like your coworker reviews his LLM output roughly as well as you read the other replies before assuming that this was an anti-LLM pile-on thread.

That's actually exactly what I do! And I highly recommend it as a viable alternative to Max/MSP. It's the native way to create patches for the Organelle and many other instruments.

PlugData in particular has been a real joy to play around with.

I'm glad that your tools are working out well for you. I do reject the idea that I should STFU about being annoyed that I can't run Max for Live scripts, though. Native Instruments Kontakt isn't my favourite piece of software (or company) but at least they understood from early on that making the player free drastically increases the value of a paid license for the people who make content on that platform.

It's 2026. I'd hoped that we were well past needing to debate whether OSS is good or not. Apparently we're not!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Honestly, I just know what I'm talking about.

I believe that you misunderstood my message, which actually means that I didn't communicate well. Let me do better.

I am not proposing that someone needs to disrupt or make Ableton obsolete.

I am suggesting that the existence of Reaper strongly implies that there's an under-served demographic of people who (correctly) understand that the DAW can be more than a way to translate audio data from buffers to hard drive and VST host.

In the same way that there is currently a lot of innovation in mixers that don't just sum channels, it's not at all unreasonable to imagine that the DAW itself could be an instrument or at least provide composable functions that make other instruments more interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EclavOHIo4o

One of the best things about the golden age of music tools that we're experiencing is that guitars and guitarists have been decentered from the conversation. We don't call them guitar pedals anymore; they are effects pedals now. We're moving past the GROG TURN OVERDRIVE ON OR OFF phase into a much cooler place where pedals are usually MIDI controlled and often have CV inputs as well. Arguably the most lauded pedal of 2025 was the Polyend Mess, which literally allows sequencing of effects. It's awesome!

https://polyend.com/mess/

The cool thing about a truly composable modular DAW is that it doesn't have to get more complex. Being able to strip things down is also totally valid. Perhaps then folks wouldn't be making such a big deal about Tape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKZhwIA9hiw

I didn't say that. I didn't even come close to saying that.

I am saying that when 40-50% of people will experience something, it is statistically very normal. In fact, it's technically "likely".

In most cases, 40% is significantly better than Vegas odds.

Cool! I'll check it out.

That is... not a good analogy at all.

What it is, though, is a misguided attempt to move the goal posts on what I actually said, which is that a huge amount of the value of Ableton is gatekept behind paid addons.

If a DAW was structured like Blender or KiCAD and designed from the ground up to be extensible (or minimal!) then you wouldn't have any impetus to try to shame people who haven't paid a gate toll to execute software people have contributed to the public domain.

You're going to really, really hate learning about STM32 MCUs.

https://www.digikey.ca/short/2v4t0n5m

That's simply not what happened, at all.

You're seeing either incompetence or conspiracy when the opposite is true.

Please say more

I answered this in a different branch of the thread, but you're kind of missing my point. I don't own Max for Live, so the large ecosystem of useful tools that I'd enjoy trying out is unavailable to me.

It's not about special powers, just being forced to pay the gatekeeper to the otherwise free/OSS ecosystem.

I think we're talking past each other.

I don't own Max for Live. If I want to use it, I either need to upgrade to Ableton Suite for $500 or I need to upgrade to Standard and buy Max for Live separately (also $500).

There's a huge ecosystem of tools that are implemented as Max for Live packages which I cannot access because I haven't paid the toll.

I see that even this new Extensions SDK is only available to people who have paid for the full Suite edition.

I'd describe that as a market opportunity.

I've often felt as though the way to make a DAW that competes with Ableton today would be to build the entire UI around composable scripted modules.

Far too much of Ableton's secret sauce is hidden away behind Max for Live and top-tier pricing only features. This is a great step in the right direction.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how MCU families work, I'm afraid.

There's not 10+ versions with different features. The word version strongly implies that there's an incremental progression over time, and they keep screwing up by adding and taking away modules. What jerks!

What's actually happening is that you have 4-5 different product lines that all share the same SDK, design philosophy, pricing structure, supply chain and support channels. Each one of these dimensions is extremely important to engineering teams designing products around them. It's not about hobbyists who are learning the ropes, although IMO they do a pretty good job of supporting those folks, too.

Within those lines (at this point, primarily S, C, H and P) you actually do have versions; for example, ESP32-S2 is no longer recommended for new designs because you should use ESP32-S3.

Ultimately, the lens you need to use to understand this stuff is: can I place an ESP32-labeled chip on my PCB and program it using the same SDK?

The same is true for the RP2XXX series of MCUs; if someone is confused by the difference between a microcontroller and a SBC then they might just be in the wrong place.

Bigger picture, some advice: when confronted by something like this, you will get further faster if you don't lead with the assumption that you have things figured out and everyone else is doing it wrong. Instead, keep an open mind and ask lots of questions. We're living in a golden era of enabling autodidacts but that's only true for folks who go long on humble curiosity.

Everyone is different, but board layout is one area where I aggressively don't want any LLM input until such a time as it is as good at board layout as it is at refactoring code.

We're still a ways off from that, and that's likely because board layout requires a much more nuanced perspective of the enclosure shape, power requirements, heat dissipation, RF...

It's really not about placing ICs with caps nearby. I actually really enjoy that part anyhow. That's the fun part!

The "Who's your ideal dinner companion (deceased or alive)?" survey at the end is icing on this cake.

I honestly think I'd rather go hungry at this point.

Hey man, speak for yourself.

It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me.

Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand.

Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing.

Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.

... I'm genuinely intrigued to hear what you found funny.

It is criminal to read an article about one of the catchiest songs of that decade and not see at least one of the excellent videos embedded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ee1gxJvVi4

Just make sure that you switch to the Italian audio track when the music kicks in or you will be profoundly confused by the auto-dubbing attempting to translate for you.