> What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.
I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, honestly. With the invention of home recording and all the attendant production tools, the lower barriers to entry, broader exposure due to the internet, etc., there was always going to be a vastly larger amount of music than there was 30 years ago. If the old model had not changed, we'd still be in a world with a glancingly small number of slots on the radio charts for each genre—those are the people the average person knows about, and spends money on—and most other musicians would be broke.
I assume. I could be wrong. But my two points are that it's not like the old model was friendly to artists either, and that it's not actually very easy for me to imagine a coherent model for music that would work be equitable for all artists in the world today, given the other changes that've taken place.
I don't think it's just to pretend that if there are 4-5x more people releasing music today, we would all would be spending 4-5x more on records and concerts than we did in 1996. And I am not saying that's what the author is saying, I'm just trying to work through the consequences of what I inferred from this article, the economics of which were a little hand-wavey.
> I don't think it's just to pretend that if there are 4-5x more people releasing music today, we would all would be spending 4-5x more on records and concerts than we did in 1996.
But they also don't have to.
In 1996, the primary way for people do buy music involved it being pressed in a factory and then delivered on a truck to a store that had to pay for retail real estate and checkout clerks. The percent of the sale price going to the artist was tiny.
Today the distribution cost is you send it over the internet, the cost of which rounds to zero. The dominant cost ought to be the 3% the credit card companies take. And if you give the cost savings to the artists instead of the record companies, they could very easily be getting 4-5x more of every dollar customers spend.
The problem is, the record companies would prefer that they get the cost savings from digital distribution, and we need a system that ensures that they don't.
There is also the question of what it means to make it. The artist at the top of the charts is making many millions of dollars, but suppose we didn't have a system that props up superstars. Then instead of having a tiny number of artists who make many millions, we would have a thousand times as many artists who make many thousands.
> we didn't have a system that props up superstars.
such a system does not exist.
Superstardom is a natural phenomenon in the industry. Just like sports or really, any mass entertainment. The only way to achieve the "thousands times as many artists making many thousands" is to have separate communities of music markets that do not overlap.
I dont think that's feasible on the internet, and i certainly would not support any laws that tries to bring that into effect.
There's nothing wrong with a tiny number of extremely famous, extremely successful artists.
> The only way to achieve the "thousands times as many artists making many thousands" is to have separate communities of music markets that do not overlap.
This is not true. All you need is to have multiple buyers with different tastes and a functioning discovery system that allows each individual to find what they like.
The latter is the opposite of what the industry provides. They promote what's popular, regardless of whether you'll like it.
And then they make it difficult for anyone else to do otherwise, because artists who want to be The Rolling Stones sign the record contract thinking they'll get promoted, and then they don't get promoted but the record company owns their songs and charges prohibitively high fees for streaming so independents can't afford to play it and let listeners discover it.
This is how they destroyed internet radio, for example. Before the industry lobbied to change the law law, there was a vibrant set of internet radio stations. Then the Kill Internet Radio Act passed and set the fees higher than most of the independent stations could afford without taking payola, and now "internet radio" is dominated by iHeart Radio, AKA Clear Channel, the same company that owns all the terrestrial radio stations that play the Top 40 on loop.
So you want new artists to be promoted and you're willing for those artists to be paid less to make it happen? Spotify Discovery Mode seems to fit the bill. Artists agree to take a lower rate, and Spotify is incentivized to include their music more often in their algorithmic playlists and radio, so they can be discovered. Of course, this was not exactly uncontroversial!
The premise of "artist get paid less" is that they get a higher percentage to make up for the fact that with better discovery the consumer's budget will be spread across a larger number of artists.
"Discovery Mode" is a transparent attempt to pit artists against each other. The one that gives the middle man a bigger cut gets more sales. The flaw here is the lack of alternative means for new artists to get discovered without signing a one-sided deal, i.e. we don't have enough competition for distribution. This is mostly because of laws lobbied for by the industry.
Sorry, I'm not following, how is getting paid less the same as getting a higher percentage?
Artists have always been in competition with each other for the same consumer attention/dollars. Indie artists often undercut prices of popular artists on CDs or downloads to try to incentivize discovery. In the streaming era, the marginal cost to the consumer is zero (which is great for discovery!), but Discovery Mode is bringing back pricing as a means of competition on the supplier side, for better or worse.
> Sorry, I'm not following, how is getting paid less the same as getting a higher percentage?
The premise is that we want more artists, so the combined way we get this is that a) the artists get the savings from digital distribution, instead of the labels, creating a larger pool of money for the artists, and b) we have fewer superstars, so that pool of money allows more artists to exist, instead of just allowing the same number of superstars to pad their coffers even more.
The result is that the average artist gets less, because there are more of them. But less than Taylor Swift is still more than enough to make a living.
> Indie artists often undercut prices of popular artists on CDs or downloads to try to incentivize discovery.
This is fine if they lower the price to the consumer, because then the consumer's finite number of dollars allows them to buy more music from other artists, and thereby supports the viability of other artists. Or, from an individual perspective, getting a million sales at $0.05 is just as good as getting half a million sales at $0.10 -- or better, because more people discover your work and may then go to live shows or buy the next release.
The problem with Discovery Mode is that it lowers the price to Spotify, which is still going to charge the market-clearing price to the customer, and then they use the money to line their own coffers and shrink the pie for the artists.
Well, somewhat. A "natural phenomenon" in the sense that the natural economic equilibrium implies that huge amounts of money are spent on maintaining a system that props up superstars.
I think Mr Mouse's point was that we should imagine for a moment that the natural order of things was upset and we instead had a system that was a bit more organic in promoting good musicians and the implications that would have. Ie, a counterfactual.
> huge amounts of money are spent on maintaining a system that props up superstars.
i see no evidence that the profits of the superstardom is spent maintaining the "system".
My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success. If the argument that it's the promotion that makes them successful, then the argument is less correct today than ever before - the advent of the internet means there's no more strict radio slots etc, which is unavailable to an amateur or starting musician.
Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person).
That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.
There is absolutely zero evidence to support your assertion - "My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success."
In fact it's demonstrably wrong. Take any aspect of musical talent, from innovativeness to musicianship, and measure any top 100 chart musician against it. They'll do worse than a typical Berklee or Juliard Grad. Measure technical ability / virtuosity, and essentially no mainstream pop artist will rival the guitarist in one of a hundred thousand unknown speedmetal bands.
You're working from the fallacy known as the 'just world' hypothesis rather than reality.
We may be at point in post WW2 history where the lines of talent / ability and fame are most divergent in the music space. There absolutely are fantastic musicians with large audiences, but extremely few at the top of the industry. Meanwhile the production line of safe, marketable, utterly conventional pap - from Taylor Swift to K-Pop is operating at maximal efficiency.
I don't have a solution to this problem (outside the wholesale destruction of consumer capitalism), but to pretend its not there is ludicrous.
Nah, you're just wrong about your quality measure. The production of "conventional pap" is very much a form of mastery. And so is good marketing.
Raw technical skill isn't enough for success, you also need an audience for that skill. It doesn't matter that your skill at the guitar is divine if you only play technical pieces only other expert musicians appreciate.
Take Minecraft for instance. A graphically unimpressive game made by nobodies before it got famous. It didn't get so big because it demonstrated the pinnacle of game development.
Minecraft was revolutionary in the openness of it's game design... It's a terrible example of 'technically bad'. The technical quality of Minecraft is in design, not graphics.
There's no parallel for musicianship. I don't disagree that there are fantastic producers working in bad pop music - they're not the musicians who's names mast the tracks, they're folks like Max Martin, RedOne, Boi-1da. Their skill is not in making music better. It's in producing prototypes that the factory of the industry can mass produce and tweak for different demographics. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of music. It's more akin to propaganda or marketing. The talent at work here is manipulation, not artistry.
Minecraft had good graphics, actually - the color pallet was clearly well thought-out, and the blocky low-poly aesthetic was chosen for visual consistency with the 1m voxel size that makes up the entire world.
Short of shipping with raytracing (which notably wasn't real-time possible in 2010), there's not much Notch could have done to improve the core graphics.
(Note that while I'm using 'graphics' and 'aesthetics' interchangeably here, they're separate things with graphics meaning technological capability and aesthetics meaning artistic choices.)
The mistake you made is that you're measuring "good" by your own (arguably sophisticated) taste.
The objective measure is commercial success. If's commercially successful, it is "good". Just because someone's musical skills and/or other aspects deserves your respect and admiration, it does not make them "good".
that's not my argument - that's my statement of fact.
I'm arguing that this success cannot be made into a model where many musicians gets a very small slice of the entire pie. There's gonna be mega successes, unless you artificially restrict it (to nobody's benefit).
I think you have made your position unnecessarily confusing by bringing "good" into it. You have entered a conversation about changing the music industry so that it provides a greater reward to certain artists that it currently does. You then said "well, if they're good, they're at the top, so why do you want to change who's at the top?". That's a very confused thing to say, because everyone else in the thread is arguing that by their definition of good, the good people are not at the top.
If you are actually trying to argue that we cannot have a music industry where people are rewarded more evenly, you have provided absolutely no justification for it. You just said that since success attracts, it will naturally pool to a smaller and smaller group. Well why is there more than one artist, then? Why is it distributed in exactly the way it is now? When the distribution changes, why does it change?
It seems obvious that the world we are in is not the only one that could possibly exist, and that changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it. Do you want to have that argument, or no?
> changes in the structure of the industry, or the laws, could modify it.
which i also argued, is at best pointless, but at worst harmful.
I don't really think it a problem that there exists superstars that take the majority of the money spent on music. The only argument for changing it is that there are musicians that "deserve" to receive more revenue than they currently do, rather than an explanation of why. Equality of outcome is not sufficiently good to add regulation or restrictions to prevent what occurs today.
You are responding to an interesting statement that unpacks to "Economically high-performing musicians are more a product of industry effort than an indicator of technical skill ("good at music"); You will find abundant technical skill distributed widely in economically unproductive musicians."
You're staking out a semantic position, to wit: "technical measures of musical prowess are not valid, and I refuse to use the word 'good' to describe high rankings in those measures. The only meaningful metric of worth is economic productivity. Therefore, a tautology: Economically productive musicians are economically productive". This is a reasonable semantic usage, but is a less interesting statement.
The thing I take issue with in your comment narrative is the idea that somehow music labels don't need (have) marketing any more — that we've entered into a wonderful meritocracy for creativity. It seems naive to not imagine that there are huge sums of money being spent behind the scenes by the labels to push specific artists and buy their popularity.
I have no reason to believe the masses are suddenly no longer influenced by ... (paid) influencers.
i dont think you can buy it as easily as you claim. I'm also not claiming meritocracy, but popularity, as success metric. They are different. The quality of popular music is that lots of people resonate with it - so much so that people become fanatics about it. While marketing helps, it's but a spark. The actual music has to be "good" - where good is defined by the metric i mentioned above, not by some theoretical framework of music taste, skill or some other academic measure.
But I think in your mental model of the internet, you removed all the marketers and influencers!
People whose business is marketing artists have the ability to get orders of magnitude more exposure for an artist than people who are artists. To deny this would be to deny the importance of concepts like SEO.
People who market music select for the musicians who are the easiest to sell. This includes not only "musical goodness," but also image, age, and all kinds of other attributes that aren't part of the music itself.
There are even famous record executives who have famously stated publicly that they wouldn't support an admittedly "musically good" artist because of her looks. And looks are just one attribute that adds noise to your metric.
There's also a rich history of recording studios paying money to gain popularity for their artists. So unless you have an enormous corpus of evidence it appears that your metric is extremely noisy in the non-musical sense.
Do I even need to point out that you've committed a tautology. "If's commercially successful, it is "good"."
Good musicians are successful != successful musicians are good.
Like all tautologies, this isn't a good or bad argument, it isn't an argument at all. If you're trying to make the point that successful musicians are successful then no one can rationally disagree. If you're making the leap to inferring quality from success, then please reread my original post. I wasn't arguing for my 'taste', I was listing a few aspects of objective musical accomplishment. Feel free to substitute your own. Sales isn't one.
Even from a (literally) tone deaf, utterly venal perspective modern pop stars don't do well in the musical marketplace. That's why a) charts exclude legacy sales - real sales charts consistently show 'classic' albums outsell new releases and b) charts include merch and other non-musical play / purchase sales. One factoid I often think about is that the first Counting Crows record massively outsold the first Brittany Spears record. Brittany of course, with her t-shirts, dolls etc was a greater source of revenue, and hence massively more highly promoted in the corporate media.
Good here doesn't mean the music is to your tastes, or has some subjective level of sophistication or technical prowess.
The objective measure of how good it is can only be compared using commercial successfullness. If sufficient people are willing to shell out for the music, then it must mean it's good.
Because the assertion that good musicians are rewarded is unfalsifiable in that formulation. Your definition guarantees that you will always find it true. It proves nothing.
There was a classic study, https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full...., quality is pretty significantly correlated to success. It is not everything - there are random factors, marketing, etc. - but I would certainly say there is significant evidence that how good a musician is does in fact matter and contributes to their success. Besides "Friday" or the "so bad it's good" category, terrible song = terrible sales.
It’s a bit more complicated than that: being good is necessary but not sufficient. It’s true that terrible music will fail even if promoted but once you’re over certain quality thresholds there are many artists who are roughly comparable but most won’t make it big because they weren’t picked by the right label/promoter (not being in with the Ticketmaster/LiveNation cartel means you can’t even play at a high fraction of live venues), didn’t manage the right social media campaign, didn’t ace an interview with a music reporter or popular influencer, etc. or simply didn’t have the interest/stamina/wealth to keep cranking out posts and new material.
It’s similar to what we see in the Olympics: Algeria getting a gymnastics gold in a historic first for the entire continent didn’t mean it’s somehow impossible for African kids to train up to that level but rather that no matter what raw talent you’re starting with, nobody gets to the top without expensive infrastructure and training which aren’t even distributed. Music isn’t that extreme but there are still a lot of advantages to the artists who can hang in the right scenes in a few cities compared to equally good performers who can’t swing the rest of the career-making package.
This study is interesting, but it might as well have 'in mice' in the title for all its relevance in the real world. The study is measuring preference - and I'd definitely agree that all else being equal, preference would uplift better work (across artistic domains). But all else is most definitely not equal. Distribution is now essentially free - but all that demonstrated is that it was never the bottleneck. Marketing is. The music industry is a machine for creating what the kids call 'plants'. Groomed, quantised, pop creatures with a minimal bar for talent and huge appeal to their chosen demo (these days primarily young women). The industry is, contrary to what we might have assumed would happen - still the mediator. They negotiate the front page of spotify, book the tours, create the relationships with broadcasters and media outlets.
There are absolutely segments in the industry that address and include taste and quality, but they're long tail stuff next to the pop machine.
It would not. It is not relevant either. Music is shaped into something you buy by wielders of copyright. Removing copyright as a weapon would leave them powerless to do so, allowing music to once again be some thing you primarily do.
That might be true, sure. But it wouldn't get musicians paid.
Making music is something people enjoy so much, that many do it for free, and many would do it professionally for very little pay. Predictably, the average musician ain't paid a lot. Even the top, say, 0.1% of best-paid musicians are paid very little compared to eg the top 0.1% of lawyers or surgeons or programmers.
(I am not trying to make an argument about whether musicians _should_ get paid nor how much. I'm just following the context of the discussion.)
FWIW I agree with you analysis. I am making the argument that that is how it should be and that copyright gets in the way.
For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable.
> For context, compare making music with parenting and imagine we had a legal framework allowing parents to extract a royalty from their kids future earnings, further imagine some clever lobbying having made that right transferrable.
Seems reasonable?
Of course, there's plenty of ways to make this system terrible. But I think the objectionable thing, if any, is the royalty payments in the first place. Making them transferable is just efficient. And eg would allow parents to pay for current expenditures they have because of the kids.
> The Maintenance of Parents Act allows Singapore residents aged 60 years and above - who are unable to provide for themselves - to claim maintenance from their children who are capable of supporting them, but are not doing so. Parents can claim maintenance, in the form of monthly allowances or a lump-sum payment.
There's a certain level of skill required to compose and produce a song, but beyond that the genre/style of the song is more important, and which style is better is very subjective.
The best opera singer in the world will not take much business away from a techno DJ who merely presses a "play vocal sample" button, and both genres have their fans.
In a system where people listen to songs based on recommendations fitting their individual taste (where the recommender doesn't assume popular is good) you can have people listening to individual songs from the long tail of many artists.
> My point is that if a musician is good, they will earn money proportional to their success. If the argument that it's the promotion that makes them successful, then the argument is less correct today than ever before - the advent of the internet means there's no more strict radio slots etc, which is unavailable to an amateur or starting musician.
This is an unimaginative way of looking at things. For one thing, many people do still listen to the radio, where slots are still limited. Those who don't listen to the radio often listen to equivalents of the radio--Spotify or Apple Music playlists that are curated and quite likely involve the same kind of payola issues that the radio had.
It's the same structure: musicians reach their audience through a middleman that has an interest in promoting a particular group. Spotify is only a piece of this, you also have album promotion campaigns, brand tie-ins, and so on. (For example, did you know that the artist who plays the Superbowl half-time gets paid a pittance for it?)
> Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person)
The whole premise of this is that there's a universal quality of "good" that you can assess for a particular musician. That's nonsense. Some people love Taylor Swift, others can't tolerate her. Some people find a Bartok string quartet sublime, others think it's just noise. There's no universality to appeal to here. At best you can create an average over the population--but that changes from time to time, place to place, demographic to demographic.
Popularity involves skill but also luck. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders": musicians who happen to be in the right place at the right time but are never able to repeat it. For every musician with a steady career, there are many of these.
> That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.
This is already the way genres work, with the difference that these segments are voluntarily chosen. There are people who listen to, for instance, modern classical and almost nothing else, or death metal and almost nothing else, etc.
I think a good system would be one that works like ours, but with more to cushion artists from the random contingencies of the market. A lot of this already exists--grants given to artists in areas that are deemed culturally valuable, for example. Laws placing minimum prices on music licensing for film, TV, etc. Probably there should be laws forcing Spotify to be more transparent about royalties and promotions as well.
It's also worth pointing out that, historically, a very small percentage of artists live off the income from recordings or reproductions of their works. This is true for musicians, painters, authors, actors, or any other creative artists.
By and large, the only way to make a living as an artist is to continuously produce and perform copious amounts of work, or to have another source of income from a day job.
The entire concept of making a living off recordings/reproductions didn't really start until the invention of the printing press which allowed for mass reproductions.
Prior to that anyone with enough time on their hands and skills could legally reproduce any text, music, painting, etc for profit. Artist where largely compensated for performances or for original artwork. There was more relative demand for live performances because of the lack of other available entertainment options.
Now the primary issue with being a successful artist is the attention economy is incredibly competitive, and the barriers to entry are incredibly low.
Yes and no. Technical barrier to entry is low. It is also relatively easy to do something that your friends will say: wow that sounds great. It is totally another thing to make something good enough that they will play it several times a day on their own. Look at rushes and jams released by amateur musicians: the average quality is super super low. Not super low as being painful to listen, but super low as "sounds unfinished/incomplete/dull, I have no desire to play it again".
Recorded music was a viable business for maybe a single century. That’s a historical blip. If you wanted to listen to music before the 20th century, your only option was live music, so that’s how musicians made money. In the 21st century this is also how musicians make money. Also, it turns out that even in the 20th century, the real money was still made on tour.
Goes back before the 80’s. The Rolling Stones played arenas and stadiums on their 1969 tour and “arena rock” was huge in the 70’s. No disrespect towards the 80’s stars though!
> that it's not actually very easy for me to imagine a coherent model for music that would work be equitable for all artists in the world today, given the other changes that've taken place.
I know a way: universal basic income.
Which is coincidentally how you can also fund open source, and serious science (as opposed to the scam-filled journal/grant system we have today)
But how do you allocate more capital to more successful people so that you drive effort towards what people need / enjoy the most ? If there's no incentive to do popular music, then we could all do shitty music ?
That’s misunderstanding the human spirit in my opinion.
Maybe some would coast and be happy with whatever the basic income is, but I suspect many others would strive and do more. If not for survival and the privilege of having food + a roof (like it is now), then mostly for the satisfaction.
I don’t subscribe to the theory that giving everyone a basic income would instantly turn everyone into a couch potato. That’s just not how a healthy person thinks/functions. At least not in the long term.
First, I admit, I believe in certain stereotypes that X people are more hardworking than Y people. (On average)
I believe so, because I believe that upbringing has tremendous impact of how an adult lives, commits and achieves things, and different cultures have different styles of life, and consequently guide kids differently.
UBI most definitely would not change things over night, but it could (I mean that it’s probable) start the shift towards “couch patato” like end of culture spectrum.
We've 100xed the amount of production per human. Surely we can afford to risk some couch potatoes bringing that down to 80x if it makes everyone happier.
IF it makes everyone happier. That's a pretty big 'if'. I would be all for it in that case, but my intuition is that the results would be more mixed. Worth exploring for sure nonetheless.
I agree that people have creative impulses, and not everyone wants to be a couch potato. However, I imagine a lot of people would rather noodle around on a guitar (or try to be a YouTuber, or mess with RPGmaker, or write a blog, etc) than haul trash all day. If we subsidize that, we might end up flooded with physical trash and digital trash.
Read about how Intermittent Du Spectacle and Sacem/SACD work.
Very broad strokes, IDS is basic income, you have to fulfil a number of gigs to renew a fixed guaranteed income for the following year. Sacem is more or less proportional to success.
Not a perfect system by any means but it's something.
You're right. I'm going to get bashed for gatekeeping I'm sure, but Spotify is filled with low quality garbage. Not everyone's band deserves to make it. As a former musician, it's incredibly difficult to make a living and always has been. Most bands/artists just aren't that good. Art is hard. There's a lot of loud people yelling about how they can't sit at home and make passive income by gaming social media and getting paid for releasing a song on Spotify and never performing live. Get out and play. Music is a social thing. If you can't book shows or are unwilling to, too bad.
I know this comes off as get off my lawn, but that's just how a performance art works. Only the best make it no matter what you do.
Just one data point here — I think popular, mainstream music has been shit for (looks at watch) three decades now.
If the most popular music sucks so bad, I can only conclude that either I am from another planet or pumping huge amounts of cash to promote a label's "artist" actually works.
Well if you choose music that's optimized for the lowest common denominator, you'll have that. It's a poor metric. If you pick "most popular food" it'll end up being Dominos pizza or something, which says nothing about anything.
Most popular food in eg Singapore is surprisingly good. And the singe most popular fast food in eg Germany is the Döner Kebab from your local Döner place, and that's usually pretty decent.
Of course, for food popularity price place a large role. All recorded music has approximately the same price, eg when played on the radio.
Musicians need to live near each other in order to collaborate. Cities are too expensive for artists to live and the rehearsal spaces are too expensive as well. Maybe the technology is better but you have to consider the macroeconomics as well
My aspirations to become a rock musician peaked right after I graduated high school in the US (2006). It was sort of the beginning of music-streaming being cheap and possible for small artists. I decided to join a local singer-songwriter's band (self-titled) as a lead guitarist and backup singer. It was a huge wake-up call for me who had spent my youth idolizing musicians as to just how much work and hustle everything was. The music was just barely passable as mid-tier singer-songwriter John Mayer wannabe rock, but the hustle the leader had was insane.
With all of that work we managed to have 40k MySpace followers (some had to be bots), 100k streams on PureVolume, and a decent number of CD sales, at least to my mind (in the several hundreds). But the barrier was no longer whether or not an artist could get to a studio or a record deal, the barrier now is the noise of the internet.
>> those are the people the average person knows about, and spends money on—and most other musicians would be broke.
My son is a drummer. Has been doing studio work and other stuff but steadfastly has refused to be in a band. On multiple occasions he's said the same thing. Not enough exposure and the insane amount of work you have to do to make even a little bit of money isn't worth it.
He says he would prefer to be a studio musician and do production work since its more stable, reliable and actually pays his bills.
Thing is, recordings alone are only part of what a musician does. Concerts, merchandise, and special editions of their albums with padding and thus a higher profit margins. If it was only recordings that earned them money they would only work for a few weeks or months a year.
Apologies if this feels off-topic and ranting, but it's all connected:
I'm convinced (in particular by years of reading Bob Lefsetz's punditry [0], as well as working alongside multiple successful musicians, DJs, and industry agencies for many years) that Spotify single-handedly saved the aging and out-of-touch record business, that their payments to artists are fair, and that it's more accessible now than ever before by an order of magnitude to build a real, sustainable career as a musician.
You have to simply put in the work, and it is brutal, long, thankless, isolating work, on top of the Herculean task of creating something people legitimately want and connect with. And you should be attractive (not beautiful persay, but charismatic and authentic). And provide the illusion of access to you. And be kind to your fans. And maximize all of your potential channels (digital and IRL, from socials to tours to brand partnerships to merch/apparel to unpredictable, serendipitous syncs in film and tv (ex. Kate Bush "Running Up That Hill")), all the while cultivating fans like plants in a garden.
You have to travel and perform, and be present, and be the soundtrack to their lives, always meeting your fans where they are, however they congregate, and and and and and! For years and years. It takes a long time to enjoy a tree you've just planted.
People do not have the bandwidth, mentally or financially, to support or patronize more than a few artists that mean something significant to them. Just because the amount of people making and publishing music has exploded doesn't mean that listeners have available slots to add you into their mental playlist, until you keep doing what you're doing long enough that you appear, almost seamlessly, into a moment in their life that awes and delights and converts them into a believer.
There is no "right place at the right time" -- you have to be in the right place ALL the time, and eventually your random times become other peoples' "right time".
If you never give up, if you're always there, you'll also eventually be a staple on the scene -- you'll be, literally by default, "old guard" that people look up to. You'll have earned your respect, you'll have put in your dues, and the money / fame / power will come as an after-effect.
Any other situation where it's overnight success, those acts are created as nothing more than products to be sold. Both can make a lot of money, but money isn't the goal. Craft, legacy, driving culture, these are what artistry is supposed to be about. Money is secondary, and always comes if you take the time to learn the business and take your fan stewardship seriously.
The amount of shallow takes on Twitter, Threads, or god forbid LinkedIn about poor musicians who "deserve a living wage", who are "gamed by Big Tech", who are "slaves to the algorithm", who aren't living the dreams they weirdly feel entitled to, they don't deserve anything if their music and persona are nothing anybody wants, if they haven't put in the work, haven't shown up and met people continuously, haven't failed over and over, haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to their guns until they eventually get lucky -- not because the universe chose them, but because they made sure they were already all of what I wrote above when opportunity came knocking.
Like, sorry, the world has become hyper-connected, super decentralized, insular, tribal -- MTV can't break you anymore. None of us are paying attention to the same things as anybody else. It's harder than ever to get attention, and what you're selling had better be damn good -- but if you succeed, the rewards are richer than they've ever been.
Most plants get choked out on the jungle floor by the canopy, or end up adapting to quietly survive in their environment. Some defy all odds and break through the top. Chances are you're not going to the top, but you don't have to get choked out either.
Still think that the way Spotify distributes money (pooling subscription money then dividing it according to stream numbers instead of dividing your subscription solely amongst the artists you listen; I don't want to pay for garbage I would never want to hear) is completely unfair.
I agree 100% but it's not really up to spotify - it was the rights holders who wanted it that way. Some label execs have come out in favor of the user-centric model, but as long as some labels make more money off the per-stream model, they will block the change. I believe spotify themselves would prefer the user-centric model, as it would alleviate their fraud-bot problem.
This exactly, and it is not often enough mentioned when there are protests in the newss.
Big record companies get more money if smaller artists get less money. So anything that is ‘more fair to (smaller/indie) artists’ is worse for record companies and they hold the cards.
I don't understand the difference in your two propositions, since money is fungible : whether the ratio is established globally or customer per customer, the end result would be the same, wouldn't it ?
Unless there are specific calculation rules ?
If I pay $10/month to Spotify and play 2 artists 20 times each over the month, then each artists should get $5. Ignore Spotify fees for this example.
What Spotify actually does is give these two artists some cents per play. Let’s say $0.01 per play, they each get $0.20 from my subscription and the rest of my $10 goes to Spotify.
I believe they actually see that 0.000001% of all plays went to your artist, so 0.000001% of all money goed to that artist.
This means if you listened to 1 song this month, they do receive way less than 10$. (Because number of streams does not fluctuate much you can probably give it a $ per stream)
Yes, but this argument isn't based on how people actually listen to music.
It's really unclear whether an artist-centric model would make any real difference to artists - under an artist-centric model the more an individual user streams the less the artists get per stream, so if you have a small number of fans who listen to you a LOT the artist-centric model means you get less money
"All the world's music" is a bit much. As a metalhead and extreme music fan, Spotify has gigantic holes. Pretty sure it's the same for anyone with taste reaching in the truly obscure.
And don't get me started on labels only lending their shitty remasters to streaming services.
> You have to simply put in the work, and it is brutal, long, thankless, isolating work, on top of the Herculean task of creating something people legitimately want and connect with.
I never understood complaining about touring/being a musician being a hard job. You are living someone else's dream, stop complaining. If you don't like it, simply don't do it. My 9-5 soulless work is hard as well...
> haven't failed over and over, haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to their guns until they eventually get lucky
Isn't that true for most endeavors if you want to get good at something? Including cs.
Most musicians, at least in my experience, often don't understand, that it takes more than a good music to speak to people. And people feeling addressed by you is what usually results in someone making it. However, this is hard to fabricate, if you are gonna spend most of your creative process how to address certain group of people and then fabricate your art to fit into that, it probably won't feel as authentic as someone who actually lives their lives, lives their struggles and socially acts like them. It will be hard for a 45 year old person to address Gen Z for example
I agree with much of your comment on what it takes to succeed commercially in today's music scene, but it also nails why modern (popular) music is so same-y and uninteresting -- just the "logisistics" requirements only fit particular kinds of artists.
In 1992, the Danish representative for the music industry managed to negotiate a “Private Copying Levy” on all recordable media (mainly CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes , memory cards and USB drives).
fees were around (per media) :
CD media : $0.35
DVD media : $0.56
Memory card : $0.80
They then managed to pass a new law in 2022 that expanded the original law to also apply to phones, tablets, computers, basically anything that can store data.
Hard drive < 128GB (SSD or magnetic, internal or external) : $0.59
Hard drive > 128GB : $2.34
Tablet / Phone / Computer : $6.59
No wonder the music industry loves piracy. For every tablet/phone/computer sold, they’re literally pocketing $6.59 without ever lifting a finger or even delivering any content (not even a bad U2 album).
For every hard drive, memory card, or SSD sold, they’re pocketing from $0.59 to $2.34, again, those are not preloaded with music content either.
Of course, having paid the fee does not entitle you to any form of piracy.
Sweden too, its such bullshit. These laws are basically about the fact that you technically can store pirated music on a device, therefore you are, such a dirty racket.
> No wonder the music industry loves piracy. For every tablet/phone/computer sold, they’re literally pocketing [...]
With "the music industry" presumably you mean record labels, or even something else? Surely this money doesn't go to artists — how would anyone know how to distribute the money. Even distribution among record labels is super unclear.
In case of the Danish levy, the money does actually flow back to whomever holds the rights to the music. I purposely do not write artists, as there is no guarantee that they are holding the rights.
The reasoning behind the levy is to compensate artists (mentioned as artists in the law) when people make “private copies” (I.e. backups, copying media from yiur PC to your smartphone, etc, not to be confused with pirate copies).
Allegedly artists are missing out when you purchase a song from some service, and then copy that song to a media player somewhere.
Considering that a lot of people stream music today, and rights holders are compensated per play, this makes it even more absurd that you need to pay a tax for every device capable of streaming media.
I don’t have any hard numbers for the streaming vs purchased music, but judging from the number of record stores now and when I was a kid, as well as the size of said stores, hard copies of music doesn’t look like it’s a thriving business,
Of course you can buy music digitally on iTunes/Youtube/Google/Amazon/whatever, and I’ve personally done just that for a couple of decades, but even I had to eventually give in when the kids wanted to listen to music. I still purchase “classics” that I know I will listen to over and over again, and I have a respectable music library that I own (DRM free), but for everyday listening it’s just streaming, and with a family subscription it’s also cheaper than when I was a teenager and was buying albums weekly (we did have better music back then though :-D )
> Allegedly artists are missing out when you purchase a song from some service, and then copy that song to a media player somewhere.
I don't know much about copyright law for media, but wasn't the core issue commercial usage and distribution? I believe once I buy something, I'm entitled to consume it however I see fit, whether it's from a CD player, or a file on my computer. I love CDs as a physical artifact, but the convenience of digital files is superior.
> hard copies of music doesn’t look like it’s a thriving business.
Most people I know only do ambient music or party music. Focused listening is a rare thing. For the first two option, streaming is great, as you don't need to worry about where the files comes from and if you've synced them to the player. But once you've got a collection albums you really do like, the current state of streaming software makes it difficult to manage them there.
As for me, the albums I do like to listen to, I already have them in my collection. For anything else, I go to youtube.
Don’t get me wrong, i think streaming is great, and it has allowed a lot of artists to publish music that probably wouldn’t have made it otherwise.
Some only have one or two songs in them, and with streaming that’s fine. With record labels they’d have been forced into a record deal producing one or two good songs, and 3-5 mediocre albums.
Likewise, for pop music, streaming is great. Pop usually has a very short lifespan where a song is popular, and after that the majority thankfully fades into oblivion. I would hesitate to purchase pop music even on iTunes despite most tunes being $0.99, but with streaming i don’t think about it.
Nelson's faming here pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole ball of wax myself, a musician, and someone who started their career working for a major national concert promotor, worked for two streaming music services and who participates in a local music scene as performer, supporter and occasional promotor:
"""
The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with.
It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat. If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.
Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't really have any other choice unless you fooled around with expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that kinda get what they deserve.
[1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?
The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. For some reason[0], you can't just upload your music to Spotify or Apple Music directly, you have to have a middleman, and that market of "middlemen for unsigned artists" is just three companies[1]. They all suck in different ways, but there's a lot of creative-class wage theft going on, even beyond Spotify just underpaying indies on rights.
You can upload music directly on YouTube, but they pay very little on short videos and music streams. And there's also sketchy management companies and MCNs there anyway.
We also have to keep in mind that the music industry loves complicated and unclear ownership structures over the music being produced. Nobody completely owns a music track; there's separate copyrights for melody and recordings, both of which get separated and broken down in extremely opaque ways. Remixes and sampling make the rights situation even more complicated, and at best, mean that the person who made the remix or used the samples has to share revenue. At worst, you get to deal with all sorts of bullshit claims (or lawsuits) from people who think they own more than they do.
Insamuch as cheap distribution has flooded the market, it's often either in the form of attempts to launder money through Spotify[2], or online advertising style click fraud of some kind. The problem is not that there are too many honest artists, but that nobody does proper KYC on indies. Either they don't care if you're legit or they don't want to work with people at the small end.
[0] In the case of Apple, long-standing trademark disputes with The Beatles prohibit them from representing artists directly, which is how management companies got their start for self-published acts. However, this would not bind Spotify or other streaming services.
[1] CDBaby, TuneCore, and DistroKid, if I remember correctly
[2] e.g. buy a bunch of Spotify subscriptions with drug money, publish a bunch of nominally unrelated artists on Spotify, listen to them 24/7, then the Spotify payments are clean cash
> The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally.
Spotify has a list of recommended distributors [1]. The first one on the list, DistroKid, charges $22/yr for unlimited uploads to Spotify, Apple Music with the artist keeping all royalties[2].
I appreciate the links, would you share the complaints here?
I access the web with 8yo phone or 11yo laptop and HN is great because it’s text only and does not require to arbitrage between loading speed and buying a new device each X year.
Well they're off base because it's nearly free global distribution. Cry me a river or be so talented the entire world wants to pay you to perform live. No one pays to see mediocrity.
There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's minds with.
The ease of obtaining such sounds on the cheap makes it difficult to appreciate just how cutting-edge those sounds were in Kraftwerk’s time. Making electronic drums sound good requires a lot of processing, and they did all of that with analog equipment before we even had a complete idea of how electronic drums “should” sound. And that raises the bar for today’s musicians — doing “Kraftwerk” today requires pushing boundaries like they did, not just making the same sounds.
> Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman?
The difference in era was the ability to earn enough money to exist long enough to "Git Gud".
Sure, music is cheap to make today. However, that just means there are twelve zillion shitty bands that never progress past that.
Many of the bands that are heralded as "awesome" really weren't to start. They generally took years to gel and often the members formed, dissolved and reformed several bands before the one that caught fire.
Even the Beatles sounded like every other Merseybeat band to start.
Without the ability to make money at their craft, artists don't get better at their craft. It's that simple.
There's a UK band that's risen from playing to 20 people at daggy gigs to being everywhere in roughly 18 months - that's been on the back of being individually not bad musicians and then workshopping like demons for much of the time the UK was in lockdown.
I think something is off with those guys. Their ascension seems off to me, they aren't that good, there are plenty of better bands playing at the Windmill but for some reason these guy are the chosen ones.
I might be being overly cynical but thing just don't add up.
:EDIT:
I just looked up the credits of their first album, it's produced by my current fav producer James Ford and mixed by the legend Alan Moulder, they even got a full orchestra. This is pretty much unheard of for a debut album. They don't even have a drummer!
Someone at Island records must really really really like them. It's all a bit bonkers, I'd love to see what their record deal is because the budget for that album must have been huge!
Yeah, call it luck if you like, IIRC the Violent Femmes rapidly ascended to fame on the back of busking in the right spot for the right person to see them
We could argue that this particular girl band had a "cute" video that infatuated a connected producer, or ...
There are few positions in the spot light and they're taken up by a fortunate few who happen to hit a sweet mix of hard work, connections, and sheer luck by varying degrees.
This confuses skill for song writing ability. There are 1000s of world class jazz players that can play back to you anything you play them. But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to. That's the hardest part. The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that.
>The Ramones are terrible musicians, but locked into something our collective consciousness liked. You can't practice or engineer that.
I don't have enough perspective to really know, but it seems to me the record companies were a lot better at identifying this ephemeral quality decades ago, and then pushing it into the mainstream. If the Ramones came around these days, they'd probably go nowhere, but back then someone figured out that people would like listening to their music and pulled the strings to get their music into the public consciousness.
>But they are nobodies because they aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to.
Yep. I've even seen this with plenty of well-known musicians over the years. They achieve fame as part of some band, but then they join up with some other top-tier musicians from other bands as part of a "supergroup", and the result is completely underwhelming: technically very good, but just not all that interesting to listen to. So, many times, it seems that the "magic" came from a particular combination of people writing music together, at a particular time.
> aren't capable of writing music people want to listen to.
That puts most of it in a nutshell. If they -can- write music people want to listen to, they need to get it to people's ears.
My problem as a listener with dollars in my hand is: how do I find that music. (Else, I can make do with what I've got... but it's not fresh! or new!)
At one time, there was a system that got it to my ears. It was a radio with a great DJ who named the song and the artist after each track, so I could walk to the record store. Or else a good friend played their copy.
That system is gone. NOW those musicians haven't got a way to get to my ears. In case they find it, I'll keep listening around.
> At one time, there was a system that got it to my ears. It was a radio with a great DJ who named the song and the artist after each track, so I could walk to the record store. Or else a good friend played their copy.
But there is a system, and it's better at hitting more people. They post it online to somewhere with a list of people who like that type of music (Youtube, Tiktok, etc). If it is something people want to listen to, they share it and it propagates through those circles - no need to go to a record store or bring it to a friends house. Eventually it hits the older "mainstream" channels - radio, your Spotify recommendations, etc.
No idea what you're talking about. The system is still there. Instead of a DJ speaking the artist and song name to you, you can look at your phone screen and read it. Spotify weekly playlists are fantastic for discovering music. You can check forums or use the Google. You can talk to people. If you still want to be spoonfed what you're supposed to like, you are always free to turn on the radio for some brainless consumption, just like the good ol days.
I think the point is the recording industry was a very different beast. Now it's not. What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing. Anyone willing to put in enough time to have music worth recording can record it with only a modest percentage increase in time and money.
The gate was never that music is hard [1], but recording and distribution. Well, recording and distribution is now very, very feasibly done without companies, and even the process of making it is easier than ever. Why would we expect anything but an explosion in supply?
Most of it will, of course, be crap. Sturgeon's law can not be denied. But 10% of a 50x increase is still a lot of new good music, and 10% of 10% of a 100x increase is still quite a bit of new great music.
[1]: Music is, of course, hard. But it's hard in the way programming is hard, accounting is hard, being a biochemist is hard, plumbing is hard, etc. Many, many things are on this level of "hard". It's the sort of thing that takes enough investment that you are making a choice to pursue it rather than other things, but it's well within an individual's capability. No need to form a 1000 person company in 2024 just to record some tunes, whereas if you want to distribute your music nationally in the 1960s you are looking at "1000 person company" sorts of tasks, where the successful companies were larger than that.
"Music has demeaned itself" is nonsensical. Music didn't do anything. Music will be around long after the music industry is on the dustbin of history. The comment I replied to seemed to think music is worthless unless people can make money off it.
> What would pass as a high-quality studio in the 1980s is now home hobbyist accessible, with bits and pieces state of the art for even the current decade like the digital processing.
The gear is accessible - but the acoustics of a studio certainly is not.
True, but there's still a whole lot you can do with virtual instruments, synthesizers, direct-recorded guitars, and minimal (or even no) good room acoustics.
That does leave some niches open for the value of recording live instruments in a sonically good space, so surely some professional studios will persist, of course.
And just for recording larger groups, regardless of the acoustics. Many home studios are fine for one person, or two, or three, but if you want to record a band or a choir or whatever you may just need more space.
Indeed, virtual instruments open up a whole lot of creative space. And not having to record everything in reverse order of importance while burning the previous version is a substantial benefit vs even professional recording gear of the past!
Sure they are. People put together well-equipped car garages, woodworking shops, broadcast studios, all sorts of things all the time. Tens of thousands of dollars can get you where you need to be and people do that for their hobbies all the time.
Heck, "home recording studio" is now a minor industry of its own, post-COVID. A lot of voice actors have their own home studios set up now, doing top end TV work, because it was easier to do that then to travel.
The acoustics of a studio isn't important anymore and I don't think was necessarily a good thing. Make your space completely dead and load the Abbey Road studio A impulses. Now we have infinite options.
You can record the standard rock band setup with minimal hardware. Direct input guitar and bass, processed with amp simulation. Electronic drum kit with some good samples (most modern recordings use drum replacement anyway even if they're recording real drums). A single close mic for the vocals, and maybe some basic room treatment, which is relatively easy in the vocal range. Convolution reverb with impulse responses for the acoustics. Most listeners won't be able to tell the difference.
Only if you insist on real drums does it become difficult and expensive.
A) If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself; B) maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.
Intended meaning: A can't be true so B therefore must be true. I probably should have used 'or' instead of 'and.'
Music kinda always has been a utility. I reach for Happy Birthday like I reach for tools in my toolbox - it's birthday time, so let's sing it.
A hard truth about art is that, for "good" art, the artist has often poured intense personal energy into it, yet there is no guarantee that that energy will transfer to future experiencers of your art. When that transfer happens consistently over decades or centuries, it's awesome and that speaks to the greatness of that art, of course (not necessarily the artist). Business models around particular arts such as music have little bearing on this phenomenon, other than possibly giving more people the ability to pursue art. But artists who can achieve greatness (which they will have an innate need to do because it is a personal energy thing) will manage it regardless of any surrounding business model or economic/religious/political system.
"Happy Birthday" is a utility, but also a great work of art, because we are still singing it 100 years later.
> There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music.
What is your reference time frame here? That's exactly how it was in the 90s and before. Feels like there was a tiny bright spot from the early 2000s to say 2010 or so, but then it was over.
> "That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut."
I think it's a bit early to start claiming victory in a paradigm shift to streaming that makes pirating obsolete. The price of video and music streaming has quickly been increasing, and in many cases, we've come full circle to being forced to deal with ads again. It's entirely possible for the music business to price their customers out of the market again to the point that an on-demand pirate streaming service completely overtakes legal streaming. I think we're already approaching that for video streaming.
I'd love streaming if the client software were actually useful. All of them are disaster in UX if you do more than listening to music in the background. Peak design for me was iTunes 10 and Winamp 2. Which means control/status panel, a queue list and customizable table views for the songs (optional grid view to browse by album). Most streaming clients are click/scroll hell.
I only see this mentality here. On Spotify, I search for a song I want to hear and I play it. Or I add it to a playlist. What more do you want? For it to sense your mood and queue up what you played last year during Oct-November before 10 am while you were driving?
I don't understand how the tech crowd thinks Spotify is so hard to use. My 70 year old parents have no issues navigating it.
My "offline" songs are sometimes no longer downloaded. Trying to navigate to my saved songs takes me past multiple ads for podcasts I don't care about, and looking up an artist gives me ads for shows they're playing or their new albums.
I just want my collection of music and to be able to play it without wading through a sea of garbage.
Not "hard" to use, no, nobody's saying that. But painful to use for anything else than scroll/click/play, absolutely yes.
Active music discovery is terrible, tracking your "progress" in your weekly releases listening is actively being made impossible (the list is seemingly being re-randomized, at random), the obsessive emphasis on tracks rather than albums or artists is very limiting, UIs are not flexible enough, and I could go on for a while.
All streaming clients are currently hot garbage. Again, not hard to use, just extremely user hostile for anything more than click and play.
It's not just price and ads either - the user experience on most of the big streaming apps is absolutely dismal. I just recently started using Stremio with a debrid plugin (basically, it's just a nice streaming frontend for watching torrents, without needing to download them to my LAN).
It is crazy to see just how good things can be. And Stremio's UX isn't even great, it's just that it's not loading me with ads and bullshit, and the thing I want to watch is just there, and turns on with minimal fuss.
Yep, agreed. I used to think Netflix had great UX (website and Android app), but they've gone downhill so much over the years. Months ago I started seeing recommendations for weird games (some of them seemingly kinda sexual?) showing up in the very top spot of the app. More recently, Netflix has somehow decided that I'm not "home", and I've fallen into their password-sharing trap, even though I'm not sharing the account. I really need to just cancel Netflix; it's just annoying and a waste of time to deal with this crap.
Fortunately the music industry does not seem to go the same way as the video streaming industry: each platform having their exclusives, fragmenting the offer, and making life hard for customers. Music streaming services differentiate through other means.
That’s why I’m happily paying for Deezer and not for video services.
You could call it a market inefficiency since the media would actually be worth the higher prices to people if they didn't have a way to pirate. So as long as piracy is technically not very hard, it'll always be relevant.
Today, you can see this with live sports. Hardest thing to pirate for technical reasons, most expensive thing to legally watch. I get that it costs more to serve, but not that much more.
It’s market inefficiency for sure. Besides price, there’s also just a failure to provide a service that people want. This is what happened to games and prime time television. Gamers wanted to be able to download games instead of dealing with physical DRM-riddled fragile media. People wanted to watch TV without ads. Barriers to entry in distribution are very high, and there are lots of exclusivity rights, so it was a virtual monopoly. But monopolies arent stable and the market will still find a way around them, legal or not.
Some places such as Amazon and Bandcamp still allow downloading the music files. Is there a similarly lopsided revenue model in these cases, as there is for streaming?
Anyway it seems that the industry is pleased with where it ended up, the link between then and now is a bit tenuous. However it's also on us that we willingly handed over control to streaming companies for the convenience. Think about the number of times we've justified something by it being the cost of a few coffees a month. TV, music, Adobe.
Once one of my favorite underground artists deleted his album that was available on soundcloud. I messaged the guy without expecting any response, imagine how shocked I was when the guy made the album public on bandcamp just for me so I could download it for free. No way, I had to buy it
7/10 is my Bandcamp threshold (NYP releases can go as low as 6/10), off-Bandcamp that rises to 8/10 (personal ratings, not some music site), both for CDs that I’ll then rip into the FLACs I’d have downloaded off Bandcamp, and the bad-for-archival MP3s.
And of course, there’s the Japanese where you are often lucky if they even release something on a public streaming platform, physical releases are expensive imports and even Apple/Amazon often don’t sell the digital files.
Only if that artist can provide me with a voucher code to “purchase” the bandcamp music which allows me to stream/play offline in the app. Exception being vinyl-only releases by which usually a high quality WAV is provided to buyers.
Indeed. I used to buy amazon mp3s, but they jacked around a couple of times to make it harder to download whole albums, at which point I stopped and won't buy on amazon anymore. I know currently it's pretty easy to download whole albums, but they torched my trust. On Bandcamp, I buy it. Not on Bandcamp, nope.
Qobuz has a pretty chill process too. I don't actually trust their servers that much, (or anyone server) so I download albums as soon as I bought them. What I wish for when downloading digitally is getting the booklet (or liner notes) of the albums. It's nice knowing who was involved in the project and the thoughts/story of the artists.
Guarantee you these are lots of bootlegs and other-region copies behind resold. So probably Amazon is worst for the artists because even the labels are getting cheated there.
>Bandcamp
As I understand it, this is (was?) one of the few places an artist could still get a good deal. Bandcamp positions itself more as a marketplace and takes (iirc) 16ish percent. Let me check that against their website:
Also, Bandcamp has "Bandcamp Fridays" (or similar name), where for the entire day, 100% goes to the artists.
I keep a list of music that I add to when I come across something I want to buy, then when the Bandcamp Friday comes around, buy everything on the list.
Not normally a big fan of the genre, but in case you missed it, there was the slightly proggy, slightly powery trad release last year that exploded in popularity (relative terms, 281 Bandcamp buys which is more than most of the music I buy :D) earlier this year:
Mother's Guilty Pleasure Part One by Noor
https://noorband.bandcamp.com/album/mothers-guilty-pleasure-...
When I was a teen I used to download all my stuff from torrent, or DDL sites. Before that it was Limewire and other P2P networks... These days, with a stable job, I've kind of gone into a weird redemption ark that sees me paying for music from all the bands I used to listed back then... I'm probably about 50% into my collection and I now buy a lot from Bandcamp, but also iTunes... I feel like I'm seeking absolution from the music industry, or something like that...
> I'm probably about 50% into my collection and I now buy a lot from Bandcamp, but also iTunes... I feel like I'm seeking absolution from the music industry, or something like that...
Go see those bands live and buy something from their merch table, they'll make a lot more money than if you just buy albums.
An artist only gets 85% off Bandcamp if they don't have a label. If they're on a label they're making a small portion of that 85%.
I got the impression the stuff the GP was buying was not a bunch of independent small artists that only have a Bandcamp page and no label. Ticket and merch sales are likely to make a label artist more than download sales. Ticket sales also help get artists more gigs. Bands tour because they make more money than if they only tried to sell records (in any medium).
Ticket sales for bands I talked to rarely even make up the costs of the gig. Especially if they aren’t the main act with a decent fan base. Merch is what brings in some more money.
But depending on the band, touring can even just be for the fun of it, where break-even is a victory. And then there’s the whole pay-2-play, where you get nothing of the tickets, and instead pay to be support.
It’s really not as simple or homogenous as people make it seem.
Seeking absolution from the music industry?!? From those exploitative bloodsucking parasites?! Pardon my French but fuck the music industry. Do you know that, here in France, when you buy ANY hardware that can potentially store digital music (a hard drive, a USB key, an mobile phone, whatever) you pay a tax that goes to the fucktards of the music industry? Today, in 2024, when pretty much everybody turned to streaming. Yep. I sincerely hope they all end up unemployed.
I vividly remember the moment when I turned on them: as soon as I started to have income during the 90's I used it on music. I was buying at least 5 or 6 CDs a week, I was tracking new releases obsessively and was making it a principle to pay for music. When MP3 exploded I started to encode the music I was buying, because that's pretty much how and where I was listening to it: on my various devices. But when the music industry started to feel the heat from the Napster and Limewire alike they reacted in the stupidest possible way: being user hostile and considering their own clients as potential thieves. The various copy protection systems they came up with started to be annoying but the nail in the coffin for me was a Jay Jay Johanson album that I simply could not play on any of my devices because of this. I gave them the middle finger and started to download, right this moment, without remorse. I only came back to paying when streaming started to be easier and better than downloading.
The music industry is mostly just disgusting pigs only worthy of contempt and disdain.
They're not a monolith. If they're purchasing from Bandcamp artists, then they aren't affiliated with the RIAA anyway. The middle man is slimmer in the music underground. For the larger "industry", artists also seem to benefit more from concerts.
Mhmm. Yeah, johnny guitar is totally capable of figuring out distribution, licensing, copyright, tour planning, venue booking and insurance, lining up sound and light production, logistics, staff management, feeding the crew, budgeting, marketing, etc, all on their own. Anyone with any talent understands how important that entire framework is and how it's literally impossible for even a small team to do. The people who bitch about this are just not making music anyone wants to hear 99% of the time so they blame "the industry".
I can relate, and I think this is a great sentiment. Buying a Spotify subscription was enough to ease my personal feelings of guilt though (and subscriptions to some video streaming services like Prime). This way I give back to the artist community as a whole rather then a specific artist I may have cheated in the past. Plus, I get a ton of new content.
Ironically as Paramount+ is unavailable where I live I'll have to pirate this documentary.
Streaming music services are not perfect but at least for the most part I can move service and not lose access to the bands I enjoy listening to, whereas for video media the content is unique to the service. With the massive differences between music & video content financing & production costs, I wonder if there will ever be a consolidation to common video streaming services. E.g. you watch on Netflix or Paramount and the production company gets paid regardless.
"the algorithm" has got to be a tough one though. You can't recommend very many bad fits for the user before they will stop using it, and unknown/lesser known songs are a huge gamble.
I badly want an algorithm that I can say, "Find me artists that sounds like <example-song> that have less than 1,000 subcribers (or whatever metric)" but I can understand why they don't do that (because there are very, very few people like me out there). It sucks.
I don't know if they still have it, but the AI playlist builder on Spotify could do stuff like that. If you play a regular playlist on Spotify called Reggae or Rare Reggae or obscure Reggae you can bet your life it has a few Bob Marley tracks on it. The AI thingummy was able to restrict to less popular artists only.
Old legacy acts account for a significant proportion of streaming revenue. I don't know the revenue numbers but you can get an idea of an artist's popularity from the Monthly Listeners metric on Spotify. I would hazard a guess and assert that most of the middle ranking artists that make up the rump of streaming listens (with monthly Spotify listeners over 1 million) are legacy acts.
A random example: Dan Fogelberg achieved some success 40 - 50 years ago, his style of soft singer songwriter has very little relevance today and yet he is getting 1.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
It's really hard for contemporary artists to get to 1 million Spotify listeners even if they are critically-lauded. For example, here are some artists from the top of the Album Of The Year aggregate list of lists of the best albums of 2023 [0], together with their monthly listeners on Spotify. In other words these artists' albums were widely viewed by critics as among the best albums of 2023.
Sure, critical acclaim does not equal commercial success, but these numbers highlight how hard it can be to break through even if you are really good.
And with the already massive catalog of recorded music swelling further and further every year the outlook for new artists is scary.
The massive choice and availability of music on streaming platforms is absolutely fantastic for music lovers but the competitive environment for contemporary artists is one where they are trying to find and grow an audience in a massive glut of content. It's hard, and very different from the old music biz.
I came across a new artist yesterday, NIKK has just 112 monthly Spotify listeners at this time, and their debut album is really great! Described as "ambient glitchpop soundscapes" give it a listen!
> What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.
I mean, if you look back before radio, the amount of money artists made from recordings was $0 (Okay, maybe some money off of sheet music or player piano sheets).
So in the grand scheme of human history, the primary income of musicians has been from their performances. That was true before recordings, and that is true again now. For a weird blip there was a cartel propping up the value of their recordings (of which the industry profited more than musicians). But this isn't a collapse of anything more than it's a regression to the mean - the marginal value of a copy of something approaches to 0 over time.
When you hear about artists complaining about royalties from streaming, it was a very, very, very elite group of musicians who ever made money just from dropping albums. You are only hearing from the winners of the Label system. Most bands ended up "owing" money to their record labels.
(The way record deals worked, you got paid an advance for songs/albums. But you only kept ~10% of album sales. From which you had to pay back your advance + recording expenses + marketing costs.)
Music distribution, as well as other worldly matters, cost money.
It was also a strongly gate-kept industry, while this isn't the case anymore.
The main reason for gate-keeping is supposedly to "keep the financial equation fair for everybody".
The problem is nobody knows most of the parameter in the equation, not even the gate-keepers themselves.
Why? Because the basis for how payments should be done, the mythical "play", is gamed by bot networks.
The bot networks are used by small and big artists.
Officially, the gate-keepers (Spotify) do not releases official numbers of real data, officially to not give better tools to the bad guys (bot networks).
Of course, we know how well security by obscurity works, and it makes everyone dependent on trusting the gate-keeper, now Spotify rather than the music labels.
Another point is while the revolution in the distribution model happened, another one happened which is that the gate-keeping essentially disappeared.
In any case, the industry has embraced that through for example DistroKid being targeted at making a small revenue from any aspiring musician without any musical barrier. Note that Spotify has shares in Distrokid, even though they have pinky-sweared this special relationship does not give either to Spotify nor Distrokid any advantage regarding access to data from other involved third parties (other marketplaces, labels, etc).
To round it up, even if the parameters of the financial equations are partly released, the creative industry is known for its "creative accounting" (also known as Hollywood accounting).
The creative accounting lets the industry take advantage of the tax breaks that are offered to the music industry in basically all countries on some conditions, and stretch these conditions to situations that the spirit of the law normally excludes.
There is another incentive to lie about the numbers. It gives the possibility to undercut any viable competition to consolidate a monopoly (the Amazon method).
I believe that the only thing that can really improve the situation is way more transparency than we have.
The complaints from musicians are often unrealistic, but it is not their fault as they cannot have a realistic view of what things really cost.
So all they have is to try to strengthen their side in the tug of war.
Ideally we would move away from that process towards a cooperative model, but this is possible only through trust, which cannot be obtained by obscurity.
Surely this is glossing over the fact that the reason money is being made from streams is due to adverts, and that the same people who would pirate music back in the day are a subset of the people who block ads.
As Steve Albino taught countless indie bands how to make money in the music industry, give away the music to get bookings for a tour and sets, the same thing happens with the movie theatres. You cannot earn anything from the content, you'll only earn from selling soda and popcorn.
This author manages to say nothing about this well-known phenomenon. Maybe the NYT also just writes brainless LLM articles now?
That's partially true. Albini also called out Ticket Master, as well as Taylor Swift. You can still find independent venues, and sell tickets not via the ticket master mafia. Or if you are as big as Taylor even bypass the movie studios which are an even bigger mafia than ticket master.
