A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music • Hacker News Board

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#201

Post by Kalium » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:02 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #194

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right -- I think the reason this is so contentious is that the market for recorded music didn't collapse, to the degree it did, due to lack of demand; it collapsed due to the marginal cost of reproduction dropping to effectively nothing. I'm not making a moral argument here, lest market libertarians prepare to jump -- I'm not saying the market as it existed should have been propped up artificially. I'm just ma…

Spotify could pay far more for each stream than it does. But it chooses not to, and the money mysteriously disappears into the bank accounts of the management team, assorted investors and Spotify's owners - which include the major record companies. The arts publishing/management/distribution businesses have always been about relentlessly screwing value out of creators, usually by leveraging differences in political a…

You're absolutely right! Spotify could pay far more per stream than it does.

Spotify currently spends 79% of its revenues on royalties. How much more do you think they should spend?

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#202

Post by 3xblah » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:29 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

The emergence of "music industry" has probably resulted in higher quantity of music but also more lower quality music.

Touring is not easy work. It stands to reason that "love of doing" is still a primary motivation.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#203

Post by blensor » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:33 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #188

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money. It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. So why is it fine to apply it to an art? The predictable outcome is that you'll…

Isn't this a natural way that scarcity comes back. If everything thar is produced is unsatisfying then someone will be willing to pay more to get something better. When someone finds a good way to sell that premium model then others will try to imitate it and after a while the value will drop again until someone finds the next way to do increase the value and so on and so forth.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#204

Post by Proven » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

[dead]

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#205

Post by usrusr » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:40 AM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #29

skookumchuck wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of artisans getting wealthy before the 20th century.

"Wealthy" is a different goalpost than "doing art/music for money". But even then, artisans in antiquity definitely reached middle classes. (And it's plausible to assume that at least a few individuals were wealthier or converted their artisanship into a bigger merchant operation.)

Sure, but isn't wealthy the undertone that goes into all these laments that music does not pay anymore? (the original doesn't seems much like a lament though, I read it more like a counter to those laments)

The whole "Let your creative juices flow, somehow gain access to recording equipment and distribution, have a hit record, be made for life", that's mostly over it seems. But it hasn't been with us for that long to begin with. Except for those brief few decades of industrial recording, getting paid for music has always been hard. Depending on economical overall productivity (excess food for entertainment specialists), maybe some or even a relatively high number of musicians would get paid, but hardly ever (or more likely "never"?) so much that their incomes would be envied by productive middle class, including artisans in decorative fields. Remember that before recording (well, before printed scores), music was entirely transient, whereas the products of artisans would routinely be investments in intergenerational status.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#206

Post by xvVY » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:41 AM UTC

Ace17 wrote: post #196

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money. It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. So why is it fine to apply it to an art? The predictable outcome is that you'll…

> It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. I suspect the "bad" argument is actually compatible with division of talent and labour. Could you explain the link between this division and income? > You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. > So why is it fine to ap…

People are not pirating "some" art, the generally pirate the best art available.

The best art has always been produced by professionals and not by some YouTube narcissists who think they're God's gift to this world.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#207

Post by jhbadger » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:58 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #188

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money. It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. So why is it fine to apply it to an art? The predictable outcome is that you'll…

Well, until the 20th century, the modern way of funding science (by competitive grant proposals to funding agencies) didn't exist. Scientists were to a large part just doing it for love of the subject as being a professional scientist just wasn't a thing. At best they could get a job as a professor, but that literally meant teaching back then; if they wanted to do research, they had it do it on their own and pay for it themselves. And the best scientists of the era like Darwin and Lord Rayleigh were from the idle rich who never needed a paying job at all so they could devote themselves full time to science. It didn't work that badly -- except of course that the number of scientists was tiny compared to now.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#208

Post by NeedMoreTea » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:33 AM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #129

Ok, so further down in the comments there is this: > Superficially there is some sense - the higher frequency signals are rendered less and less accurately, and nearer a binary on-off. Who knows what nuance and harmonics may be lost affecting what's heard at lower frequencies. It's true that at a given sampling rate, if you choose a sine wave with a frequency right below Nyquist it is composed of fewer samples per pe…

No idea of the technicals, other than sampling at double the audible frequency does- to this layman - seem logical it would give you a wave more diverged from reality as frequency increases - and at the absurd extreme a 22khz (inaudible to most) square wave if sampling at 44, 4 points to represent 11k etc. I don't see how it can be otherwise, just as interpolating and anti aliasing is often right but cannot always correctly insert missing pixels - see the attempts to use AI to make hires versions of Mario and other 8 bit assets, some work, many don't. It was only an idle conjecture after the main point, which was meant to be about mastering, so I'll expand that a little.

One of the places I worked at in the 90s was connected with a well known recording studio. We got to blind demo from master tapes how their latest attempts at going digital were going compared to analogue a few times. At least a couple with whatever graphs they'd measured. 25-30 years later, I don't have much recollection of the how or what. Aurally, it wasn't something subtle to listen out carefully for, flaws were plain, therefore memorable. Surprising in the era of digital and CD growth and their supposed "perfect" sound forever, and DDD being marketed as always preferable to ADD or AAD. Not so surprising when you realise it was the era of all ADCs and DACs at any cost being shit.

By the time I left, analogue mastering was still preferred by the engineers and still the studio's first choice for albums they recorded. Can't explain that technically either, though they clearly thought, and could demonstrate analogue was still doing a measurably better job. Were they misunderstanding? shrug.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#209

Post by tomcam » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:53 AM UTC

mamon wrote: post #127

tomcam wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it Um, no. I say this as a holder of season tickets to the opera and as a trained operatic tenor myself. Many, many pop singers are incredibly good and far outstrip the skills of most barroom singers I have experienced.

It's not that pop singers aren't talented. It's just that pop music as a genre is pretty much boring, and the artists that appear every season, or every "America's got talent" edition, they all are easily forgettable. You could switch covers and sell Selena Gomez album as Ariana Grande album and noone would even notice the difference. Pop music is a commodity, and as any commodity it's pricing/value is basically a ra…

That’s not the point GP made. Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande have roughly similar genres but Ariana is a musical titan who can famously sing in any style she chooses.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#210

Post by distances » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #71

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stuff again. I have several friends who are convinced that a $2,000 HDMI cable can produce "better" audio and video. I've grown so tired of these debates, that I just nod my head and move on when they start down these roads. Because of these arguments, I've been saving articles about them when I run across them. When I retire, I may make a web site devoted to debunking this nonsense forever. One good example was…

> it's just an EQ on the original recording I'll be pedantic and say that it's actually not just an EQ, but a non-linear compression function. The needle has a different frequency response at different amplitudes, due to its mechanical properties. They used to master music specifically for that, but now they just cut the Spotify master into the record and hope everyone attributes the sound differences to "analog warm…

Music got much more compressed in the 90s and 00s, to make radio and tiny speakers sound "better". I can imagine this may also be a big contributor to people preferring the old analog recordings.