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

#241

Post by chipotle_coyote » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #201

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

While this is probably an Unpopular Opinion™, I think the heart of the problem is ultimately that streaming services undercharge. There's no objective reason to believe that their current price is correct, and the fact that Spotify loses money while artists think they're being underpaid seems to strongly suggest that the price is too low. But consumers now believe that $10/month -- less than the price that a single CD generally is, even on Amazon -- is the Objectively Correct Price, and everyone is stuck.

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

#242

Post by coldtea » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:23 PM 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…

>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".

Whether that is "the way it should be" or not, depends on what we want it to be as a society.

Not to whether some technology helps it or not. Untraceable murder could be very easy tomorrow with some new technology, but we'd still not want it to happen.

So the part that "artificial scarcity" helped musicians make money off of their art, is a historical and technological accident.

But whether artists should be able to make money off of their art (scarcity be damned) is an ethical and "what kind of society we want" question.

We shouldn't abandon our "oughts" at the first sign of some technology working against them.

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

#243

Post by coldtea » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:27 PM 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…

>The predictable outcome is that you'll get mediocre unsatisfying art that leaves everyone involved feeling like something vital is missing - which is more or less where we are no

On the other hand, modern, professionally produced, top-10, high grossing music, from the few millionaire "division of labor" artists, also leaves me "feeling like something vital is missing", so there's that...

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

#244

Post by coldtea » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 9:30 PM 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…

>You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians, financial experts, sports, or software developers.

I would, probably.

Sports were better when it was amateurs, and scientists were better, more independent, and less corrupt, when they were independently wealthy people or at least tenured academics... (80% of modern science and technology that changed the world came from those people -- for the last 50 years or so, we just got incremental, evolutionary, updates in the 20% rest of the rest).

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

#245

Post by musicale » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 4:22 AM UTC

Someone should come up with a system where concert tickets could be sold and some of the money could be paid to the performers.

It could work similarly to the way stage actors are paid.

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

#246

Post by musicale » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 4:31 AM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #8

> However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing. Human hearing only goes up to 20 kHz when you are young, dropping to about 12 kHz at the age of 50. 44 kHz sampling gives a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, easily encompassing the full range of human hearing. Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in th…

Well-mastered CDs sound fantastic - no hiss and amazing dynamic range.

I like tape artifacts such as saturation, hiss, wow/flutter, distortion, etc. as much as the next person. I even like the "sound" of cassettes. But CDs are vastly superior in terms of accurately reproducing audio signals.

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

#247

Post by ionwake » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 10:47 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…

This is great insightful comment, thank you.

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

#248

Post by jimrhods23 » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #114

jimrhods23 wrote: post #111

It's the same reason why journalists and whole host of other content creators are no longer making a living: There is so much out there for free, most people don't perceive it as having value anymore. This is why music piracy of the early 2000s hurt the industry: the individual artist wasn't necessarily losing money directly at the time, but it definitely made it difficult for all artists to make money 2 decades late…

>The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS. This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions. Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings? I think a big problem is the lack…

"Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings?"

Yes. I know plenty of independent artists before and after the Napster days and they could no longer make a living. People just expected it for free, because Napster changed the culture of music..which is the long-term danger of piracy.

It also made it so the only artists that could make a real living are forced to sign with a big label, because you now need an entire marketing department behind your music to compete with free.

Music is now used as free marketing to get people to go to a show...and you need to be signed with a giant label to play at any decent venue. Small artists don't have access to any of this.

"I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance"

These were always poorly paid gigs..and for good reason. There is no ROI for the restaurant/cafe, who are barely eking out a profit.

"This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions."

This IS true. Many software companies went to SaaS because it can't be shared for free and the cost of server space/hosting is now very cheap. I should know, I was involved in many meetings with business owners that did just this.

So the unintended consequences of over a decade of software/music piracy is pushing all of the independent artists out of a living and we now need to pay a monthly fee for software instead of being able to purchase it outright.