61–70 of 245 posts
Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.
Seems that's the way society ended up being structured. Perhaps we will all end up selling houses to each other and no one will have to make anything at all! I swear, even the Aztecs had a less destructive system.
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I could also write my own novels and produce my own TV shows but they wouldn't be as good as what an Orwell or Sorkin could produce.
Sure. And the pleasure you would get out of this would depend in part on your skill in the relevant medium. But I think there's a significant difference: with music, as you play it, you are also experiencing ("consuming") it. And that's what also brings a lot of the pleasure to it. With writing and videography, meanwhile, the act of production is usually a lot more decoupled from the experience of consumption. I happ…
I perform Bach terribly. But I consume Bach wonderfully when I play. I call it “Listening to the music with my hands.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfENUjqz4bs
I have experienced this with many other physical activities. To ride a twisting descent engages your brain more deeply than to look at the same road or trail. To climb a boulder engages your brain more deeply than to look at the line.
Climbers pantomime the moves before climbing just as aerobatic pilots pantomime their routine before flying. Physical motion engages the brain a certain way that simply thinking, listening, or watching does not.
The pleasure of listening to music with your hands begins when you first make a single satisfying note happen. It is not necessary to be able to play what you would like to hear.
This new moment of marketization is interesting to observe from the sidelines. I'm a musician but I've never gotten paid for making music and don't want to be. This way, songwriting and playing music can remain something I do purely for the intrinsic joy of it. And it's not really so long ago that, if you wanted music in your house, you had to play it yourself. I have nothing against recorded music or professional mu…
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I could also write my own novels and produce my own TV shows but they wouldn't be as good as what an Orwell or Sorkin could produce.
Do the things you do have to be world-class all-time greats in order to be worth doing?
You and only you decide if a thing is worth doing. If you want to learn Mandarin, so what? You will probably never be a best-selling or critically acclaimed author of Mandarin books. You are unlikely to be the next star in a Mandarin-singing boy-or girl-band. You will not be a TV host reading the news in Mandarin.
What of it? Does learning even a little Mandarin give you pleasure? Do it!
It’s insane to judge everything in your life by whether you are going to be in the top one tenth of one percentile. That is a recipe for constant stress an unhappiness, for forever judging yourself by impossible standards and coming up short.
This is what's considered innovation. It's not innovative in that he's solving a problem but just an innovative way to try make more money.
This is finance. "Innovative" means it puts more money in a banker's pocket.
Essentially, the summary of this article is that this dude thinks he can leverage these song catalogs better than other investors. He's literally a music fund manager for music.
His firm is "overpaying" for these back catalogs because he's essentially putting together a collection that might command more revenue than other "fund" managers, and possibly set up something of a targeted monopoly, and he's betting that they can extract more value than less competent managers and record labels.
It wasn't directly addressed in the article but I suspect that the general strategy is to own the majority the sorts of songs that are more suitable for generating Synch fees. A big corporation is going to look around for a collection of songs that tend to do well in a TV commercial, for example. Perhaps they find that Hipgnosis happens to own all of them, and now they have to pay a higher rate, and all of a sudden the high price paid for this catalog doesn't seem like overpaying.
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What's to say he's not trying to provide an innovative service? It'd be interesting to be at least able to license most pop music from one place, not that this is an ideal way to get there. If he prices pop music out of the culture, then less popular music becomes a viable alternative.
> It'd be interesting to be at least able to license most pop music from one place Didn't Spotify do that already?
If you can license music for distribution or inclusion in TV/film scores from Spotify, I am not aware of that.
Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.
Not a bad idea. Finding avenues to rent-seek seems to be the winning strategy, especially with all the cash floating around looking for returns.
Seems that's the way society ended up being structured. Perhaps we will all end up selling houses to each other and no one will have to make anything at all! I swear, even the Aztecs had a less destructive system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How, exactly? I'm fairly certain most of a songs revenue is made by the first year. To go beyond that, you've got to get your song back in the public mind. Bass player with a 70s pop star who's still working and making music here.... I know that his hit songs still generate a significant amount of income for him (I'm not giving figures, but I would be more than happy if I had that much coming in for a full time inc…
That's kind of my point. Getting airplay and being in adverts helps keep his song in the public mind which generates income from the song. He may see it as passive income, but people are doing things to keep that income going. I'm also guessing he didn't start out eight figures in the hole by purchasing his songs from someone else.
He didn't start out 8 figures in the hole, but he has spent a LOT of time getting the money he was owed due to being ripped off by managers doing dodgy deals - every story he tells me is jaw-dropping and you just can't believe people would act like that, but they do. Repeatedly!