A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song • Hacker News Board

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#151

Post by mrmonkeyman » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

jrs95 wrote: post #145

tomrod wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feudalism is one of the standard memes of history, as per David Brin.[1] The essay is well worth reading, as well as the thesis that a new meme ("otherness") arose within Western Liberalism. In my mind Otherness is a saddle point, and worth investing in to protect.[2] [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Western Liberalism increasingly seems to just be a system by which you establish global feudalism. I guess it's good for a few generations. Hard to argue it's even good now though because even though we're wealthier than ever we're increasingly unhappy and mentally ill.

Speak for yourself.

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#152

Post by wolco » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #142

neilwilson wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need about 1% of people to grow the food and perhaps 9% of the people to make stuff we need. The other 90% then have to convince the 10% that do the actual work that they are worth the time to produce a surplus for. IP barriers are one way of doing that. Even farmers like pop songs.

That assumes the amount each individual person "works" remains the same. Why not full-time employment at 15 hours a week, with 30% of people making stuff we need? Most of our efficiency gains are presently being funneled into a glut of overproduction of nonsensical "goods" (eg overfinancialization and overadministration) rather than direct quality of life improvements of everyone being able to work less.

Why not 4% with robots handling the rest?

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#153

Post by lordnacho » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #83

From one perspective, this looks like economically useless activity. And it could be. But it isn't necessarily so. Historically, content creation and distribution were bundled. Distribution further bundled the content per se and performances. This was all an artefact of the up-front cost of manufacturing and distributing physical media. With digitization, there is no reason a content creator shouldn't be able to esse…

Yes, financially this is similar to being good at picking credits. Some firms will default, some will not. Buy the ones that won't. Or another related analogy is convertibles, which are a sort of bundle package that is separable. That's not an economically useless activity at all.

The big question though is why does he think he'll be better at this than others? Or rather, for his investors, why will it be better after his fees?

He's got a first mover advantage by the looks of it. It takes some balls to buy a team with music experience to do this new thing. Of course you have the issue that some other guy will just do the same and compete with you, just like umpteen financial businesses (eg Private Equity).

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#154

Post by lordnacho » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #8

I wonder why this guy thinks that the rights to a successful song are an "uncorrelated" asset. Wouldn't strong economic growth mean that people are far more likely to spend money on these things? Especially for 'sync' rights which mostly come up for things like ads, or derivative mass-marketed media (e.g. successful song X ends up in the soundtrack of movie Y)? Just seemed like a weird claim to me.

He really means "less correlated". Just about everything is glued to interest rates and the general economy.

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#155

Post by wolco » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #129

jedberg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet when you see a car commercial they use an old song. You’re not accounting for the value of nostalgia and cultural significance.

In many cases, old songs are used precisely because they are cheaper to license.

Old songs have greater surface. Many more people have heard it over something popular today which 20% might have heard of. New music is usually much cheaper. Even within the same artist. Would you lic. Bieber's Baby, baby O or something new. More extreme example would you lic gangnam style or anything newer by that artist?

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#156

Post by wiseleo » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

It will be industry-wide game over when they grab Max Martin and Lukasz Gottwald https://nypost.com/2015/10/04/your-favorite-song-on-the-radi...

I think the goal is to launch the next ASCAP/BMI/SESAC and basically charge astronomical rates for songs people want to hear. Songwriters will love it and artists will have no choice.

This is pretty much a confirmation: "Along with owning a bigger chunk of the publishing market, he wants to continue altering it. He’s considering launching a songwriter’s union, something akin to the Screenwriters Guild, that would give songwriters more leverage to extract better deals from the industry’s power brokers."

It's a public company. I might want to buy some stock in it when I can.

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#157

Post by m0zg » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:19 PM UTC

I hope he succeeds and makes "every pop song" so expensive to license that pop music just dies a natural death, yielding way to musicians who can actually play instruments and singers who can actually sing. The current situation is kind of absurd.

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#158

Post by imtringued » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #44

jahewson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the things you do have to be world-class all-time greats in order to be worth doing?

If they are accessible, then yes, and I don’t see why that would be controversial. Normally enjoyment of the art making process for amateurs is just that, enjoyment of the process . If I want to enjoy literature, I’ll read the work of professional writers. If I want to enjoy the task of writing, I’ll write myself. For most people, art making as a hobby is occasional, simply by the time & resource limits of regular jo…

>If they are accessible, then yes, and I don’t see why that would be controversial.

The simple answer is that it completely ignores how the world works. Things don't decide to be world class. They are labeled world class after they have existed and were compared with other things that are not world class. If you decide to remove the non world class things from the ranking (because they were not worth doing) you will realize that the number of non world class things has increased.

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#159

Post by hakfoo » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #63

decasia wrote: post #15

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…

Who is buying music? On the whole don't people either stream it or look it up on Youtube?

A compact disc is, for practical purposes, indestructible under normal use (compared to vinyl and tape, which degrade in playback) Rip it lossless and use good backup discipline, even more so.

It's never going to say "our business model requires you pay 20% more to keep listening to me", or "we're going to stop working on your favourite playback device because we changed the DRM and expect you to buy a new one."

No service-based model can match those claims.

Re: A Man Who’s Spending $1B to Own Every Pop Song

#160

Post by jariel » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

loso wrote: post #128

NOGDP wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think pop songs are a depreciating asset since new ones can be pumped out rather quickly like out of a factory.

When you hit 40 you start to see in real time how valuable those old songs are. Your friends and other people in your age group hate the new music so they only listen to music from when they were young. All of the commercials play music you thought would never be used in a commercial. Walking through the grocery store or waiting in an elevator you start to bop your head because one of your favorite songs from high sc…

"Your friends and other people in your age group hate the new music so they only listen to music from when they were young."

Young people hate a lot of music made these days and listen to older music. It's not just a 'when I was young' thing anymore.

There's something very profound that comes from artists who make music, as opposed to a producer who makes some licks, a mediocre singer who belts it out, and a label that brands it.

When the brand/hype/marketing of the 'current flavour' dies down, what is left?

Music older than 4 years has to compete on its own merits, and most of it is forgotten, the better stuff hangs around.

Because music is ever more produced and less created, a lot of the stock today just stand the test of time.

When I was young you'd hear 50's music in the grocery store. Now you hear 80's music. But I think in 30 years we're still going to hear a lot of 80's music (and 60's, 70's and other eras) but the ratio of 'recently contemporary' to older music will be a lot lower.