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

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

#231

Post by int_19h »

opportune wrote: post #119
netcan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a basic sense, that's what all wealth is. Income generating property. Debt produces interest. Company shares produce dividends Real estate earns rent. Capital produces revenue. It's all quite interchangeable. The most famous rant on this is Marx & Engel's manifesto. Chapter one explains how history works, making similar comparisons from their day to older days. The second chapter describes communism's aims. It's a…

A very large number of early economists railed on rentiership (Adam Smith, Herny George, of course Marx). With regard to intellectual property, "ownership" is effectively monopoly because nobody else has the right to produce the good. There might be "inferior" or replacements goods with pop music, but maybe not even that when it comes to things like patents. However I disagree with your assertion that wealth is incom…

With regard to any property, ownership is a monopoly or oligopoly, so long as more of identical or equivalent good cannot be easily produced. Ownership of land, or natural resources, is the same in that regard.

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

#232

Post by wahern »

doh wrote: post #168
wiseleo wrote: post #156

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 mar…

> 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. In US, for mechanical royalties, the rates are set by government. So yes, they could charge whatever they want for live and synch, but that would have much smaller impact on the general population.

I believe negotiated rates are often lower than compulsory rates, for a variety of reasons I couldn't begin to fully comprehend except in the abstract.

This may be less true in the digital streaming realm, but it's hard to tell through all the rhetoric.

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

#233

Post by neilwilson »

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.

That assumes fungibility and substitution. The reason we have 1% of people making the food is because that is the specialisation we can't eliminate by mechanisation and automated processes.

The "Spreading the unemployment" argument is a bit like saying we don't need all those violin players in the orchestra, just ship a few unemployed people in and give those violin players Thursday and Friday off.

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

#234

Post by hndamien »

speedplane wrote: post #207
anonytrary wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That we're somehow wealthier than ever is a great misconception... I think you'll find that there hasn't been much improvement. Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. The net worth of humanity has gone up. Significantly. We have more advanced technology than ever before. Whatever GDP is measuring probably doesn't con…

> Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. Those that argue we're no better off than we were 200 years ago are pretty unpersuasive these days. I'm more worried about the next 200 years though. It took several thousand years of civilization to create the industrial revolution, and that was quickly followed by the informat…

The problem is that the bill may come due for that rapid change due to how we achieved it.

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

#235

Post by anticodon »

narrator wrote: post #169
jrs95 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have a billion dollars in the U.S you can park it in treasuries and make millions and outsource the income generation to the government's tax collectors. Meanwhile, in China, the government just prints money electronically when they need it and billionaires have to be clever about where to park their billions to earn a decent return. That need to be clever contributes to creating useful capital that increases…

> Meanwhile, in China, the government just prints money electronically when they need it

The only country in the world that just prints money when they need it is USA. No other country can do it ­— it'll just cause hyperinflation. China is not an exception. They can't print US dollars. And if they would print more Yuan, it doesn't mean that China billionaires would be able to buy more houses in LA - the exchange rate of Yuan to dollar will simply drop and they will be able to buy exactly the same amount of goods in US as before.

USA can print almost unlimited amount of money because they control almost all the world and bend most of the governments to buy US treasuries. This is why there're US military bases in many countries and if some country decide to stop accepting US dollar for foreign trade, the next day it's invaded by US military.

Although many people predict that this uncontrollable printing of US dollar will cause US economy to collapse sooner or later. You simply can't do that forever.

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

#236

Post by sjwright »

lonelappde wrote: post #226
sjwright wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only mention Vulfpeck because they're at the pinnacle of their genre, not because they're the threshold. There's plenty of opportunity for anyone. Look at akageorge. (If you can—previously known as George Barnett, he seems to have reset his identity and thrown away much of his earlier material.) He's a self-evidently brilliant musician who can write and perform every part of a radio-ready hit. To the extent anyone…

That guy is talented, but those songs aren't radio-ready hits. In large part because the music/recording is nowhere near the major part of what makes a radio ready hit. Radio hits are the result of advertising and marketing, not music creation and production.

Expensive marketing is effective for established acts that already have an existing audience—whether that be international superstars like Coldplay or relative newcomers like London Grammar.

But it's also true that traditional marketing is becoming increasingly less relevant for new acts. New music discovery used to be driven by radio, media and advertising. Those gatekeepers are now being challenged by algorithms and social media—and there's no sign of that trend slowing down yet.

———

To my original point: making music is now an order of magnitude cheaper than it was just a few decades ago. And venues where an act to break out are more accessible than ever. I'm not saying the industry is now or ever will be perfectly egalitarian, but the distance travelled is monumental.

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

#237

Post by mindslight »

neilwilson wrote: post #233
mindslight wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That assumes fungibility and substitution. The reason we have 1% of people making the food is because that is the specialisation we can't eliminate by mechanisation and automated processes. The "Spreading the unemployment" argument is a bit like saying we don't need all those violin players in the orchestra, just ship a few unemployed people in and give those violin players Thursday and Friday off.

Sure, abstractly. But to continue the analogy - there is presently a glut of violin players and other musicians, and everyone currently making up the orchestras have no time to do anything else.

And yeah, the "best" orchestra is going to face an insatiable demand for their specific time, and likely enjoys performing as much as humanly possible. But these conditions are exceptional, rather than the situation faced by basically everybody else.

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

#238

Post by aguyfromnb »

wiseleo wrote: post #156

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 mar…

Fortunately,demand also plays a part in price setting, and simply charging astronomical prices is a sure way to increase piracy or open new markets.

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

#239

Post by perl4ever »

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…

There was a "classic rock" radio station playing in the store where I get my morning coffee, and it was playing the same songs as 25 years ago, from the 70s or 80s. By now shouldn't they be playing music from 1995-2005?

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

#240

Post by perl4ever »

jariel wrote: post #160
loso wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

"Now you hear 80's music."

I heard "Christmas" music in the grocery store that was some traditional song but done in a 90's grunge style.

But it does seem like you have to go out and find music from 2000-2015 these days.

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