Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok • Hacker News Board

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#71

Post by winternett » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 4:19 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #35

Interestingly, labels playing games about releasing albums is an old trick for various old reasons too. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/apr/15/arti... https://www.buzzfeed.com/azafar/what-happens-when-your-favor... for a couple old references A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs. But this "record industry is committing suicide"…

The only way to break ground is to promote the music of others that "magically" trends on TikTok non-stop.

I joined because I wanted to figure out how it worked and luckily I have been able to mostly resist the addictiveness of it by manipulating search on YouTube to find the content deeply buried on that platform.

As a label runner myself. it quickly becomes apparent that TikTok is gamified, and it really only cares about promoted content, and everyone is at the mercy of the 5 seconds of fame rule. Even people who do go viral get exhausted by the content consumption factor of the platform, but the truth is that TikTok is just the most recent and updated iteration of the social media model that really does not work for new music discovery.

Listeners, the people that actually buy music are too used to playlist culture now, no one goes searching for music because of the sheer tediousness of the process, and when any music, even total drivel is played repetitively to people, it simply ends up selling.

These platforms are a distraction from our lack of choice and individualism, and it also highlights a time when being a successful independent entrepreneur is totally under threat because not only can you be let down by the illusion that success is possible on these platforms, you can also waste lots of money on ads that don't work for much other than generating bot stats, and years of fruitless promotional work on these platforms through the opportunity they promote as "being possible". These platform timelines are focused on single posts you make, they have no interest in allowing people to follow up on your music, and they do absolutely nothing to help listeners to find your music, the work is all on us... The process from scratch every time a new platform rises is excruciating when you don't pay a lot for shortcuts, and those "shortcuts" are what skews every stat you see on platforms.

That being said, I mostly go "viral" for the memes I post over our actual music videos... It's allowed me to polish my video production skills and I do get slightly more music sales than the old days of selling CDs out of my trunk.

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#72

Post by winternett » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 4:31 AM UTC

qgin wrote: post #43

scarface74 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A popular “musician” is just a front person for an entire organization of producers, videographers, lawyers, promoters, that can get you into venues, choreographers etc. It still takes a lot to produce a hit and the money is still made from concerts https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-...

I can imagine a lot more stories like the one of Billie Eilish and Finneas producing her first album at home... > This is no humblebrag bedroom studio that turns out to have been professionally outfitted. It’s just a regular bedroom, with a bed against one wall, where Eilish sat to record her vocals, facing a desk and bookshelves and O’Connell’s modest production setup: Apple Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 i…

On social media, the common story is bedroom producer because it is so easy for a major entity to promote anyone they want to stardom with a solid budget behind them.

Many of the most popular influencers on social media are corporately backed with songwriters and million dollar production units behind the bedroom cameras. You can usually only tell this when you search BMI and see how many songwriters and engineers names are listed on hit songs.

The hit making "bedroom producer" with 50k+ followers is now mostly smoke and mirrors...

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#73

Post by jay_kyburz » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 4:37 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #68

jay_kyburz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the indie video game world, you can work on your game for a few years, then once its done, tested and polished, a publisher will want 30% for doing a few months of organizing the release. They value their time at perhaps 1000 times more valuable that your own. Its outrageous.

They spend 1,000 times more than you to build out a network. 30% is lower than what Walmart would charge you if you were lucky enough to get listed. Most people raise prices to cover these and advertising costs. If you tried to replicate that network the time/effort would outweigh the costs. Spending years on an indie game was never going to be that profitable. I hope you build the game for other reasons aside from p…

err.. no they don't. An indie publisher is typically one or two marketing dudes sitting in an office somewhere and pretty good at writing press releases. Walmart is a massive retail chain with.. like.. millions of employees and like.. thousands of brick and mortar stores.

Oh, perhaps you thought I was talking about the platforms like Apple, Google, Steam and the like. I don't begrudge them their 30%

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#74

Post by vlunkr » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 4:38 AM UTC

kromem wrote: post #59

majormajor wrote: post #35

Interestingly, labels playing games about releasing albums is an old trick for various old reasons too. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/apr/15/arti... https://www.buzzfeed.com/azafar/what-happens-when-your-favor... for a couple old references A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs. But this "record industry is committing suicide"…

It's not committing suicide - it's just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them. When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over. We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's sympho…

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I don't believe this will happen, and unless I'm mistaken, there's absolutely 0 evidence for it. People are usually attached to the artist when it comes to music. You buy a Bowie album because it has his name on it. You learn about them, look forward to their future work, maybe go see them live, etc.

Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#75

Post by winternett » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

kromem wrote: post #59

majormajor wrote: post #35

Interestingly, labels playing games about releasing albums is an old trick for various old reasons too. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/apr/15/arti... https://www.buzzfeed.com/azafar/what-happens-when-your-favor... for a couple old references A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs. But this "record industry is committing suicide"…

It's not committing suicide - it's just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them. When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over. We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's sympho…

The recording industry is notorious for pay for play schemes.

The Internet leveled the playing field for many years.

The industry has found that social media's dominance allows them the opportunity to distract independent artists from releasing their own quality music and also distract the public from hearing indie music through the illusion that social media helps them to be seen more.

The real question that anyone who works on these platforms needs to ask themself is "Is the platform really helping me?"

The only way they help people now is if you choose promoted ads, and it takes a ton of money for an unaffiliated indie label to break into their main feed on each single post, and that's true for any of the platforms that facilitate sponsored ads.

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#76

Post by HKH2 » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 4:54 AM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #74

kromem wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not committing suicide - it's just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them. When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over. We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's sympho…

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I don't believe this will happen, and unless I'm mistaken, there's absolutely 0 evidence for it. People are usually attached to the artist when it comes to music. You buy a Bowie album because it has his name on it. You learn about them, look forward to their future work, maybe go see them live, etc. Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?

The next generations will follow pseudo-Bowie, because David Bowie is for old people.

edit: I'm imagining what they would say. I'm not here to offend Bowie fans.

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#77

Post by winternett » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:19 AM UTC

throwaway_1928 wrote: post #57

notyourwork wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its only dragging on because record labels have some of these mega mainstream artists by the balls. As contracts die, as we see more independents rise to the top mainstream record labels will die. It's just going to be slow like cable companies. Inevitable but undoubtedly.

If artists negotiated like Drake, record labels would face a bleak future. https://musically.com/2020/07/20/steve-stoute-if-drake-goes-...

That video is advertising a digital distribution service which is owned by a well known record label exec.

The sales figures are quite exaggerated... 99% of artists never sell anywhere near the volume that Drake does.

I think it's important for artists to call out and quit pushing the mostly false profit models that the industry keeps pushing to put artists on a pedestal and to keep artists worshiping the big music industry machine.

If Russ was making $1m a week, he would not be doing self-produced promotional videos and tiktok posts about how to succeed in music. Even $1m a week for a well known music artist is not realistic in a good economy when Spotify only pays a fraction of a penny per play.

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#78

Post by latchkey » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:21 AM UTC

ericwaller wrote: post #41

latchkey wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Eric. I'm pretty intimately familiar with the whole industry. I once owned a small (~2k person) club / live music / multiuse venue in San Francisco as well as built a ticketing SaSS for USCF (us cycling federation) sanctioned events. From the club days, I got subtly screwed by Clear Channel on an event once and it really left a bad taste in my mouth. From the cycling ticket stuff, I got to deal with another ty…

Very cool (well, not the getting screwed part). Most of my experience so far is on the sports side, with music exposure being more indirect. It's amazing how many ticketing systems of various forms have been built over the years. It seems like one of those things that should be simple, but there are just so many ways to slice it.

The UX for setting up events and selling tickets was some of the most complicated stuff I've ever built. The logic is extremely domain specific and difficult to implement. Good work.

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#79

Post by pavo-etc » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:21 AM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #74

kromem wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not committing suicide - it's just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them. When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over. We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's sympho…

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I don't believe this will happen, and unless I'm mistaken, there's absolutely 0 evidence for it. People are usually attached to the artist when it comes to music. You buy a Bowie album because it has his name on it. You learn about them, look forward to their future work, maybe go see them live, etc. Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?

Counterpoint: Hatsune Miku

Re: Record labels dig their own grave, and the shovel is called TikTok

#80

Post by Manheim » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:30 AM UTC

Even though TikTok is a new platform the phenomena this article describe isn't new. It can also be attributed to other publisher industries than music, i.e. book publishing.

Imagine you where a startup and you go to a VC. The VC tells you that they want to invest. However, they want full ownership of your IP, they want their investment money repaid by taking 100% of your startup's earnings before the company can use any profits (read; It must be entered as an expense in the accounts), and you are not allowed to take out any personal salery until they have their money back. After they have gotten their initial investment money repaid, they want 85% of all profits forever. In return they will maybe try - and this is important - they will MAYBE try to help you succeed. Basically you must accept that you need to do all the lifting, not only the heavy lifting but all lifting.

Would you take their investment money? Probably not. These terms are ridiculous. But artists, writers and other creative producers of their own content have had to live with these kind of terms since forever. The reason has been that the publishers controll the market. They own or control the distribution, and they have the market budgets and connections (often even ownership) to get access to media, whether it is the radio or TV shows that promote your content through talk shows and airplay, or it is the magazines that write about you and your product. Almost no content on the commercial media platforms are there by chance or because an editor found them interesting. It's a market in play.

We might think (and maybe hope) that social media and different self publishing platforms will change this, but the market and industry has gone from too little distribution to too much distribution. There is so much content put out into the market every day that it it is next to impossible to get enough attention to your product. On top of this the attention span on platforms like TikTok is very short. Warhols' 15 minutes is today 15 seconds.

I do not believe we will see the end of publishers like record labels. We will see a shift in their role, and maybe in power distribution among the different players in the market. However, so far it seems like it is the media companies that take all the profit nowadays. Spotify is an excellent example of this, but also "older platforms" like YouTube.