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Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

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Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#251

Post by yetanother12345 »

CPLX wrote: post #34
bluefishinit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's kind of boring, there's no definition of better that everyone is going to agree on. I agree. Part of that is that economically successful music also isn't "better", it's just making money. I like Madonna but she's an objectively crap singer. Just because something is popular, it doesn't make it good. That's like saying Coke is the best drink in the world because it makes the most money. Commercial success…

> Commercial success is due to marketing, distribution and luck. But we're back here. I still disagree with this, it's a poor analysis of what's actually happening. In music, commercial success, more than any other factor, comes from making music that is liked by large numbers of people . If you can make music like that you'll probably have commercial success.

> if you build a better mouse trap...

...and from another post

> will bubble up...

Excuse me for being blunt but this is way too simplistic and the world does not work like that. Artists (= suppliers in over-crowded markets) don't just "get discovered". An artist has a job, and that job is definitely not marketing, sales, public relations, or really anything other than doing their thing.

If artists were left to their own devices they would happily rot in their basements, attics and/or garden sheds and die in anonymity. The (potential) audience needs some way to actually discover said artist _before_ they can even form an opinion on likes/dislikes. And, the market is over-saturated with extremely good artists, globally. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artists. Only, 99.999% plus is not known by anyone except perhaps their near social circle and/or relatives.

An artist without an agent or an agency* (proper marketing and networking etc) is just a random person with a creative hobby.

* added: Or patron

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#252

Post by dragonwriter »

tomcam wrote: post #60
dragonwriter wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UBI is a bane because it kills meritocracy. UBI enables meritocracy, it doesn’t kill it.

What if most people paying taxes now opt for UBI instead?

> What if most people paying taxes now opt for UBI instead?

Most people don’t settle for poverty level income if additional effort provides a better standard of living, and UBI increases the degree to which that is true compared to means-tested aid programs (which is why, under a different name, it was proposed as a right-libertarian alternative to such programs long before becoming popular on the left.)

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#253

Post by colanderman »

verve_rat wrote: post #232
aidenn0 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see a list of jobs for which: 1. We generally value as a society 2. Two people both working the job and married to each other cannot afford to raise two children. There are some jobs which we romanticize as being this way (musicians and other artists being a big example), but are we okay with e.g. social workers all either starving, or from wealthy backgrounds?

Garbage people. Aside: what is the gender neutral term for Garbage Man? Garbage people sounds like I'm disparaging them.

Sanitation workers

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#254

Post by bagacrap »

JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote: post #217
shtopointo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came in here to mention something similar. Seems wishful thinking that New York would owe something to anybody that grew up there. If anything, growing up there should give you the opportunity to have a network already, that would be a local's leg up... from kids you grew up with, to people you practiced music with etc. This might also be a case of a naive perspective from Billy thinking that the work is all that mat…

You seem to have missed the blogger's point, which is that NYC is in the process of locking out the entire class of artists to which the young musician belongs. A one in a million musician with superior networking skill, or unbelievable good looks, or luck, or whatever, may start making bank and secure his place in the city. That's not the point. The blogger's point is that the game is rigged to the point where if yo…

No, you are missing the point of this comment thread, which is that this Billy has no more right to live this dream than Billy from Orlando.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#255

Post by bagacrap »

chmod600 wrote: post #239

I don’t see what “the game is rigged” adds to an otherwise positive message, let alone why it comes first. Why is it somehow bad that musicians need a day job? There are a lot of aspiring musicians out there compared to the audiences waiting for them to perform. A day job is a quite reasonable way to make sure they contribute something to society while we’re waiting to see if they are truly talented or not. Would we…

Indeed. Many kids aspire to join the NBA. That's a kind of art, isn't it? Yet I think society collapses if we let every one of these kids off from contributing to sustaining it.

At least until the robots and AI take the wheel.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#256

Post by bruce511 »

saagarjha wrote: post #58
bruce511 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music is a commodity. There's already more music available to let my playlist run for years without repeats. Plus it's never been easier for folk to create, and publish, new music. With endless supply comes diminishing unit value. So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anythi…

What about this does not apply to software, or any other highly paid profession?

Some highly paid professions are likely safe. Think Doctor. Basicically they're a commodity [1] but we kinda like having them around and (cruicially) their work doesn't scale.

Frankly, at some level, software is already a commodity. Some markets have matured and it's increasingly unlikely you'll make a living there[2]. I needed a compass app on my phone the other day, there are a million to choose from, they're all free, and there's no way to differentiate one app that shows North from another.

We are currently in the phase of new platforms, and that helps. I've worked on DOS, Windows, Linux, Web and Mobile. Each platform asks for the existing work to be redone.

Once platforms settle down, once the library of work is big enough, and feature-complete enough [3] then the software development market will become very unvaluable. Itll exist, but it won't be a high-flying job.

[1] I use the term commodity here in the sense that it's interchangeable in use , not that they're identical. Cars are a commodity because they all perform their function (transport) while differentiating on more-or-less irrelevant details (Cup holders). Sure a 2023 car is "better" in a million ways, but a 2012 car does the transport job perfectly well. There was once 50 car manufacturers in a single town in the UK. Today there are a handful globally. It takes a new platform (Tesla) or a new market (China) to make anything new in this space.

[2] outside the odd viral game, which has its 15 minutes of popularity, you can't make money with a soley mobile app. You can make money with the app as an interface to a big backend system, but its the system making money not the app.

[3] in some cases it's already there. How many times are upgrades basically a collection of visual updates coupled with features nobody uses? We fiddle around the edges but most languages are interchangeable. Good luck making money in developer tools these days - novelty is not enough. Yes tool x is better than everything else, but so is tool y, z and a. Sure everyone has their favorite editor, but the reason we can't decide on vi or emacs Is because functionally they both do the editing job just fine.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#257

Post by yetanother12345 »

toast0 wrote: post #22
CPLX wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. A commodity would mean that people are indifferent to the music of Metallica vs Taylor Swift vs your brother in law's blues band. They aren't. So it's not a commodity. Because that's what commodity means. You could let your playlist run for years, but you don't and nobody else does either because repetition and familiarity and quality are things people care about musically. Playing music well in a way th…

Fruit is a commodity, but there's many types of fruit. And when you drill down, there's a tons of types of apples or whatever, but they're pretty much commodities. Some are more valuable or desirable than others, but if you want fruit and you can't get what you want, you substitute with something else. Music has a lot more variety than fruit, and some varieties are much more valuable, but still. If you're thinking ab…

Dear Sirs, hold your horses. There are notable definitions and references we may lean against here :)

Commmmodity:

       "In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them."[0]
Note here that the essence is not about preferences ("indifference"), but "equivalence" only (ie. "fit for purpose"):

Fungibility:

      "In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts are indistinguishable from any other part" [1]
- and

       "Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another."
So: Both sides can be right!

Music _is_ a commodity when one item (a song) is _perceived_ so similar to another item that their value _in_the_given_context_ is _perceived_ as equal by a consumer (the case for one poster below).

If a consumer assigns equal value (not preference, value) to Song A and Song B then these two are commodities because they are _interchangeable_ in some context. Both are "fit for purpose"

On the other hand, if the consumer does not want to replace Artist A with Band B then these are not interchangeable, and as they are not interchangeable they are not commodities either (the case of another poster below).

So, the customer is always right. Ie, commodity or not is a matter of context.

I hope this helps.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#258

Post by bagacrap »

mirror_neuron wrote: post #43
itake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an ethical society stand point, yes. In the US, we agreed that we need to support everyone’s children and so we pay taxes so other people’s children can attend school. If you refuse to help other people’s children get an education, you’re evading taxes and that is unethical.

It's a matter of the degree of support. Would it be wrong, in your view, for a wealthy tax-paying parent to invest in their own child above and beyond what their taxes provide for society's children?

Is it wrong? No. But it's probably not good for society or even the kids, honestly. I struggle with how I'm going to be able to keep my kids grounded and motivated given the advantages they'll have in life.

If I could change the tax code I would cut income taxes (why discourage work?) but jack up taxes on inheritances/gifts.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#259

Post by bruce511 »

npteljes wrote: post #95
saagarjha wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this does not apply to software, or any other highly paid profession?

Software is very quickly outdated, and the software world is also expanding. So you need a lot of people writing new software. I don't know how much security there is in the field, in our lifetime, probably a lot. But I can also imagine a world where the CPU doesn't get much faster anymore, and the churn of paradigms and frameworks slow down, and in that world, software lives longer and so you'll not need as many, or…

History is full of examples. Think cars and planes. Invention, followed by massive innovation, rapid obsolence, followed by industry consolidation, and eventually stagnation.

Between ww1 and ww2 military planes had a lifespan of a few years, tops. The Spitfire was conceived in the 30s, obsolete before the end of the 40s. [1] Today military planes have much longer lives, B52, F15, F16, A10 are all still in active service since the 70s or earlier.

I was lucky enough to have a career in the golden age of computing. The next generation will oversee the consolidation, and in 40 years time work in hardware, and software will be commodity jobs for a small handful of multinationals.

[1] prototype 1936, production 1938, 24 major upgrades in 9 years production ends 1947, retired by the RAF in 1954.

Re: Lifers, Dayjobbers, and the Independently Wealthy: A Letter to a Former Student

#260

Post by bruce511 »

JSavageOne wrote: post #38
bruce511 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music is a commodity. There's already more music available to let my playlist run for years without repeats. Plus it's never been easier for folk to create, and publish, new music. With endless supply comes diminishing unit value. So, not to be brutal, but playing music is not an especially valuable thing, and so people really don't need to pay much for it. Ditto for writing books, making ceramics, pretty much anythi…

> but playing music is not an especially valuable thing Sure if your definition of value is "income generated".

In the context of this thread, and the context of the actual article, yes "valuable" in the economic sense.

Of course there are other benefits to playing music (it's fun!) But the post was about doing it for money.

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