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A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

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Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#191

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ericmcer wrote: post #137
jdietrich wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be". Absolute nonsense. We have evidence of professional musicians dating back to at least ancient Egypt. Plato complained in his writings about popular musicians holding unruly concerts. The invention of recorded music was a disaster for professional musicians, because it rendered most of them unemployed. People of the pas…

Why were Mozart, Bach, Etc. all relatively poor then? Even the greatest musicians of their age were not wealthy. Compare their incomes to a Taylor Swift or Led Zeppelin and the difference is insane. The last 70 or so years have been the only period where artists incomes rivaled that of land/factory owners.

Bach wasn't relatively poor - he was comfortably middle class, as it was then, with a secure job and extra income from a concert series he set up. (One of the first in the world.)

Mozart was relatively poor because he was terrible with money. Some of his contemporaries, especially opera composers, did very nicely indeed - something which continued to be true for centuries.

Handel was easily the equivalent of a modern multimillionaire. Some performers and/or composers - Paganini, Liszt, various opera singers - earned far more for each performance than modern artists do.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#192

Post by adrian_b »

Pfhreak wrote: post #49
RugnirViking wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of human history, MONEY wasn't a thing. And yet we still have cave paintings as well as clear evidence that tribepeople and pre-agricultaral societies made music, art, poetry and more. Consider that this time could have been spent building shelter, or hunting for food. We make art because we enjoy it

You misunderstand my point. I never said we do art only for money. I specifically objected to the idea that artists have only been able to do art for the money for the past few hundred years. Sumeria had coinage thousands of years before common era. So money has definitely been a thing for more than a few hundred years.

They did not have coinage, but they already had prices and also professional musicians (besides other non-producing professionals which appeared there for the first time, i.e. judges, medical doctors, accountants and prostitutes) (obviously, chiefs and priests existed much time before written history).

Initially the prices were expressed as weights of precious metals.

The coins, which allowed simpler payments, without the use of weighing scales, appeared thousands of years later after the prices, probably in Lydia in the first millennium BC.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#193

Post by sgift »

carpo wrote: post #39
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

It wasn't all through patronage though. I just finished listening to a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and he was taught in a workshop, essentially as an apprentice. They would do independent commissions for people - portraits, statues etc. It's true that the great artists would get patronage once they were great, but it seemed that there were a bunch of these workshops with apprentices that copied the master's paint…

So, for the most part art was like everything else: If someone wanted it, they paid you to produce it. If you thought you could produce something people want you made it and maybe someone bought it. Or not. Same as a carpenter making a chair or a table. Maybe someone buys it, maybe not.

Then we got copyright and with it the idea that producing something gives you rights to every copy of it. Like a carpenter building a chair and laying claim to a chair someone else build, cause "they looked at my chair".

I think this is absurd, but many people seem to like it.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#194

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #106
jjeaff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying there isn't a market for something is not the same as saying they aren't worthy of being paid.

You're right -- I think the reason this is so contentious is that the market for recorded music didn't collapse, to the degree it did, due to lack of demand; it collapsed due to the marginal cost of reproduction dropping to effectively nothing. I'm not making a moral argument here, lest market libertarians prepare to jump -- I'm not saying the market as it existed should have been propped up artificially. I'm just ma…

Spotify could pay far more for each stream than it does. But it chooses not to, and the money mysteriously disappears into the bank accounts of the management team, assorted investors and Spotify's owners - which include the major record companies.

The arts publishing/management/distribution businesses have always been about relentlessly screwing value out of creators, usually by leveraging differences in political and corporate power to intimidate and bully creators into "voluntarily" signing over their income in return for access to various walled-garden markets.

Streaming media have really taken it to a new level.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#195

Post by buro9 »

jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

I worked in the music industry for a decade and contributed to research to determine the value of music.

Everything I learned said one thing: The value was high when scarcity was controlled, and scarcity was mostly controlled by distributors and those involved in distributing art would make the most money - not the artist.

That the artist, and even the record label, make any money is a mere side effect and overspill of the money made by controlling distribution.

I think jedberg is right on this, the more I saw and learned the more I too believed that the natural model for art and music was patronage. Distribution (be it limited by production of physical media, or controlled by tech companies now) is an entirely artificial construct... where physical media at least was plausibly scarce, the digital is not.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#196

Post by Ace17 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #188
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money. It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour. You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. So why is it fine to apply it to an art? The predictable outcome is that you'll…

> It's a bad argument. It ignores the fact that humans progress by division of talent and labour.

I suspect the "bad" argument is actually compatible with division of talent and labour. Could you explain the link between this division and income?

> You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians [1], financial experts, sports, or software developers. > So why is it fine to apply it to an art?

Because history shows us that "some" art gets done, even when no money is directly involved. And actually, it's the same for physicists, engineers, sports, software developers - not sure about lawyers, policitans, or financial experts.

Now we have to ask ourselves: for all these domains, what's an acceptable amount for "some"?

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#197

Post by Ace17 »

koolba wrote: post #66
philipov wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what he said. People made money for -performing- music, and performing artists still make money for doing that.

Not exactly. Before recorded music, a live band (or one man show!) was the only game in town. It was either that or silence. Everywhere that wanted to fill that silence had to hire musicians.

> Before recorded music, a live band (or one man show!) was the only game in town.

Don't forget the orchestra. Unless you consider it to belong the "live band" category :-)

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#198

Post by boomlinde »

wwweston wrote: post #101
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

Sure, music will always exist as a human form of expression. It's just more likely to exist in the same way your hobby projects compete with your full time job. Lots exist as concept only. Some are half-finished but never ship. Maybe some of them get done. What could you have done if people payed you to do what you cared about? Patronage is... a thing. Better than nothing. But obviously a weaker form of economic syst…

> Patronage is... a thing. Better than nothing. But obviously a weaker form of economic systematizing than a model where you pay to listen to a performance or a recording.

> I mean, if you're designing a system function, do you want it to reliably tie outputs to inputs, or optionally tie outputs to inputs?

> Paying for things supports the enterprise that goes into providing them. Diluting or disconnecting payment from the music is another way of saying "in order to make music, you should be spending time doing things that aren't making music."

So when you pay for a copy of a recording of a piece of music, do you feel that you are more directly paying for someone to make music?

In the exact sense that you describe here, paying for copies of recordings has a very weak tie to the actual production of music. I'd have to pay for a copy of a recording even if the recording artist has been dead for decades and can't possibly create more music. It's not payment for "making music". It's rent on some work that may have been performed in the last century. No one needs to make music to sell me a copy of a recording.

As a patron, however, I'd be paying people to create music. If they didn't and I didn't trust that the investment was worth it, I wouldn't. If they were dead, there'd be no sense in supporting them. It would be like sending paychecks to a dead employee. Someone needs to make music to receive my patronage.

If the output I expect of a "system function" is for someone to make music, paying into a function where the output is copies of recordings is worse than paying into a system function where the output is the labor of creating music. I can see why this view would be confusing, though. Vague abstractions have a tendency to obscure actualities, and of course there is a more complex relationship with more inputs, outputs and feedback loops.

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#199

Post by Ace17 »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #182
ericmcer wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were Mozart, Bach, Etc. all relatively poor then? Even the greatest musicians of their age were not wealthy. Compare their incomes to a Taylor Swift or Led Zeppelin and the difference is insane. The last 70 or so years have been the only period where artists incomes rivaled that of land/factory owners.

If Taylor Swift only gave concerts to hundreds of people at a time, she'd be poor too. Mozart never had studio deals or CD distribution, or endorsement deals--at least not in the global stage.

Yes.

But the point was that Mozart didn't need to be rich to do great music.

Whether he deserved to be rich is another question (more related to morale than economics).

Re: A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music

#200

Post by Kalium »

anigbrowl wrote: post #79
jedberg wrote: post #6

For all of human history, we've been making music and art. And for almost all of that time, it was done for love of doing, not money. For a few hundred years, there was the patronage era, where if you were really good you could get a rich person to feed and clothe and house you while you made art. Or you traveled around giving performances for money or food or clothes or shelter. Then only in the last 100ish years ha…

This argument crops up on every discussion of this topic. Why is it always people who work in the arts always told their work isn't worthy of payment except when delivered under certain conditions? If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

> If you don't think artists should be paid, then neither should programmers.

You're absolutely right! Artists, programmers, attorneys, and doctors are all exactly the same. They should get paid under the circumstances where someone with money finds their work to be valuable. Some portion of each specialty will find that others value their work enough to allow them to live by their work alone.

Is it perhaps possible that the relative size of this portion might differ between specialties? Perhaps in a way that reflects the relative number of people willing and able to do the work, and possibly also reflective of the level of demand?

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