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Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

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Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#311

Post by barbariangrunge »

Jeslijar wrote: post #273

Is this really a problem? Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever. All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies. How much should music make as an industry? Wh…

Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million--but every day there's a dozen posts on here about how greedy the arts industries are for trying to charge money for things.

Well, no problem, in the near future you can just get a personal AI to make everything for you. The Arts will be wiped out completely. Time to celebrate? No human artist need ever get paid again, starting in 20 years, or will it be 50? Maybe it will take 75 and you won't get to personally enjoy it? All the money can go to amazon and to ISPs because they provide the REAL value, that of providing sharing or generation infrastructure

Mix in the constant posts on here claiming that these tech companies get to make derivative works off of everyone's art, without compensating those artists, and, I don't know what to say

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#313

Post by mhh__ »

WalterBright wrote: post #255
mschuster91 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You just got old. It happens to everyone, and every generation says the same thing: The music I enjoyed when I was young and impressionable was great, but all the stuff they make nowadays is crap. Thing is, there are objective metrics about quality. One aspect is "loudness war" aka compression, where subjective loudness gets increased at the cost of dynamic range [1], another (in)famous aspect is the increasing use…

It's hard to find a popular recording these days that hasn't had the vocal electronically altered. Autotune is just one of the effects applied.

You're saying Daft Punk don't sing like that in real life?

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#314

Post by throwawaymobule »

cubefox wrote: post #249
mrguyorama wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone on spotify is free to put their music on bandcamp for $10 instead, and I in fact have bought music exactly that way, getting high quality lossless audio from a niche artist that probably doesn't make a cent from spotify. But artists largely don't take their music off spotify to exclusively sell alone, because if they tried that they wouldn't make a dime. Music is hard to "find" and your average music maker t…

I doubt it works for almost anyone. Who is making $80k in donations? More likely seems the following: People listen to music on Spotify and don't even begin to think about donating any money to the musician. They already pay for Spotify after all. And of course Bandcamp can't compete with Spotify pricing, let alone piracy.

It's probably not going to be the model they go with, but I can imagine epic games doing 'giveaways' of music from bandcamp.

I think their current aim is to streamline licencing for video games, which would be smaller, but still real revenue.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#315

Post by throwawaymobule »

ftrobro wrote: post #304
jesprenj wrote: post #296

> Attempts to levy a tax on blank cassettes didn’t get traction in the UK. In Slovenia, we pay a tax for blank media and audiovisual recorders. The law was put in place in 2020. Source: https://www.uradni-list.si/glasilo-uradni-list-rs/vsebina/20...

Several countries have that tax. Here in Sweden we pay about $10 for every new computer, mobile phone, SSD etc just because we might store music on them. Quite absurd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Whenever I hear about these levies, I always wonder what's stopping someone from spinning up a 'record label' and attempting to claim the funds.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#316

Post by geoelectric »

cubefox wrote: post #91
fipar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. As someone who lived through part of that (I’m from ‘78 but for a country that was lagging in media developments; we got CDs in the early 90s) I can say that cassettes were a lousy medium. I love them because I grew up with my Walkman and I loved the tape swapping scene (physically compiled an…

> That graph does not show cassettes were responsible for that, it just shows revenue numbers. There are other possible causes. You don't mention any of these possible causes though. > interpreted as people willing to buy music just fine provided it sounded good and kept sounding good Yes, CDs replaced cassettes and records. They had better audio quality and were nearly as small as cassettes. But cassettes weren't mu…

Think probably the most important quality was you could use a cassette or CD in a portable player, boom box, or car stereo.

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#318

Post by kzrdude »

cubefox wrote: post #64
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything cassettes served as a music discovery service before we had the ability to share links online. Pretty much everything I ever bought I discovered because someone borrowed me a tape or sent me one from abroad.

But they also lead to a substantial decrease in music revenue, as the chart shows.

How do you see that in the chart?

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#319

Post by gardenhedge »

cubefox wrote: post #17

The reality is that yes, cassettes really were responsible for a substantial downturn in music revenue in the late 70s and early 80s: https://i.insider.com/4d5ea2acccd1d54e7c030000 Then cassettes got replaced with CDs which (initially) were read only, which again saved the market from piracy ... until online piracy with Napster and MP3 players completely crushed the music market, but far worse than cassettes. Even 20…

I mean the top musicians are still millionaires so I don't feel too sorry for them

Re: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the music industry waged war on the cassette

#320

Post by commandlinefan »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #311
Jeslijar wrote: post #273

Is this really a problem? Revenue based on selling copies of a recording is down. The cost of reproducing copies is less than ever. The barrier to creating your own music and distributing it to everyone in the world is less than ever. All the middlemen cranking out wasteful copies of just one thing are not necessary since music is trivially reproduced with digital copies. How much should music make as an industry? Wh…

Artists need to buy groceries and retire some day--almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million--but every day there's a dozen posts on here about how greedy the arts industries are for trying to charge money for things. Well, no problem, in the near future you can just get a personal AI to make everything for you. The Arts will be wiped out completely. Time to celebrate? No human artist…

> almost none of them successfully pull this off, it's like one in a million

That's pretty much always been the case, no matter how art was distributed, though - yet people still love creating it enough to take the gamble.

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