Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 245 posts

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#91

Post by llbeansandrice »

michaelt wrote: post #89
lopis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video. It makes it clearer that we are supporting the creator's livelihood, not buying a token that they produced. Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? Higher subscription tiers could include merchandising and concert tickets.

> Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans. After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running c…

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#92

Post by FalconSensei »

donpott wrote: post #58
anonymouse008 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You Belong With Me... wow There's such a difference in a young up and coming begging for a guy to acknowledge they love the outcast, to Taylor Swift singing the same song. They always tell you in vocal lessons that so much of a song has to do with feeling. For people like most of us on HN, that makes absolutely 0 sense, and for many decades I've never been able to understand that... until now. Same person, different…

I've always found this apparent in Johnny Cash's covers, like "Hurt", "One", "Big Iron", or "If you could read my mind". He manages to add a different feeling to the song that changes the backstory it's suggesting. I recommend a listen and comparison against the originals if you're interested in the phenomenon.

Johnny Cash's Hurt is one of my fav. songs/versions ever. I listened to the original, and many other versions, but that one is just a few steps above

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#93

Post by jasode »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #59
rayiner wrote: post #28

The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves. > Nilay Patel wrote in Vox: > "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.' > This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcit…

> How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music. Obviously these are two different things! Yes, they are two different things. The problem is that artists (and record labels) want to get paid for the non-scarce thing: the copies, and not for the actually scarce thing:…

>The solution then would be to find a way to charge not for the copies, but for the time effort that the artist put into the production of the music.

But this method would be anti-consumer for many buyers of music because the final quality of a song does not always correlate with effort.

- low effort but high value: a musician can have a flash of inspiration and come up with a catchy chorus melody and great intro hook on a synth in 15 minutes. They then record the vocals in 2 or 3 takes and thus the whole song is done in less than a day. This ends up being a hit song.

- high effort but low value: an artist struggles for weeks and months on composing a song with many rewrites. The producer brings in a dozen other co-writers to help finish it. When they go to record, they record 100 different takes of the vocal and then construct the final vocal by splicing in syllable-by-syllable from the different takes. Very laborious. And yet, the final result is music that's heavily produced but lacks an addictive chorus and does not compel repeat listens.

A lot of movies and its sequels are like that. The original on a shoestring budget had a better story and a magic quality but the new sequel with a $200 million budget and an army of special fx artists ends up creating a dud.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#94

Post by hnbad »

jtbayly wrote: post #5

What this piece leaves out is that given this reasoning, Taylor Swift can simply declare another piece of art the "New Taylor version," thus completely devaluing the previous "Taylor version."

I thought this was kinda the point by comparing it to NFTs. NFTs can be trivially devalued if you derive the value from that attributed to it by the author of whatever it references.

It's probably even truer for NFTs as often the NFT itself merely represents a JSON payload which itself references URLs managed by a third party and trusted to continue referencing the original work. Once that third party goes away, the reference chain breaks. The value is not only reliant on everyone agreeing that the third party "owns" (whatever this might mean) the "work" (whatever that might be) but also that the NFT continues to represent this ownership by proxy even when the proxy goes away.

There's nothing stopping a new middleman claiming authority over the ownership of a work and issuing an NFT for it. But its value entirely hinges on a shared understanding that this claim is valid.

Of course this would break down if an artist really did devalue earlier NFTs for the same work by issuing new ones because the value largely comes from the expectation that the non-fungible token's authority is also non-fungible, i.e. permanent.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#95

Post by benatkin »

aaroninsf wrote: post #71
tshaddox wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we might disagree on the extent to which the collectible sports card is valuable because of its unique physical materials, and the extent to which it’s valuable because of “human imagination.” I think the latter is responsible for the overwhelming share of the value of a sports card, and the former is only a historical coincidence that creating rare and difficult to counterfeit items was only practical by fab…

I have been looking for a useful formulation, or metaphor, for why the NFT premise feels so [preposterously] wrong to many including myself. Here is one idea, for how we intuit value: As a fraction, in which non-fungibility (~= "authenticity") is the denominator; nominal value (whatever that is, a function of context etc.) is the numerator. In the sports card example, a physical object with a provenance has intrinsic…

They're quite perceptible. A lower probability of being hacked than one divided by the number of grains of sand in a billion planets.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#96

Post by eindiran »

michaelt wrote: post #89
lopis wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason why many youtubers on patreon switch to a monthly subscription rather than charging per video. It makes it clearer that we are supporting the creator's livelihood, not buying a token that they produced. Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? Higher subscription tiers could include merchandising and concert tickets.

> Would anyone pay for a Taylor Swift subscription if that meant she could relax and produce music as she sees fit? I have a (completely speculative) theory that the "support the artist to keep creating the work they're giving away for free" model has a ceiling when artists become visibly a lot richer than their fans. After all, what kind of sucker would charitably donate to a multimillionaire's private jet running c…

Even if this is true, the ceiling is very high. Look at the current top earners on Patreon, with a known per month figure:

https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators

* Chapo Trap House, 3 hosts - 170k/month

* The Tim Dillon Show, 1 host - 121k/month

* AdeptusSteve (I couldn't figure out how many people, possibly 1 guy making some sort of porn game?) - 103k/month

* Flagrant 2, 2 hosts - 98k/month

* Tiny Meat Gang, 2 hosts - 82k/month

* Cum Town, 3 hosts - 81k/month

Note that the dollar amounts of most of the people on that list aren't visible and I cut them off at 80k/month.

People are willingly chipping in to help creators making 1M/year, not including sponsorships, live shows, etc.

And there are some multimillionaires that could likely make it work. If the Spotify deal hadn't happened, Joe Rogan almost certainly could have.

Unrelated comment about the list: of the Patreon categories, podcasters are predictably over-represented. But I am surprised by the number of "adult games" on the list. I didn't realize how popular these were.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#97

Post by hombre_fatal »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #50
rayiner wrote: post #28

The quote from Nilay Patel's Vox article hits on one of my pet peeves. > Nilay Patel wrote in Vox: > "Taylor makes a nice little argument in favor of paying for music. 'Music is art,' she says, 'and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.' > This is an impressively-constructed syllogism. It is also deeply, deeply wrong.... On the internet, there’s no scarcit…

> How does such an obvious fallacy command such purchase among smart people? Swift is talking about "music" as an original work. Patel responds with an irrelevant point about digital copies of music . Your quotes don't support this analysis. There's plenty of original music available on the internet. Enough to call it an endless amount. Weirdly, you point this out yourself immediately after accusing Patel of a fallac…

There's certainly an endless amount of content on the internet, but it's not an endless amount of content you enjoy or seek out, so paying for the content you like is a way to incentivize the creation of more content that you like in a sea of content that you don't.

720,000 hours of new content is uploaded to Youtube every day, and none of it is the 90 minute movie I want to watch right now.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#98

Post by NotSammyHagar »

SloopJon wrote: post #42

I've always found the idea of master recordings curious. Once a song becomes a hit, the band may perform it almost every day for the rest of their career, but what we listen to through our headphones or speakers is this one particular moment in time. Yes, there are live recordings and bootlegs, but by and large it's this one master recording, which may get dusted off every couple of decades for a remaster. Some maste…

The original masters led to the song sounding "the right way" when you hear it on the radio, instead of sounding different. Sometimes that difference sounds good too, like your favorite live album from some band. But other times that song doesn't sound right, the live version or alternative take just loses that magic. So the original has a lot of value if it hits.

But I think you missed another aspect, the real value is the original master plus the tweaks and additions to make it into what became popular. That production of the song probably wouldn't sound the same if you applied those processes to a slightly different version, say the singer or band's best efforts later.

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#99

Post by sodality2 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #68
sodality2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was more than a money grab- I think it was a giant middle finger as well to the company.

> giant middle finger as well to the company. How dare the people who supported, developed, and promoted a young performer get a return on their investment.

Hey man, I don't have a horse in this race. But I asked my friend, she says you are dead wrong >:(

Re: Non-Fungible Taylor Swift

#100

Post by bvaldivielso »

tshaddox wrote: post #35
apples_oranges wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However that ink on flimsy cardboard is still somewhat unique. The NFT only associates a wallet address with a hash of whatever digital document. It's similar, but not quite. It has value in human imagination, sure, one can convince oneself that's the case. But the token is merely a hash of something that can be obtained very easily in full original quality on the Internet. The flimsy cardboard is not. At least not i…

I think we might disagree on the extent to which the collectible sports card is valuable because of its unique physical materials, and the extent to which it’s valuable because of “human imagination.” I think the latter is responsible for the overwhelming share of the value of a sports card, and the former is only a historical coincidence that creating rare and difficult to counterfeit items was only practical by fab…

Thanks. This is exactly my current understanding of the situation regarding NFTs, only articulated better than I could
Post reply on HN