Comment by JohnnyConatus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnnyConatus | Hacker News Reader

ITT no one admitting that the problem with the recorded music industry is now the fans who expect bits that make sound to be free while other bits are paid.

Spotify, Pandora, and Soundcloud fixed just about everything that people said was wrong with the industry from the consumer point of view. And don't give me that line about the labels screwing artists because thanks to fans who won't even pay for a premium subscription, Spotify literally can't afford to pay artists more without going under entirely.

TL;DR - music doesn't want to be free. Selfish people want it to be free.

It's not the artists who are struggling, it's the platform. By your logic, I'm oppressing Youtube creators because I didn't buy Youtube Red.

In terms of artists posting on Soundcloud, the fact that there's any demand for Soundcloud at all pretty much torpedoes this entire worldview you're espousing.

It is extremely common for artists to simply give away mixtapes on Soundcloud. When/if Soundcloud is gone, those same artists will continue to release on p2p networks. It is bizarre and delusional to believe that some valley person has to be making money off of it for me to listen to the music I like.

People sell things to make money. People make things for all kinds of reasons. Music is fundamentally an artistic venture, and everyone who tries to turn it into this other thing can frankly get completely bent imho.

It doesn't seem like a controversial position for those of us who enjoy music to wish there were some professionals making it.

If we are going to have professionals they must make money some how & the current status quo requires them to be constantly touring.

Talk to them and this is taking its toll both in longevity & album quality. I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.

> I listen to albums a lot more than live concerts so I find this concerning.

Or .. disconcerting?

How dare you.

I take it you've never had to buy pro-audio equipment?

The capital investment required to make music these days essentially negligible unless your heart is set on setting up a studio so you can have a band like it's the 1980s.

You might enjoy this Twitter account:

https://twitter.com/forexposure_txt

You are right, people are cheap. However, some of the blame lies with these companies. They have taken a growth at all costs > figure out monetization later path to their own doom. You can't go from free unlimited streaming to paid limited streaming once you realize your costs are killing you. The recording industry does keep raising the prices (rightfully so?) making it harder to stay afloat. There is still a win here for the person with the right vision.

I have no idea how you got that notion, but as a previous paying spotify customer I quit because they consistently screwed up their UI, made pointless changes and kept forcing "social" into something that shouldn't be social in the first place.

I now use google music. It is still no way near as good as groveshark was (especially when it comes to having all the music and a simple interface) but it works pretty okay.

And of course they can afford to pay the artists: I get to pay way more to the music industry now, than I ever did before.

I use Google Music to listen to music, and when I find an album I like I buy it on Vinyl, and also attend concerts when they are nearby. More than I have spent on music than ever before.

I love google music because their "Radio" feature is incredibly useful. So if I like a song, there is a "radio" option that plays similar songs, which has worked surprisingly well (imo). Maybe their AI is just better or something, but I'm a very happy customer so far.

The only thing I fear is that they will shut the service one day for no good reason (because they have done this before). But since its a core part of their android offering I'm hoping it won't happen.

Also any Google iOS devs reading this: PLEASE ADD WATCH INTEGRATION. I love to listen to music while running, but currently there is no watch integration, so all I can do is play the next/previous song through my watch. Definitely more control would help :).

I keep thinking about this problem, and music isn't the only industry affected.

I wonder if this is us hitting some of the limits of capitalism? It's not that I mind paying, in fact, I want to support artists I like. But the entire ecosystem of media is set up in a way that it is just more efficient for everyone to get stuff for free.

I feel like financial transactions get in the way more than they help, but this is obviously from the consumer point of view.

I get it. You feel like maybe we're hitting some fundamental limitation of capitalism, whereby deserving artists aren't properly supported by the economic ecosystem around them. You're right in the media ecosystem is weird here. Music is relatively unique in that it is something that's easy to consume more or less piecemeal. Nobody reads only 1/12th of a book or watches 3/10ths of a movie, but these are common in how people relate to music.

But what if there's another possibility?

I think we're expecting the future and present of music to not look like the past of music. Music, like pretty much all forms of art, has a small number of professionals and a large number of very talented non-professionals.

What's changed is how professionals attain that status. Once upon a time it was impress something really rich enough to be hired on permanently. Then this complex system involving record labels came into being. Now we have a couple of different viable models at hand, and we have yet to settle on one as the dominant new model.

Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.

I wouldn't call it a limit of capitalism. I would call it a limit of the old music business model.

Take this with a grain of salt as economics is not my field but...

>You feel like maybe we're hitting some fundamental limitation of capitalism, whereby deserving artists aren't properly supported by the economic ecosystem around them.

It's actually the opposite. I would like the artists to get paid, but it's more that the payment barrier seems like a waste of time and energy.

> Couple this with a lowered barrier to entry and generally increased competition for entertainment dollars (which compete with mobile games, ebooks, etc.), and users have good reason to favor subscription models. Artists have yet to puzzle out how best to interact with this, but I have faith people will get there.

This is what I mean by seeing the limits. The subscription model makes no sense to me. It's inefficient at best, and it's clearly not working out.

It's not that I mind paying, it's that I don't want the work-flow for accessing new content to be limited by a payment barrier. But capitalism encourages the growth of artificial barriers for payment. It's just easier and a better use of time to bypass the payment method, even a subscription based one. It's more efficient for everyone if we could figure out a payment method and avoid that artificial barrier.

So far, a subscription model is as close as we've come. It allows users to deal with a minimum of payment friction a minimal number of times while still paying.

Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it. The approach thus far has been to make it convenient, easy, and cheap enough that users are willing to pay in some fashion.

I am deeply curious what you imagine this artificial-barrier-free experience that still coerces payments to be like, however.

A subscription model is the best that I've see so far, but it's still a shitty system, and it seems fundamentally so, IMO.

> Any time your business is exchanging information for money - music, video games, movies, etc - there's always an incentive to circumvent it.

Sure, but the new incentive is that it is currently a better product/service in almost every aspect. It used to be that circumvention was to save money, but that's not why a large number of people do it now. The service is better, the quality is better, the selection is better, etc. Maybe I'm missing something, but other than "the artist gets paid" I can't think of a single thing that going through an official route makes better.

> I am deeply curious what you imagine this artificial-barrier-free experience that still coerces payments to be like, however.

I have no idea, that's why I'm wondering if we've hit a limit to our current system. And it's not just music, basically anything that's digitally distributed is running into the same limit.

I believe you may be underplaying the role time plays in these matters.

Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds. In my student days as a profligate music pirate, I had to put a non-zero amount of time into making sure the stuff I'd torrented was of a reasonable quality, tagged in compliance with my schema, and accessible where I wanted it to be. I was willing to do that because $10/mo was a lot of money to me at the time and I had time to spare.

Today, a new album from a band I like is one click and two seconds away from being actively in my eardrums. $10/mo is no longer a lot of money to me, and worth paying to avoid an hour of work a month.

> Curation, collection, access, and reliability are all value-adds.

That's even more of an argument that our current system isn't working. You might want to look into the current non-official music scene. Non-official sources of music come way better organized and faster than the legit sources that I've bought from. Tags are done correctly, quality is much better, and it's online before a lot of sites put it up. I've also had music that I paid for disappear because the company I "bought" it from went away.

Having a middle-man for this transaction has mostly been a waste of time for me.

Why must the model of terrestrial radio always be left out of "customers are cheapskates" harangues?

Because it's a an irrelevant, circumstantial argument that is largely made-up to begin with.

No, it isn't. Billboard released their first charts in 1912 for Top 10 sheet music, but people have been using radio to listen to music since the early 1920s. The foundation of the contemporary music industry is based in free radio.

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