A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music | Hacker News Reader

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

rootsmusic.ca

202 pointshowsilly238 comments

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 has it been possible to make art for mass consumption (and mass money), but that's only because of artificial scarcity.

Now that the scarcity is gone, we are back to patronage (see Patreon) and making money from the performance of music, by doing live shows and such.

I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".

Well put, your description of the history of paid art puts things in a different perspective.

> 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.

This seems wildly improbable to me? People didn't get paid for art until a few hundred years ago?

Are you suggesting artisans weren't a thing? That all the art produced globally outside of the past few hundred years was done just for love of doing?

I've never heard of artisans getting wealthy before the 20th century.

"Wealthy" is a different goalpost than "doing art/music for money".

But even then, artisans in antiquity definitely reached middle classes. (And it's plausible to assume that at least a few individuals were wealthier or converted their artisanship into a bigger merchant operation.)

Sure, but isn't wealthy the undertone that goes into all these laments that music does not pay anymore? (the original doesn't seems much like a lament though, I read it more like a counter to those laments)

The whole "Let your creative juices flow, somehow gain access to recording equipment and distribution, have a hit record, be made for life", that's mostly over it seems. But it hasn't been with us for that long to begin with. Except for those brief few decades of industrial recording, getting paid for music has always been hard. Depending on economical overall productivity (excess food for entertainment specialists), maybe some or even a relatively high number of musicians would get paid, but hardly ever (or more likely "never"?) so much that their incomes would be envied by productive middle class, including artisans in decorative fields. Remember that before recording (well, before printed scores), music was entirely transient, whereas the products of artisans would routinely be investments in intergenerational status.

Wedgewood pottery. Charles Dickens.

Not even Antonio Stradivari?

People got paid, but there wasn't a way to reproduce art for basically nothing but sell it as if it was the original. That radically changed the economics of music for a period, which could be seen as a distortion and not the way things should be. OP is now lamenting (right or wrong) that system is gone, only the live performance really still exists as a money maker.

Right.

The OP's lament is heard from other musicians of his age. Being In A Band used to be a Big Deal. Fame, fortune, groupies. Then came lower cost equipment, Myspace, and streaming. At peak there were several million bands on Myspace.

> Are you suggesting artisans weren't a thing?

Historically, anyone who made something by hand was an artisan, so the hammer maker and the sword maker. I suppose you could consider that art, but when I say I art I'm talking music, paining, sculpture, etc. Things that only have aesthetic use, not functional use.

And I don't believe there are any examples of people making aesthetic works as their only source of income before recent times, other than through patronage.

I've only studied art history briefly though, someone who has studied it more could probably chime in here.

Grecian pots are covered in paintings. Greek and roman sculpture was considered one of the highest forms of art by Pliny.

Pliny said this of Peiraikos:

It is well to add an account of the artists who won fame with the brush in painting smaller pictures. Amongst them was Peiraikos. In mastery of his art but few take rank above him, yet by his choice of a path he has perhaps marred his own success, for he followed a humble line, winning however the highest glory that it had to bring. He painted barbers' shops, cobblers' stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects, earning for himself the name of rhyparographos [painter of dirt/low things]. In these subjects he could give consummate pleasure, selling them for more than other artists received for their large pictures.

Polygnotus? Apollodorus? Zeuxis and Parrhasius?

That's drawing just from Greek history.

Yeah I bet the 300+ year history of Ancient Greece has several examples of famous artists being well paid.

This sounds like an artificial distinction, drawn there only to make the point you want to make. A hammer isn't art, because a hammer is functional, and a decorative handle on it is part of that non-art. A wall isn't art, because a wall is functional, yet a fresco painted on it is art?

"when I say I art I'm talking music, paining, sculpture, etc. Things that only have aesthetic use, not functional use."

Painting, sculpture, and music have had functional uses since forever.

They had functions such as:

  - reminding people of what happened in the past
  - teaching people moral lessons
  - exulting or placating gods
  - inspiring troops to be braver in combat
  - honoring the dead
  - letting people see things they couldn't see in person
  - training doctors and scientists
  - providing propaganda for rulers or religious organizations
  - inspiring people towards revolution or to right various wrongs

and on, and on, and on.

Only relatively recently has the idea become popular that art should be divorced from function, placed in museums or galleries, and be appreciated merely for its aesthetic value alone.

Also if you look at the kind of art that is actually just appreciated on aesthetics alone now it’s actually pretty derivative. It’s the sort of stuff you’ll find artists painting in bulk to sell in order to support themselves. Most art that gets put up for public consumption has some function beyond mere aesthetic appreciation. It’s usually about something.

The classical arts used to be the vectors of vital cultural information (music, poetry and story telling are mnemonic techniques).

We then invented writing which made those media mostly obsolete.

We're still drawn to those disciplines though, because they provided an evolutionary advantage for a long time, making the trait of liking those things quite stable (since pleasure leads to practice, and practice leads to skill).

The same goes for gossiping and superstition.

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.

Yes. There is this question of 'what is art'? and we can assume that old cave paintings are 'art' but is it really? Is that just us assuming this is 'art'?

Art as we know it really is a capitalist contrivance. Sure the communists had art too but do native people outside of regular capitalism have 'art'?

In Canada they tried to get an art exhibition together of native people's art. It didn't really happen. They tried teaching them how to make art but they didn't get it. This was not because the native folk were primitive and backward, far from it. They had plenty of beautiful things they made as part of their daily existence. However, they did not see the world mediated through images and capitalism. They weren't worshipping icons either.

Before capitalism as we know it took over the church had all the power and art was invariably made on some Bible oriented theme. Nobody painted scenes of rural peasant life, it was always the baby Jesus.

I am sure that everyone puts some art into what they do. Writing code is an art. The medium just isn't brown pots or watercolours. Code is a creative medium though.

Music is an interesting one as we all grew up at a time when we partied for fun. The guy sorting out the music was just contributing to it. Then we grow up and meet musician friends. And yes, all of them are out to make money, it isn't just about the music any more. It probably had more to do with sex first time around so even then it wasn't entirely just about the music.

This is why music is not at all useful for revolutionary or activist causes. There aren't many John Lennon's in the world willing to stay in bed for peace.

Sometimes I hear of musicians I listened to many aeons ago and wonder when it is they will get a proper job. Years ago it was about the music, now it is about paying for the kids to go to private schools.

Most of what we know of as art because it commands price tags is 'art business'. This is just a game and the likes of Damien Hirst know how it is played.

I don’t know of anyone who has made any worthwhile music who did it to make money. You’d be an idiot to do it for the money, even in the golden age of music labels. The vast majority of musicians made nothing and a few got super wealthy. You had to practice for years, putting aside any other career in order for a small chance to get discovered. Now once you’re discovered and you have a career, you might continue to do it for the money, but nobody starts there and by then you’re already a talented musician, having done most of the hard work of learning to make music with no real financial incentive at all.

Now people can work on music part time for years as a hobby and just throw it out there and if it’s good people will find it and maybe they’ll get asked to do a gig here and there and that might be enough for them.

You think Brittany Spears made music because she loves music? Or the Backstreet Boys? Or pretty much any K-Pop band these days? They're all out there because a record person wanted to sell personas.

That's a pretty cynical attitude you have there. You should try listening to all of the acapella recordings of Brittany Spears, or all of the videos of her singing and performing as a child.

As a child who was forced to play piano (and other instruments), in my opinion, you cannot force a child to become a "Brittany Spears," they have to want it too, or they will never perform and work hard enough to make it.

Brittany Spears, whatever you think of her, clearly loves singing and performing. The fact that you have this attitude either shows you have zero understanding of human nature or just are a very negative and cynical person. Either way, it's a sucky attitude.

She's a talented singer, but they forced her to change her range higher to fit the "cute little girl" package. So while she may enjoy music, she changed her music to make more money. And now she's changed it back and it's better, but she's already successful so she can take risks now.

>The vast majority of musicians made nothing and a few got super wealthy

The vast majority of {entrepreneurs, actors, drug dealers, athletes, ...} made nothing and a few got super wealthy.

It's structurally a tournament in a lot of fields.

You're right, of course. Unfortunately, this applies to a lot more fields than just music performance, and society is really going to struggle to sort out living in the post-scarcity economy. Also, the-once revolutionary "long tail" now makes choice so individualistic, and effectively arbitrary, that it's hard to capitalize on any particular genre or act.

Sales of recorded music are way down but every other part of the music industry has grown. If this is the pattern that other fields follow, then we're all going to be rich!

Has there ever been a better time to be a musician than now?

> 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.

I would challenge you almost precisely the opposite. The vast majority of the "great art" was in fact done for money.

For example, walk through the Parthenon and its museum, most of the art was commissioned.

Look at the wall murals of Pompeii--again, done for hire.

I can go on and on and on.

Art not done for hire is almost exclusively a very new thing brought about by industrialization giving us enough surplus that people have enough spare time to specialize in something other than their job.

Right on.

Pretty sure the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was not done as a volunteer graffiti job either.

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 paintings, worked on commissions with them etc. Just thinking about it now as I write, and the Patronage is like the "made-it" moment where an artist gets rich, but I bet there were a multitude of apprentices that toiled away in workshops just making money for food.

Isn't a bespoke commission just an act of patronage though? If I hire you to make something for me, I'm your patron.

I guess the main difference is that back then, you would sell the work and then make it. Nowadays, you make the work and then hope to sell it over and over again.

Well, I guess you could say that's a form of patronage, but "arts patronage" as a concept is more of a general sponsorship of an artist in the hope that they will produce significant works (and maybe have some influence over their production), rather than a transactional relationship where you are paying for a specific piece.

Patronage seemed like a more formal thing though. They lived with the patron who would provide them a workshop, food and money. Their early days in a workshop seemed more like an employee at a business, not much different than today. The owner would have to go and find work and tap his network to find people who needed his businesses wares. He would hire employees, and they would complete jobs under his supervision. When Leonardo da Vinci was 14 and working at a workshop he was an employee of the workshop owner. It took him a long time to get a patron. He even sent letters to rich people trying to get their patronage by saying what he could do (and just like today, there was a bit of "fake it till you make" in those letters too :)

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.

Absolutely agree. The creation of technology that allowed people to scale their work is the key. With a single song/album that was sold in stored as well as being able to be played via FM radio and television, a single person could be known throughout the country (or even worldwide). That was never possible before. Prior to that, you always had to basically perform in person, which is a labor-intensive process and therefore pricier than just paying for the album and having it forever (and could also re-sell it). The number of people who could afford live performances historically is far less.

To add another point on top of yours - something else to consider is that music used to be considered free. Or stated another way - without ownership. Society was the owner historically. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the reason why this was the cause, but I've heard it talked about by historians in documentaries. I suspect it has to do with what you said - that wealthy people funded their artistic endeavors and society as a whole owned the result. Or that they weren't bankrolled by a rich person but instead collected money from passers-by on the streets as they performed. This also speaks directly to the concept of "traditionals" with no known authors.

We're seeing a return to this model in DJing, where the boundaries between performance and playback have largely disintegrated, and the difference between "making new music which repeats familiar refrains" and "pasting together bits of existing recordings to make a new piece of music" has completely dissolved. There's a complex body of compromises with copyright law which is allowing this to happen, but what's essentially going on is that everyone is silently agreeing not to get too wound up about it and we're going back to a model where music is a shared, linguistic experience, and music makers copy, echo, reframe, and reply to each other in a giant collective conversation. It's a much more interesting, relaxed experience than the hard-edged, scarcity-driven model of specific recordings with specific ownership that prevailed through the end of the 20th century.

>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 past had far more limited access to music, but they weren't stupid or undiscerning - they wanted to hear the best possible music and were willing to pay for it. Busking is probably as old as currency and remains a perfectly reasonable way of making a living. If you owned a bar or tavern, having the best music in town was a huge competitive advantage that you would be more than willing to pay for. Dancehalls had bands, circuses had bands, theatres had bands. The Ottoman Empire had military marching bands in at least the 13th century.

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.

It was not "that" or silence. You're not considering that learning to play a musical instrument was itself more common. Performing music was a community activity people used to entertain themselves; the hiring of musicians was for the wealthy aristocracy.

Maybe hire is the wrong idea. I meant more generally, “provide a venue for...”.

Indeed, you see examples of people singing in the parlor, or a guest or host playing an instrument for everyone else after dinner and at parties in many books and movies.

"Performing music was a community activity people used to entertain themselves"

It still is, among the people I know/grew up with.

See:

https://festival.oldsongs.org/

"In addition to three concerts there are over 100 daytime workshops, dances or performances."

The existence of DIY approaches was and is real, but:

1) it's a marginal point in response to observations about the meteor-strike level of impact the invention and spread of recorded music had on the market for live performers. The difference between a past with no widespread recording/playback tech and a present where recorded music is widespread and came to be treated as essentially free is so great that invoking the past seems hazardous even if ...

2) we actually have an accurate understanding of it. For my part, I'm pretty skeptical about the idea that paid performances were largely absent in common life before the 20th century.

3) Carefully consider your last sentence there. What exactly was the wealthy aristocracy buying when they hired? Why wouldn't a community or individual with modest wealth want to buy that if they could? Why would it be priced out of reach?

Not true in the USA. Thousands of towns had multiple amateur concert bands during the 19th century, and band shells are still left over in many parks, although of course they are seldom used for their original purpose.

> 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 :-)

> Absolute nonsense.

I think the point was poorly put. I suspect most musical experiences throughout history were either not paid for or paid for voluntarily, not as a condition of access. I also suspect that there is a strong tradition throughout history of professional musicians but that the majority of musicians then (and now) are not professional but amateur (in the positive sense of that word).

> Plato complained in his writings about popular musicians holding unruly concerts.

Did he talk about how they were paid? otherwise I fail to see the relevance.

> The invention of recorded music was a disaster for professional musicians, because it rendered most of them unemployed.

That is an interesting claim, I am prepared to believe it, but I would like to see evidence supporting it. I would suspect that the money to be made by playing music created by other people was reduced. I would also suspect that this stimulated the creation of new songs and musical styles since new copyrightable work became a much more important means of earning income from music.

> People of the past had far more limited access to music, but they weren't stupid or undiscerning - they wanted to hear the best possible music and were willing to pay for it. Busking is probably as old as currency and remains a perfectly reasonable way of making a living.

The modern innovation on busking is platforms like patreon. I pay a monthly amount to a musician I have spent innumerable hours listening to while working. I suspect that payments for access to live performances and voluntary support of musicians you like is the future of musical income. Musical copyright stimulates the creation of some types of music and suppresses other types. It also primarily benefits larger, older, entrenched entities at the expense of suppressing newer, smaller and more innovative entities.

Indeed, also churches had music, and education included music. Bach was an employee of a city, assigned to work for the local church, which included composing, managing the choir, teaching, and performing at services. He quibbled with his employers about pay.

Music education is still an OK income source.

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).

The number of business owners whose wealth is far greater than the richest artists has roughly kept pace with changes in artist's wealth. While Mozart was relatively poor compared to his patrons, Taylor Swift is quite poor compared to Spotify founder Daniel Ek.

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.

This is the intro to Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux (1725) [1], the textbook used to teach music in Mozart and Beethoven's time:

Aloys. — Perhaps the hope of future riches and possessions induces you to choose this life? If this is the case, believe me you must change your mind; not Plutus but Apollo rules Parnassus. Whoever wants riches must take another path.

Joseph. — No, certainly not. Please be sure that I have no other object than to pursue my love of music, without any thought of gain. I remember also that my teacher often told me one should be content with a simple way of life and strive rather for proficiency and a good name than for wealth, for virtue is its own reward.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joseph_Fux#Gradus_ad_Pa...

Do coders get paid every time their code fires? No? Oh then musicians and artists can join the rest of society in not getting paid per usage of an item. Creatives just get greedier and greedier. No other industry gets paid the way that they do, not teaching, not labor, not babysitting, not management, not politics, none. If you want to get paid, perform or provide an object to purchase.

A vanishingly small percentage of artists make a living from art. An even smaller percentage of artists get rich. A bit like not every developer is making $120k+...

Yes. This is the key point. And various commenters have made it here, in one way or another.

Also, as others have argued, only a vanishingly small percentage of musicians have ever made a living from their art. Even during the peak of the 40s-80s boom in recorded music. At least, if you include everyone that others have cared to listen to.

That is, you only made it if you signed with a record label that didn't screw you. And through graft or luck, hit the charts. Those are some serious filters.

Indeed, one could argue that direct marketing via the Internet has allowed more artists to earn at least some income from their music. If in no other way than getting paid for performances. It's just that the chances of making it big are lower.

> Do coders get paid every time their code fires?

That's what the SaaS model was invented for and why you increasingly can't use software without a subscription anymore.

I would never use SaaS. Or at least, I'd never base a business on using it. Because you have no recourse if the price increases dramatically (e.g., Google map API) or the API goes away (not at all uncommon).

That's like those people who disable JavaScript in their browser. Yes you can get through life without using SaaS and you will likely be fine. But you can also join the 21st century and get on with your life.

I like that I can pay for software based on how much I use it rather than ponying up hundreds of thousands of dollars once. A lot of the cheaper end SaaS-es could never ever be sustainable without the monthly subscription business model. Particularly because they themselves use SaaS and have to keep the lights on.

Imagine if isntead of paying a monthly fee to use whatever services companies use to run their company they'd be required to build everything in house? Ain't nobody got the funds for that.

Yes, I get that. And maybe it works out OK, most of the time. But I've surely seen lots of horror stories on HN.

Also, building in-house isn't that expensive. Or at least, not compared to developing in-house. I'm not all that technical, and I setup my own Docker registry, for example.

I am one of those people who only allow minimal required JavaScript :)

I think it’s about opportunity cost. It’s often cheaper to outsource everything not-core and focus your time and attention on the things only you can do. Where “you” is whatever you consider the relevant company/team/businessunit.

Can I build a website? Yes. Can I save money by paying someone to build a website and focus instead on filling it with great content? You bet.

Same applies for SaaS. It would be a waste of time/money/effort to build my own ConvertKit for example

There's a huge difference between outsourcing and SaaS. Sure, it's cheaper to pay someone to build your website. That's outsourcing. But then you run it on a server that you lease. If it's running on something managed by a third party, it can just disappear. And that's SaaS.

There's also the issue of sharing sensitive data with SaaS providers. Just think of all the data leaks that's caused. The Squarespace heatmap stuff we just saw. The deals between Google and phone manufacturers. The behavioral-ad-delivery morass.

Re ConvertKit, the alternative would look like "git clone foo".

It's because of the artificial scarcity caused by the copyright laws. Now, with cheap digital distribution, that's changed a lot, even though you can't (legally) copy music and pass it around in most places. So it's going back to performances being the place for musicians to make money: the recorded music is how they advertise mostly, and then they make their real money by getting out on the road and performing in front of big crowds.

The Romans in 500BC were buying decorative scupltures for their villas, medieval artists made gold jewellry for cash, renaissance painters employed entire studios of artists to churn out hundreds of paintings a year under a famous artist's 'brand'. I think the commercialization of art has been going on for at least a couple of thousand years.

If you're interested the non consumption-oriented music tradition, you'll do well to check out the Clifftop ["old-time music"] Festival [0]. Basically it is a music festival in which the music is made by the attendees, and there are no formally booked or scheduled artists (kind of).

A few things that surprised me (I was totally naive going in, just giving a ride to a friend en route to somewhere else): - Old time music has become a little bit of a punk scene. It seems like the young people interested in making music socially are "crust punks", because it's rowdy and free and made for acoustic instruments/voice. "Old people"and "hillbillies" make up the other half of the stereotype categories. The dynamic is interesting because you have old-school christian cultists and dreadlocked/pierced crust kids teaching each other tunes, and (almost) nobody finds any reason for conflict. - I still have songs stuck in my head that I have not heard recorded or played for years and years. Many oral tradition songs are really fucking good, presumably only the most "viral" ones survived. Many of these songs do not have a recording that sounds "right", the only time it sounds the way it crystallizes in a place and time.

[0] http://www.wvculture.org/stringband/

Will now have image of crust punk playing Old Dan Tucker firmly burned into my mind

I'd like to find something like this for electronic music.

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.

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

There obviously is a market for songwriting and composition, but anger over excessive copyright (eg Disney style life+90) has drastically undermined all copyright. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and is justified (above and in other comments below) on the idea that music lacks utility.

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 making the observation that "there is no market for recorded music" is a very different statement than "there is no market for horse-drawn carriages." People are listening to recorded music as much as ever, by some measures more so; we just don't expect to have to pay more than ten bucks a month for All The Music.

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.

You're absolutely right! Spotify could pay far more per stream than it does.

Spotify currently spends 79% of its revenues on royalties. How much more do you think they should spend?

While this is probably an Unpopular Opinion™, I think the heart of the problem is ultimately that streaming services undercharge. There's no objective reason to believe that their current price is correct, and the fact that Spotify loses money while artists think they're being underpaid seems to strongly suggest that the price is too low. But consumers now believe that $10/month -- less than the price that a single CD generally is, even on Amazon -- is the Objectively Correct Price, and everyone is stuck.

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

Pretty sure that RMS is advocating for that kind of vision.

Too bad he can't figure out how to apply it to real world commodities.

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

"Pretty sure that RMS is advocating for that kind of vision."

That's a common misconception. He actually has no problem with programmers making money.

The GNU Project has an article on this, which starts by saying:

"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible--just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

"Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."

More here:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can.

with subtext being > "good luck if somebody attempts to undercut your prices though."

Its a kind of pointless quote though because the GPL requires that after the first person buys your software they can legally put it up online for free and now you have lost your sales.

Yes, I'm familiar with that, but if said software is distributed under the GPL, one essentially gets to charge for the first sale. So programmers get paid for e.g. contract work, or custom one-offs, but not for writing retail software.

The corresponding model for artists is the Wu-tang clan selling the sole copy of their album to Martin Shkreli.

I don't know about you, but I'm paid to perform(much like a live musician I suppose). I don't get residuals on my performance. I don't list myself as the writer or composer of my code and receive payment if someone uses or derives their own work from mine. My employer might.

I haven't seen anyone here saying musicians shouldn't get paid when they perform for an audience or for a certain purpose (let's say a commercial or soundtrack)

Not a great comparison. We are talking about musicians getting paid for composing music, not for performing. If you want to go with this analogy, then you would note that you DO get paid for the composition (of the software) but not its performance (when it runs on people's computers). Musicians, on the other hand, cannot make money composing anymore, but they can still make money for performing it.

And if you are an indie dev, you probably do make money from the software in its commodified form. And if you are not an indie dev, then your high salary is because someone else makes a lot of money from the software's commodified form (even if that form today is as a service). The point of the article is that musicians can no longer make any money from the commodified (in this regard meaning recorded) form of their music.

> 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?

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 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?

And yes, the economics matter, even considering the "love" factor. 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."

And the problem with that is that Time is the primary ingredient that goes into making music. More time goes into making music that's "better" by any number of reward functions in listeners. You can cheat that rule a little bit at the margins with better tools or inherent talent more than a standard deviation or two above the mean, but the significance of those terms in the equation is generally less than capital-T time.

Which means diluting/disconnecting payment either limits the output of people who don't have outside resources, or limits the quality of the music produced.

> do you want it to reliably tie outputs to inputs, or optionally tie outputs to inputs?

if the input to music is money, i argue that the output is poor quality music.

> Paying for things supports the enterprise that goes into providing them

and thereby changing the goal of the enterprise from producing music, to producing money from music. Look at modern pop music today? They are pretty terrible at best. And yet, the money keeps flowing in!

Nobody is saying that artists don't get paid - they get paid by selling their music in some form, and performing their music. But because the motivations for them doing music ins't due to money, the product end up being a labour of love - a true expression of art. I think patronage achieves the same goals, where as a mass market music business model doesn't get the same result because the goals of a mass market music business is to saturate, and to make sure that their audience is huge (so you end up with pop music).

if the input to music is ability to eat, clothe and house your family, and pay medical bills then the output is probably the music you wouldn't get otherwise.

>>Look at modern pop music today? They are pretty terrible at best.

That's a whole lot of opinion there affecting your theory.

Pop music makes money because, as the name implies, it's popular. That doesn't mean it has to be lyrically or musically devoid of complexity. There's high quality pop music.

Pop music makes money because 1-it tends to be formulaic in it's musical composition to hit sounds that people "like". 2- the stars are young and attractive and people respond to that for a myriad of reasons. 3- the people producing the music and marketing the industry have found that it's a stable and reliable market in a time when the industry as a whole collapsed.

As someone married to a professional artist, I would also like to point out that the starving artist who just LOVES producing their Art so much is a problematic ideal that people romanticize. The bottom line is, if you produce something of value, and someone wants to procure this thing, they should respect your time. The problem is that so many artists don't value their work or time in an economic framework, and thus they drive the market rates lower for the community as a whole.

Time is likely the currency we all spend.

Human activity of all kinds is exchanging time with each other. I spend some time doing A and give you some. In return you spend time doing B and give me some.

Ultimately we all have a finite amount of time available.

When you start assessing things in terms of hours exchanged rather than dollars, euros or pounds you see how it all works.

Baumol’s cost disease explains itself for example. It still take the same number of hours to be a violinist and a concerto takes the same amount of time to perform. And we still value violinists so some of them get paid.

Our machines reduce the human time element embedded in other products and services and that reduces their value in exchange terms. We see that expressed as the dollar price of violinists going up.

There’s even a film In Time where this idea is explored Hollywood style. Not the greatest film but the philosophical idea behind it is fascinating.

The movie had an interesting idea (presumably stolen from any number of old sci-fi novels), but unfortunately turned it to a generic "the rich hoard all the money, we should redistribute it to the masses!" action flick.

While there were several hints at some interesting effects on society throughout the movie, they were never actually explored.

> 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.

For most of human history nobody made money doing anything. Capitalism is an an abberation in history, not "the way it should be".

In fact, I would say there is no "the way it should be". Capitalism seems to have a net positive effect on the majority of the planet. Let's stick with it.

Capitalism is destroying the planet. That's hardly a net positive. In fact it's the worst thing possible. There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse.

> There is nothing humans are even theoretically capable of that is worse [than capitalism].

A bartender once made me an Old Fashioned without muddling the sugar. Are you certain that’s not worse?

What is the suggested alternative to a market economy? Command economies aren't what I would consider better for the globe. Energy intensity per unit of labor is almost universally lower in market economies than it is in command economies.

There is no alternative unless we magically have free energy. The only way out of this is to colonize the solar system, galaxy. At that point the Earth's status as a habitable planet will hardly matter.

A market economy would be fine if it's impact on the ecology was priced in.

Worst thing possible? Really? That's a simpleton's view about existence. Countless planets die every day. I only care about the next 20 years I'm going to be alive for. I don't care about the planet or the survival of your children. Don't force responsibility on me.

So capitalism it is for me.

This is the capitalism mindset and this comment is proof that its the worst thing there is.

I guess it depends on your definition of capitalism but many would argue that it only requires private property and voluntary exchange, both of which probably stretch back into prehistory.

Nonsense. Capitalism is when people make money for doing nothing. People have been paid for work they produce for all of time. The innovation of capitalism is that you can be paid for the work other people produce.

art and music do require skill, and people will pay for good art/music no matter the availability.

take pop music (of all sorts) for example. the money that pours into it is puzzling if you consider the music on its own merits. the melodies are catchy and the lyrics too, but no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it.

(in fact singing is probably the most accessible and widely distributed art form. we're all born with the instrument and a little practice is all that's needed for passable entertainment.)

so why do pop stars make so much money? it's simply not scarcity that drives the price. it's fashion, or culture, or whatever you prefer to call it. it's the need to forget our troubles. it's our secret hopes and dreams routed through a channel for bonding with our fellow man. that's what we're paying for.

and we'll likely always pay for it. but whether the marketing machine of yesteryear can continue to maintain a stranglehold on access and taste is really the open question.

> no one really considers it high art. any barroom crooner could sing and play it

Um, no. I say this as a holder of season tickets to the opera and as a trained operatic tenor myself. Many, many pop singers are incredibly good and far outstrip the skills of most barroom singers I have experienced.

Oh definitely. I don't think people know how much work goes into the typical pop song, even though it may sound like anyone could write and record it.

People think they could sing Britney Spears just like her until they get behind a mic to record. Most people don't even know the cringey feeling of "God, I didn't know my voice sounded like that" after having heard their own recorded voice for the first time. Or how out of tune and rhythm they actually are.

So no. Everybody thinks they could sing the typical pop song, but I doubt that they could.

It's not that pop singers aren't talented. It's just that pop music as a genre is pretty much boring, and the artists that appear every season, or every "America's got talent" edition, they all are easily forgettable. You could switch covers and sell Selena Gomez album as Ariana Grande album and noone would even notice the difference.

Pop music is a commodity, and as any commodity it's pricing/value is basically a race to bottom.

That’s not the point GP made. Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande have roughly similar genres but Ariana is a musical titan who can famously sing in any style she chooses.

sure, some pop artists have great skill, but that's beside the point.

my point was that singing entertainment (e.g., pop) is widely available (someone sitting near you right now can probably sing well enough to be entertaining), so not scarce. you can find millions of decent takes on pop songs on youtube.

and further, the level of passable entertainment is low, both because plenty of people can sing passably, and because enjoyment of the music comes not from admiring the skill but mostly from other factors.

this argument against IP is really good

Plenty of people are making money in music, just not artists.

Plenty of people are making money in software especially from free and open source, just not the developers.

"I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be"."

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying you think we should go back to the way musicians used to be treated in the past?

That's a rather reactionary position.

Historically, women in most societies were treated very poorly, often treated like property, and you could say that women being treated with respect is an "abberation in history". But so what? That doesn't mean we have to go back to when women were treated like crap just because that's the way they've mostly been treated before.

Slavery was the norm in many societies for thousands of years, and you could similarly say the lack of slavery is an aberration in history. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to bring back slavery.

If you want to argue that making money off of making music is wrong, you have to make a stronger case for that position than simply saying that's not the way it was in the past.

> I don't want to put words in your mouth...

Then don't.

Asking if a consequence is intended is different from asserting that a consequence is intended.

I apologize for my previous comment being rather terse. I should have taken the time to write a more reasoned reply.

I was responding to this:

> I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying you think we should go back to the way musicians used to be treated in the past?

> That's a rather reactionary position.

That was just the start...

> Historically, women in most societies were treated very poorly...

> Slavery was the norm in many societies for thousands of years...

And these had what to do with the original comment?

Then the coup de grâce:

> If you want to argue that...

This is the very definition of putting words in someone's mouth!

And it's not a nice thing to do.

> I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are you saying you think we should go back to the way musicians used to be treated in the past?

If there is a demand, then musicians will be paid. But the economy is not obligated to provide musicians a living.

To play devil's advocate, consider how many people you know that work in so-called "bullshit jobs".

TBH, I know plenty of people whose jobs are not that meaningful - yes, some of them create "value" in one way or another, but sometimes even if they create value (indirectly?), maybe it's a bullshit sales job where they are primarily tasked with convincing people to buy their product when an open-source or less-expensive option exists elsewhere. Think "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". You might choose Expensive Enterprise DB over Free And Open Source DB if you are a purchasing manager and don't want the blowback of choosing something with less history. And the people who sell Expensive Enterprise DB might have a salesforce of thousands of twenty-something's who, for the most part, are not technical experts, but spend most of their days propping up the product and convincing people to buy.

I don't think the theoretical perfect supply/demand curve always matches up with real life. Maybe - in the long-term, it does, but sometimes things fly under the radar, maybe for decades, before the business cycle or something else forces a correction.

I don't disagree with your statement, though. If someone wants to earn a living in music, or at least make money, they need many of the same qualifications any startup needs. 1) They need to understand what they are selling and who is buying (product and demographic). Image/Brand is everything (especially since Instagram). ; 2) They have to be able to market - find a launchpad. Whether this is done in-house or the musician is lucky enough to find someone early in their career that signs them to PR / etc., it has to be done. 3) They've gotta be good at what they are doing. Not everyone has to be a Julliard-trained pianist, but they need to be good enough that people want to listen.

Economically, there are certain genre's that (at least to me) seem to immediately be a problem for actually making a competitive living off it. On the other hand, genre's like pop may be incompatible with someone's age - you won't see many 40 year olds releasing their first album to compete with Bruno Mars, for example.

I don't know, though. Music is less important to some than others. I know people who have literally no preferences and just turn a radio on to hear something, and I know others who spend their days in studios writing and recording and living and breathing music.

> I don't think the theoretical perfect supply/demand curve always matches up with real life. Maybe - in the long-term, it does, but sometimes things fly under the radar, maybe for decades, before the business cycle or something else forces a correction.

Yes, it's not perfect. But supply does play a large role.

Nobody is lining up to do "bullshit jobs" but a ton of people do want to make a living with music(and in the arts, in general).

It's the same problem with video game software development. The pay is not that great compared to other "boring" jobs like finance because the supply of people wanting to do it is far greater.

Sigh. jedberg makes a pretty good argument questioning the framing and underlying assumptions of the thesis, pmoriarty swings in with a respectful and reasoned rebuttal, and I'm ready for what looks to be an actual conversation.

Then the Internet clowns pull up.

I didn't say making money making music is wrong. I do think artists should get paid.

He didn't say anything about what ought to be. Rather, just an observation that based on the last few hundred years, making a living off your art is simply not the "natural order" of things. This is relevant because a reversion to the mean (which you could argue this is) is not particularly shocking.

> I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".

I assume you apply the same thinking to software, or movies, which also create artificial scarcity. It is just that movies and software are a new thing. Do you?

I think there's somewhat of a leap of logic in there. The idea that the transition to the present era is due to the end of artificial scarcity is questionable considering how many confounding variables there are.

Look at the graph of real median income vs. per capita gdp or productivity, income has been flat even while the economy grows. And this somewhat understates the problem because the economy today is different than what it was back in the 1970s. A huge segment of the working class is being pinched, economically, and they have less money to spend than they might otherwise. It shouldn't be shocking that people are spending less on things like music when they can do so. That doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't spend plenty if their earnings were in line with pre 1980 historical norms, however.

I'd be curious to know also how many people are still being paid for their work as artists through movies, TV, video games, etc. I bet it is also a significantly larger percentage of the population than a few hundred years ago.

Not so much aberration but a gradual corporatisation and then collapse of the industry of "recorded music".

To a large extent the performance side of music has remained unchanged. For a period it may have become subservient to the recording side where artists "toured" an album, but a lot of what went on was due to artists patronage from the respective recording rights holders.

Regarding the scarcity thing: I still listen to the same music, but for free. YT, downloaded a while back etc etc.

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 get mediocre unsatisfying art that leaves everyone involved feeling like something vital is missing - which is more or less where we are now.

In fact it takes many more years of study and experience to become a competent, productive musician, artist, novelist, or other creative worker, than it does to become a software developer.

The arts are a profession, not a hobby. Just because most people can have a go doesn't mean it makes sense to run them on an amateur basis - any more than it does to run software development in the same way.

[1] The one category it probably should apply to.

> 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"?

People are not pirating "some" art, the generally pirate the best art available.

The best art has always been produced by professionals and not by some YouTube narcissists who think they're God's gift to this world.

As a rule, people are pirating the most valuable art, not the best. This is an important distinction, because by conflating them, you are buying into the industry's point that the most expensive art is the best -- and as the monopoly cartel controls the price, that becomes self-fulfilling.

It is true that in pop music and movies the best art does not necessarily win, but even bad movies have some level of professionalism that is absent from indie productions.

YouTube becomes the cartel these days, and tries to drive down the price for "content" to zero.

It is far more evil for artists than any middleman taking 60% or more of a substantial sum of money.

There are pirates who are in it to make money, and pirates who are in it to get the art itself. The former might focus on most valuable art, the latter focus mostly on art that is the best - they're not going to pirate something they don't like (I'm purposefully not taking into account things like downloading that horrible Celine Dion album for dear old mumsy. :) )

Isn't this a natural way that scarcity comes back. If everything thar is produced is unsatisfying then someone will be willing to pay more to get something better. When someone finds a good way to sell that premium model then others will try to imitate it and after a while the value will drop again until someone finds the next way to do increase the value and so on and so forth.

Well, until the 20th century, the modern way of funding science (by competitive grant proposals to funding agencies) didn't exist. Scientists were to a large part just doing it for love of the subject as being a professional scientist just wasn't a thing. At best they could get a job as a professor, but that literally meant teaching back then; if they wanted to do research, they had it do it on their own and pay for it themselves. And the best scientists of the era like Darwin and Lord Rayleigh were from the idle rich who never needed a paying job at all so they could devote themselves full time to science. It didn't work that badly -- except of course that the number of scientists was tiny compared to now.

You could apply this argument to almost literally anything that people do or have done for money.

Yes, there is a reason nobody is making money selling NPM modules and that is the marginal cost is zero and there is no constraint on supply, people like to do it for free.

Doctors and Lawyers have professional guilds that legislate to constrain supply. Hence the price is high.

Competence doesn't really come into it, even in the high art world it's more about who you know than what you know. No amount of wishful thinking will change this.

> 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, financial experts, sports, or software developers.

The key point you're missing is these people are selling their labor (aside, maybe, from software developers who could be selling their product).

If you get an engineer to design a bridge they do the work and get paid, no IP rights, no "limited" monopoly, no nothing but a paycheck.

If you get a musician to write a song for you they (and their heirs) get payed for that work for a long, long time.

I understand where you're coming from (that artists should be a protected class so we have "enough" artists) but the days of the billionaire rockstar is probably over.

Arguably the equivalent work that artists can do as compared to what other professionals can do is to have their work commissioned for some other project. You know, jingles, soundtracks, creating atmosphere (i.e. live performances), that kind of thing.

I guess what I'm saying is that following the state of typical labour markets, having somebody produce something that they have their name on, that is an artistic work of its own right and actually getting paid for it is actually pretty extraordinary. Only a very tiny fraction of people get to work that way (probably because of the limits of attention as much as anything else). In many respects it's not surprising that it's fragile.

While I don't disagree that it would turn out to be bad for music to lose its professional art for art's sake, I also don't think the comparison with other professionals holds.

>The predictable outcome is that you'll get mediocre unsatisfying art that leaves everyone involved feeling like something vital is missing - which is more or less where we are no

On the other hand, modern, professionally produced, top-10, high grossing music, from the few millionaire "division of labor" artists, also leaves me "feeling like something vital is missing", so there's that...

>You wouldn't apply it to physicists, engineers, medical specialists, lawyers, politicians, financial experts, sports, or software developers.

I would, probably.

Sports were better when it was amateurs, and scientists were better, more independent, and less corrupt, when they were independently wealthy people or at least tenured academics... (80% of modern science and technology that changed the world came from those people -- for the last 50 years or so, we just got incremental, evolutionary, updates in the 20% rest of the rest).

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.

Also the best way to summarise the research and the distribution angle was:

The avg value a consumer expresses for:

* listening on a radio in medium or high quality is near zero

* downloading a track in medium quality is near zero.

* buying an CD album in high quality is 75p per track.

* buying a CD single in high quality is 25 per track.

* buying sheet music in an abstract quality is £3 per track.

* buying a midi file to use as a ring-tone in lowest quality for portion of the track is close to £12 per track.

The fidelity and quality were not a major influence on the value... but the distribution and how controlled or locked-down the distribution and means of playback for the end consumer of the music had a direct impact on the value. The ring-tone was DRM'd (badly) at the time, which meant it was not trivial to put your own music on there but yet people would pay £1 for barely 20 seconds of a barely recognisable midi file.

The more you can lock down the distribution and control the means to access the media, the more you can push the price up.

Or as I think it... if Apple hadn't come along and artificially held the value of music at the price it did by controlling distribution, the sooner we would have reached another age of patronage. I still believe that Apple, and now Spotify, are merely holding back the inevitable and they haven't stopped it but will get very rich in the interim.

I think it's incomplete to characterize the state of the industry today without discussing how those consumer perceptions of value were intentionally created. If you worked in the music industry for 10 years then your experience almost completely post-dates these efforts.

Starting even well before Napster, investors and technology companies saw the opportunity to change the allocation of value from artists and producers, to distribution. To be clear, that was not the allocation 30+ years ago. Record stores and radio stations did not make immensely more money than the labels and artists.

Tech companies and investors worked aggressively to "commoditize their complement"--that is, depress the value of art on their platforms, so that they could reallocate consumer spending to their products and services.

"Buy a computer and Internet connection and you can have all the music and movies you want for free" was explicitly advertised by technology companies--see for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxtxPAUcwQ

I think this historical perspective is crucial for understanding how we got to today. Music files are small, so the music industry was attacked first. The large size of video files kept them safe for long enough for visual artists and producers to understand what was happening and counteract. That is why you see producer-owned distribution channels for video today (Hulu, HBO Go, Disney+, etc), but not label-owned distribution channels for music. This is why Netflix, Amazon, and now Apple have had to get into original video content. They were not able to beat the movie and TV producers before the producers could figure out the technology themselves.

I did not say the 10 years was to now, I've been in tech for the last 20, my time spanned late 1980s to late 1990s... the time you speak of.

Got it--bad assumption on my part. Interested in your thoughts on my comment.

The emergence of "music industry" has probably resulted in higher quantity of music but also more lower quality music.

Touring is not easy work. It stands to reason that "love of doing" is still a primary motivation.

I disagree very strongly.

For most of human history, the arts existed for a huge part in the service of religion, and therefore were instruments of power and wealth.

It's gross to say that making a living by creating art that people love is an "aberration." It's not like recorded music is unpopular--it's more popular than ever. But for some reason, now people are bad for expecting to make money creating it?

To be clear, there is still scarcity: new music you like is scarce. That is universally true; new music doesn't just appear, it has to be made, and until it is made, you can't get it. That is the definition of scarcity: "the state of being in short supply."

Music in general is not scarce, but some music is more popular than others. Shouldn't a normally functioning economy account for that?

New recorded music from Daft Punk is in short supply; it is scarce. Are the members of Daft Punk an "aberration" (definition: an unwelcome deviation from normal) for wanting to be compensated for reducing that scarcity?

How is that different from a new video game being released? For all of human history, we've been making and playing games. Is it an "aberration" for people who make video games to want to get compensated for reducing the scarcity of new games?

If we want to play the "doing it for love" game, then let's be clear that you, and anyone else, is welcome to make music for free, play it for free, record and release it for free. There is nothing stopping people from doing it for "the love"; in fact it is easier than ever to make music for free.

But it is IMO abusive to then say, well doing it for free is the only acceptable norm, just because they like to do it. I like to work with computers, but guess what: I also get paid do it. I bet you do too! Why is that normal for you and me, but an aberration for musicians?

Usually when people talk about "scarcity being gone" they mean that digital files can be copied and distributed with almost no marginal cost. Well guess what: so can financial instruments. Should we stop charging for Apple stock just because Apple can create new stock at the click of a button?

Why do supposedly digitally-savvy folks get so hung up on the fact that music comes on digital files? Lots of things come on digital files, like your direct deposit salary payments. Does that mean money is not scarce anymore?

I think this is historically inaccurate and tbh it's also a bit dangerous to think that, making money from your art is wrong because this wasn't always the case.

There’s nothing wrong with making money from your art. People weren’t making money from art in the past centuries because until a recent time in history there was no market for it or for almost anything else, and also no property rights.

The only market there was after the fall of the Roman Empire and until the end of feudalism, was church commissioning some art and construction.

Also, I don't understand the argument about artificial scarcity. Original art has inherent scarcity, and this is the foundation of the art market. And a digital album that can be copied by anyone with a tape recorder, CD drive or computer didn't prevent bands from making serious money, even in an environment of abundance.

Finally, markets are not that easy. There is a market for art as there is a market for SaaS, or services. And most SaaS companies fail, just like most consulting agencies and most artists that don't become commercially successful.

Artists choose to seek patronage in order to minimise risk, and we are lucky that contrary to the past, they can do so without giving up their rights to opportunity, as it used to be the case.

>I think people making money making music was an aberration in history, not "the way it should be".

Whether that is "the way it should be" or not, depends on what we want it to be as a society.

Not to whether some technology helps it or not. Untraceable murder could be very easy tomorrow with some new technology, but we'd still not want it to happen.

So the part that "artificial scarcity" helped musicians make money off of their art, is a historical and technological accident.

But whether artists should be able to make money off of their art (scarcity be damned) is an ethical and "what kind of society we want" question.

We shouldn't abandon our "oughts" at the first sign of some technology working against them.

This is great insightful comment, thank you.

> However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing.

Human hearing only goes up to 20 kHz when you are young, dropping to about 12 kHz at the age of 50. 44 kHz sampling gives a Nyquist frequency of 22 kHz, easily encompassing the full range of human hearing. Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in the first place.

>I have long since abandoned arguments about the quality of sound. The analog sound was better. It was fuller and warmer, and it held all the sonic information.

16-bit samples on a CD can represent about 96 dB of dynamic range. The cassette tapes that he is arguing for can only represent 60-70 dB of dynamic range. It certainly doesn't hold "all the sonic information".

I really appreciate the historical view that the author brings. In terms of the technology, though, he sounds like one of the foolish audiophiles buying the $1,500 HDMI cables.

Also:

>The sample rate of an MP3 is 23,000 compressed samples per second, half the sample rate of a commercial CD and a quarter of the sample rate of a studio quality digital recording.

The MP3 format does not support 23kHz sample rate, which is a strange non-standard rate that I've never hear of anybody using in any format.

Must be confusing it with the 32kHz option, which I don't believe was that widely used. As far as I recall, most MP3s were 44.1kHz (same as CDs) but 48kHz was an option too.

Yup. I dug deep into the technology recently when I taught a class on the science of sound at a local college. When you look at media not only from the mathematical perspective (Nyquist, etc), but the physical (grain density and size on tape), it’s pretty clear that past technologies did have fundamental limits. It’s hard to disentangle the technical appeal of certain recording media from the nostalgia for a rosier looking past when reading some of these articles.

This stuff again. I have several friends who are convinced that a $2,000 HDMI cable can produce "better" audio and video. I've grown so tired of these debates, that I just nod my head and move on when they start down these roads.

Because of these arguments, I've been saving articles about them when I run across them. When I retire, I may make a web site devoted to debunking this nonsense forever. One good example was a guy who used "cheap" and "expensive" speaker cables, and COAT HANGERS, and challenged people to reliably tell the difference in A/B testing. No one could.

It seems to me that we have the cheap and highly-available ability, these days, to 1) lift audio and video from a source directly, and 2) pass it through various stages in the reproduction chain, and 3) PROVE that this-or-that piece of kit ACTUALLY reproduces the ORIGINAL recording any better than another.

(My favorite piece of gear, in an audiophile catalog, from about 30 years ago, was a replacement knob for your amplifier. Apparently, the bakelite one that came with it introduced unfavorable harmonics into your listening experience. The replacement fixed all that for you. It was a wooden puck, with a hole drilled in the back. They wanted $500 for it. .... I'm in the wrong business.)

All this boils down to is various levels of equalization. You can say that a turntable and an analog amp is "better," and that's fine. You may really prefer it. But don't tell me it's "more accurate." I can demonstrate that - at the end of the day - it's just an EQ on the original recording, and does not reproduce the original more accurately. (With math and graphs and everything!)

Unfortunately, I know what I'm up against. The people who believe this audiophile nonsense will very likely NOT understand the math and the graphs, and I'll be wasting my time regardless. The entire market is fed by -- and I hate to say it, because these kinds of folks are GOOD friends of mine -- people with literally more money than sense.

Guess that came out a lot more rant-y than I was shooting for.

> it's just an EQ on the original recording

EQ along with a bit of harmonic distortion and record player noise.

> it's just an EQ on the original recording

I'll be pedantic and say that it's actually not just an EQ, but a non-linear compression function. The needle has a different frequency response at different amplitudes, due to its mechanical properties. They used to master music specifically for that, but now they just cut the Spotify master into the record and hope everyone attributes the sound differences to "analog warmth".

Music got much more compressed in the 90s and 00s, to make radio and tiny speakers sound "better". I can imagine this may also be a big contributor to people preferring the old analog recordings.

There was, and is a lot of snake oil in consumer audiophile gear. There is in most fields. Let's discount idiots suggesting snake oil, and stick to the rational. :)

That there was a noticeable difference in equivalent quality master sources where one is digital and the other analogue, that can be heard in blind testing. As a result some engineers and artists preferred analogue mastering long into the digital age. Digital mastering had issues for years, and they could be heard on both the CD and vinyl. Hardly a case of claiming record is always better.

Superficially there is some sense - the higher frequency signals are rendered less and less accurately, and nearer a binary on-off. Who knows what nuance and harmonics may be lost affecting what's heard at lower frequencies.

There were also serious problems in many early digital (and hybrid) audio production chains. Some productions had great engineers on board who'd taken the time to learn the new tools. Others ... were varying degrees from "meh" to "disaster". For example, I have a CD that's unlistenable if you've still got your high-end hearing – there's major high-frequency artifacting. I'll bet that the mastering engineer couldn't even hear the problems.

Many people formed their critical listening opinions during this time, and came to the at-the-time logically supportable conclusion that "analog sounds better". In fact, that was just an unfortunate period of industry-wide learning curve. Much of what followed was rationalization of that early opinion, generally not backed up by the science of audio recording and production.

I always wonder how some bands (like Dire Straits) seemed to figure this stuff out so early on while a decade later others struggled to do the same.

You think they figured it out early? Go listen to some Miles Davis recordings from the late 50s. Analog tape, two mics, and that was it. And it still sounds better than almost everything made since.

Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom). With "modern" studio techniques we've adopted multitrack recording, close mic'ing of instruments, and what not. While these may make the recording process easier, they don't make recordings of a higher quality. Give me a pair of high-quality mics in ORTF configuration and natural, unamplified instruments any day.

Is it fair to compare studio-quality analog with a consumer format for digital? You would have to compare studio-analog with studio-digital and I'd be surprised if the analog comes out on top in any way.

Techniques like close mic'ing aren't really about ease, it's about capturing a different sound and it predates the digital era.

Your preference for particular mics and instruments is kind of irrelevant to digital vs analog as a storage format, isn't it?

> Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom).

I'm not sure what you mean by "studio-quality analog". If you literally mean playback from professional studio gear, what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records.

And records are temperamental. For decent sound quality, you needed expensive turntables. Also a clean environment. If you used mass-consumer turntables, you'd destroy high frequencies. And if your records got dirty and/or scratched, there'd be noise.

Also, if you didn't have space to put the turntable and speakers in different rooms, you'd get low-frequency feedback at high volumes. Which could damage your speakers.

So I did have a decent turntable. And I only played new records once or twice. To record on reel-to-reel tape.

> what's the relevance? What consumers could buy was records.

This subthread, starting from the GGGP, is about digital vs. analogue in the recording+editing+mastering process, not digital vs. analogue in the dubbing+reproduction process.

The relevance is that, despite the introduction of studio-side digital sampling, it made sense (and still makes sense!) to keep to analogue "working copies" (or at least higher-sample-rate lossless digital "working copies") as long as possible in the process, because the point you dub over to 16-bit LPCM ("CD-quality") digital is the point where you throw away information—and audio engineers in the 70s and 80s who didn't realize this are responsible for a fair number of these awful-sounding releases.

Ah. OK. Thanks.

I think what's being referred to was the shoddy way many musicians and producers used digital technology and basically just digitized an analog recording without even bothering to get mixing or levels right on the analog side. Dire Straits in particular was an early adopter of a fully digital pipeline[1] in the studio and used it very well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_in_Arms_(album) was notable as being one of the first CDs recorded as DDD as opposed to AAD (https://www.danielmcadam.com/AAD-ADD-DDD.html) which was much more common in the 80's. It's still sounds great today IMO.

> Studio-quality analog has had better than CD-quality audio since the late 50s (lower noise, more headroom).

I believe you're referring to dynamic range, that is, the ratio between the loudest possible sound and sound level which drowned out by hiss. My understanding was that the very best reel-to-reel studio decks are only capable of a dynamic range equivalent to roughly 14 bits in digital. Do you have any objective source backing up this better-than-CD-quality claim?

While I agree with you, it's also true that aliasing occurs below the Nyquist frequency and some people can hear those artifacts in ideal listening conditions (acoustic environment, DA conversion, monitors/headphones, etc). I seriously doubt the author can hear the differences considering his age.

Another point is maybe the author actually meant he preferred analog recording and mixing vs doing it all in digital, and his point was not really about the reproduction method. It's common knowledge in the industry that good analog mixing desks (eg: Neve) are still better than any plugin at summing and EQing.

Deadmau5 recently switched his studio to a Neve desk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWZdPQAXxW4

It's true that you can alias into these frequencies, but that's not really an issue of reproduction but of capture and the filter chain. This is often confounded in discussions of "CD quality"

Aliasing is a problem coming from insufficient filtering. That is actually one reason that 48kHz still makes sense to upgrade to from 44.1kHz - it makes the antialiasing filter design a bit easier because the rolloff doesn't have to be as sharp to stay above the range of hearing and below the Nyquist frequency.

Neve make beautiful mixers, but it's not necessarily "better' - it just has a nice sound because the analog components colour the sound in certain ways. There are other ways to do the same thing though - as long as you have good enough preamps and digitisation, you can download characterisations of certian amplifiers/mixers to apply to your digital signal. This is massive in guitar effects - you can download basically any vintage amp and sound basically identical without having to ship around heavy amps with delicate tubes in them!

> It's common knowledge in the industry that good analog mixing desks (eg: Neve) are still better than any plugin at summing and EQing.

At certain points in history, it was common knowledge that the Earth was flat and that a reliable method to determine whether someone was a witch was to see if she would float.

> Any overtones that are missing in the recording are overtones that didn't make it through the human ear in the first place.

Even if human beings cannot hear higher frequencies directly, they can hear the beats produced when higher frequencies sound at the same time as lower, directly audible ones. This has sometimes been exploited for musical purposes and I do wonder if this plays some role in some listeners’ feeling that low-bitrate encoding or speaker playback lacks oomph.

If the beats are audible, they're "real" and recordings will pick them up just fine. You don't need to record the original ultrasound to hear them. You still can't hear the inaudible frequencies, at the risk of stating a tautology.

You can make some small case for lower frequencies, because even if they are not audible they get to the point where other senses can pick them up too. A sufficiently loud 1Hz wave is simply something shaking. But you can't hear ultrasound.

They are an artifact, a side effect, of the way human hearing works, they are not actually present on a recording medium (only the frequencies that produce the effect in the human ear are).

Yes so the EFFECT is recorded cause the microphone hears it just the same as a human ear.

And they weren't actually present at the time of recording either, they're a product of waves adding together. Those same waves are still added together when it plays from your speakers.

> Those same waves are still added together when it plays from your speakers.

Not if the bitrate used to encode the digital audio is low and drops any of the higher frequencies from the lot.

I think people's experience with digital audio being "worse" than analogue audio, mostly comes down to the average audio reproduction equipment getting worse over the years. (Worse and cheaper. Like flights.)

Everyone used to have a pair of gigantic bookshelf speakers, where you didn't even need a subwoofer because the woofer covered the full low end of the range. They were also shitty, but in a particular analogue way that made them "warmer" and introduced a bit of hiss (which essentially was doing a cheap antialias of the source, according to our ears.)

When was the last time you listened to a good set of speakers, outside of a movie theatre? (Good headphones don't count—they can reproduce audio with high fidelity, but they can't produce enough sound to vibrate your body from the direction they're coming from—let alone enough to make the acoustics of the room you're listening in important.)

Analog introduces it's own set of distortions into the final sound -- it's simply a preference for that style of distortion.

Totally duplicate on modern equipment though, no $1000 cables needed.

Well-mastered CDs sound fantastic - no hiss and amazing dynamic range.

I like tape artifacts such as saturation, hiss, wow/flutter, distortion, etc. as much as the next person. I even like the "sound" of cassettes. But CDs are vastly superior in terms of accurately reproducing audio signals.

The author's basic premise is false and his article is riddled with basic factual errors.

The vast majority of artists never made a significant proportion of their income from recorded music, due to the extremely shady accounting practices used by the industry to deprive artists of royalties. For detail on this, see Steve Albini's notorious essay The Problem With Music.

https://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17

The internet has hugely undermined the value of recorded music, but it has greatly increased the marketability of live music, which is and always has been the most reliable source of income for musicians. If you've got a mailing list with a few thousand people who'll pay to see you perform, you've got a career. You don't need a record contract, you don't need a booking agent, you don't need radio airplay, you just need 40 or 50 towns with enough fans to sell out a small venue.

Prior to the internet, building that mailing list almost always involved a record deal, because there was no other way to reach the public; a few independent artists made it through 'zines and word-of-mouth and tenacious effort, but most didn't. If you didn't get on a radio playlist, nobody got to hear your music and nobody came to your shows. Today, the equation is completely different. There are a thousand different niche acts with absolutely no recognition among the general public, who nonetheless make a respectable living from touring because they can connect directly with fans.

> it has greatly increased the marketability of live music

Yet that might be a blip. Some of my friends who used to be passionate concertgoers, now say there’s no reason to pay for a concert, deal with getting to the venue, etc. when bands are uploading full-length concerts in fine video and audio to YouTube. Also, since musical tastes have fragmented enormously due to the wider supply, people are less likely to share favourite bands with friends, and so you might not have anyone to go to concerts with you. Concerts used to have an attraction as a social outing, but if you’d have to attend alone, what’s the point?

Mind if I ask how old these friends are? This seems like more of a general age thing. I'm 26 and wouldn't even begin to compare watching a concert on Youtube to actually being there. I've watched Stop Making Sense 1,000 times but it would still be my first stop in a time machine.

I found it underwhelming that the author talks about "artists are no longer making a living making music" but provides no numbers. Do we have fewer professional musicians per capita? Do they make less on average/median/mode?

The closest he comes to evidence to support his thesis was the informal survey he gave his students about their perceptions about becoming a professional musician. Yet even here he fails to provide any evidence that this perception has changed relative to any of the other time periods he talks about. I don't think "professional musician" has ever been seen as a particularly valuable career path and has usually been a choice made based on love, rather than greed.

The closest he comes to an argument to explain his students' belief is not an argument about the money making potential of music given our current technology, but an argument about how there is too much competition.

Then he says this:

> And so what of the future? Since the death of Steve Jobs, Apple has not released any new platforms in the last five years. Are technological changes slowing down after 30 years of whirling change?

He ignores the two of the most important newer platforms for music: youtube and then later, spotify. Looking at the future without considering the effects of royalty paying platforms with complex recommendation engines completely misses the point about how high competition and new types of centralized discovery platforms will change the face of music. Overall, this is a poorly constructed article that reads like it is about 10 years out date, I actually scrolled up to check when it was published.

Yeah - /any/ "star" role has always been a risk that it is foolish to go for without a back up plan! That is simply the case of all winner takes most jobs. If you want to complain about low level viability being ruined you need to go back to before recording where getting rich was even rarer.

Not to mention the downright dishonest exclusion of song downloads while lamenting decline of CD sales.

Much of what you say is true, but then the live music scene is dominated by an oligopoly for ticket sales (Livenation & Ticketmaster) and for bookings (GoldenVoice). Commercial venues tend to sign contracts with these big players and that's killed off most local and regional booking agencies that used to set people up. It's better than it used to be in some respects, but also centralized and excessively driven by analytics.

The problem is that people took Steve Albini's legitimate criticisms of large end of the music industry and threw the baby out with the bathwater. It's far easier to launch a music act in some respects, but at the price of destroying a lot of economic infrastructure and favoring the lowest common denominator, eg things like 'Gucci gang'.

by the way, livenation and ticketmaster are the same company (headquartered in LA).

I sort of remembered that but then I told myself I was getting carried away on my anti-monopolistic rhetoric and exaggerating the issue, and it didn't seem important enough to pause and research the issue :)

Honest question, why has nobody gone after them for monopolistic practices?

hard to say, as i haven't dug into it at all. on the face of it, using their stronghold in venues/marketing (livenation) to get their way on ticketing (ticketmaster), or vice versa, seems like it would be ripe for abuse as well as regulatory scrutiny.

This article reeks of blaming new technology for killing an industry (it didn't), and resistance to change (i.e. things were so much better when I was young). He actually (sort-of) acknowledges this in the last paragraph when he mentions theatre taking a hit when films came about, but music hasn't been replaced like theatre has so the comparison is moot.

> Now everybody can make a record – and maybe that’s not a good thing

No, that is a very good thing. High studio costs mean that you had to get funded by a record company to get anything recorded and released. Record companies were the gatekeepers. Now, you can make a decent sounding record with only a few thousand dollars worth of recording equipment and a laptop. No, it will not sound as good as one recorded at a proper studio, but Joe/Jane Consumer generally won't be able to tell the difference anyway. The magic of music is not how high quality the recording is, but how well the artists composed the music and how they played it. I think the punk recordings he mentions showed that the best, because they objectively sound bad from a traditional music production standpoint, but that was the whole point those punk artists were making. There have been some absolutely great records made in people's home studios, even as early as the 90's. The key ingredient of good music is creativity, not sound quality, and having decent recording gear for cheap just lets more people be more creative.

As much as I hate sifting through the mountain of music that should probably have not been released, I couldn't agree more. It's relatively inexpensive to setup a home studio that yields excellent results. You still need technical skills, of course. But, assuming you have them, a computer, a DAW, and a basic audio interface can go a long way.

> The key ingredient of good music is creativity, not sound quality, and having decent recording gear for cheap just lets more people be more creative.

I have to remind myself of this everytime I get the urge to buy new stuff aka GAS

So this article is largely about the changes in technology, namely that with a high barrier to entry and when distribution was predicated on moving physical products, times were good for musicians selling the media of the time (records, CDs).

But this article makes the same mistake pretty much every article decrying the zero cost of distribution (ie the Internet) and the inevitable piracy, it ignores a key point: at probably every point in this era only a very few musicians could ever earn a living just from selling recorded music.

The primary source of income for the majority of musicians has been for performances. Even in the Internet/MP3 era, people still want to see live music. Maybe that's not attractive to those who want to sit at home collecting royalties but getting in front of a live audience and playing music was, is and will continue to be a potential source of a living.

And while the income from recorded music situation is unquestionably worse than, say, 50 years ago, we also no longer have record companies and radio stations as the gatekeepers of taste. Anyone can publish digital music to Spotify, Youtube, Soundcloud, etc so it's not all bad.

So whenever you see any articles complaining about low royalties paid by streaming services or the unfairness of record contracts, look at that article and see if it anything about income from performances because almost always it doesn't.

But the sale of recorded music did enable many musicians to earn income even if they didn't want to or couldn't tour, or couldn't make much money off of touring, which was the story for most small/indie artists. It was another income stream, and for the smaller artists, a source of revenue that helped justify continuing to record. (If they worked with an honest publisher and/or had control over rights)

As you noted, for a smaller number of top artists, record sales served as the sole source of income, and enabled them to do amazing stuff. XTC springs to mind - Andy Partridge apparently had terrible stage fright, hated touring, and basically stopped after the late 70s. During the 80s they recorded some truly groundbreaking albums on the strength of their songwriting and studio talents, and were able to survive on record sales based on a strong fan base and very limited radio airplay to promote record sales.

The KLF is another example. I worked for their record label in the early 90s, and they did absolutely no touring at that time (or ever, AFAIK). Revenue was from the sale of singles, the White Room album, special releases, and foreign licensing.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite artists came out with a new album. The day I tried it out, I played through it several times. My brain was invigorated, my blood was pumping, and I had an abnormally productive day of coding.

That day of productive coding produced tens of thousands of dollars of value for my company. That's value that, at least partially, wouldn't exist without the artist's new album.

My company will reap benefits in the form of added revenue. I'll reap benefits in the form of bonuses and promotions. But the artist, who produced this value as an externality, will only receive value if I decide to buy their CD out of gratitude.

The gap between artists producing value for society, and being rewarded for that value, is a shame, and we're worse off for it. I can't think of a solution, but I also can't shake the feeling that this disconnection of value is at the heart of the "making a living" issue.

Solutions already exist. Bandcamp allows artists to let users pick their price, and services like Patreon allow you to support the artist directly. So all of this would have actually been more difficult in the "good old days," and you now have more ways of supporting your favorite artist however much you want.

And those solutions are not so great for quite a variety of artists, which is what this story is about. Network effects force everyone to deal with a small number of platform vendors who dominate their market.

I would have included George Orwell as a successful futurist.

For those that are younger: Courtney Love Does the Math (https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/). Hard to believe it's been (almost) 20 years since that was written.

I'm watching a young, extremely talented guy make his bones on YouTube. He's now started touring extensively, and working with other up-and-comers. I'm hoping he can reach the tipping point to become mainstream.

Aha! I have been looking for this article, I believe it's the same one Billy Corgan referenced in a podcast when he was going over the economics of Smashing Pumpkins' chart success in the '90s.

He harks back to the "savannah" age but really he's hankering for a much more recent, 20th century mythical golden age.

The title he should have used was "why musicians and music writers now have a very hard time exploiting a temporary, and vanishing distribution shortage to make even a fraction of the money collected by the record companies."

Plenty of artists of all sorts are still making money; maybe not as much as during the 40-year bubble and of course a small number as it ever was.

My experience in college radio (a while back) suggests that most professional musical artists, indie or otherwise, are just not that good. I don't lament the democratization of music like this guy does. If nobody wants to listen to him, am I supposed to feel bad?

As for supporting the musicians, I'm happy to pay 10 USD/month for music streaming, but it's not worth more to me. My totally acceptable alternative is just not listening to such paid music at all. The musicians owe me nothing, and vice versa.

> There are signs that the royalty-collecting agencies are beginning to catch up to the myriad array of digital offspring ranging from the internet to satellite television and radio.

They were never behind. Wherever there is music, they have their claws in it. They are also the single most important reason we can't have good things and why musicians don't get paid nearly enough.

I think an even easier way to describe this phenomenon: can you commodify what you do? If you can, you can sell it and make a living. If you can't, you can't.

Albums and three minute songs became a popular format to record in because they could be commodified as a record sales. Novels become the most popular form of creative writing because they could be commodified as moderate sized- and moderately priced book sales. Etc.

The title itself is problematic, because it should be "A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making popular music." Classical musicians (with notable exceptions) have been unable to make a living recording new music for a long time. Only specific genres were able to thrive during the 3-minute song album era. And now the internet has made that more difficult because we don't need the commodified form -- records, cds -- anymore.

But people can still make money writing music that is bundled with other commodities: movies, games, etc.

I decided to fact-check one random thing while skimming the article, and of course the article got it wrong. Makes me wary of the whole thing.

> With the addition of multi -track recording, invented by jazz guitarist Les Paul, another golden age of recording began.

No he didn't. He was just the first person to buy a system capable of doing so [1], though he had some influence on the development of that particular system. In reality it was a lot of incremental work by many different people. There was also people experimenting with "homemade" stuff long before the first commercial system.

Giving all the credit to the one guy who was already famous, just because he happens to be a known figure, always irks me.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_multitrack_recordin...

Is there a historical chart anywhere that shows earnings for low/mid/top popularity tier performers over time?

I believe the general consensus that they make less on average, but no idea how much less, if the hit was even across tiers, what the timeframe was, etc.

Two very bad analogies in the first paragraph.

1/ We don't know much or anything about our prehistoric ancestors; but we do know that lions don't hunt humans, because where they still cohabit in a natural state, it's rather the other way around

2/ The story of the frog in slowly boiling water is apocryphal and false; if you put a frog in a jar and heat it, however slowly, the frog WILL JUMP OUT

Sounds like sour grapes to me. "I'm done arguing about it, but analog sounded better" as if he has any evidence to back up his claim. Not all of us can tolerate music with an assload of white noise splattered all over it. I've yet to listen to a vinyl without the experience being ruined by analog hiss.

My daughter got an inexpensive record player (Audio Technica) and some records for Christmas and I was shocked by how great it sounds. I remember playing records 30 years ago and just accepting pops and hisses and skips. Plus I owned a lot of crappy records (anybody remember K-Tel?)

Going to the record store with her has gotten me back into buying music as well. She shops the vinyl section and I buy CDs. I think CDs sound better and I like not having to flip the disc, but there's something very satisfying about handling a large grooved record where you can "see" the music and the accompanying booklet or sleeve with lyrics and artwork.

Something I didn't expect is how cheap CDs are now. I've bought lots of stuff for $6-$8.

I'd wager that modern vinyls and record players are significantly better than those produced in the 60-70s, so you get very decent sound.

And the physicality of it surely can't be beat.

I posted this elsewhere, but you will probably enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

this feels very 'old man yells at cloud.'

People still make money making music (and other art,) but it's changed. That's true, but this person has an outsized view of his own impact if he thinks that hustling to move 100k copies of his own record changed anything for better or worse.

I checked out Ian Tamblyn on Spotify. He has 319 monthly listeners. His top track has 11k plays. Is it because analog has more fidelity?

It's the same reason why journalists and whole host of other content creators are no longer making a living: There is so much out there for free, most people don't perceive it as having value anymore.

This is why music piracy of the early 2000s hurt the industry: the individual artist wasn't necessarily losing money directly at the time, but it definitely made it difficult for all artists to make money 2 decades later.

The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS.

>The same thing also happened to software, which is why so many companies moved to SaaS.

This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions.

Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings?

I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance (live music at restaurants and cafes and the like) which makes such things rare and usually very poorly paid.

I would love to frequent places with good food and good live music with the atmosphere of being able to carry a conversation while the band was on. What I've experienced is bands in big rooms with terrible acoustics and bad mixing so loud I can't hear myself think or anything really but the drummer. Combine this with the social and economic situation of everyone staying home and watching TV most nights makes the demand for live music weak.

There is an opportunity for targeting that kind of market but difficult to capture requiring a good booker and a sound person that doesn't want everything to sound like a rock show.

"Did anyone ever make much of a living on selling recordings?"

Yes. I know plenty of independent artists before and after the Napster days and they could no longer make a living. People just expected it for free, because Napster changed the culture of music..which is the long-term danger of piracy.

It also made it so the only artists that could make a real living are forced to sign with a big label, because you now need an entire marketing department behind your music to compete with free.

Music is now used as free marketing to get people to go to a show...and you need to be signed with a giant label to play at any decent venue. Small artists don't have access to any of this.

"I think a big problem is the lack of market for the less intense public performance"

These were always poorly paid gigs..and for good reason. There is no ROI for the restaurant/cafe, who are barely eking out a profit.

"This isn't true. If you make updates paid enterprise customers are going to drag their feet and you'll be stuck supporting a large number of versions for a long time. It is much easier to lock corporations into continuous subscriptions."

This IS true. Many software companies went to SaaS because it can't be shared for free and the cost of server space/hosting is now very cheap. I should know, I was involved in many meetings with business owners that did just this.

So the unintended consequences of over a decade of software/music piracy is pushing all of the independent artists out of a living and we now need to pay a monthly fee for software instead of being able to purchase it outright.

I don't remember the moment when I first installed in the 90' on Windows 3.x "Napster" on a PC connected to my 28.8k modem, but I do remember the "oh-my-gosh-it-seems-to-really-work"-feeling while watching the download bar(s) slowly progressing towards the ultimate target of 100%.

And then the "oh-my-gosh-this-technology-is-incredible"-feeling after doubleclicking on the downloaded file and seeing/hearing Winamp playing it (not sure if I was already using Winamp right from the start).

That's when I really realized that I was connected to the whole world.

Nowadays I still usually first download songs/CDs but only to be sure that they aren't bad (in the 90' I often had to pay 30CHF for a CD which contained only 1 good song) => if they're good then I buy the CDs or the single digital files (I have to "own" the media, hehe) => many people think that I'm more or less stupid/weird doing this but personally I just try to motivate the artists to keep creating what I like (kind of similar to opensource donations) and I do not want to have dependencies towards 3rd-parties => this (that for other people it's weird that I really "buy" the CDs & songs if I have anyway already downloaded them) makes me think that "ethics" have recently been lost not only in the big/high areas (e.g. big mixed scandals like Enron/Andersen, AIG/Lehman, Madoff, Volkswagen, ...) but as well on an individual level.

On the other hand Spotify & Co. are anyway changing all the rules (except for me, as I have to "own" the song, hehe), so what I mentioned above is now probably not relevant anymore.

Aside from the history and opinion in the piece, there are technical errors that are addressed by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Anyone interested in the argument over digital audio vs. analog will enjoy the above.

Popular music will always sell one way or the other. It's that simple.

I've been producing for +10 years and I used to dj almost every weekend for two years but eventually I stopped because even though I loved doing it, it just wasn't bringing in any significant money. I'd probably make more money by creating sample packs and sell them through various of sites but it would be the equivalent of "buy my mix tape!" and I'm not doing that.

I produce a very niche genre where there isn't any real money to be made unless you're one of the absolute top names in that genre and they're not rich by any means but they do make a good living doing it.

It's not a right to make a living making music or art and neither should anyone expect doing it unless you set out to commodify it. Very few people will succeed in doing so.

The author is out of touch.

Plenty of people are making a good living making music. They just aren't making their money selling CDs and MP3s.

I wish the author would read up on self-made artists like Post Malone and Logic. They have made tons of money ... starting small, selling merch, and then finally filling stadiums at $50-$100 a ticket.

Those are household names and it also requires that the artist wants to tour.

Touring isn't a new requirement for making real money

A friend of mine makes 6 figures touring as a dj, backed by work he does producing and remixing for a pittance just to get his name out there. And he is far from a household name. Is he rich? No, but it’s a living.

Meanwhile some poor fool is spending over $50,000 a year to get an MFA in music always do your market research before going into tremendous debt to enter a field of work that no longer exists.

The title of this needs to be changed go "A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living recording music". Live music is still huge and there are great musicians who make the majority of their income making something unique every night. Much like how people have made money off music has changed from selling sheet music to live performances to recordings we are back at creating music. Not selling its reproduction.

Ok, so further down in the comments there is this:

> Superficially there is some sense - the higher frequency signals are rendered less and less accurately, and nearer a binary on-off. Who knows what nuance and harmonics may be lost affecting what's heard at lower frequencies.

It's true that at a given sampling rate, if you choose a sine wave with a frequency right below Nyquist it is composed of fewer samples per period than a lower frequency sine. But lots of audiophiles-- like the one I quoted above-- seem to equate "fewer samples" with "less accuracy" which does not follow[1].

So here's the question-- what would it sound like if you built a filter to make this common misunderstanding true? So the closer the frequency content gets to Nyquist, the more the filter distorts that frequency.

It would be fun to build so that people could apply it to digital input and realize just how awful the output would sound if their misunderstanding of digital audio were true.

[1] https://www.xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

No idea of the technicals, other than sampling at double the audible frequency does- to this layman - seem logical it would give you a wave more diverged from reality as frequency increases - and at the absurd extreme a 22khz (inaudible to most) square wave if sampling at 44, 4 points to represent 11k etc. I don't see how it can be otherwise, just as interpolating and anti aliasing is often right but cannot always correctly insert missing pixels - see the attempts to use AI to make hires versions of Mario and other 8 bit assets, some work, many don't. It was only an idle conjecture after the main point, which was meant to be about mastering, so I'll expand that a little.

One of the places I worked at in the 90s was connected with a well known recording studio. We got to blind demo from master tapes how their latest attempts at going digital were going compared to analogue a few times. At least a couple with whatever graphs they'd measured. 25-30 years later, I don't have much recollection of the how or what. Aurally, it wasn't something subtle to listen out carefully for, flaws were plain, therefore memorable. Surprising in the era of digital and CD growth and their supposed "perfect" sound forever, and DDD being marketed as always preferable to ADD or AAD. Not so surprising when you realise it was the era of all ADCs and DACs at any cost being shit.

By the time I left, analogue mastering was still preferred by the engineers and still the studio's first choice for albums they recorded. Can't explain that technically either, though they clearly thought, and could demonstrate analogue was still doing a measurably better job. Were they misunderstanding? shrug.

I gave a link that clearly explains and tests the technical aspects using analog equipment. It's an extremely well-thought out and well-researched video. Did you watch it?

I'm not saying you didn't hear something. I'm just saying the phenomenon you described does not accurately characterize the current state of digital audio, even when using commodity hardware.

> No idea of the technicals, other than sampling at double the audible frequency does- to this layman - seem logical it would give you a wave more diverged from reality as frequency increases - and at the absurd extreme a 22khz (inaudible to most) square wave if sampling at 44, 4 points to represent 11k etc. I don't see how it can be otherwise, just as interpolating and anti aliasing is often right but cannot always correctly insert missing pixels - see the attempts to use AI to make hires versions of Mario and other 8 bit assets, some work, many don't. It was only an idle conjecture after the main point, which was meant to be about mastering, so I'll expand that a little.

This is not correct. If the input signal is entirely below nyquist, the sampled values (ignoring quantisation of the levels, which is a different thing) exactly capture the signal, should you appropriately reconstruct it. Now, a perfect reconstruction (or antialias) filter does not exist, which is one of the reasons why we use 44kHz or 48kHz instead of the 'ideal' 40kHz, but this recreation is extremely accurate, to the point that modern digital approaches will outright outperform analogue techniques.

The same is true for images, incidentally, but most media does not exceed the limits of human vision yet (nor do most display mediums make for very good reconstruction filters).

I highly recommend watching the video, it demonstrates this very well.

Someone should come up with a system where concert tickets could be sold and some of the money could be paid to the performers.

It could work similarly to the way stage actors are paid.

I was under the impression that music industry revenue had been on the uptick for the last 2-3 years [0]

But did artists actually make more money during the 40's/ 50's? It was my impression that large record labels generally reserved the profits for themselves then too (would love to hear a more knowledgeable answer though about whether is was easier for a musician to make a living then)

[0]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/

> The value of the work is the key phrase here.

It's another version of the Labor Theory of Value which has been thoroughly discredited. It doesn't matter how much work was put in. Only the results matter.

The lifelong plight of the artist. I don't think it will every change. The community tends to only respect the artist once they are long gone.

Wonderful article!

If all of western society downsizes its eco-footprint by massive media consumption and the state subsidizes this (panem at circensis) by lawlessness - im okay with it. Sorry, its hard on everyones dreams, mine was to life from game-design- wont happen. Nobody will live from music anymore. Thats just the way it is- your dream is your hobby. But that hobby keeps a lot of people sitting in front of a glowing rock, like meditating monks, instead of buying useless tanksized cars and overdimensioned houses. Worth it.

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