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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

All these market places are finding new ways to extract money from the market. There is no incentive to stop until it only makes just enough sense for the content creators to not stop making content. As they are monopolies (mostly), there is no moving. All extra profits, efficiently, to them.

This is happening with Airbnb, Amazon, Shopify, and now Spotify? We pay a cut to be in the platform, then we pay for marketing on the platform. It's obvious who holds the cards.

Our feudal lords now have catchy names.

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I don't disagree with you, but are you aware of how things were before the vendors you listed existed? it used to be VERY difficult to get anywhere as a musician - at least now with YouTube and Spotify you can roll the "going viral" dice and better your chances with something good.

I will also say that the issue is mainly human nature - any platform that gets critical mass will likely see people interested in money bubble to the top and eventually monetize.

Going viral is thanks to the internet, not big tech monopolies. These rent-seeking monopolies deliberately make it more difficult to go viral by prioritizing paid placement.

I don't disagree but the virality you speak of is heightened because of the centralization.

In content, as in pandemics, exponential growth requires large populations. The ease of going viral is absolutely because of big tech companies. Nobody goes viral on a BBS.

>I don't disagree with you, but are you aware of how things were before the vendors you listed existed? it used to be VERY difficult to get anywhere as a musician

If you were any good, I'd say it was the opposite.

You could get signed and live off of 50-100K records sold per year (from Indie labels where you got a bigger share of your sales revenue) globally. You didn't have to compete with anybody in the world that had a guitar or some synth and an audio recorder, only comitted musicians with deals.

The "company screwed me" stories of that era come mainly from suckers that got signed as starry eyed 17 year olds or something into major labels with crappy deals. And even those stories were somewhat overblown when it came to big bands (the company did made millions, but they did get plenty in advances too, enough to buy cars, houses, and support constant parties and a few drug addictions).

Any small indie band/musician in the 80s to 00s has found the mp3/streaming era much worse with regards to industry income.

you may be right, but the point is that it's much more accessible and more music is ultimately produced as a result by a larger amount of artists under the current system versus the previous one. the previous system simply didn't allow those who were not good enough, as you say, to participate at all.

Survivorship bias. You don’t know how many good people were completely missed and were left with nothing in that super inefficient discovery system.

I do however, and they weren't that many.

Of ~20 decent bands I knew of at creation, 1 signed a independent record deal and personally they where far from the best.

5% seems better than the 0.01% number that you see a lot with regards to “making a living in music”

Oh, they don’t cross the “making a living in music” threshold. I didn’t get exact details but it sounded more like the part time minimum wage job threshold.

That is a laughable claim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=152&v=M2RpseaDw_o

I miss when you could add timestamps to end YouTube links as well as start them, since I only want the first 3 seconds of that clip. Ah well, it's never a bad time to rewatch old Family Guy.

>That is a laughable claim.

You just needed to hang around or be aware of your local scene (basically knowing all the bands in the city), and see how many good bands actually didn't sign. I'm far from a concern animal, but even I was well aware of every local band doing gigs within a ~8-10 year period in a several million strong city...

I don't know how you could possibly know all the bands in a city of millions, unless those bands are already well known. I grew up in a city of millions in the US. I'd estimate more than 100 new bands were formed every year. Most of them never got gigs, but that's because they never got a chance. Admittedly not all of them cared, but most did.

I think we're just gonna disagree on this one, as I'm arguing from a theoretical perspective (you can't possibly know how many bands there were) and you are arguing from a pragmatic perspective (anybody in the scene knew everybody).

>I don't know how you could possibly know all the bands in a city of millions, unless those bands are already well known.

There are not that many bands playing gigs "in a city of millions".

In my city (and several others I'm aware of) there are like 5-10 rock/electronic venues for example, and the usual 200 or so suspects play, with 20-30 of them being more well known.

If you're limiting yourself to 5-10 venues for a popular genre in a city of millions, you either live in a city without much live music or you are missing out on a lot of smaller venues and bands.

College parties, public events (the kind nobody goes to), store openings, hell even coffee shops. How many of the bands playing those venues did you know?

I wouldn't expect you to know most bands because, well, I don't think it's possible. About a dozen bands came out of my high school class, not sure any of them ever did more than parties. They wanted to, but they never did (or at least I never heard about it). You'd never have known any of them if you didn't graduate with me or go to the same parties they played.

You are straight out writing your bias but unable to see it. The point is exactly that lots of bands never even got the chance to play those gigs at all.

> If you were any good, I'd say it was the opposite.

I dont know, i think the systems of yester-year selected more for "image" and "attractiveness" than musical talent.

Monkees Menudo Back Street Boys 98 Degrees

When the record label has open auiditions/ casting calls it very much is a image and attractiveness industry and not a talent industry

Musician here. I don’t think it’s easier to get recognition now. Not at all.

The barrier to entry is too low. The competition, outside of mega pop and hip hop acts and the like, is functionally infinite.

Before, there were all these hurdles and gatekeepers sure, but this meant if you were stubborn and lucky and talented you had a halfway decent shot at getting somewhere.

Now it is closer to absolute random.

None of this money goes to Spotify.

The point still stands. Spotify is providing a platform to further enhance the grip of capital.

They provide a platform that lets users share playlists.

and pay artists for letting them play their songs (or whenever a song is actually played, or some combination). which has a huge impact when they're one of few music hosting platforms people use

But it’s not clear the activity is not net beneficial to them.

Everything can always be better, but this is the best it's ever been for content creators.

Why is this excuse always dragged out? History and precedent is orthogonal to objective and sufficient quality and fairness.

So? The only reason it's "the best it has ever been" is because people in the past didn't accept that argument as a good reason to stop improving things.

I don't really care tbh. Spotify is a non essential and easily replaceable service. If paid spots in playlists start to degrade my experience I can move to an alternate platform. If they don't degrade my experience, then thats great for the platform at no cost to me.

Marketing is always a necessary part of any endeavor that requires people to know about your product.

Sometimes you get free marketing without any effort.

But most times you need to put the work into to be noticed. This includes paying for services that help get the word out.

If no platforms exist there is no means of distribution and there is less motivation to create. You can talk about feudal lords all you want, but the simple fact is without a marketplace no one is exchanging anything except in very ad-hoc manner. Here is a clip of what it might have been like in pre-agricultural revolution era [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHjYt6Jm5j8

How is Amazon in that list? Seriously, there are tons of other viable options to sell online and in stores. You even listed an alternative!

Last I checked for a vacation, VRBO still was a viable alternative for renting people’s homes. Then there are tons of other location specific real estate companies specializing in renting vacation homes.

If you think there is no alternative to these big tech companies, you haven’t looked very hard.

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