Comment by obstacle1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by obstacle1 | Hacker News Reader

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I would exercise a little humility and allow for the possibility that you don't understand what parent is saying, before slinging obscenities.

You are absolutely right about music being fundamental to the human experience, universally. But parent isn't denying that at all.

Parent is talking about the BUSINESS of popular music -- not music full stop. The business of popular music absolutely _has_ co-opted music itself as a means of marketing other products. That's how the money is made and it's the only reason you are aware of any popular music artists at all.

Yes people listen to popular artists because the music makes them feel certain ways. But from the business' perspective that only matters insofar as it enables the business to capture the attention of the listener, to sell things. Are you aware of how many product placements litter nearly all popular songs? Why do you think country music -- which is a massive market -- is hyper-focused on getting drunk, drinking beer all day, driving pickup trucks, etc.? Do you know how much money there is in that?

I think I understand it fine. The comment said this:

> The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol

That's nonsensical. The business of music essentially started as a way to sell music. Music is staggeringly popular and people have shown a willingness to pay vast sums for it. It's a core human need.

It's like saying "the food business essentially started as a way to sell airline tickets" or something, it's just word salad.

It isn't. Churches and bars would comission people to perform in order to attract patrons/contribute to ambiance. This is before record stores.

yeah, that's not when "the music business" started, though. that's one particular subcategory, thousands of years after it started.

calling that the start of the music business was just ludicrous. it's an overly specific example for an overly general topic. it's incoherent.

“Music” has been around for a long time, likely from hundreds of thousands of years ago. The “music business”, where people can own music, the distribution and modern incarnation of “the music business”, has only been around for a a little over a century.

People have been buying sheet music for a lot longer than that.

Of course it's true virtually by definition that the "modern" incarnation of the music business has not been around for very long.

yeah, if you move the goalposts, then you score every time. and the original post in this thread said nothing about modernity.

but even if the original ranting comment was only talking about the modern music business, that starts with sheet music publishing in the 19th century, not this made-up nonsense about churches and bars.

and the 19th century sheet music publishing business was itself founded on hundreds of years of sheet music publishing that came before it, just at a smaller scale.

> made-up nonsense about churches and bars.

The first sheet music printed (15th century) was almost exclusively liturgical (i.e., religious).

Similarly, it's no accident that the first popular work of the printed word was the Gutenberg Bible.

Sure, but the sheet music was a straightforward product. Certain people wanted to perform certain music, and the sheet music helped them to do it. Music has been part of religious observance since forever. It’s just inaccurate to analyze the situation as one where the sheet music business is only profitable because it’s being indirectly used to “sell preaching”.

Anyway, whatever the beginnings of the industry, there was a very large secular sheet music market shortly thereafter. I’d love to hear the cynical analysis of the madrigal industry, but I suspect the truth of it is a lot simpler: people enjoy singing songs.

From Wikipedia:

> Jacques Arcadelt (also Jacob Arcadelt; c. 1507 – 14 October 1568[1]) was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music. Although he also wrote sacred vocal music, he was one of the most famous of the early composers of madrigals; his first book of madrigals, published within a decade of the appearance of the earliest examples of the form, was the most widely printed collection of madrigals of the entire era.

No clue why you're bringing up sheet music, modern music industry is recorded music, not sheet music. OP was discussing recorded music, ie "the music industry", not the "sheet music industry"

It's not entirely clear to me what the OP was talking about, as the claim in their original post is quite vague.

I just wanted to point out that people have been able to "own" music since long before it was possible to record music. So there is a long history of music being a product.

When did this start? The first paid admission concert in history was apparently held in the 17th century at the home of a violinist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert#17th_Century. I'm no expert, but it looks a lot like people paying money to hear music without any ulterior motives from anyone involved.

Honestly the grandparent comment reads like a bunch of learned wordbabble. It's easy to understand why parent got it wrong. I think the thrust of the violent reaction to GP is that it is clinically picking apart a thing which is fundamentally about human expression in music, which is primal and precedes capitalist notions of "selling yourself" or optimizing some crap "vertical" that could only be uttered by a business and economics graduate.

My favorite band, Crystal Castles, didn't become a global success because some brand-guy figured out how to sell weed-pops emblazoned with "CC" logos. They were playing shitty dives in Toronto and smaller venues and almost suddenly became a global success because they made something that was really fresh and much needed by the disaffected youths of the time like me.

My love for that band was never tied up in any kind of notion other than the one that spoke to my heart. Any attempt to dismantle that in verbiage is going to make me angry too.

yeah, the top comment in this thread is just utter nonsense and meaningless trash. try telling Skrillex that you can't make a living with music and all your revenue's going to come from your side hustles. side hustles are great, but revenue from live performance has gone up during the same era that revenue from recordings went down.

Skrillex is a dated example, maybe, but that fits, because this happened a while ago.

this whole discussion is just filled to the brim with people with no serious background in the topic, saying wildly inaccurate things. this is usually what happens when HN talks about any kind of show business, no offense.

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