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Comment by jp57 | Hacker News Reader

His conclusion seems like measurement bias. Cloud-based streaming now means we can measure what people listen to, rather than only what they buy. Back in the days of LPs and CDs, it was natural that people only purchased new recordings, but most people maintained at least a small collection of favorites, often years old, that they listened to over and over. Likewise for movies and TV: TV broadcasts and movie theaters presented new works, only new works, but a favorite movie could be purchased once and watched as many times as needed. Or it could be rented.

Now that we can measure all media consumption, we're discovering that people like to listen to their favorites over and over, and somehow concluding that's artistic stagnation.

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That is, IMO, is spot on and I cannot upvote you enough. In addition to that it is a question of accessibility. In the old times, let’s say in the 90s you discovered an obscure piece of music from 70s. Good luck going to a CD or vinyl store and digging it up. Now the whole discography of that artist is on your fingertips.

As a kid growing up in 80’s and 90’s Liverpool (UK) I was into US west coast hip hop.

We did actually have a decent record store but once you’d gone through the rap section a dozen times you were stuck with months old photocopies of the source and ordering from the store that took months.

Then ‘Yo mtv raps’ aired in uk on our nascent satellite service that hardly anyone had so we’d pass around blurry copies on vhs.

Then a voice said ‘let there be music’ and Napster happened and my life changed forever.

Napster to Kazaa to bit torrent to Usenet back to torrent then finally iTunes Match and Apple Music.

And I still listen to ‘All Eyez On Me’ at least once a week.

It is also measurement bias in choosing what to pay attention too. The content of high budget films makes for a poor metric for creative output.

High budget films inherently have huge financial risk, so it reasonable that the decision making is risk adverse. Meanwhile, the rest of the ecosystem is flourishing with creativity. We have an astonishing selection of works in indie films, HBO, and Netflix programming. As a consumer, I've never had more high quality options to choose from.

Hollywood of old used to crank out and an enormous number of films, almost none of which were big budget. This is the same as today where streaming services crank out an enormous number of creative entertainment options.

The oligopolies of recent years may find that their business models are challenged, but the industry as a whole hasn't lost an ounce of creativity.

This also explains why the value of catalogs has gone through the roof.

This is evident by the huge valuations of the majors eg Universal going public, indie publishers such as Reservoir and Hipgnosis, and artist and writer catalogs eg Queen, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, etc. A few times a year I will read about a writer/artist catalog getting sold for $100M. Except for maybe a death like Whitney or MJ, that never happened 10 years ago.

Is this the long tail we heard so much about?

It’s kind of the opposite of that. Almost all of the value in music comes at the “head”. Something like 80% of the value is in the top 100K tracks and 95%+ in the top 1M.

100K tracks are added each week but most don’t have any commercial value. Even if you are modestly successful with say, 1M plays, that’s not enough to live on for very long (about $10,000, split by however many people in the band, publishing costs, etc.).

It also wouldn't surprise me if the demographic streaming music is getting older, as the older generation are still increasingly getting online. The pandemic certainly helped this transition. They probably won't change their taste in music as they start renting their streaming services.

TV stations only showing new material? I think you'd need to go back a long time before movie rentals for that to be true?

We recorded movies from TV onto VHS, it wasn't unusual for them to air again before we watched the taped copy.

Yeah broadcast TV content has long consisted in large part of reruns, syndication, and older (cheap to license) movies, think of what was showing during non prime time hours when you were growing up. If anything there’s much more new content now thanks to the streaming wars.

Where it began, I can't begin to know when. But then I know it's growing strong.

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