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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

Rich patrons mostly.

Also, the church(es) which employed many of them.

On top of that, music was not a commodity back then. Live performances literally made a living for many of them as these performances were the only source of music. (And a church needs this music for every mass, for instance.)

Now music is abundant, recordings are cheap / free, and the best performance is easily available in a recorded form. Live performances are still a thing and still feed many of the music creators. Royalties, too. But you better be a superstar for that to bring enough. (Liszt and Mozart were superstars, in a sense.)

Wait until a Dall-E equivalent for music emerges though.

Dall-E for music will be interesting, but I think it's different. In a sense I think we're already there. Not in the sense that AI makes music but that music is so abundant, and there already aren't a ton of jobs in music writing. It's not a trade in the same way that like graphic design is. I mean, maybe Hans Zimmer loses his job but socially it doesn't seem like that big of an impact. Musicians don't tend to make money from streaming, and if you like going to shows to see performances, you're probably not going to watch a server rack on stage (Maybe, who knows what the future will bring!).

A "Dall-E for music" will put much of the control into hands of listeners. That is, you will not search for the music that matches your mood, you will ask for it directly, and maybe adjust in near-real time.

A DJ will arrive with a unique set, likely with every track custom-made for a given gig.

Selling any records at all will become very-very hard, except for rare hits with outstanding human vocal performance. In music clips, music will be relegated to the position of a movie soundtrack, if not lower.

I suspect ai music will have the uncanny valley/98% done problem for a while. For 1 I suspect the 'DJ' in your example, being an actual DJ or the artist themselves plays a larger part in how people listen to music, especially when it comes to 'pop music' (it may be less so for electronic/classical/jazz/"artistic" music.

Obviously for anything sort of focus-y, house music downtempo etc. If we're not already there, we'll probably be there soon, though I am curious if a careful listener will eventually notice the uncanny valley problem there. But pop music I'd say has two problems. 1. There's a je ne sais quoi quality that's hard to replicate, and two I imagine the corpus is just not that big. I mean sure, there's a decently large corpus of pop music, but good pop music? how many hip hop billboard charts have there been a thousand, maybe a few thousand. How do you combine Beyonce, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston into a banger that doesn't sound too much like Beyonce', Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston without the titular character marketing said music.

Well, you might not want to watch a server rack, but what if that server rack were eventually powerful enough to run a light show, splice a video montage, and compose a song in real time, together based off of audience feedback? I've gotta believe that people would show up just for the spectacle.

I hadn't thought about it until just now, but soundtrack music has been so terrible for the last 15-20 years that it's one area AI might genuinely be much better than what we've got now. Be hard to do worse, anyway. Studios and producers don't want to pay for good music anymore, so maybe they can get so-so AI music for cheap, and at least it'll be better than the crap they're using now.

Also most people were pretty poor at that time. Honestly being a live performer probably wasn't that horrible job comparatively. Think of farming or manual labour or low rung artisan. Grinding making some parts in poorly lit conditions.

I feel like the patron system of old ended up turning into the modern professional sports system instead of supporting the arts. Which sort of shows the shift in priorities at least the rich have had in more recent years.

Eh I don't know, I think to an extent Patreon which is explicitly this model has helped allow anyone to patronize artists they support.

The patron system of old was rich people/nobility, not large swaths of people. Patreon is named AFTER the idea, but isn't quite the same thing.

Except it's really local governments bankrolling the stadiums and upgrades. And then ticket and merchandise sales are mostly the fan base, not some patronage class. Maybe sponsorships are closest to patronage but those are still more of business transactions. It's all just business, and the wealthy aren't donating anything (unlike arts patronage).

The stadiums yes (and that's a rant I could go on for hours) but the salaries are based on the actual money coming into the league. And if you argue that isn't the same thing, what makes it any different from Kings funding patrons using tax money?

I draw the distinction because the fans themselves are (at least in theory) voluntarily choosing to support their hometown team, whereas the decision to apply taxes towards patronage is unilaterally made by the king. Though we could probably debate over whether the descriptor of a "hometown team" is truly honest, since it's more accurately a wealthy owner's team that happens to be located in / named after a city which benefits very little from the team's success.

I think a lot of them were royalty. But they competed with other royalty. See I have the best music!

They were also something that most modern artists and writers are not: good.

In 100-300 years people will probably only know the names of the "good" modern writers and artists too.

I am quite sure there were a lot of bad contemporaries, but they never ended up in the history books.

One of the new genres that really impresses me, is 3D art. The art form is getting quite mature, and often requires as much work as any Dutch Master oil painting.

One of my favorite 3D renderings, is Worth Enough, by radoxist[0]. Nowadays, I'm sure that there are works that beat it, but it was quite amazing, when he posted it.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

We have now pretty successful art creators like Alan Walker, but overall I dont see them ever being in the art history books.

Ppl also dont see art where it is in its pure form -Engineering.

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