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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be more about Groovesharks' business model than emails.

They appear to be respectable businesses, and have mounted a successful propaganda campaign regarding paying them for music, but let's not shed a tear for the major labels. They steal far, far more from musicians than 'piracy' ever has. Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts. Every major label has failed to pay up to hundreds of millions owed for radio plays and licensing, from all levels of musicians. All in all, they're about as respectable and deserving as your average street pimp. Good for Grooveshark. Someone needs to shake up that industry.

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"Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts."

VC firms do the same thing. So why are they so respected on HN?

The artist-label relationship is similar to entrepreneur-VC relationship in more than just this one regard. Angels/incubators are like indie labels, and the relationship there is slightly less skewed, but most parallels still exist.

They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride?

So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo.

So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth.

Y Combinator is to VCs as _____ is to record labels.

The people who can fill in that blank will be very rich someday.

Indie labels?

Not that rich. The music industry is very small by gross profits. It's mentioned often here that Apple, Goog, and Microsoft have enough cash hand to each buy a majority of it.

Sure sounds like an interesting project, though. There's tons of room for bands to grow beyond just iTunes et al.

American Idol, X Factor, The Sing Off?

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