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> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.

People love to say stuff like this, but having gone through that grind myself, it's not nearly as easy or accessible as you describe. These platforms also make it easier than ever for artists to face things like copyright strikes and takedowns, which people are more than happy to abuse.

Additionally, streaming royalties pay peanuts for the vast, vast majority of artists and they get to determine how artists are paid based on calculations they determine. For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.[0]

Sure, it's easier to platform your music, but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier to generate meaningful income, particularly when you need the service to be priced as cheaply as possible in order to get reach. In the long run, I think this is going to further incentivize entertainment that is created passively and augmented by things like AI, which I'm personally not that excited about.

0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2022/10/22/how-much-per-...

> For example, Spotify pays artists by calculating their "stream-share", not a fixed amount per stream.

Well, obviously. I don't pay Spotify per stream, I pay them per month. So my $10 must get split up across every song I've listened to that month. No other model is possible given a monthly subscription.

Your money goes to the most played music on that platform. The artist you played may get nothing.

> The Pro Rata model, currently used by all major streaming platforms, means that monthly revenue from premium subscription costs and advertisement revenues is collected into one pool of money. Spotify takes 30% of that revenue and distributes the rest based on artist’s total listening numbers, rather than the listening times of individual users. Meaning that, even if a user never listens to the most streamed artists on the platform, a percentage of the money they pay will be given to the most streamed artists.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/10/a-breakdown-of-music...

What's the difference between whether my money is individually given to the artists I personally listened to and similarly for all other subscribers, or whether all subscribers' money is pooled and then re-apportioned out based on the cumulative listening tallies of all subscribers? Aren't these the same results in the end?

Imagine we are the only two subscribers:

* You spend an hour a day listening to A during your commute

* I spend 9 hours a day, my whole workday, listening to B.

In the current system, B gets 90% and A gets 10%, but some people would prefer to see a system in which they each get 50%.

Additionally, I believe they use total streaming time and not total streaming time for paid subscribers. So an artist who is popular among paid subscribers doesn't earn any more than an artist who is popular only among free subscribers.

I don’t get why this is always the talking point. The least streamed artists are also getting money from the listeners who only listen to the most streamed artists.

This is outrageous.

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

It isn't. It would be impossible for Spotify to guarantee any kind of fixed payment per stream, since customers don't pay per stream.

I guess they could pay based off the theoretical maximum a user could stream. So if the cost of a subscription is $10/month and an artist's song is 3 minutes long, then Spotify could pay ($10 / (31 * 24 * 60/3)) per stream. Thus guaranteeing that if a user streams an artist's song for the entire month, the artist gets the user's entire $10 subscription fee. But that's $0.00067 per stream, which is much less than they currently pay.

An opportunity for musicians to get paid is to seek out video authors that get taken down for incidental copyright violation of the music in it. Offer to make a custom tune for them at a nominal cost.

Sort of like "send me your slide deck and preferred music style, and I'll compose for it an intro and outrow soundtrack for $XX."

Sounds like a machine learning job. :-/

>Is there any data to support this? I would be shocked if this were true outside of the COVID years. There's certainly more music readily available to people now than at any point in history.

It’s hyperbolic BS, as per usual when it comes to emotionally charged arguments with no basis in reality. According to every statistic I can find, live entertainment and concert ticket sales have been on a steady uptrend until (as you mentioned) 2020. Here’s one source:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...

Concert tickets represent a small slice of the music scene. Parties, bars, etc don’t pay that well, but there are vastly more people at the bottom of the music pyramid making near minimum wage than superstars.

Are these statistics considering what the musician gets payed or what ticketmaster gets payed? I wonder if it takes a larger show to make the same inflation adjusted take today as it did 25 years ago.

To be fair the modern concert experience can be very not-live

If they're dancing, they're lib-syncing.

> And yet it's never been easier for a musician to share their music on Soundcloud, use Bandcamp for album sales, put their music on Spotify/Beatport/etc and collect streaming royalties, and set up a Patreon to get recurring revenue from fans.

This just means that it is far more complex to be far less likely to make a living.

But I would hazard to say that the quality of well written likable music that will stand the test of time and keeps people interested has nose dived with the progression you outlined.

Or at least, what is popular doesn't highlight the good music any longer.

Being easier to write, produce and release didn't seem to have made music better from what I can see and what I have read.

I'm sure there is still good stuff being produced, but by Jebs, it's very hard to find now.

Edit. Quality isn't just my measure. As mentioned, I've read about the topic a few times as well articles and studies showing what music gets listened to the most, the complexity of music, how the simpler music gets the less it remains in listenership for long periods etc etc etc. Even playlists show that music pre 2010s, maybe 2000s can't remember now, is preferred by even people in their 20 to 30 year olds with some questioned stating new music is too simple or is rubbish.

And by no means does it mean all modern pop music is bad, this is not a blanket statement. There is still good stuff, it's probably just getting drowned out by the weekly flavour changes.

How do you measure “quality”, though? To my ear there’s a ton of great new music being made today, rivaling music from basically any point in recording history.

As for whether it will stand the test of time, well, only time can tell that. But most people are forever stuck waiting for more music that sounds like it did when they were in high school and college, which is a mindset destined for disappointment.

As I mentioned, good music is out there. But finding it seems to be harder now as a lot of it doesn't make it into the charts and stays hidden except to those who know about it.

The charts are still there, though? And only a fraction of good music has ever made it onto them. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what exactly you think has changed.

> But I would hazard to say that the quality of well written likable music that will stand the test of time and keeps people interested has nose dived with the progression you outlined.

People have felt this way since time immemorial: the music they grew up listening to in their formative years was just better than whatever exists now.

Your dad's dad, or his dad depending on your age, thought that Led Zeppelin was just a bunch of talentless idiots making noise.

People probably have, but now it seems to be getting some backing by statistics.

This isn't me just saying something random, it's something I've read about recently and had come out of studies of changes in music over the last 60 years.

Unless those studies have managed to verifiably predict the future and quantifiably measure how a particular album would affect the industry decades down the road, I wouldn't put much salt into those "studies". And if they have somehow managed to successfuly accomplish that, I think that only raises way more questions.

There have been quite a few examples of albums that were bombed on release by both critics and the audience, but then ended up as critically (+publicly) acclaimed and massively influential (+still standing the test of time) many many years later just from the past 2 decades. That alone tells me that whoever claims they have a method to predict the future influence and "standing the test of time" on aggregate is just playing around.

Yeah exactly, two examples that immediately come to mind during my lifetime are My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade (the song more than the album) and Green Day - American Idiot. At the time they were released, many people saw them as emo-pop dreck, a complete departure from "real" punk-rock music of the 80s and 90s into something far too watered down and palatable for the masses. Now if you look at YouTube comment sections for those songs, it's full of people wistfully remembering the good ol' days when people played real music with real instruments.

Hell, even Limp Bizkit, Limp fucking Bizkit, has been widely retconned into being a charmingly nostalgic relic of music at the turn of the millennium instead of just, you know... bad.

A study in 2022 saying that most people say music from before 2010 was better is meaningless, because a study in 2032 will show that music from before 2020 was better.

And coming from a completely different genre, 808's and Heartbreak by Kanye from 2008. Hated on release by everyone (both critics and the audience), it wasn't "rap enough", people weren't thrilled by electronic tons and sadboy singing.

Less than half the decade later, the critical and public opinion took a full 180, with plenty of new major artists (like Brockhampton) claiming they owe their entire music career to that album. You could easily hear the influence of that album pretty much all over other artists' works.

Disclaimer: yes, I am aware that over the past few years Kanye had become a person doing things that are hard to defend in any way, but that's not something I am trying to do here at all. A lot of those actions are pretty much indefensible. However, his personal behavior doesn't change the impact of his music from 2008 on the industry and music as a whole.

careful looking for truth in youtube comments. how many of those people are bots? or just idiots?

those albums you mentioned ARE dreck ;)

Grandpa?? When did you sign up for HN?

In my day... Green Day was on the same label as Operation Ivy!

Unlike the great music that was produced when you were aged between 12 and 22 ?

Personally I like music regardless of when it was made. If it sounds good then I like it. Time has nothing to do with it.

And I can't remember exactly what dates the studies focused on as there have been a few I've read. One was over the last 60 years of music if I remember right and across all age brackets in 2022

Except that autotuned singing is inferior.

>Would you feel bad for a software developer who learned Visual FoxPro in the 90s, refused to learn any new tools, then complained that their occupation was no longer relevant?

Indeed I wouldn't

>Musicians who refuse to adapt won't succeed, and those who do thrive.

tautological - anyone who is thriving has adapted, if they aren't thriving obviously they have refused to adapt.

Probably more likely that many have adapted to the situation but still making less money than they would under the old system, perhaps to the point of not being able to have music be their primary employment.

Rubbish. I have many friends who play instruments. Paying to hear certain sounds is the aberration of history.

What exactly are you even saying? What is "rubbish" and what do you mean by "certain sounds"?

People have been paying for live performances of music, i.e., "certain sounds", throughout all of recorded history. So it's the opposite of an aberration. "Paying to hear certain sounds" is a time-honored human tradition. If we broaden our definition of "paying" to include barter, I would guess it goes back to the invention of musical instruments.

I meant that the idea there is little live music any more. Historically people have paid for the time of musicians, not for music. If you want to hear more live music, pay for someone to play at your venue. If you want to be heard as a musician yourself, take your instrument down the pub or onto the street and just start playing.