Comment by babarock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babarock | Hacker News Reader

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I never sold a single app in my life, I loathe the app-store model and I strongly oppose any limitation to technology in the name of making any business model work. That never prevented me from making money off my programming skills, and that never prevented me from writing a lot of software.

I am not arguing that musicians should not make money, far from it. I am merely saying that any business model that relies on "pretending Internet/Technology cannot do this" is flawed, no matter how many laws and regulations you throw at it.

Technology can be very disruptive for some businesses. The 'backspace' button on your keyboard cost a lot of typists their jobs. Machines are driving cinema clerks out of jobs and fridges make ice-hunting obsolete (there was an article featured here on HN about a guy whose job is to get ice off the mountain and distribute it to villages).

To answer your question: I don't know about people here, but if it were up to me, programmers should be held to similar standards I suggest for musicians.

You can easily be held to the same standards as musicians. Just quit your job, release open-source tools and earn your living from a donation button on your site.

Or figure out another way to make money aside from working for a company and selling products. Since you don't like the app store, you should exclude that from your possible sources of income as well.

You're responding to the guy who stated he didn't think the donating model would work for musicians. He also implied that he got paid for creating open-source code, which I'm guessing was the gist of his suggestion for musicians too, get paid for being a musician, not by monetizing the legal right to restrict duplication.

I've lost track of the music business, but have they even moved past the "making it difficult for people to buy music digitally and randomly suing young music fans while cheating the musicians" stage yet? Maybe they should try just selling music online directly from artist to fan for a while (and sack anyone who's no longer contributing materially to that goal) before moving on to the giving it away for free stage.

It is and has been easy to buy music online for quite a while, so I don't think that's really a problem. The problem as I see it is that musicians simply don't see any of that money. I can say this with confidence because I have two albums on iTunes and just about every other music site and I have never seen a dime from any of it. And my group has a fairly boiler-plate label deal. (this is from a while back, I don't play music professionally anymore)

An app store for musicians I think is a fantastic idea and I don't understand the babarock's distaste for that. It seems some people are just opposed to any way of profiting from digital creative work whatsoever (although conveniently their personal source of income always seems to be ok). I find it hypocritical. It is very, very difficult to be a musician for all but the hugely successful.

I read something about the RIAA having stopped their lawsuit strategy http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/riaa-bump/. I don't know if that's actually true or not.

> It is and has been easy to buy music online for quite a while, so I don't think that's really a problem.

If you are into mainstream music perhaps, but if you are in the United States and like music from a Dutch group you won't find it on iTunes in the US music store, it will be in the Dutch iTunes store. But you can't purchase the music from the Dutch iTunes store because it requires a Dutch iTunes account.

There are so many times now that I have looked for legal ways to purchase music, particularly music from Europe (where I am from) where the techno/trance/electronic scene is so much bigger and I just can't get it legally. I start searching for various different websites that might sell it to me and there are restrictions because I am in the US. Then I try to find it on Amazon or other sites and get physical copies and I end up on shady looking websites where I am not even sure I want to enter my credit card credentials.

I feel much more secure grabbing a .magnet link from The Pirate Bay than I feel inputting my personal information on various different websites while hunting for the music I want. The worst is when you follow a "Download here" or "Purchase here" link and you end up on yet another website that sends you to yet another website and so on and so forth.

These days pirating simply isn't an option for me due to my job, and I don't like to do it, so I find the music on Grooveshark, or Spotify or hope that it comes by on Pandora again, until the next time when I am in The Netherlands and I can walk into a record store and purchase the stuff on a CD.

I think what bugs me about comments like yours is the mentality that the labels must fail. Why? If you want to support local indie bands, go see local indie shows. Do we really think its not enough for me to win, my enemies must lose?

I apologize if I'm projecting an attitude into your comments that's not there, I may be reacting to a general trend and not your comment specifically.

The argument isn't that the labels "must fail", it's that they must give up trying to create artificial scarcity. The problem isn't the labels, it's their behavior.

People implicitly (or explicitly) believe that changing this behavior will cause them to fail, but the main point isn't about their failing. In fact, the best outcome would be the label's succeeding despite giving up on the current business model.

> they must give up trying to create artificial scarcity.

How are they trying to create this artificial scarcity? Many if not all the major labels have a lot of their artists music available via digital formats like iTunes and Amazon, etc. They just have the crazy idea that if you want to listen to their artists music whether it be via a CD, 12" or MP3 that you should pay them for it.

Well, first there is no question that they're trying to create scarcity: you can create nearly infinite copies of information for basically 0 cost, and they want that to become difficult.

Secondly, it's artificial because they're leveraging the government to enforce it. If they took no action, there would be no scarcity. Therefore it is artificial.

Contrast this with, say, physical goods: even if the manufacturer does nothing about limiting the distribution of whatever you purchased, it would still be scarce because making copies requires significant resources.

Fundamentally, economics is about managing scarcity. The main reason you pay for some resource is because it is scarce. So their "crazy idea" is exactly that: creating scarcity.

Your argument implies you disagree with the concept of copyright (artificial scarcity). Do you, and have you thought through all the implications of this?

You are arguing that nothing digital should ever be sold.

I disagree, and would assert that information does not magically lose its value because of the support medium being easy to copy. Just because you can copy information easily, has no bearing on whether you should. Society has rules to enforce not copying the intellectual labour of others, and has done since ideas could be copied easily on bits of paper.

I still don't see how they are trying to do this when about all of the major labels let you buy their music via iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Spotify, etc...

One of the most important concepts in economics is scarcity[1]. It is what drives the whole supply/demand cycle. When somebody says the labels are trying to create artificial scarcity, the logic is this:

A. High demand, low supply raises prices. If I reduce the supply, I can increase the price (up to a certain limit).

B. Music has high demand. Music labels have controlled supply for years, giving us the "normal" pricing for CDs.

C. With the Internet, the incremental supply costs go to zero. Supply is also infinite (anybody can create a copy), so the price drops to zero.

D. The only way to keep the price above zero is to create a scarcity that doesn't actually exist. The labels have done this by fighting putting anything online, suing people who copy files, getting the government to criminally try a class of people who copy and using DRM to prevent copying. The whole goal of all of this is to introduce a scarcity into the product so people will pay.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity

I don't think I'd define the labels requiring you to pay them for their artists creative output as enforcing scarcity...

I think you're misunderstanding everyone here. "Scarcity" is a technical term in the academic field of economics, and was being used as such. You appeared to think tikhonj meant that the labels were limiting the supply of music to a fixed number of copies, making copies of the music "scarce" in the sense you're used to.

tikhonj then attempted to clarify what she or he meant, but rather than explaining that your interpretation, while reasonable, was different from what was meant, just went ahead and explained the economics definition of "scarcity". Based on this later reply, you appear to have read that as tikhonj disagreeing with you on what scarcity is, rather than clarifying what she or he meant. Your reply at the time "I still don't see how", however, doesn't make this clear at all.

Now, SoftwareMaven and tikhonj both interpret your reply as you not seeing how the music industry has, in fact, created "scarcity", in the technical sense, and proceed to reason through exactly how the actions of the music labels resulted in a phenomenon that satisfies the technical definition of "scarcity".

Isn't it amusing when humans try to communicate?

It sounds like what is trying to be said is that the labels are somehow in the wrong trying to force people to pay for every copy of an mp3 album, but that since it is so easy to copy digital media that they should be allowing this to happen for free without consequence.

If Person A buys a song, rips it, and puts it on bittorrent, when Person B downloads one or more copies he has not stolen anything from anyone nor broken any contract with anyone.

He has stolen the time and effort of the person who created the song.

This is not hard to understand. You may choose not to understand it, but you're playing a game with yourself that the rest of us are not obligated to accept.

The time and effort were already expended. You can't steal those anymore than you can "steal" a digital file you made a copy of.

If I build an app and sell it for a $1 and someone purchases it for that amount and then makes a copy for his friend I have simply missed out on revenue, but my time wasn't stolen nor was my app.

You can't steal abstract nouns.

For the amount the artists actually get for the price of the music you pay... The intermediates get a much larger share of the cake. The artists get the crums.

Scarcity is a limit in resources. The music labels are using the government to limit their songs by stopping you from creating copies.

Without these restrictions you would be able to make an effective unbounded number of copies because each copy has a resource cost of basically zero--there would be no scarcity. With these restrictions, you can only make as many copies as the labels allow you to, which means the number of copies is bounded.

I should note that this is orthogonal to whether you think they are justified in seeking to be paid for their songs: in either case, they ensure being paid by making the songs more scarce using copyright.

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