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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

When I was a teen I used to download all my stuff from torrent, or DDL sites. Before that it was Limewire and other P2P networks... These days, with a stable job, I've kind of gone into a weird redemption ark that sees me paying for music from all the bands I used to listed back then... I'm probably about 50% into my collection and I now buy a lot from Bandcamp, but also iTunes... I feel like I'm seeking absolution from the music industry, or something like that...

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> I'm probably about 50% into my collection and I now buy a lot from Bandcamp, but also iTunes... I feel like I'm seeking absolution from the music industry, or something like that...

Go see those bands live and buy something from their merch table, they'll make a lot more money than if you just buy albums.

I don't think that is true?

I would expect an artist to get a far larger cut off Bandcamp than merch or tickets.

Artists get like 85% of a zero cost digital sale.

I can't imagine a ticket being close to that after ticketmaster takes a cut, the venue takes a cut, and the band pays all the expenses of touring.

An artist only gets 85% off Bandcamp if they don't have a label. If they're on a label they're making a small portion of that 85%.

I got the impression the stuff the GP was buying was not a bunch of independent small artists that only have a Bandcamp page and no label. Ticket and merch sales are likely to make a label artist more than download sales. Ticket sales also help get artists more gigs. Bands tour because they make more money than if they only tried to sell records (in any medium).

Ticket sales for bands I talked to rarely even make up the costs of the gig. Especially if they aren’t the main act with a decent fan base. Merch is what brings in some more money.

But depending on the band, touring can even just be for the fun of it, where break-even is a victory. And then there’s the whole pay-2-play, where you get nothing of the tickets, and instead pay to be support.

It’s really not as simple or homogenous as people make it seem.

> If they're on a label they're making a small portion of that 85%.

That really depends on the label.

Seeking absolution from the music industry?!? From those exploitative bloodsucking parasites?! Pardon my French but fuck the music industry. Do you know that, here in France, when you buy ANY hardware that can potentially store digital music (a hard drive, a USB key, an mobile phone, whatever) you pay a tax that goes to the fucktards of the music industry? Today, in 2024, when pretty much everybody turned to streaming. Yep. I sincerely hope they all end up unemployed.

I vividly remember the moment when I turned on them: as soon as I started to have income during the 90's I used it on music. I was buying at least 5 or 6 CDs a week, I was tracking new releases obsessively and was making it a principle to pay for music. When MP3 exploded I started to encode the music I was buying, because that's pretty much how and where I was listening to it: on my various devices. But when the music industry started to feel the heat from the Napster and Limewire alike they reacted in the stupidest possible way: being user hostile and considering their own clients as potential thieves. The various copy protection systems they came up with started to be annoying but the nail in the coffin for me was a Jay Jay Johanson album that I simply could not play on any of my devices because of this. I gave them the middle finger and started to download, right this moment, without remorse. I only came back to paying when streaming started to be easier and better than downloading.

The music industry is mostly just disgusting pigs only worthy of contempt and disdain.

They're not a monolith. If they're purchasing from Bandcamp artists, then they aren't affiliated with the RIAA anyway. The middle man is slimmer in the music underground. For the larger "industry", artists also seem to benefit more from concerts.

Seek absolution from your favorite bands, certainly, but I don't think you owe the "music industry" anything. They're leeches, plain and simple.

Mhmm. Yeah, johnny guitar is totally capable of figuring out distribution, licensing, copyright, tour planning, venue booking and insurance, lining up sound and light production, logistics, staff management, feeding the crew, budgeting, marketing, etc, all on their own. Anyone with any talent understands how important that entire framework is and how it's literally impossible for even a small team to do. The people who bitch about this are just not making music anyone wants to hear 99% of the time so they blame "the industry".

I can relate, and I think this is a great sentiment. Buying a Spotify subscription was enough to ease my personal feelings of guilt though (and subscriptions to some video streaming services like Prime). This way I give back to the artist community as a whole rather then a specific artist I may have cheated in the past. Plus, I get a ton of new content.

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