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Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Music is a tough nut to crack. The industry players feel burned by every technological innovation, from the CD to Napster. The status quo rejects technology because it undermines business models and threatens to put new people in charge.

It helps to be Dr. Dre when starting up and trying to break into such a mess. Or you can sell a big chunk to the labels (Spotify) so they can feel comfortable that the latest disruption won't be the end of selling musical bytes.

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Not knowing anything about the industry, why do we still need music labels in 2014? My understanding was that before digital, their primary role was to provide distribution. The artists could not afford things like burning and shipping CD's, etc. However, no anyone can set up a distribution channel on the web for extremely cheap (probably cheaper than the equipment the music is recorded on).

I suppose promotion is a part of it, but where is the meritocracy? Should we all be just listening to "good music" and the artists get rewarded directly?

I suppose promotion is a part of it, but where is the meritocracy?

Where is meritocracy anywhere? More importantly, how can you be meritocratic about something that is deeply rooted in a person's individual taste?

Labels are still useful for promotion. We're a long way away from that being a solved problem.

Well, if meritocracy is the ideal, then sure, it's nowhere to be found. However, imagine if you put together a kick ass SaaS product that is super useful to thousands of companies small and large. Then suddenly you can't just put it out in the wild and see how it does. First, some executive somewhere has to look at it, use it for 10 minutes, then either approve or disapprove of it. And if the exec disapproves, you have no choice but to start building something brand new. Doesn't that sound like bullshit?

You can be meritocratic about music, the same way you can be meritocratic about things like web browsers, or cars, or fine art. You know quality stuff when you see it. You do still need an efficient way to discover good stuff, but that's where services like Spotify, iTunes, etc. can really shine. Why do we need a label as a middleman between the artist and iTunes? What value will the label bring vs just throwing all music at iTunes and seeing what sticks? What kind of a refined musical appreciation talent do the label execs have that they can decide what I should or should not hear?

The truth is that labels aren't needed if you are a savvy business person as well as a musician, but most musicians are not. They need help understanding how to advertise, where to do so, and they need leverage in order to get better deals. More importantly, whether they need these things is secondary to the fact that most of them don't want to do these things themselves and it would be a massive distraction from the main goal of making awesome music.

Interesting. My understanding was that Maclemore et al actually challenged this model by hiring parts of a label to do the parts they themselves could not do and in that they ended up retaining more ownership. The analogy would be that they got (paid) advisors instead of taking on VC money.

The way you put it does make more sense: marketing, distribution, finding gigs is not what musicians do best, so they outsource that job and pay for it with "equity"/creative control.

My understanding was that Maclemore et al actually challenged this model by hiring parts of a label to do the parts they themselves could not do and in that they ended up retaining more ownership.

...which makes it sound like they have a lot of business sense. Many don't.

> What kind of a refined musical appreciation talent do the label execs have that they can decide what I should or should not hear?

I think you misunderstand music as an industry, and you definitely stopped reading after the GP's first sentence. Label execs have very refined taste -- for one, specific thing: finding "artists" that have broad appeal to a target demographic. And even that's a Silicon Valley-esque "lost money on 99, made money one 1" kind of situation.

Music needs labels for the same reason startups need VC: they have resources, connections, and expertise not often found within (bands|founders). Yes, it is possible to bootstrap in both situations, and yes there are companies trying to disrupt that model in both spaces. But it's not the status quo.

Heh, you are absolutely correct. I know nothing of the music industry beyond some very basic knowledge. That's why I'm asking these questions.

So you are saying that if I'm a kick ass singer, and have recorded a few original songs that I put on, let's say, YouTube, then to move on up I need to do a whole lot of marketing and hustling to get the right people to listen to me? Moreover, are you saying that it's a whole lot easier to have someone with all those connections to do it for me? And the way this someone gets paid is by taking a percentage of anything I create? I suppose that makes more sense than the view I had of things and explains why even today we still have music labels.

"then to move on up I need to do a whole lot of marketing and hustling to get the right people to listen to me? Moreover, are you saying that it's a whole lot easier to have someone with all those connections to do it for me? "

I suspect that's largely true. Even for the people who could do it, the more they do that, the less time they have for actually working on their product/craft/music/act.

It is true. As much as any other industry, the music industry is entirely about connections and who you know. This is an interesting article about the biggest new pop music station in the UK, and how they go about dealing with playlisting (effectively choosing who gets to 'make it')[0].

Especially at large UK festivals like Glastonbury with a broad appeal, it's the acts that are playlisted on BBC that will be playing the festivals. It's not just that that's where the audience is, but it's the echo chamber effect caused by the fact that that's where the industry's ears are, from the pluggers, to the PR men to the festival organisers.

The funny thing is that in my experience this pattern even holds true for niche scenes like math/post rock or metal, just with a different centralized power broker (be it a label, radio station, magazine or booker).

Like tech startups that are beholden to the VCs because they're capital starved at an early stage, the speculative nature of music (I think) is why power tends to accumulate in the places where influence and capital lie.

[0]http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/25/radio-1-playlis...

Distribution is a solved problem, however the promotion side can't be glossed over. Sure I can self distribute a track, but it does no good if no one ever hears it and wants to buy it.

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