> Spotify basically killed any money coming from the physical distribution - Worse than piracy, which was inevitable too at the time, but at least you didn't have to pay your lawyers to renegotiate with your label on top of NOT getting any money.
It’s even worse than you say — it was murder on digital retail too, right at the time when it was on track to compete with or exceed old physical sales.
Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them with the false veneer of legitimacy.
Fundamentally, neither spotify nor piracy matter. People enjoy making music. Today, there are more people able to make and publish music then ever, but the day still only has 24 hours, you can't listen to more music then before. Unlimited supply, limited demand.
We're talking about the business side of the whole ordeal. It's not just about "enjoying making music". It's about paying mixing and mastering. It's about paying NTS, Rinse FM, and the constellation of medium-small distribution channels. It's about distributing on labels like DFA, !K7 or whatever. It's about making sure that Fabric, Rex Club and Sneaky Pete can keep the lights on so they can play your music, so you can get paid, so you can keep making music instead of ahem having to become a webdev and write angry comments on HN.
It's about keeping an entire industry, live or recorded, and their milieu alive.
The truth is that what happened wasn't a liberation. It was a methodical purge of the medium-sized side of the music industry. Now we're reaching the point of having 5-6 industry giants taking all the money plus...yes, an inordinate amount of people making mostly self-referential music in their own bedroom on weekends, music that will reach no-one outside whatever local scene they hang around. But most of them were making music even before, and were by their own choice irrelevant to the industry. (True, now they can also become influencers on Twitch and maybe one out of thousands can make a living by streaming their life 24h/day. One ticket for the lottery, please). Whoever was between them and the majors is being squeezed out of the game.
Fundamentally, the artists getting paid doesn’t matter because they enjoy making music? As a musician, your comment is completely ignorant, self-centered, and totally irrelevant to the discussion of people getting economically screwed.
As more people are able to produce music (due to cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education, etc etc), if the demand of music doesn't grow proportionally, the average income of musicians/songwriters would decline.
The above will happen regardless of Spotify's existence. Thus, Spotify doesn't matter (much).
That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it.
Sure, there are exceptions, but it's not the rule. Michael Jackson would not have existed if there was no money in the career. The money is why his father pushed so (insanely) hard.
The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm. And maybe for a while that would happen, but eventually we'll see someone (similar to the private search engines we see today) come out with a new platform with the selling point that artists get a living wage -- as long as the people demand it, and I believe they will.
> That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper. How much cheaper is another question, as circular saws are already very cheap today, compared to hand-made furniture.
So yeah, you're right, it's just like saying that.
> if there was no money in the career
It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
> Uh... and it's true? If the price of circular saws drop in price, and the demand for hand-made furniture doesn't change, then they'll become cheaper.
I don't know whether circular saws are likely to be the biggest input into a piece of handmade furniture, but my guess is they're not and it's time invested in the specific work and practicing the art rather than industrial capital.
Similarly, while DAWs while can (though not necessarily do) reduce capital necessary to do certain aspects of production, they don't represent the most significant investment into writing music. Also time, both in the creation of the specific work AND in terms of time practicing the art.
> It's unlikely to decline indefinitely. Piracy, Spotify, more youtube channel teaching how to make music... all these didn't prevent Billie Eilish from becoming a star.
Survivorship bias. Billie Eilish or any other individual success are no more an indication that all is well with the status quo than blue zone anecdotes are promises anyone who chooses can be a centenarian.
>That's like saying as the price of circular saws drop in price, hand made furniture becomes cheaper.
>You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
Well, yes, and that's how IKEA and mass production in general made many people that would be making furniture out of the job.
Even in tailor-made stuff good cheap tools does make work of skilled maker far quicker. And you can get more people trying to get into that if the tools are cheap.
Hardware is cheap, software is free/near free so there is far more people trying, when you no longer need to spend small car worth of money just to say play electronic music
> People still want to listen to quality music from artists who have years of practice and experience. You can't reliably get years of experience unless you're getting paid to do it.
Most musicians got that by playing in garage bands and doing concerts.
And many of them did it entirely for free, out of passion, till they were good enough, far before fancy computers were in everyone's pockets.
> The counter argument is trash music will just be the norm.
It is the norm far before Spotify happened I'm afraid
> You're just going to end up with a bunch of sloppy tables.
That's only true if you assume all the customers desire (or are willing to settle-for) arbitrarily bad tables for cheap. That isn't guaranteed, but even then... why are you so certain their decision is wrong? Maybe they simply care about something else more than their tables.
Meanwhile, the section of customers who still desire good tables will find those good-tables more affordable than before, even if they're a relatively smaller slice of the expanded table-market pie.
Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king. Terribly an artful books exists to come up, but I could still accumulate a library in my pocket that would be the envy of any ancient monastery or place of learning.
> Sure, there are crappy $5 T-shirts, but today I could buy silk and lace enough to embarrass a king.
Actually I think something has happened to the textiles industry whereby demand must have driven a certain band of suppliers out of business, and now try as I could I can't get polo shirts in the same thick quality cotton weave I could 30 years ago. There is probably some niche source possibly online but I don't know how to discover it; the standard "throw money at luxury mall brand" route seems to not work any longer as the brick and mortars have watered down their materials as well. Sic transit gloria mundi
It's a well-documented escalation of planned obsolescence and it's true for everything from your washing machine to your polo shirts to your car. If you make it cheaply so it deteriorates quickly, constantly bring out new styles to make your current thing seem prematurely out of date, and make it juuuust cheap enough, you can sell people 10 shirts over 10 years instead of 2.
I like wearing industrial clothing (like red kap cotton work shirts) and to my eye seem like they're made about the same quality they always were.
There's still money in making music, just not in selling recordings. Biggest touring artists (the Beyonces etc.) bring in millions. They, in turn, require skilled producers to make their songs, who are also paid well.
Might have been interesting to ever find out if this was true.
What happened instead was that Spotify led the pricing change by taking capital, cheating policy, and producing a consumption avenue that cut the price by orders of magnitude.
And meanwhile:
> cheaper tools like DAWs, more accessible music theory education
The gains in education are fractional. The library or a neighborhood piano teacher were good enough resource wise. YouTube eliminates the trip (and the funny thing is that we're iffy on even rewarding those people proportionally), but isn't a new opportunity.
And even for materials that are better in the way that 3Blue1Brown is for math... just like you're going to have to sit down and spend a lot of time actually doing problems rather than just watching the videos if you have any hope of really getting it, the constraint when it comes to producing music is still sitting down and putting in the time, not only on the specific problem/work in front of you but in the background to do it elegantly.
DAWs are great and can make up for some margin of missing virtuosity, but you have to put in the time practicing using them too -- they become their own instrument.
The constraint on making music has always been time. And what gets you more time to do something? Either having another source of wealth, or getting economically rewarded for doing that thing.
Spotify and the damage it's done the market absolutely matters. Just because music is getting through the damage doesn't mean there wasn't some lost, and not just quantity, level that could have been leveraged to through the magic of compounding focus. Anybody who's read Graham's "maker schedule/manager scheduler" should already know this.
What even was the music market though? I think it was a spot where record labels could get rich off of music while musicians still had to pay their way with live shows and merch.
Why do I care if spotify's investors have replace the record label investors?
Even before the digital/internet sea change, this didn't capture the whole music industry. There were artists who made good money off their recordings either because they DIYd it, or found better labels, or negotiated better deals. None of those paths has ever been easy but before recording revenue got kneecapped it was more available.
But let's say for the sake of argument that's how it worked before the internet. If so, why did we let that level of disruption just replace one set of bad guys with another?
What we should have had instead was what we were on track to have: multiple-scale digital recording retail, Apple to Bandcamp to individual artist site to local indie collective as point of sale. Charge whatever artist and buyer choose and can clear a transaction at, they keep 70-90%. True streaming, some with a format, some algorithmically customized for both audio wallpaper and music discovery... but in every case not user-programmed because that's how you justify the difference between the ridiculous fractional cent payouts and recordings.
That's the world we could have tomorrow if the policy was there.
More likely, everybody's too used to a decade of having the privilege of an unlimited basically free recording buffet that Spotify used to cannibalize the industry and we won't do it no matter how it erodes the economics of creation. But we could.
I'm never not astonished by the sweeping pseudo-philosophical bullshit conflating hobby art with literally millions of people's livelihood, visual and other creative culture, etc. There has to be an echo chamber in some subreddit where people who have no idea what they're taking about all slap each other on the back for their ill-conceived musings about the disposition of artists in our society and the nature of art.
Increasing the size of the market is a well understood phenomenon, but it isn't the only way a business can be successful. The music companies would prefer that you spent less time watching TV and more time listening to music. Or, they would prefer that you had less meetings at work so you'd need music to fill the silence. Or, Artist A would like to convince you that they are better than Artist B.
Humanity has always been constrained by the 24 hour a day thing, but the economy has grown nonetheless.
That last little bit is interesting. Back in the physical media era, if Artist B fell out of your rotation, you could sell your record/tape/CD and decrease the size of their new market a little bit. Then we went to DRM, and every song you bought was a sunk cost; if you didn't listen to it, you still payed. Now with streaming, it's back to the downsides of physical media; if you stop listening to Artist B, they stop getting paid.
Did you miss a /s? There is more varied music being created every day than ever before right now. There are sub sub sub genres you can seek out if you want. Contrast this with when I was a kid and we basically had what the radio played or what cassette we could buy with our $10.
The problem now is that we have so much content (music, books, movies, short vids, long vids, etc...), and not enough aggregate time to consume it all.
People being able to afford professional equipment and professional session musicians vs a guy recording himself in a bedroom over a MIDI karaoke track is not the same at all.
Most people are not professional music critics, and most of their consumption is as a backing track to the rest of their life.
You could replace most of this category with a Markov chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most people even thinking about it, and I know because this is exactly how I made music for my shareware video games a decade ago.
> You could replace most of this category with a Markov chain bouncing up and down a simple key without most people even thinking about it
That actually makes Spotify worse, because they could have offered that product instead of using huge sums of capital to reshape the expectation anybody with a device is entitled to listen to any work on demand for free.
I guess the good news is that it wouldn't cause a fuss if someone were to change policy so that you can't pay out buffet streaming like it's digital radio and people ended up having to buy songs or at least do the honest work of piracy if they won't accept the app directing programming. After all, most people are just as happy listening to a Markov chain generate bloops for free.
> Most people are not professional movie critics and enjoy more a hollywood film rather than me recording barbie dolls and making them talk.
Sure, but they'll also watch daily soap operas, and the meme "I showed my favourite film to a loved one, but they paid no attention" predates multi-screening.
> Did your video game sell as much as outcast? A game with a proper music score.
Even in aggregate over all the games: I wish :P
But the real question is: how much of that was the music?
Even now, were I to redo that period of my life (and so no need to caveat markets changing), the music isn't what I'd focus on changing — shareware was already a bad idea though I didn't realise it, MacOS shareware written in Java just as MacOS got its own (ObjC only) app store moreso.
Many don't see a difference. Just amount of coolnes.
You can apply this on professional filmmaking or vlogging. I guess amount of time consumed audiovisual production today is much higher on amateurish production thanks to antisocial networks.
If you are used to fast editing, loud music and cheap filters, you'll get hard time to watch ie Malicks films, listen concertos or go to photography exhibition. No doubled about qulity.
Nowadays most valuable is attention. Cheap stimuli is easier to consume. That's what technology teach us.
Turns out that having skills to get money is exactly the point I was arguing, in response to "there is an infinite supply of (crappy) music, so its value is 0"…
If music was fungible for any other music and a musician's day had an unlimited supply of hours, this might be a reasonable position.
There was already "enough" recorded music decades ago that someone could fill all their living hours with constant listening and not exhaust it. If that's really all there is to it, I'm sure you'll have no problem committing to never listen to anything after around 1970. If you have any hesitation about that then you might start to see serious shortcomings in this conception of supply.
"there are more people able to make and publish music then ever" also papers over nearly everything that matters about the statement. "There are more people" is the defensible part. There's half an argument we have greater access to affordable digital tools for production than ever -- but I'm not even sure it's half. The constraining factor on music composition, performance/recording, production is always time. Even where the tools themselves save time that's a series of converging terms that stops at a limit because to make good music you have to practice using those tools plus others. A lot.
Set up a system which rewards those people in proportion to the audience they find and those people are both equipped and incentivized to spend more of their time into making not only more but making better, because they aren't required to spend their time doing other things.
Set up a system which says "Oh yeah, we shouldn't reward any of this, people should just do it in their spare time" and sure, some will do it in their spare time. But they'll miss out on the compounding effects of focus and its power laws because they're occupied with whatever other stuff policy+markets have been set up to value instead. And their audience and the rest of the world will miss out on their power law peaks.
Which is why I was too generous with my earlier "never listen to anything after around 1970" thought experiment. Really, don't listen to anything except debut releases before 1970. Some of the debuts are really good, of course, and labors of love (or capital-backed love) as you say. But the post-debut work is what's enabled by the economic feedback.
There will, of course, likely often be survivors to bias ourselves to the status quo with. And perhaps that's good enough for some. Hell, maybe we're even rapidly getting to a point where we don't even need most artists at all, we can simply have software trained on all the work of all the artists that have ever recorded produce music for you, and be done with not only the pesky idea of rewarding musicians whose work we appreciate but having a pesky human being involved in direct production in the first place.
I used to purchase mp3s from Amazon, and there was one song that had a glitch in it, like it was a bad rip. I always wondered if they were using pirated copies as well. I just re-downloaded for fun and the glitch is still there.
It wouldn't surprise me if e.g. people at Microsoft ran pirated copies of Office or whatever. Or like Photoshop at Adobe. Getting hold of licenses can be a nightmare, and Microsoft products more so in the past. Nowadays, every Microsoft license seems handled by some enterprise admin account.
I can speak for Adobe- Adobe employees have work accounts with full access to the Adobe suite, an internal web portal to get annual free licenses for their personal accounts, and an internal web store to purchase heavily discounted licenses to gift to friends and family. No one within Adobe is pirating Photoshop.
Anecdotally, I had a friend at Microsoft hook me up with discount Windows OEM licenses for my PC builds and it seemed similarly easy to get licenses.
It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded their library, so while that statement is true it is a little disingenuous without further context
There are lots of other examples of this happening too... I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms
> It was employees' personal MP3 collections that seeded their library, so while that statement is true it is a little disingenuous without further context
If anything, that feels even worse.
> I believe some of the early nintendo retro releases were emulators running pirated roms
If Nintendo has a licence for the game that the ROM was an unlicensed pirate of, while that's weird, it doesn't seem fishy in the same way.
I don't understand how employees contributing their personal collections is somehow worse than company agents trolling torrent sites specifically to stream.
Like, every nerd from the era has an mp3 collection. Mine is literally the only data that I have that's been around since I was 15 and survived multiple HD crashes.
How are you going to get the streaming business up and running without some seed data?
The music industry wasn't just handing out blanket streaming rights until Spotify showed up. All the other services of the era sucked -- their libraries were patchy and music streaming looked very much like TV streaming is today where every show lives under a different provider. It took freaking Apple to convince the music industry to allow single track sales and thats why we were in that state until the mid 2010's when Spotify came in and started to clean house.
The music industry was not looking to break the stranglehold they had on CD sales. Someone had to come in with a 'shoot first ask questions later' attitude to get to where we are today.
Uber and Lyft did what they did for the same reason -- the (oftentimes mafia-backed) taxi cartels had a monopoly on pricing and taxi medallions and the only realistic way to break that was to operate illegally.
I think you will find that the law (and copyright) to be extremely overrated. Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality, to say nothing of the various entities which have carved out most of the royalties that an artist can make for themselves.
This was not Spotify vs CD sales. By 2005 everybody (even the labels) knew the writing was on the wall and physical media was going to be legacy niche. Digital retail grew fast from there (faster than CDs replacing tapes for a few years) and by 2011 (still limping through the trench of the 2008 crash) the yearly revenue was not only growing it was outdoing physical media and rising. Not just Apple. Amazon, Google, Bandcamp, Bleep, half a dozen others plus artists and indie networks experimenting with direct marketing and retailing. The physical vs digital fight was over at all levels of industry strategy when Spotify was founded and smartphones were a rumor, and music was well on track to a complete digital transition by the time the monster escaped scandinavia.
What Spotify actually did was cannibalize digital retail. Because of course it did: it used massive capitalization AND ignoring pesky laws/policies about actually compensating people creating the work Spotify's service depends on to give that work away to consumers for essentially free, until they'd created that expectation in the market and had enough pull as a channel to buddy up with labels (and the ironic thing is it's not even clear how profitable they can be, maybe leading the charge to the bottom has downsides).
> Copyright, in particular, should not exist in its current form, especially with digital data that is not bound by the laws of physics or physicality
Copyright conventions become more important in the face of falling barriers to reproduction and transmission, not less. That's how they got created in the first place: physical copying got industrialized and could take place with scale and ease that was unheard of before then. And the rationales behind them are still solid today, because they're about the economics of creation, not distribution.
The economics of creation are meaningless if distribution lacks physical scarcity. That is the entire problem with copyright in the digital age -- it is physically impossible to control (i.e. prevent) consumption once the consumer has the data, and for IP like music this is impossible to control. Sure, we can attach DRM and technological controls to our work, we can form massive databases of royalties distribution, we can falsely moralize until our faces turn blue, we can even try to craft laws and legislation to get what we ant. But all these things are meaningless in the digital land of infinite plenty to a determined enough adversary, and some music fans are adamant (yet also kind enough to share with others)
If copyright (and DRM) was enforced the way some wanted, we wouldn't have a rich history of remixes, recontextualizations, or bootlegs that allow a work to live on far past its shelf-life. Memes would be a shallow husk of what they are today. We wouldn't have many, many genres of music, and things like the Amen break wouldn't exist and we'd all be worse off for it.
For that reason copyright needs to be abolished. There are other ways of monetizing intellectual property. Once a given work is released to the public, its creators have literally zero control over it, despite the technological artifices we construct otherwise.
> The economics of creation are meaningless if distribution lacks physical scarcity.
As if nobody has to actually create the first instance of a given work, it's just copies all the way down.
That's why the economics of distribution/reproduction are distinct from the economics of creation. Maybe it's clearer if we use the term invention. The major input is time, time to develop the faculties needed to invent/create -- often years if not decades -- and then the time needed to put into a specific work.
The legal claims/controls on distribution give inventors leverage they can use to get better returns on that time, which provide better incentives.
> Copyright (and DRM) was enforced the way some wanted, we wouldn't have a rich history of [blah blah blah]
Copyright was enforced for literally centuries and for much of that period we got a rich history of works which borrowed in a dozen ways from other works, because actual copyright law has both boundaries and blessed borrowing.
I swear, so many tech folks got half a narrative in their heads about draconian DRM as digital gulags and lost their minds to a manichaean all-or-nothing view on the topic.
Yes yes the evil suits from 1999 probably wanted to super-glue your 1/8" output and lock you out of control of your machine. Again, almost 20 years ago the basic truce on that battle was defined. There's always going to be some activity that can't be controlled, but that doesn't mean you can't define and encourage legitimate activity, so we keep the basic bargain because giving inventors/creators a say in how/where/pricing for their work is both helpful and decent, but we don't try suing individuals over their uh "freely-sourced" media collection or install policing malware.
This isn't digital hitler on every last device vs total free-for-all. It's saying Amazon can't sell your ebook or music without compensating you. And maybe even that Spotify doesn't have the right to give away tracks for free or a pittance, that buffet streaming is close enough to ownership that it calls for artist payouts that are closer to the scale of retail than broadcast. You don't need total control to get there, and we have the levels of control to make this happen.
> Memes would be a shallow husk of what they are today.
Oh no not the memes, known for their fullness and depth.
But also no, not the memes, since it'd be vanishingly unusual that any of them would end up in court let alone to be found to violate copyright law.
> There are other ways of monetizing
It's a well-known fact about creative paths that they're not littered with the luxury of money-making opportunities. There are a few ways of doing it, but they're legs of a stool, and the number of inventors/creators who have the stool up to even 3 legs is not large. Suggesting they give just one little leg knocks over a lot of stools, and for what?
> Suggesting they give just one little leg knocks over a lot of stools, and for what?
A great filter, for one, that eliminates those that do art for money in favor of those that do art for the sake of doing art. Personally I don't want output from the money-motivated. I want art for art's sake. The made-for-money stuff is bland and lowest-common-denominator. It is essentially trash.
First, the idea that art is inundated with people who are just in it for the money isn't just wrong it's funny. Who is this crowd of cold dollar-driven people who pass over high-value careers like business, finance, medicine, tech, etc and say "yeah, being a musician is my gravy train, even though I don't give a damn about it?" Like, insert Drake-in-Orange-Coat meme here, right? Even with the rare outlier successes (like Drake), everybody knows the arts are a lottery ticket. Nobody is doing it just for the money. Especially music.
Second, it's pretty iffy that only low-quality succeeds economically. Sure, everyone can think of examples that somehow succeed with limited merit, but you can't sustain the thesis that well-rewarded work is mediocre without ignoring a lot of strong yet widely appreciated and profitable material.
But even those two big points are minor compared to the most important one:
Everyone needs money. Even artists who do what they do for love. It's the legs of their stools you're suggesting "filtering"/kicking out too.
When someone can't earn money doing what they love, they have to spend time doing other things in order to get the money. And that's time they're not creating art and time they are not refining their craft.
What you're "filtering" out is the peak of the skill they could have developed with more time as well as the art they could have created with it. Maybe even the attention and focus they have to doing it at all, hijacked by all the ways necessity can preclude even love.
I'm probably more on your side that you think WRT the law and copyright law but let's not pretend Spotify, Uber, and Lyft are doing some social good. They're greed-driven corporations (a bit redundant, but it's especially true for them). They may have partially broken up the walls around their particular industries, but not to democratize them, just to take ownership of whatever they can grab.
And in doing so, each has failed to realize better solutions for people. Uber & Lyft have increased our dependence on wasteful, dangerous, expensive personal vehicles. Spotify is a worse model than Bandcamp for indie artists. It's also a worse model than pretty much every other streaming service in that it pays so little to artists. So, yeah I don't like it when rich people break the law to get more rich at society's expense. We should be breaking the law to make society better.
Ergo, piracy and buying music on bandcamp. Still very viable options. I am close to publishing an EP on bandcamp myself. But I cannot deny how handy Spotify has been with musical pursuits. Spotify may rule the roost but we still have Bandcamp, Beatport, JunoDownload, Amazon Music, iTunes, Discogs marketplace, and others.
And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it. That said I am not trying to make money from music, that is just foolish.
> And I would say Spotify is doing a social good. As a nobody artist, being able to point people to stuff on Spotify is really compelling. Any other way I'd have to force people into either buying or using an app they are unfamiliar with just to listen to it.
Well, I understand where you're coming from here, but that's not really Spotify doing a social good, it's just the inevitable effect of their cultural dominance. Everybody[1] has Spotify. But they've taken that position due to their unethical growth plan.
Anyway, I've realized that we're discussing multiple things, not one thing. Spotify can be bad for artists who want to make money off their art, while being good for those who don't want/need to make money from music.
It’s even worse than you say — it was murder on digital retail too, right at the time when it was on track to compete with or exceed old physical sales.
Spotify adopted the economics of piracy and stamped them with the false veneer of legitimacy.