'Monopolists and Oligopolists' May Be Devastating the Lives of Recording Artists (prospect.org) 130
"The platforms have driven the price of content to zero," says William Deresiewicz, author of The Death of the Artist. "This demonetized content is still generating a fortune. But the artists aren't getting that money."
"Artists today are beset on all sides by monopolists and oligopolists," argues a 7,000 word analysis in The American Prospect. "Like so many sectors of our economy, government inaction has allowed the music business to consolidate, with devastating effects on musicians. Radio is to a shocking degree in the hands of one company, Liberty Media. Two companies, Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), control a large number of venues and artist management services, with Live Nation dominating ticketing. The major labels have been whittled down to three. Record stores, alt-weeklies, and other elements that nurtured local music scenes are largely gone.
Dwarfing all that in significance is streaming, which has become the industry's primary revenue source, despite giving a pittance to the vast majority of artists. For the main streaming companies — YouTube and Spotify — music is really a loss leader, incidental to data collection, the advertising that can be sold off that data, and the promise of audience growth to investors... This radical upending of the industry's business model has benefited a few stars, while the middle-income artist, like so much of the middle class in America, struggles to survive...
Chris Castle, an entertainment attorney who used to work at A&M Records, could see it coming when he caught wind of an advertisement for a rebooted version of Napster that operated as a primitive streaming service. The tagline was: Own Nothing, Have Everything. Castle recalled: "I thought right there, that's the end." David Lowery, lead singer of Camper van Beethoven and later Cracker, who now lectures at the University of Georgia in addition to making music, described the internet as reassembling all the gatekeepers that kept artists away from fair compensation. "We celebrated disintermediation, and went through a process of re-intermediation," he said.
The article points out that in 2018 YouTube already accounted for 47% of all on-demand playtime globally, according to figures from a nonprofit trade group — while RIAA figures show that streaming now accounts for 83 percent of all recorded income in the U.S, while digital music downloads now earn even less than vinyl records. It remains to be seen whether movement building from all stakeholders, from musicians to fans, will be able to force platform monopolies to give creators just compensation. But the winds are shifting in Washington around Big Tech, and a united front of artists could prove key to raising public sympathies against exploitation and toward basic fairness.
Artists would rather think of themselves as outside the system. "The wonderful thing about the DIY vision is also its weakness," noted Astra Taylor, a writer, filmmaker, and activist whose husband, Jeff Mangum, fronts the lo-fi rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. (Astra has occasionally played with the group.) But the system has come for them, and toppled the structures that allowed them to create. Everyone loves music, and most of us now have the capacity to listen to anything, anywhere, at any time. We can't hear through the noise that the people who brought us this musical bounty are in trouble.
In the article Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, complains that "The same neoliberals in anarchist drag boosting indie labels in the '90s are now boosting Bandcamp. I love Bandcamp. I love the food co-op too. They've been around since the 1930s, they're 3 percent of the market, will never be any bigger... We need to either tear the whole thing down and create real socialism where I get an apartment for my good looks, or a functioning market."
"Artists today are beset on all sides by monopolists and oligopolists," argues a 7,000 word analysis in The American Prospect. "Like so many sectors of our economy, government inaction has allowed the music business to consolidate, with devastating effects on musicians. Radio is to a shocking degree in the hands of one company, Liberty Media. Two companies, Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), control a large number of venues and artist management services, with Live Nation dominating ticketing. The major labels have been whittled down to three. Record stores, alt-weeklies, and other elements that nurtured local music scenes are largely gone.
Dwarfing all that in significance is streaming, which has become the industry's primary revenue source, despite giving a pittance to the vast majority of artists. For the main streaming companies — YouTube and Spotify — music is really a loss leader, incidental to data collection, the advertising that can be sold off that data, and the promise of audience growth to investors... This radical upending of the industry's business model has benefited a few stars, while the middle-income artist, like so much of the middle class in America, struggles to survive...
Chris Castle, an entertainment attorney who used to work at A&M Records, could see it coming when he caught wind of an advertisement for a rebooted version of Napster that operated as a primitive streaming service. The tagline was: Own Nothing, Have Everything. Castle recalled: "I thought right there, that's the end." David Lowery, lead singer of Camper van Beethoven and later Cracker, who now lectures at the University of Georgia in addition to making music, described the internet as reassembling all the gatekeepers that kept artists away from fair compensation. "We celebrated disintermediation, and went through a process of re-intermediation," he said.
The article points out that in 2018 YouTube already accounted for 47% of all on-demand playtime globally, according to figures from a nonprofit trade group — while RIAA figures show that streaming now accounts for 83 percent of all recorded income in the U.S, while digital music downloads now earn even less than vinyl records. It remains to be seen whether movement building from all stakeholders, from musicians to fans, will be able to force platform monopolies to give creators just compensation. But the winds are shifting in Washington around Big Tech, and a united front of artists could prove key to raising public sympathies against exploitation and toward basic fairness.
Artists would rather think of themselves as outside the system. "The wonderful thing about the DIY vision is also its weakness," noted Astra Taylor, a writer, filmmaker, and activist whose husband, Jeff Mangum, fronts the lo-fi rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. (Astra has occasionally played with the group.) But the system has come for them, and toppled the structures that allowed them to create. Everyone loves music, and most of us now have the capacity to listen to anything, anywhere, at any time. We can't hear through the noise that the people who brought us this musical bounty are in trouble.
In the article Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, complains that "The same neoliberals in anarchist drag boosting indie labels in the '90s are now boosting Bandcamp. I love Bandcamp. I love the food co-op too. They've been around since the 1930s, they're 3 percent of the market, will never be any bigger... We need to either tear the whole thing down and create real socialism where I get an apartment for my good looks, or a functioning market."
Why physical copy is still better (Score:4, Insightful)
The tagline was: Own Nothing, Have Everything.
Which is exactly why I, and a whole bunch of other people, continue to buy CDs and DVDs. We own the end product. We're not dependent on someone else to provide us with whatever artistry we want. We have the product. We paid for it. We own it in perpetuity for our own use. I can make as many copies for backup as I wish so I never lose what I own.
Re:Why physical copy is still better (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not dependent on someone else to provide us with whatever artistry we want.
Except the artists. Which is the point of the story. That the middle-men is having a negative effect on artists. Physical medium or streaming.
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Fuck them.
Way too many "artiste" are chasing trends with vinyl only issues, NFTs, or whatever is the marketing scheme of the day.
They went for the payout instead of building a model for themselves.
It is literally WIDE OPEN to start their own streaming services, sell media directly, or organize their own shows.
But they want a piece of the money train that would literally fall apart without them, and are bitching that the real money-men are the same people who use to fuck them previously are still fucking the
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It is literally WIDE OPEN to start their own streaming services, sell media directly, or organize their own shows.
And the up-front capital to do all these things would come from where, exactly?
Oh, you mean from their streaming revenue, and their media sales, and their shows, of course! How silly of me, thinking that you need revenue to build the things that give you revenue!
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It is literally WIDE OPEN to start their own streaming services, sell media directly, or organize their own shows.
And the up-front capital to do all these things would come from where, exactly?
Oh, you mean from their streaming revenue, and their media sales, and their shows, of course! How silly of me, thinking that you need revenue to build the things that give you revenue!
Hosting is cheap, and WordPress and WooCommerce can be had for the grand price of 0. Boom, you are selling mp3s. Or physical media (how expensive is it to burn some CDs to get off the ground?)
Oh ... you mean they might need some marketing, promotion, distribution? It's almost as though the businesses who do that stuff might want to get paid then. This is a crime why, exactly?
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A lot of artists are not good business people and don't understand the fine print in the contract, at that they're happy to get any type of contract, at least at first.
Unluckily we live in a system that rewards lack of ethics and I don't see any type of fix that doesn't bring its own problems.
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Tell us how fair is the market?
You are describing the libertarian wet dream of the fair market that solves all problems, where all actors are equally powerful and everyone is enlightened about what is a good deal and what is not. This article is about monopolies and oligopolies where the market is skewed towards some players and that it isn't a fair and functioning market. The contracts you are idealizing about are only possible in a working market. But please tell us how this is not true instead of spammin
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Re: Why physical copy is still better (Score:2)
It's fine to strip DRM for personal use.
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What you actually own is a license to play what's on that disc for personal use.
That's not true. What you own is the disc, which has a copy of a sound recording of, presumably, a musical composition, on it. You can do any lawful thing with it; there is no license. Copyright doesn't restrict non-public performances of the contents, so you can do that. Copyright does restrict your ability to copy it, so you can't do that. A license can only exist for things you're not inherently lawfully able to do, because otherwise the licensor would have nothing to license to you.
The confusion ab
Re: Why physical copy is still better (Score:2)
Actually what you describe sounds a lot like a license.
It's not supposed to.
Something is illegal if it is simply against the law. You can't lawfully murder someone with a CD. That's illegal as to everyone.
Something is licensable if it is legal but someone holds the right to control whether or not it is done. A copyright holder can lawfully make copies of his CD all day. Someone else cannot. If the copyright holder grants permission to the someone else, then they can. The key is in getting permission.
But if someone doesn't control a right, they cannot license a
Re: Why physical copy is still better (Score:2)
I'm referring to use exemptions granted on top of the DMCA. Things have changed since the early 2000's.
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The US being an exception, unless DRM stops you from doing so. If you get a physical CD from an artist without DRM, or buy one, you can make a backup for yourself. You can not sell it. This is fair use. If you make a backup of content with DRM on it, it has to maintain the original DRM.
No.
In the US backing up a copy of software that you own is expressly allowed under 17 USC 117. Otherwise, for a general consumer (as opposed to, say, a real library) backups are not permitted. Under certain circumstances, space shifting to a different medium -- such as from CD to computer file to iPod -- may be allowed as a fair use, but fair use is a fickle beast, and it's entirely dependent on the circumstances. What is fair use for one person may not be fair use for another.
But, any lawfully made copy
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I was against streaming until I tried it for a while. I listen to music while I work - so I'm probably on Spotify 5 hours a day for the last year. Over that time, I've discovered a couple dozen artists I really like, and hundreds more one-off songs that are on my favorite list. Reconstructing just "the songs I listen to often" would cost me hundreds of dollars, and I would still burn out of those songs quickly if those were all I had. I would very much miss the discovery playlists - that's how I find new
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I don’t worry about scratched media, because each disc comes out of it’s jewel case once, in order to allow me to create an AC4 recording, which I then store digitally on my NAS. I use iTunes as the client but there are plenty of alternatives. I keep the physical copies because:-
1. I can stop purchasing whenever I want and I don’t los
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I still have my vinyl records and CDs from the 1980s.
Recently I went on to Google Play and discovered they closed the system and gave no way to retrieve the literally thousands of dollars of music I had purchased on it. Apparently there is supposed to be a way to download it, but the link just goes to a page that says the service is closed. SUPPOSEDLY it was all moved to Youtube and for a fee I could rent it back. No, fuuck you google I paid for it already.
I made a complaint to the australian regulator but
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The tagline was: Own Nothing, Have Everything.
Which is exactly why I, and a whole bunch of other people, continue to buy CDs and DVDs. We own the end product. We're not dependent on someone else to provide us with whatever artistry we want. We have the product. We paid for it. We own it in perpetuity for our own use. I can make as many copies for backup as I wish so I never lose what I own.
Meh.
I still have a few CDs and mp3s, from as far back as the 90s. Do I ever listen to them? No, why would I? So much simpler to just stream the music if I want to hear it.
Yes, I could keep buying CDs, and rip them, and store them, and catalog them, and back them up, and they would be mine all mine gollum gollum ... or I could just pay $9.99/month, which is less than I used to spend on physical media or paid downloads, and then not have to worry about that.
Making other choices is fine, of course, but fewe
Oh come on! (Score:4, Insightful)
Entertainment industry accounting has been a known for a VERY long time.
The performers can't claim to be innocent of that knowledge.
And still they choose to do that business.
But they MIGHT get rich!
News at eleven.
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Sound logic. It’s always been terrible so let’s keep it that way.
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There's two ways to change a system. From within. How's that working so far? And from without of which there are several ways including setting one's own system.
Best example of change from within and without is the current broadband battle and SpaceX. Changing the system from within wasn't working (incumbents), so one man established both a cheap way of getting into space (important), AND setting up a LEO constellation that did better than the current satellite network (latency, bandwidth, speed, etc).
The O
Re:Oh come on! (Score:5, Interesting)
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from an artist perspective (Score:2)
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There's also saturation. Much like in writing there are lots of people writing but few are making much of a living from it. For the consumer it's like the problem podcasts have, plenty creating, but hard for consumers to find in the midst of plenty of varying quality.
Re: from an artist perspective (Score:2)
So... sell watermarked audio files direct to consumer. If your music can find an audience, the profit margins are insane.
If you can't find an audience without the RIAA, well... who really deserves the money then?
Everybody can sing (Score:2)
Not everybody can sing or play an instrument well enough that thousands of people will want to listen to them. But everybody can sing, its part of being human.
Perhaps if there is not a immense fortune to be made in controlling the distribution of recordings of a very few select musicians, the background won't be near totally filled with said reproductions droning away. Then, perhaps, more humans will have the soundspace to hum or sing or play their own songs.
It's probably a terrifying silence for people ac
Re:Everybody can sing [and starve] (Score:2)
Well, if I had a mod point to give... One of only two mentions of "creativ" in the rapidly growing discussion, but mostly the discussion has obviously been wrong-footed by lousy FPs defending selfishness and greed and money über alles. To the devil with encouraging creativity for social benefit, even though that was supposed to be the main point of copyright law when it was created. Also buried deep in the top-level but relatively invisible contributions were a number of aspects of starving but dedicat
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But returning to my original focus and folded into the attention topic [kudos to TuringTest] the situation looks bleak. We already have more recorded music (and videos) than any human being can listen to (or watch) in an entire lifetime, even eliminating such other uses of time as working, eating, or sleeping. And more content is created all the time.
There's a whole topic called attention economy [slashdot.org] devoted to exploring that angle from an economic perspective, if you want to dig deeper.
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Already done quite a bit of digging. Most recently was The Hype Economy (which was kind of disappointing) and just started the related book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
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But everybody can sing, its part of being human.
I take it you have never met my wife. Nor, indeed, listened to Bob Dylan.
Welcome to capitalism. (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism is a great system for funneling the most amount of wealth to the fewest number of people. The only thing holding this trend back is taxation and regulation. With one political party specifically against these two things, it's no wonder some people have billions while others cannot afford to feed their children.
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It's more commoditisation of music.
Back in "the old days" you needed skill and talent, and a great deal of time invested in the field until you could earn a living from it. You had to work tirelessly to build up your name and reputation, and tour endlessly. But you could make a good life of it.
Then came recording, and things got easier, as you could bolster all your live performances and top it up with recordings, and gain money repeatedly from that time spent in the studio.
It was still largely the artist
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It's more commoditisation of music.
I don't know; I think it's the same old song.
Back in "the old days" you needed skill and talent, and a great deal of time invested in the field until you could earn a living from it. You had to work tirelessly to build up your name and reputation, and tour endlessly. But you could make a good life of it.
This only worked for a handful of people, and even then not so well. A good job for a musician would've been working for some nobleman or a church.
Then came recording, and things got easier, as you could bolster all your live performances and top it up with recordings, and gain money repeatedly from that time spent in the studio. It was still largely the artists that were the ones looked after, because they were skilled and it required a lot of time investment to be good enough to appeal.
Hah! The record labels have thoroughly dominated the music industry for a very long time. They definitely were not looking after musicians, who were just as now, a dime a dozen.
Now it was only the old luminaries that everyone wanted to hear that could negotiate a decent contract. If you were 'new', there was absolutely no incentive to pay you over the odds, or give you a particularly nice contract, because there was always someone else in the line with the minimal skills required that would do it
This has always been true; there's just more people trying to be professional musicians than the market can support, which gives the advantage
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It's more commoditisation of music. Back in "the old days" you needed skill and talent, and a great deal of time invested in the field until you could earn a living from it.
Back in the 1960s there were successions of manufactured acts playing material written by others that didn't even sing on their own records. Commoditisation goes back a very long way. There were also acts that did have skill and talent but then that's just as true today.
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> everything going on right now is 100% under their control
That's incorrect. The majority political party doesn't equate to absolute control. You're an idiot.
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the poor today have a higher standard of living than all but royalty did 100 years ago,
Yes, it could be worse but it could be soooo much better. I'm not against capitalism, I'm against removing the mechanisms that ensure it works for everyone.
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Do you really believe that the homeless, sleeping outside in the snow in a tent, if lucky, with no where to even have a shit, are better off then King George V was?
A what for your WHAT? (Score:2)
Seriously? People think they should get an apartment for their good looks? Yeah, um, no. But we don't really have what I would call proper capitalism either. Far too many people make money without ever having made anything except making other people's lives more complicated. Problem is that the people who have no ability to create have so entrenched themselves into a parasitic economy that they couldn't survive without it.
Re:A what for your WHAT? (Score:4, Funny)
People think they should get an apartment for their good looks?
Modeling.
Let me finish that headline for you... (Score:2)
Desirable Careers (Score:5, Insightful)
Musicians who play for a living are (almost all) among the most passionate and musically gifted people out there. I know many professional musicians, and a few ex-pro musicians as well. As with some amateur musicians, their talent is almost incomprehensible to me.
Here's the bad news for them....
In order to choose music as a career, a person has to be willing to forsake the more certain income that would come from being, say, a home inspector or marketing director. (Most of us lack the talent, drive, or confidence to take that step.)
Thus musicians have self-selected into a career where risk is high and money is low. Just by chance, at least some of this will be due to mistaken estimates of the risk-reward, rather than people having a truly unusual appetite for risk. Frankly, I would guess that describes most musicians. So, it's not surprising that a huge proportion of musicians end up disappointed with the level of support society collectively provides.
The same is true of other "desirable" careers. Artist, architect, athlete. If you are going to choose a career based on a passion shared with much of humanity, you are going to be risking a lot and inviting disaster. That's as unavoidable in a socialist system as a capitalist one -- there just aren't as many roles out there as we have seekers.
Western democracies are all pretty alike in having goodly numbers of professional musicians. And yet, nowhere is it a reliable and lucrative career choice even for the insanely gifted. As more money comes in, we simply get more starving musicians.
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I don't understand this sentiment (Score:1)
it really sounds like "I create, so I deserve to be paid". well guess what? you actually don't.
reality is, most people who pay for music don't NEED to hear you; they are doing just fine listening to whatever overproduced kind of stuff music industry provides them with these days. if they weren't, they would have gone somewhere else! but apparently sellaband is so much way behind youtube in playback counts, relatively few people are doing that. I have very little sympathy both with RIAA crowd and label crowd
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it really sounds like "I create, so I deserve to be paid". well guess what? you actually don't.
I guess your boss doesn't need to pay you this month either. Just because you did the work and he made use of it, why should you get paid?
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I dunno.. maybe because we signed a contract, under which I do some work that both we and my boss knew would have value for the company? is that a good answer?
music is a publisher's market and not a creator's market because musicians are essentially a commodity to the former, even though they technically aren't. again, if it wasn't, listeners wouldn't have been satisfied with what they got from labels and would have sought their music elsewhere. bandcamp is a great source of new music for myself and I have
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I guess your boss doesn't need to pay you this month either. Just because you did the work and he made use of it, why should you get paid?
You really think those situations are similar? OP didn't hire the artist to make music for him. However, OP's boss did hire OP to do whatever work.
Maybe an example will help you understand: if I take my car to the car wash I expect to pay some worker to clean it up. It's a service I asked for, and the worker is entitled to his pay. This is business. However, if some guy aggressively cleans my windshield at some light stop, even if I try to stop him, he's not entitled to payment. This is a racket, not busine
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That's because all the work has been commissioned. And it's commissioned so frequently that a person is retained to perform that work.
That's essentially what a hire is.
You can commission music too, and many entities do (jingles and all sorts). It's expensive though, and not done often enough for most to actually retain the people, so it's all done on repeated commission.
Some places (movie studies and such) often have musicians on the payroll to provide scores for their products, because there's such a nee
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But given how few there are of those overall, the jobs are vanishingly scarce.
Yes. This article is focused on the exciting field of tubas, but the general point is the same for many creative or otherwise 'fun' endeavors.
Too Many Tubas [priceonomics.com]
Why? (Score:2)
It's never been cheaper to set up a good quality audio recording studio, and a decent quality one is within reach of anybody who can afford two guitars to rub together. Pretty much everyone has direct access to several powerful distribution channels. Why are music artists beholden to monopolies?
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Distribution and promotion. I've got a Bandcamp page with nearly 200 tracks on it. I get about 750 plays a month, and have had ONE purchase over the last TEN YEARS.
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There's a whole collection of musicians on YouTube who get millions of views per video, I assume with pretty healthy Patreon accounts.
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That's great, but it depends on performing on camera, which I don't because I'm doing practically everything "in the box". There's a market for "how to use a DAW" tutorials, but it's largely separate from the people just browsing for music. I also removed my YouTube presence many years ago when they demanded everyone sign up for G+ accounts to be able to do anything. I signed up as "fuckoffgooglebastards" long enough to remove the handful of videos I already had.
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Give yourself a little promo and post a link. :) You'll get at least another look, and maybe another purchase.. :)
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That's what my sig does. I also make and give away virtual instruments, and the vast majority of my traffic is either for that, or for my demos of someone else's virtual instruments. Sometimes I get a burst of traffic when a game I've written for becomes momentarily popular. But the fact is that nobody needs my services, and most developers are fine with either using royalty-free music or just having their brother throw something together.
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So it does! Damn, I'm not on form today. :) I'll go peek. :)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Believe me when I say that you will spend far more time and effort attempting to promote your music than you will ever spend doing the fun part of writing and performing it.
But doesn't this mean the record labels are performing an useful service to musicians, even, from what I understand, an indispensable one? If so, shouldn't they be paid for this service?
There have been a ton of attempts to kill off record labels
If musicians can't succeed on their own, is killing the record labels a wise move? Are there any working alternatives?
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Record labels aren't in it for the artists. They're in it to make money. They've discovered current artists can be mass produced with little talent, locking out the really talented to a large degree..
Killing the record labels may not make much of a difference, to be honest. It'll probably stop the rather insane view that lots of youngsters have that they'll have a shining career with no work needed just by planning to be discovered by a talent scout and then just getting money rolling in.
You'd be surpris
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So what you're saying is, the hard part of music is the business bit, which is the part the labels charge so much for. I tend to agree.
Popular music is pretty simple to write, perform, and produce. The expensive part is the spectacle, and that is indeed what seems to sell. But then you're really just hiring actors, which are a dime a dozen except for the few who are really famous.
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They're both hard but only one of them requires a blessing from an oligopoly.
The spectacle isn't the hard part of the business,
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The spectacle isn't the hard part of the business,
You sound like someone who has never put on a show of a significant size before. There's a lot that goes into planning even a modest show. Having a spectacular one happen every night for 50 nights in 50 cities isn't trivial I am sure.
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two guitars to rub together
The market for such recordings is probably pretty limited.
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Search "ASMR" on YouTube.
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Attention is the limited resource (Score:5, Interesting)
When you create digital content on a platform built to make cheap perfect replicas worldwide, each individual copy is worth nothing. Meanwhile, eyeballs are a limited resource, so whatever attracts them is valuable.
Two mayor attractors of attention are novelty and slot machines. Therefore the natural economic tendency of the internet is to consolidate capital around novelty trends and skinner boxes; the most successfull platforms in the modern internet are those which can do both things well. The captured attention can be then sold to the highest bidder.
Creators are trapped in this dynamic. They can extract some sort-term value for bringing novelty, but then are quickly consolidated on the distribution platform that renders their creation's value to nearly zero, competing for attention with all the others doing the same. Not a good proposition.
What do you think the point of "IP" was? (Score:2)
Look at the licenses. It always says "distributor", and never "creator".
Thing is, since the Internet, a distributor is as pointless as watertightness on a sundial.
So any monopolism is your own choice of not "publishing" yourself.
Alt title: Artists shooting themselves in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)
...as they keep using Spotify and Youtube to reach a greater audience. Nobody's forcing them too. "But that's where my potential/largest audience is" is not an excuse. Make your own space, or build up another space, where the terms are better.
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Well yeah, you know what I remember from some bands in 80s and 90s? When they became moderately successful, they'd found their own record company if they weren't happy with the deals they were getting. And then similar bands would join that record label. If you want to be a victim of exploitation by the middlemen leeches, just to reach a greater market, well you reap what you sow.
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The bands that formed their own labels only did so after gaining fame and success in the existing system.
One of the most famous labels that a band created was probably Two Tone, which was formed before The Specials got any significant fame. However, another band-owned label was DEP International (UB40's label) which crashed and burned and left several band members bankrupt...
So 20 years later, no change... (Score:2)
Money not going to the artists?
Courtney Love in 2000 on the RIAA and getting paid. [salon.com]
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Johnny-Come-Lately.
Steve Albini in 1993 on the music industry and getting paid [thebaffler.com]
(This is the one famous for its last line: "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.")
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The old days weren't so great either (Score:2)
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The difference with streaming is that noone will generally bother to stream the garbage filler... With a CD they assume it sold, even if in practice noone listened to it except by accident.
Streaming songs for free was not unthinkable 25 years ago at all, that's basically what radio was except that you had very limited control over the playlist (eg sometimes they had request shows).
Wow. Who knew? (Score:2)
What happens to musicians ... (Score:2)
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In the mean time there's still a ton of shit jobs machines won't be able to do until artificial human level AI gets invented ... and getting people to do those shit jobs requires sufficient relative incentive.
There are no infinite number of jobs in any career (Score:2)
Before youtube a couple lottery winners made it big, a couple of musicians made a decent living just on music and everyone else has a real job on the side. After youtube the same is true, the numbers just went down.
There is no obligation on society to make music a viable career for a static amount of people. I'm not going to pay for music on youtube, Google isn't going to pay much more than they are paying now. I have vastly more choice in media to consume nowadays, I'm never going to spend as much from my
Radio? (Score:2)
Really? There are still people who listen to radio? Even in their cars, people have their own sources. It's like saying teamsters are screwed because almost all buggy-whip manufacturing is controlled by just a few companies.
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Back in the days I've had some sympathy. But this is the age of information and technology. There's no longer a reason for someone to say "I didn't know". The tools for being a one person business is there. What is also there is the idea that if there's something a person can't/will not do, there's someone to help them (for a fee).
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The real problem is that people don't want to do paperwork, ask permission, or even negotiate contracts.
If there was just one standard license contract for recording artists, that allow anyone to give them 30 cents directly to license the song to sell on their own store, the artist would keep more of the money (which they currently get like 8 cents of, with the recording publisher (eg warner or sony) taking 92% of it, of which 15% goes to the store. The store would be happier, and so would the artist. But i
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You left out all the other parts of running a business, and yes it's a business. Hence the, paying other people part.
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The Business, "you suck on my genitals and I pay for the advertising to make you a famous what ever, singer, actor, youtube star, I pay and you suck, the harder you suck the more I will invest and I want a share of those profits as well". Lets not pretend the business is any other than that.
Posing lying fuckers, psuedo celebrities, and fabrication from go to whoa, all primps and prostitutes, drug addicts and kiddy fiddlers. All protected by PR=B$ and corporate main stream media.
C'mon, none of you seriously
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By not paying artist royalties, platforms whose income comes from selling tracking data outcompete those without Hollywood Fraud^WAccounting. And an artist whose music can be found only on some obscure platform gets no views, and thus sells no streams.
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are you trying to say there is demand (from listeners) for an off-major-platform music discovery service, which for some reason has gone unnoticed by everyone in the music business?
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ok I understand now. but bandcamp has been around for like what now, ten years or so. which means to me, given its fairly obscure status, that this demand is not anywhere close to what would force the industry to become more artist-friendly. if you agree with this, then you would probably have to agree that lack of negotiating leverage from the creators is a sign of objective supply/demand situation rather than a genuine cornered market oligopoly problem.
Re: We donâ(TM)t need to create real socialis (Score:4, Insightful)
What an incredibly arrogant piece of crap writing showing you did not understand a word of what the parent poster wrote!
He said that going to a obscure platform where the artists can get a better deal means they get no views, and you equate that with their music having no value to others? Grow up! What about the oligopolies making it extremely hard for them to be discovered on that platform?
There are a lot of artists that try to renegotiate their deals, few have the stamina and perseverance to do so. After all, they are artists wanting to make music, up against corporate lawyers whose only job is to give them a worse deal. I have been in negotiations with the music industry and know exatly how "benevolent" they are.
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Ad hominem attacks because you lack the ability to write a correct reply? You are a real class act, wow. You did not say anything remotely like that in your original post. Let me quote you:
In what world can you read out what you just said from that? The quote is just condescending to those that fail to drum up any excitement for alternate means of distributi
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Yeah all those terrible failed socialist countries like Canada and continental Europe. Miserable wastelands.
Re: We donâ(TM)t need to create real socialis (Score:2)
Actual socialism is employee owned or community owned means of production, not high taxation (theft) of profit from otherwise healthy capitalist economies.
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You're using insane USish renames, not the usual meaning of the word. Eg, "communism" in the US is a slur for "anything center or left" while for the rest of us it's "a vile totalitarian regime that offed ~180M people". "Nazi" is "anything not extreme left" vs Hitler's merry men, "liberal" means a heavily authoritarian party, "inclusion" means excluding anyone not woke enough, "racism" means being unhappy with newfangled racial discrimination (except for a bit of alt-right which are indeed racist too), an
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The weirdest part is that tech has nothing to do.wirh these arguments. That' part is just a smokescreen. Twenty years ago I was a struggling musician. Won a couple regional battle of the bands and got a contract. Want to guess what 100% of the musicians I ever met thought about contracts? They exist only to get advertising for your live shows. That's it.
Unless you were multi-gold record sellers the recording deal was irrelevant. Ticket sales and merch sales is how you made your money as a musician. Doing ev