Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss?

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/

by pie • 14 years ago

71 37 14 years ago

thetrichordist.wordpress.com

pie• 14 years ago

This is a long post, but a fascinating dive into the business of music. Here we have facts, hard numbers, more-questionable numbers, anecdotes, experiments, and some rambling hyperbole from an industry veteran. I have rarely seen this kind of detail in discussions of online music.

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

This ought to be the top post on HN right now. There's a reason it sank like a stone.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

I would not have seen this had you not written this comment. Thank you. This is so excellent.

wglb• 14 years ago

I am wondering if someone flagged it.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

I realize that some of you may not know much about me or even who I am. I like to think that I am uniquely qualified as an artist, entrepreneur and geek. I was trained as a mathematician. My first job after I graduated involved being the systems operator for an MPM OS system and I wrote a lot of DBASE IV scripts. I had a fascination with the old RPG punch card programming language. I am deeply involved in the digital amateur radio world. You can sometimes find me operating PSK31 on 20 meters. I spent some time in Chicago near the CME. I worked as a “Quant” doing some semi high frequency trading. While there I became involved with a company called www.thepoint.com which evolved into www.groupon.com.

This post is blowing my mind and I'm only a couple grafs into it. David Lowery was a f'ing quant for CME traders?

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

I didn't know any of that either. But I was mainly struck by how comprehensively he attacked the arguments of those he calls 'freehadists.' I sit (uncomfortably) on the fence in these things; I think the current law on copyright is a disaster on wheels, but having spent years as a Starving Artist the problem of revenue for content creators is not an abstract one to me, and I can't bring myself to download copyrighted movies and music the way other people do. I used to buy a lot of media, now I compromise by renting it or opting for what's available on YouTube (where rightsholders have a reliable mechanism for asserting ownership of their IP if they feel an upload infringes upon them).

The bit that really pained me was his mention of John Perrry Barlow doing his schtick at the SF Music Summit. I was getting into the internet when the WELL was still in full swing and vividly recall Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace - what young digital idealist wouldn't thrill to such vaulting sentiments? Two decades later, the notions of elective citizenship and intentional nationality continue to fascinate, but not the notions that the ends justify the means and that the economics will take care of themselves.

I am very happy that the technological means of production have become so much cheaper; I have several synthesizers and related audio gear sitting on this desk I'm at now, and a great camera that allows me to shoot excellent video in HD - one handed. When I first learned my way around a movie set the cameras weighed 30 pounds and I had to use a tape recorder the size of a concrete block. Unfortunately, my technical mastery (or at least commercially viable skill) came at the same time that the market for the end product fragmented drastically - as the technology became cheaper, so the skills of people who were skilled in its use became massively devalued. We had another example the other day involving a photographer talking to a calendar publisher whose photo rights budget amounted to a mere $100. Now, I'm not really an entrepreneur, and I don't dispute that there are abundant commercial opportunities that I could have exploited and haven't; I'm hopeful that the increasing popularity of crowdfunding and the possible democratization of investment from the JOBS bill will facilitate capital-raising for small projects.

But the downside that Lowery so elegantly articulates here is that to succeed in the new commercial marketplace, a creative type needs to also be his or her own manager/marketer/salesperson/etc., to a far greater degree than before - and that means less time spent developing one's craft and creations. The old models of funding and distribution in the arts weren't totally fair, but they were predictable and relatively stable. If you were lucky and/or talented enough to get and exploit a few breaks, then there was a professional infrastructure within which you can find your own niche, whether as an artist or a technician. As the market for the end product has fragmented and revenue models have become obsolete, producers and publishers have become more risk-averse and increasingly channeled their funds to the surest prospects (which are often the lowest common denominator in creative terms). This naturally means fewer insiders willing to take the risk of financing and publishing an unknown prospect. And why should they, when people will bend over backwards and pay to have their films considered for inclusion in a film festival (most indies have neither the know-how nor the cash to sell their project at a film buyer's market, and film schools are in no hurry to teach them)?

It's not all bad, by any means. But it's not all good either; the old system provided extremely valuable mentoring and marketing utility to emerging creatives, and trial and error isn't a very efficient alternative.

Also interesting is this MetaFilter thread about the same post, though the first half is kind of Night of the Living Strawmen: http://www.metafilter.com/114955/Fool-me-once-shame-on-you-f...

tptacek13• 14 years ago

I am pretty much of exactly the same mind, down to my take on copyright policy, with a couple provisos:

* Promises should be kept. There's nothing unconscionable about conditioning a sale on "don't share this with the world for free" terms.

* Piracy has had a massive disruptive effect on the music industry. It isn't that technology simply devalued the professional skills of musicians (it did that, too). Much of what's happened to music with technology wasn't planned by the industry, but rather abetted by it once it started happening. That's why we have one dominant iTunes Music Store; they got to be the first mover on "downloading music not for free" when the whole industry was getting shellacked by pirates.

* The tech industry is fundamentally more heartless and efficient than the music industry was. Lowery thinks musicians had a better deal under the labels than the tech giants "by accident". It's not an accident: tech companies are much better at extracting surplus value than most industries, and they're merciless about it. And I think for the most part (with the possible exception of Apple) he's right: the tech industry could give a flying fuck about the economics of professional musicianship. The musicians could all go broke tomorrow; they'd get their pageviews somewhere else.

Ultimately, and this is pretty navel-gazey and arrogant so I apologize in advance, I have a diagnosis. At least with regards to the geek mindset. We're bullies. It's ironic, since so many of us got picked on in school, but the prevailing attitude among technologists is "if you can do it with a computer, it's pointless to reason about whether you should do it". Maybe it's because my particular field spends so much time discovering things people really shouldn't be doing with computers, but this is an especially aggravating and hollow attitude to me. It's bullying when you break contracts, promises, and the law just to get convenient access to a piece of music by a guy who's making less than a McDonalds manager; it's especially bullying when you tell him he should get a better business model. "Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself!"

Man, what I wouldn't give to hear Steve Albini's response to Lowery's rant. They had to have met; Andy Mason worked at Electrical Audio before he started ThePoint.com, where Lowery worked. It blows my mind that the lead singer from Camper Van Beethoven worked for Andy Mason in Chicago at ThePoint.com.

DrJokepu• 14 years ago

I wonder how come he didn't mention publishers, who are the people who make the real money in music these days. Sure, record labels make more money in total since they're very big, but publishers have much much juicier profit margins. There's a reason why Sony paid almost twice as much for the publishing arm of EMI than Universal for the phonographic arm. Yet nobody ever talks about them even though they are very very relevant to discussions such as this.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

Probably because that's not his point; he writes as if conceding that there was something superior about the major label system makes him want to throw up in his mouth a little, but that's better than eating out of dumpsters.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

This deserves so much more attention here than it's going to get. It's also genuinely TL, and many here DR at all. For what it's worth, if he starts to lose you, here are some of the key points:

* You'd want to know that David Lowery was the lead singer for Camper Van Beethoven (of "Take The Skinheads Bowling" fame) and Cracker (of "Low" fame). You'd quickly learn from this that Lowery was trained as a mathematician and worked as a quant near the CME, and worked with Andy Mason at his pre-Groupon company. He's a punchcard and packet radio chat nerd.

* He's tired of people telling him that musicians need to "embrace" technology. They were embracing technology in the '90s. They paid to have people run complicated websites. He's tired of people telling him to sell more t-shirts. Bands have sold t-shirts since the '70s. It's shitty money. And people pirate t-shirts too!

* Concerts are also shitty money for most artists. People thought otherwise because we inadvertently cherry pick stats from artists that happen to do crazy well at concerts. Lowery runs a serious recording studio, his wife is a notable concert booker. Musicians aren't making money at concerts. Many are living out of their vans.

* Recording albums is deceptively expensive in ways that technology doesn't address. ProTools can get marginally cheaper but the mix engineer doesn't get any cheaper. Mix engineers are expensive skilled professionals. Recordings sound like crap when you don't do them professionally. The mix engineer doesn't get to sell t-shirts at concerts.

* He's going to lose a lot of you by sniping at the industry for "defending software patents", as if that was a double standard. Get past that to his real point: technologists work in an industry that is supported by protectable IP. Even if you work solely on NetBSD, you'd make a lot less money if no software was protectable. No music is protectable anymore. There is a serious double standard.

* He gets it: you can give to get. He's been giving away music for decades. His shows were all recorded and given away for free; his bands organized CD burning trees. But that was his choice and he did it on his terms. The new terms are dictated to artists: your stuff will be available for free online.

* The old system was better for artists. Not because the labels were better. It was probably an accident. Editorial aside: or maybe tech companies are just better at squeezing surplus value out of systems.

* People tend to remark about how low artist royalties were in the label system. That didn't tell the whole story! Artists received sizable advances calibrated for "modest success" level outcome for their recordings. The overwhelming majority of artists never recouped those advances. So the effective royalty rate was much higher; possibly, for most bands, over 50%.

* Not only that, but artists received a mechanical 70-95 cents every time their album sold, even when they hadn't recouped. So no matter what the economics of a given contract were, when you download a pirated album instead of buying it, the artist loses nearly a buck.

* Artists don't talk about how good they have it because it's not cool to talk about how good you have it.

* Music distribution in 2012 is lockers, streaming, and stores.

* Lockers are straight-up piracy. They make huge revenues (ed aside: "MegaUpload Considers IPO" revenues) from "accelerated downloads" and from ad placement. Musicians get zero of that money.

* Speaking of piracy: recorded music sales are off over 60% since the advent of piracy. There are studies that try to show that musicians are better off in the long run. But many of them are playing games. Some pour game revenue into the same bucket as music revenue. Others use sleight of hand to equate 99 cent single downloads with album sales. One suggested a successful indie musician had seen increased revenues recently, but it turned out that musician made only 34k/yr. People circulate wildly inaccurate stories and infographics about how labels screw artists and accept them without question.

* Streaming tries to pay artists but not by viable amounts. Moreover, streaming pricing isn't transparent. Some artists get better deals, paid on different scales, than other artists.

* Stores are reliably paying artists. But the economics don't totally add up.

* The 1980s value chain: artist < store < label. The artist got the least, yes. But stores took on inventory risk and were compensated for that. Labels financed recording and distribution and were compensated. All three links in the chain provided significant value.

* The 2012 value chain: artist < iTunes < label. The artist makes marginally more. But iTunes does't add significant value: unlike the stores, which were paid to take inventory risk and predict demand, iTunes takes no risk and performs almost no service other than dealing with card processing fees.

* BUT HE'S FINE WITH THAT. He's a market guy. More competition would fix this problem.

* Except: how do you compete with Apple, Google, and Facebook? For a little while musicians could make decent money selling music on their websites. 100% of the revenue less processing fees. Then Facebook and Youtube took all the traffic. Visitor stats plummeted. New content has to be released on Facebook or Youtube; that's where the audience is. But he has no control on Facebook or Youtube. He has to fit into their revenue model, or swim against a tsunami to try to find an audience for a standalone web site, hoping to be one of the few people with outcomes like Louis CK.

* Again, he says: the old system was better. You could make a living more reliably as a musician under the major label system than you can today. The label system at least cared about music --- not in the "have great taste, prefer The Kinks to The Turtles" kind of way, but in a "our incentives align somewhat" kind of way. But music is just a footnote to Facebook & Google. The new players don't care at all about the music industry, because they're in the tech industry, and the only thing that matters to the tech industry is turning software into money.

You don't have to agree with any of this (I happen to buy all of it, wholesale; maybe it's because the rest of my family are musicians). You also don't have to believe that the tech industry owes it to musicians to change anything so that people can make a living as musicians (that's not what I believe, but I believe a lot of things you don't). But you should probably engage fully with what Lowery is saying before you try to claim that startups and tech companies are making things better for musicians, because this is him calling bullshit on you directly.

statictype• 14 years ago

Thanks for the summary. You're right that I got up to software patents, then instapaper'ed the article and tuned out.

I think I disagree with this part: The 2012 value chain: artist < iTunes < label. The artist makes marginally more. But iTunes does't add significant value: unlike the stores, which were paid to take inventory risk and predict demand, iTunes takes no risk and performs almost no service other than dealing with card processing fees.

Isn't there tremendous value in a system that makes it easy to browse music, make payments and download them to your music devices?

tptacek13• 14 years ago

We're probably working from two definitions of the word "value" (with mine, being McKinseyspeak, being the more confusing).

Apple does a lot of excellent things. What they do not do is shoulder a lot of risk. Compensation for having put capital at risk is part of why the labels get such a big cut, and why the brick & mortar stores did too.

yewweitan• 14 years ago

First, I have to say I agree with essentially every single piece of the article. This is clear thinking from someone who obviously has seen all sides of the picture.

But first, I want to talk about a personal example that centres around the role of technology, and spins back around to some ideas.

I discovered this comment via our trusty patio11 in this tweet - https://twitter.com/#!/patio11/status/192482034403393536, which probably emphasises the need for surendipitous discovery mechanisms.

One of the distribution parties I really like (and which got mention in the article) is Bandcamp. As Lowery stated, they only take 15% of the revenue made from bands (it drops to 10% once the artist has >$5000 in rev - http://bandcamp.com/pricing) and provides some really great features, the most significant one I feel being a publicly facing band website which really focuses in one the content (more on their FAQ - http://bandcamp.com/faq).

I was searching for music to code to, and the instant-play feature of bandcamp sites made it so convenient to find stuff I wanted.

The most recent purchase list: - Glorie - http://glorierock.com/album/glorie - Maybeshewill - http://maybeshewill.net/discography/ and http://robotneedshome.bandcamp.com/album/to-the-skies-from-a... - *shels - http://shelsmusic.bandcamp.com/album/plains-of-the-purple-bu... - Ever Forthright - http://everforthright.bandcamp.com/album/ever-forthright - Sioum - http://sioum.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-mortal-but-was-fiend - When Day Descends - http://whendaydescends.bandcamp.com/album/when-day-descends

It all started with the "Recommendations" page of Cloudkicker - http://bandcamp.com/recommended/cloudkicker, which led to the discovery of "When Day Descends" and "Sioum", which in turn led to the rest of the above.

By clicking through the links above, and previewing the tracks, it's obvious that I'm a fan of instrumental rock / metal / post-rock / jazz-metal, etc... and I literally found.

The artists named their prices, bandcamp got a share, and I discovered some insane music that I was more than happy to pay for (all the above only cost me about US$50).

Ok, that's a personal example from this one particular music enthusiast. Some assumptions that made this possible:

- I like discovering stuff. I started by previewing the Song 'CAFO' by animals as leaders on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmfzWpp0hMc&ob=av3e), getting my mind blown, searching for other similar artists, finding Cloudkicker, and then spiraling to the rest of the similar artists

- I've got niche interests. I've been playing the electric guitar seriously for a couple of years (about 4,000+ hours of practice by my best guess), and since all sufficiently complex Melody converges to Metal and all sufficiently complex Harmony converges to Jazz, I end up developing a liking for those "obscure" genres, and don't ever mind the extra work needed to find, learn about, and pay for good music, even if it were just to make myself a better musician. This drives the above discovery process.

- I got a paypal account the moment I turned 18, and wired my (Australian) bank account to feed funds directly into it, and always have enough cash on hand. Not everybody has a convenient source of money to spend, especially not a large chunk of the demographic that finds pirating attractive (teenagers and young adults in particular, especially those in "less developed" areas, though I don't know exactly how much piracy stems from this group)

Hopefully we'll have more technology like bandcamp which make it easier for the creators of music.

But I have a more general gripe. In short, I hate it when consumer-facing, disruptive technology gets adopted too fast. There just isn't enough resource (brain power) to get things right.

What I mean is that the entities who end up winning use "technological solutions" that optimise for market-share instead of creator productivity.

We then end up merely hoping that the market settles upon a solution that has the creator's interest in mind, which is essentially hit or miss. Once the market settles upon the winning model, it typically is there to stay until the next diruption cycle.

I like to raise the example of the iPhone, specifically, iOS.

I just recently developed a substantial app for iOS (substantial meaning > 40k lines of code, not including comments and .xib files), and I can't remember how many times I was swearing at my computer at how atrocious iOS is. non-comprehensive APIs, arbitrary restrictions, non-deterministic view behaviour, potential for retain cycles even with ARC, no backgrounding for sockets, pathetic tooling (had to get a third party openSSL), etc, etc, etc ...

I doubt it was malice on Apple's part, but rather, an optimisation for profit rather than creator productivity (iOS devs). A "slick" interface which is uniformly programmable is all they need, and they weigh the tradeoffs and decide to adopt the existing MacOS platform to build iOS instead of starting from scratch (which would have arguably allowed for much more "developer control"). Let's not even get into the app approval process yet ... that's a whole other mess.n

But I like that example because (a) it was an opportunity to gripe about Apple (sorry, the Lisper in me couldn't resist =P), and (b) there is a significant market opportunity (for music, and for apps), there are high production costs, and the creators of the final product will figure out a way to make their stuff anyway. Which makes it all the more harder to change the existing system without fundamental disruptive forces.

Where can technology help? I honestly don't know. One way is to hope that the disruptor is benign (like Linus and Linux), but more often than not it is profit-seeking, and won't respect the means of production (the artists). Maybe some cryptographers can make specific DRM channels to authenticated parties in a sufficiently general authentication scheme (inherent to the computing environment, and not having to jump through 5 different hoops)? Maybe ubiquitous P2P payment systems will enable musicians (and other artists) to take credit for their work?

I'm starting to ramble, so I'll just end on a positive note, saying that the solution space is sufficiently large, and the non-financial motivation to continue to produce music is enough to constantly drive people toward solutions. We need more technical people (like Lowery) writing articles like this and talking about better ways to approach the problem with a technological solution -- it's the only type of solution which we can rightfully say, "nothing can stop an idea whose time has come".

regularfry3• 14 years ago

It's very hard for me not to read this as thrashing in a tar-pit. Even if everything he says is spot-on, I don't see a positive call-to-action here. If all this is supposed to be is someone in the know saying "don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining," that's one thing, and I can get behind that, in a way. What I can't get behind is the implicit call for technology not to be developed, or for new business models not to be tried.

The 20th century was a complete historical outlier in the support given to professional musicians, brought on by a confluence of technology that had a high barrier to entry but low barriers to distribution. That situation has now changed, and it's inevitable that there's going to be a squeeze.

One specific issue I do take with what he's saying comes here:

    But what many of you forget is that IT IS MY CHOICE whether I choose 
    to give away my songs or sell them.  IT IS MY CHOICE how and where to
    distribute my songs.  IT IS MY CHOICE to decide which websites get to 
    exploit my songs.   Like it or not, the right to control one’s 
    intellectual property (like songs) is a constitutional right.

The first of those choices I have no disagreement with. That's just the nature of how he chooses to distribute his work in the first place. However, from then on, while he does have rights in the work, those rights are limited. I wonder what he'd say the proper length for a copyright term should be? As much as he conflates free software fans with software patent owners, I could easily conflate this part of his talk with the actions of the copyright lobby to extend copyright in perpetuity.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

This is just rationalizing. The system as it exists today provides him with virtually no rights over his work. Also, what right is more reasonable for a creator to claim than the right to price and market their work on their terms? This whole message board is full of people who post "Show HN" stories about their random weekend projects priced at $9.99/mo.

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

That situation has now changed, and it's inevitable that there's going to be a squeeze.

I think the problem is that the squeeze is not optimally applied. While we can cheer the idea of record labels (qua rent-seekers) having their margins reduced, I'm not so happy about Starving Artists being in the same situation as collateral damage. Additionally, he's observing that the labels had somewhat more utility than they were given credit for, in terms of seeking out and developing new talent. Now with youTube we're seeing Andy Warhol's prediction that 'in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes' come true, to a large extent - the trick is to be ready to exploit the hell out of the fame when it does come by, but not everyone works this way.

On a more general note, the inflexibility of current copyright is IMHO part of the problem. If I'm creating content then I do want some choice over how it is distributed - because I want to be rewarded for my effort - but I would be willing to give some of this up for information about how it used. The big problem with DRM was that it got in the way of legitimate uses by genuine buyers, while attempting to prevent any unauthorized use whatsoever. Now, if I'm a musician and 10,000 people download my new mp3 single while only 10 of them pay for it, that's painful.

But if, instead of DRM, we had some kind of Embedded Media Analytics, then it would help me a lot to know that 500 of the people who downloaded the song listened more than 10 times over the following month, because then I would have 500 high-quality marketing leads for my next release. The problem with the ad-based collectivization model is that you can get some aggregate data about how your media is consumed [1], but you don't get much in the way of targeted leads - the same entity that is distributing your content is inviting you to bid on ad keywords for your next campaign, and naturally they have no interest in aggregating data that comes from outside their platform, since they're selling the latform. (I don't mind to single out Google here; I'm just picking youTube as my preferred music-discovery portal. Other people like Facebook or iTunes or _____).

The hypocrisy within the tech industry is that we want content to be free or freely licensable, but at the same time we're obsessed with privacy and horrified at the idea that our content consumption could be object of outside scrutiny (eg DRM tracking of what we play in our headphones when we are out for a walk or what movies we like to watch when we can't sleep at 2am). I think part of that negativity is legitimate in that such information can be abused for repressive ends, but there's another part, less legitimate, that argues on the basis that it will be used for such ends, inevitably, and therefore any and all requests for such information are Bad. What I'd like to see is a development of Creative Commons licensing that acknowledged the idea of content consumption as a two-way street: you can legally enjoy this content for free, as long as you share some basic information about your consumption that will assist the content creator. Or you can reuse some of this content in your own project for free, up front, but any revenue that you derive from it (eg as a background track) is split with the original creator. In this world, I envision licensing being negotiated for percentages rather than expensive (and exclusionary) fixed sums that must be paid up front by the licensee, and the accounting/fulfillment taking place automatically.

This could work for software too. Imagine a Free Photoshop, that you can legally download and use without any technological limitations for free or some nominal fee like $20. But if you start publishing content and all your content is heavily massaged with Photoshop as part of its creation process, then 5% of your content revenue flows to Adobe. Or you could pay $500 and have unlimited use but only one upgrade. The model of 'free to use, but share your commercial revenue' has been around for a long time as an idea, but there's no product/platform that automates the revenue-sharing part of it and no legal framework providing the commercial predictability that would be needed for such an infrastructure to develop.

1. Youtube analytics, for example: http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/static.py?hl=en&to...

melocure• 14 years ago

Speaking strictly to my tastes, David mentioned something that caught my eye: "With the exception of a few lottery winners, the independent artists that seem most successful under this new digital model seem to fall into two categories:

"1.Established recording artists recently freed from major label contracts.

"2.Artists playing to a specific non-commercial niche. For example Black Metal."

Perhaps I'm being a little selfish here, but is that /really/ such a bad thing? While bands on average may sell less now, how many active bands are there now than there were in, say, 1998? While sales numbers dropped, has the pool of musicians grown? (That's the impression I get from reading random interviews.) And if so, why should it? If the economics are so bad, then why would more people bother getting into music?

Other stuff -

Cost of professionals: I wonder sometimes whether all this expensive top notch talent is really necessary. Like, if we're talking about trying to sell to the mass market, we're talking about selling music that's played through stock ear buds on loud CTA train rides. There's no appreciation for dynamics, the choice of amplifier, mic placement, etc. to be had. So why make this a sticking point when practically none of your customers care? Just how valuable can those skills be when practically nobody notices? Put another way, if we tolerate companies putting together dodgy applications with shoestring and duct tape, why doesn't the same idea of cheaper means extend to music production? We're not talking film scores here, so what's wrong with a bedroom mix? (Refer to yewweitan's mentioned act, Animals as Leaders.)

Sales -- direct vs. via iTunes, Bandcamp, etc.: One definite turnoff to buying directly from the artist (via foomusic.com) is the possibility of a, er, suboptimal payment processor and web host, not wanting to create yet another account somewhere, unwanted mailing list subscriptions, etc. Ever visit a merch page, add something to your cart, and then discover the SSL cert long expired, page pulls in insecure content, etc.? Did you follow through with the purchase or just turn away?

Traffic phagia: I understand YouTube. I _don't_ understand Facebook. As in, yeah, I expect Facebook to be one of the first place someone looks, but assuming Facebook users are getting to the tracks via the band's FB page, not via user submission (haven't seen FB since 2009-2010), what's wrong with a simple link to the Bandcamp page? After streaming a few things, are FB users just not clicking through?

anigbrowl6• 14 years ago

Well, it's great as a consumer since there's an endless flow of new stuff, though some critics have wondered whether there's a tendency towards the ephemeral. But people don't get into music or film or any of the other creative arts because of economics; they get into it because they have some degree of talent and a great deal of passion. The economic aspect is a secondary necessity if you want to do it full time. But a lot of people will do it for very little, hence the stereotype of the Starving Artist. It's rewarding on other levels besides the financial.

why doesn't the same idea of cheaper means extend to music production? We're not talking film scores here, so what's wrong with a bedroom mix?

It depends on who's doing the mixing. This is a particular skillset I happen to have, but it's not one that was developed easily or overnight. So the idea of cheaper means most certainly does extend to music production (and indeed film scores and so on), but you still need skill to exploit the means. If I give you a Ferrari for $5, it doesn't automatically make you a good driver, does it? Likewise, you can get instruments for fairly cheap - I've got a bass guitar that cost me only $150 that I like very much. Unfortunately I'm a pretty terrible bass player, so if I was making a recording that required some great bass skills, I'd have to pay someone who had them. The low price of my guitar doesn't make it any easier to play than an instrument that costs 10x as much.

suboptimal payment processor and web host

Couldn't agree more.

(haven't seen FB since 2009-2010), what's wrong with a simple link to the Bandcamp page? After streaming a few things, are FB users just not clicking through?

I don't use FB much anymore either, but my understanding is that yes, they don't click through. Avid Facebook users want their content within Facebook's standardized UI and relatively well-curated system. Like AOL, Facebook is the online equivalent of the mall - somewhat bland, but fairly clean, safe, and above all well-organized. Myspace was just as technically impressive as Facebook back in the day, but because it included a host of customization options it wound up looking like a shopping district that had gone to seed and was covered in bad graffiti and flyposters. You could tell it was doomed when some people were making a business out of selling sparkly animated gifs as page backgrounds. Myspace was so freely customizable that browsing and navigation ended up becoming a chore for visitors; you'd go to someone's page, loud music would start, and you'd be frantically looking for the transport/volume controls - like multimedia Geocities. With Facebook you never get lost as a visitor, and if the site limits a page owner's visual expression somewhat, the same is true for everyone else so you're not at a real disadvantage.

rdm2• 14 years ago

I think this article is interesting, because it casts some shadows that help me see some of the current intellectual property issues, and the associated "creative value" issues.

For example: copyright currently is horribly flawed, from a "USA Constitution" point of view. A constitutional copyright would expire after a few years. Current copyright law explicitly states that copyright lasts longer than a human life time. But copyright is a social thing -- each community of media has its own concepts for what is acceptable use of copyright, and these issues get written into law and respected by courts. The copyright rules for theatre performance are different from the copyright rules for an industrial faucet design. And I think that this kind of variation is necessary, because copyright is protecting symbolism, and symbols are at least partially a construct of the mind. So, anyways, when the rules become outrageous the communities need to structure their behavior so they can still function...

But, on the legal front, copyright laws are based on treaties, where numerous countries have agreed to implement the same laws. So changing copyright law is a Big Deal, and not something that can happen quickly.

But, back on the social front -- when the laws are outrageous, this devalues the laws themselves. Either people ignore the laws, or laws get enforced which causes damage to the country and its communities and economies.

Copyright itself doesn't expire, this causes problems, but it's dealing with symbols, so people either ignore the copyright or abandon those symbols or whatever else.

(And then there's patents which have a different "guilty until proven innocent" problem, which in the U.S. favors patent trolls.)

So, anyways, back to music... copyright creates problems for people, and it does not have enough good going for it to make up for those problems, and we see various communities doing things to ignore copyrighted works. Some of this is piracy, but the economy has had a lot of problems recently and people have been changing their spending habits as a result. This is important because if you fix the wrong problem you do not get good results.

Another issue has to do with how music achieves value. And, with why music needs to have value. In simplistic form: Musicians need to eat. So music needs to make the lives of people who provide food better. So, how does this happen?

One mechanism used to be: people would create lp records, and singles, composed of tracks that are several minutes in length. Some of these would be broadcast, which let people know about them (and which had its own financial arrangements) and people that liked records would buy them (which was a different financial stream). This was great for people with the right connections.

Nowadays, that system's inefficiencies are creating opportunities for new arrangements. This leads to different financial arrangements. Youtube is the rough analog of radio (but distribution costs are much lower now, so radio financing models do not work). Bandcamp, Apple Store, and band websites and so on are the rough equivalent of record labels -- but, again, the details are much different now.

The decreased risks mentioned here correspond to decreased costs. Decreased costs correspond to broader potential audiences, but also correspond to increased competition.

Anyways, my long-winded point here is that yes the things being talked about in this article are real, but they are not purely copyright issues -- there are other problems also. And, I think that the copyright issues are, to some degree, caused by the current copyright laws. Copyrights are a bigger sledgehammer in a situation where we need sharper needles.

If I were designing copyright law, I would give some initial period of free coverage, but after a certain point I would bake fees into the copyright. Those fees would go up over time, and would be collected by both the government where the copyright holder lives and the government where the copy recipient lives. Copyright would also have increased costs based on the copyright value being sold.

The idea here is that we want to encourage small scale use of copyright, but we do not want copyright to be any kind of permanent or long-term condition. And, at some point the cost of maintaining copyright will exceed the value of copyright and the content becomes public domain.

This of course would create a whole new set of problems (especially the end state -- that needs a better design than what I have describe here -- but it's an essential part of the plan -- the end state is the justification for this plan.)

So my plan is a bad one, but if copyright is the problem then copyright is going to have to change.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

The "Constitutional problem" copyright seems to create with respect to music is "inability to listen to newly-released songs by favorite musicians without paying for them".

Bandcamp and the iTunes Music Store are not the 2012 equivalent of record labels. Lowery spent a good deal of time trying to dispel exactly that misconception. The record labels financed albums. They provided advance payments to artists. They accepted the lion's share of the downside risk of investing in a music recording: if the music didn't sell, they were left holding the bag. As Lowery is at pains to point out: for most musicians, the labels never made a satisfactory return on their investment. Things only worked out in the aggregate.

iTMS does none of this. iTMS doesn't pay artists to record albums. iTMS accepts albums fully-formed from artists, holds no inventory, is exposed to no downside risk, and collects 30% (and forces musicians to incur 9% fees to "aggregators").

And for the nteenth time: Lowery is not upset about iTMS. He points out that the economics don't make much sense, but he understands how the market works (perhaps better than you do, since he's a musician, a music industry veteran, and a former quant). But iTMS (a) isn't the whole story of the tech industry, and (b) for damned sure isn't replacing record labels.

It's the mentality of this comment --- "Copyright, Constitution, Copyright, Youtube is the Radio, Copyright bad, iTMS is the record label now, it's Copyright's fault" --- that spurred Lowery's rant. The whole point of it is that once you dig deeper into those claims, the whole story falls apart: businesses are getting something for nothing, consumers are getting something for nothing, and artists are getting nothing at all in return for substantial investments of time and actual capital. How can we stand for this? It seems so amoral.

Natsu• 14 years ago

> But iTunes does't add significant value: unlike the stores, which were paid to take inventory risk and predict demand, iTunes takes no risk and performs almost no service other than dealing with card processing fees.

iTunes combats piracy for them by being a better option all around.

pantaloons• 14 years ago

So technology companies create new means of distribution, compelling enough that people will pay for music that can, and previously was, being obtained for free -- his complaint is that the tech companies don't take over the role of talent discovery too?

He makes a convincing argument that things are worse than they used to be, but not that Apple et al are to blame.

tptacek13• 14 years ago

You didn't read him very carefully, because he doesn't blame Apple.

hxa72413• 14 years ago

The backbone of this seems to be complaining about musicians having things difficult and not making as much money as they should. And accompanied by lots of numbers and information. The problem is, it is in itself irrelevant.

Why should anyone else care? Maybe professional gardners are having a hard time nowadays and not making much money. Do you care about that? Perhaps they are going to lobby for a law that will increase their income -- i.e. take money from you, and otherwise inconvenience you -- how does that sound?

The point is this: we do not care about musician's, or anyone else's, self-interest; we, in general, care about how much we get from them. That is ultimately the only basis of justification for any law here. The public, though laws, grants 'creators' special provisions, in order that the public as a whole benefits.

If you want to argue for such special provisions, you must show the benefits that the public generally will get. If you say creators are not making enough money, show that there is, from the public's view, too little stuff being produced.

So is there too little music (etc.) being produced? The article did not seem to answer that question -- yet that is the only thing that counts. And from a casual view, as anyone can see just looking around them, there seems to be a heck of a lot of music out there at the moment.

Show that insufficient stuff is being produced, and show that any proposed corrective laws or provisions are overall to the public's gain. Otherwise you have failed to make a case for laws that the public must bear the costs of.

If the gist is that some big companies are making lots of money using your goods therefore you should get a larger share of it, that fails too. If some industry is making too much, the answer is not to divide it up differently, it is to stop them, somehow, making so much in the first place.

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