How the music industry learned to love piracy

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/magazine/how-music-got-free-documentary.html

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

167 192 2 years ago

bookofjoe2• 2 years ago

Some places such as Amazon and Bandcamp still allow downloading the music files. Is there a similarly lopsided revenue model in these cases, as there is for streaming?

Anyway it seems that the industry is pleased with where it ended up, the link between then and now is a bit tenuous. However it's also on us that we willingly handed over control to streaming companies for the convenience. Think about the number of times we've justified something by it being the cost of a few coffees a month. TV, music, Adobe.

mrsilencedogood• 2 years ago

Amazon

Guarantee you these are lots of bootlegs and other-region copies behind resold. So probably Amazon is worst for the artists because even the labels are getting cheated there.

Bandcamp

As I understand it, this is (was?) one of the few places an artist could still get a good deal. Bandcamp positions itself more as a marketplace and takes (iirc) 16ish percent. Let me check that against their website:

"when a fan buys something on Bandcamp, an average of 82% of the money goes to you" (https://bandcamp.com/artists?from=footer)

So yeah, they get a lot of the niche weird music. I buy a lot of NWOTHM music off there for this reason.

diggan• 2 years ago

Also, Bandcamp has "Bandcamp Fridays" (or similar name), where for the entire day, 100% goes to the artists.

I keep a list of music that I add to when I come across something I want to buy, then when the Bandcamp Friday comes around, buy everything on the list.

jay_kyburz• 2 years ago

Hello fellow NWOTHM fan. (So much of it is so bad, but every now and then there is something awesome)

hardwaresofton• 2 years ago

I follow 2 rules:

1. If an artist has a bandcamp, I buy.

2. there is no second rule

freedomben2• 2 years ago

Indeed. I used to buy amazon mp3s, but they jacked around a couple of times to make it harder to download whole albums, at which point I stopped and won't buy on amazon anymore. I know currently it's pretty easy to download whole albums, but they torched my trust. On Bandcamp, I buy it. Not on Bandcamp, nope.

lancesells• 2 years ago

0. If an artist sells direct I buy directly from their site.

efilife• 2 years ago

Once one of my favorite underground artists deleted his album that was available on soundcloud. I messaged the guy without expecting any response, imagine how shocked I was when the guy made the album public on bandcamp just for me so I could download it for free. No way, I had to buy it

Semaphor3• 2 years ago

7/10 is my Bandcamp threshold (NYP releases can go as low as 6/10), off-Bandcamp that rises to 8/10 (personal ratings, not some music site), both for CDs that I’ll then rip into the FLACs I’d have downloaded off Bandcamp, and the bad-for-archival MP3s.

And of course, there’s the Japanese where you are often lucky if they even release something on a public streaming platform, physical releases are expensive imports and even Apple/Amazon often don’t sell the digital files.

_3u10• 2 years ago

Hopefully the times learns to love paywall blockers.

bookofjoe2• 2 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/magazine/how-music-got-fr...

neallindsay• 2 years ago

Presumably there's a reason they make their paywall so porous.

scelerat• 2 years ago

Nelson's faming here pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole ball of wax myself, a musician, and someone who started their career working for a major national concert promotor, worked for two streaming music services and who participates in a local music scene as performer, supporter and occasional promotor:

"""

The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with.

"""

johnny22• 2 years ago

There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music.

What is your reference time frame here? That's exactly how it was in the 90s and before. Feels like there was a tiny bright spot from the early 2000s to say 2010 or so, but then it was over.

RiverCrochet2• 2 years ago

It's CHEAP to make and distribute music. Production costs are low due to advances in PC and audio tech. Distribution costs are at the floor where the actual distribution is practically free and it is only the legal concerns that are a cost. The whole industry currently doesn't have a better physical value-add than the guy playing on the street corner with a money hat. If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.

Many say the 60's and 70's were the best years in music, and this was the heyday of the time where if you wanted to listen to someone's song, you had to buy their record and you didn't really have any other choice unless you fooled around with expensive and bulky reel-to-reel tape decks[1]. Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman? Not that the middleman didn't perform a valuable function, but it was performing it for everyone who would buy records in the whole market. Now we get to choose or be our own middlemen, and people who don't want to do that kinda get what they deserve.

[1] I don't know when the compact cassette started becoming popular - did people make mixtapes in the 70's?

phone8675309• 2 years ago

If anyone can make music then music has demeaned itself, and maybe it simply wasn't ever a big deal in the first place.

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Could you please explain?

QuercusMax3• 2 years ago

It was always true that anyone could make music, since the earliest days of modern humans.

By "music" you really seem to mean the recording industry, which is a very different beast than the concept of music.

mbg721• 2 years ago

There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's minds with.

kmeisthax2• 2 years ago

The actual distribution is not free, management companies take a huge cut both formally or informally. For some reason[0], you can't just upload your music to Spotify or Apple Music directly, you have to have a middleman, and that market of "middlemen for unsigned artists" is just three companies[1]. They all suck in different ways, but there's a lot of creative-class wage theft going on, even beyond Spotify just underpaying indies on rights.

You can upload music directly on YouTube, but they pay very little on short videos and music streams. And there's also sketchy management companies and MCNs there anyway.

We also have to keep in mind that the music industry loves complicated and unclear ownership structures over the music being produced. Nobody completely owns a music track; there's separate copyrights for melody and recordings, both of which get separated and broken down in extremely opaque ways. Remixes and sampling make the rights situation even more complicated, and at best, mean that the person who made the remix or used the samples has to share revenue. At worst, you get to deal with all sorts of bullshit claims (or lawsuits) from people who think they own more than they do.

Insamuch as cheap distribution has flooded the market, it's often either in the form of attempts to launder money through Spotify[2], or online advertising style click fraud of some kind. The problem is not that there are too many honest artists, but that nobody does proper KYC on indies. Either they don't care if you're legit or they don't want to work with people at the small end.

[0] In the case of Apple, long-standing trademark disputes with The Beatles prohibit them from representing artists directly, which is how management companies got their start for self-published acts. However, this would not bind Spotify or other streaming services.

[1] CDBaby, TuneCore, and DistroKid, if I remember correctly

[2] e.g. buy a bunch of Spotify subscriptions with drug money, publish a bunch of nominally unrelated artists on Spotify, listen to them 24/7, then the Spotify payments are clean cash

bsder• 2 years ago

Was that all it was - inability for the masses to create and distribute media without a middleman?

The difference in era was the ability to earn enough money to exist long enough to "Git Gud".

Sure, music is cheap to make today. However, that just means there are twelve zillion shitty bands that never progress past that.

Many of the bands that are heralded as "awesome" really weren't to start. They generally took years to gel and often the members formed, dissolved and reformed several bands before the one that caught fire.

Even the Beatles sounded like every other Merseybeat band to start.

Without the ability to make money at their craft, artists don't get better at their craft. It's that simple.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.

I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, honestly. With the invention of home recording and all the attendant production tools, the lower barriers to entry, broader exposure due to the internet, etc., there was always going to be a vastly larger amount of music than there was 30 years ago. If the old model had not changed, we'd still be in a world with a glancingly small number of slots on the radio charts for each genre—those are the people the average person knows about, and spends money on—and most other musicians would be broke.

I assume. I could be wrong. But my two points are that it's not like the old model was friendly to artists either, and that it's not actually very easy for me to imagine a coherent model for music that would work be equitable for all artists in the world today, given the other changes that've taken place.

I don't think it's just to pretend that if there are 4-5x more people releasing music today, we would all would be spending 4-5x more on records and concerts than we did in 1996. And I am not saying that's what the author is saying, I'm just trying to work through the consequences of what I inferred from this article, the economics of which were a little hand-wavey.

codexb3• 2 years ago

It's also worth pointing out that, historically, a very small percentage of artists live off the income from recordings or reproductions of their works. This is true for musicians, painters, authors, actors, or any other creative artists.

By and large, the only way to make a living as an artist is to continuously produce and perform copious amounts of work, or to have another source of income from a day job.

gamepsys• 2 years ago

The entire concept of making a living off recordings/reproductions didn't really start until the invention of the printing press which allowed for mass reproductions.

Prior to that anyone with enough time on their hands and skills could legally reproduce any text, music, painting, etc for profit. Artist where largely compensated for performances or for original artwork. There was more relative demand for live performances because of the lack of other available entertainment options.

Now the primary issue with being a successful artist is the attention economy is incredibly competitive, and the barriers to entry are incredibly low.

philwelch2• 2 years ago

Recorded music was a viable business for maybe a single century. That’s a historical blip. If you wanted to listen to music before the 20th century, your only option was live music, so that’s how musicians made money. In the 21st century this is also how musicians make money. Also, it turns out that even in the 20th century, the real money was still made on tour.

bongodongobob8• 2 years ago

You're right. I'm going to get bashed for gatekeeping I'm sure, but Spotify is filled with low quality garbage. Not everyone's band deserves to make it. As a former musician, it's incredibly difficult to make a living and always has been. Most bands/artists just aren't that good. Art is hard. There's a lot of loud people yelling about how they can't sit at home and make passive income by gaming social media and getting paid for releasing a song on Spotify and never performing live. Get out and play. Music is a social thing. If you can't book shows or are unwilling to, too bad.

I know this comes off as get off my lawn, but that's just how a performance art works. Only the best make it no matter what you do.

javier2• 2 years ago

Not to be negative towards my musical friends, but the bands that can make a living today are often putting out incredible art.

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

Just one data point here — I think popular, mainstream music has been shit for (looks at watch) three decades now.

If the most popular music sucks so bad, I can only conclude that either I am from another planet or pumping huge amounts of cash to promote a label's "artist" actually works.

tj-teej• 2 years ago

Musicians need to live near each other in order to collaborate. Cities are too expensive for artists to live and the rehearsal spaces are too expensive as well. Maybe the technology is better but you have to consider the macroeconomics as well

eru5• 2 years ago

Cities don't have to be too expensive for artists.

boxed2• 2 years ago

that it's not actually very easy for me to imagine a coherent model for music that would work be equitable for all artists in the world today, given the other changes that've taken place.

I know a way: universal basic income.

Which is coincidentally how you can also fund open source, and serious science (as opposed to the scam-filled journal/grant system we have today)

xwolfi• 2 years ago

But how do you allocate more capital to more successful people so that you drive effort towards what people need / enjoy the most ? If there's no incentive to do popular music, then we could all do shitty music ?

AnthonyMouse4• 2 years ago

I don't think it's just to pretend that if there are 4-5x more people releasing music today, we would all would be spending 4-5x more on records and concerts than we did in 1996.

But they also don't have to.

In 1996, the primary way for people do buy music involved it being pressed in a factory and then delivered on a truck to a store that had to pay for retail real estate and checkout clerks. The percent of the sale price going to the artist was tiny.

Today the distribution cost is you send it over the internet, the cost of which rounds to zero. The dominant cost ought to be the 3% the credit card companies take. And if you give the cost savings to the artists instead of the record companies, they could very easily be getting 4-5x more of every dollar customers spend.

The problem is, the record companies would prefer that they get the cost savings from digital distribution, and we need a system that ensures that they don't.

There is also the question of what it means to make it. The artist at the top of the charts is making many millions of dollars, but suppose we didn't have a system that props up superstars. Then instead of having a tiny number of artists who make many millions, we would have a thousand times as many artists who make many thousands.

chii7• 2 years ago

we didn't have a system that props up superstars.

such a system does not exist.

Superstardom is a natural phenomenon in the industry. Just like sports or really, any mass entertainment. The only way to achieve the "thousands times as many artists making many thousands" is to have separate communities of music markets that do not overlap.

I dont think that's feasible on the internet, and i certainly would not support any laws that tries to bring that into effect.

There's nothing wrong with a tiny number of extremely famous, extremely successful artists.

Cthulhu_• 2 years ago

Thing is, recordings alone are only part of what a musician does. Concerts, merchandise, and special editions of their albums with padding and thus a higher profit margins. If it was only recordings that earned them money they would only work for a few weeks or months a year.

camillomiller• 2 years ago

If we think about the history of music, the period of "getting extremely rich selling records" is a very short window of time.

burningChrome• 2 years ago

> those are the people the average person knows about, and spends money on—and most other musicians would be broke.

My son is a drummer. Has been doing studio work and other stuff but steadfastly has refused to be in a band. On multiple occasions he's said the same thing. Not enough exposure and the insane amount of work you have to do to make even a little bit of money isn't worth it.

He says he would prefer to be a studio musician and do production work since its more stable, reliable and actually pays his bills.

some-guy• 2 years ago

My aspirations to become a rock musician peaked right after I graduated high school in the US (2006). It was sort of the beginning of music-streaming being cheap and possible for small artists. I decided to join a local singer-songwriter's band (self-titled) as a lead guitarist and backup singer. It was a huge wake-up call for me who had spent my youth idolizing musicians as to just how much work and hustle everything was. The music was just barely passable as mid-tier singer-songwriter John Mayer wannabe rock, but the hustle the leader had was insane.

With all of that work we managed to have 40k MySpace followers (some had to be bots), 100k streams on PureVolume, and a decent number of CD sales, at least to my mind (in the several hundreds). But the barrier was no longer whether or not an artist could get to a studio or a record deal, the barrier now is the noise of the internet.

cm20122• 2 years ago

It's a golden age for music. More than half of Spotify payouts go to non-agency talent, IE small musicians. It's a great discovery mechanism.

ysofunny• 2 years ago

sure... until one realizes one has gotta pay the ripper if they ever wanna get recommended by "the" algorithm of spotify

freedomben2• 2 years ago

"the algorithm" has got to be a tough one though. You can't recommend very many bad fits for the user before they will stop using it, and unknown/lesser known songs are a huge gamble.

I badly want an algorithm that I can say, "Find me artists that sounds like <example-song> that have less than 1,000 subcribers (or whatever metric)" but I can understand why they don't do that (because there are very, very few people like me out there). It sucks.

cm20122• 2 years ago

It's the same story on every platform. No one is owed attention. Building an audience is a grind.

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

"the" algorithm is constantly giving me new music from small artists. If all you hear is top 40 hits, that's on you.

nsonha• 2 years ago

As opposed to what? Pay the record companies, or, most likely, never even to be discovered by them?

rightbyte• 2 years ago

The recommendation algorithm works fine for me. There should be some reset button though or some other levers though.

If you let someone else choose songs or choose song others like too for a party it gets messed up.

notfed• 2 years ago

Who cares about the Spotify algorithm? Make your own algorithm; send links to your music on Spotify.

legitster• 2 years ago

What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.

I mean, if you look back before radio, the amount of money artists made from recordings was $0 (Okay, maybe some money off of sheet music or player piano sheets).

So in the grand scheme of human history, the primary income of musicians has been from their performances. That was true before recordings, and that is true again now. For a weird blip there was a cartel propping up the value of their recordings (of which the industry profited more than musicians). But this isn't a collapse of anything more than it's a regression to the mean - the marginal value of a copy of something approaches to 0 over time.

When you hear about artists complaining about royalties from streaming, it was a very, very, very elite group of musicians who ever made money just from dropping albums. You are only hearing from the winners of the Label system. Most bands ended up "owing" money to their record labels.

(The way record deals worked, you got paid an advance for songs/albums. But you only kept ~10% of album sales. From which you had to pay back your advance + recording expenses + marketing costs.)

pelagicAustral• 2 years ago

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

giantrobot2• 2 years ago

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

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

s1artibartfast• 2 years ago

I don't think that is true?

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

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

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

bubblebeard• 2 years ago

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

kelnos2• 2 years ago

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

bongodongobob8• 2 years ago

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

lucsky2• 2 years ago

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

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

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

slothtrop3• 2 years ago

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

kevinsync• 2 years ago

Apologies if this feels off-topic and ranting, but it's all connected:

I'm convinced (in particular by years of reading Bob Lefsetz's punditry [0], as well as working alongside multiple successful musicians, DJs, and industry agencies for many years) that Spotify single-handedly saved the aging and out-of-touch record business, that their payments to artists are fair, and that it's more accessible now than ever before by an order of magnitude to build a real, sustainable career as a musician.

You have to simply put in the work, and it is brutal, long, thankless, isolating work, on top of the Herculean task of creating something people legitimately want and connect with. And you should be attractive (not beautiful persay, but charismatic and authentic). And provide the illusion of access to you. And be kind to your fans. And maximize all of your potential channels (digital and IRL, from socials to tours to brand partnerships to merch/apparel to unpredictable, serendipitous syncs in film and tv (ex. Kate Bush "Running Up That Hill")), all the while cultivating fans like plants in a garden.

You have to travel and perform, and be present, and be the soundtrack to their lives, always meeting your fans where they are, however they congregate, and and and and and! For years and years. It takes a long time to enjoy a tree you've just planted.

People do not have the bandwidth, mentally or financially, to support or patronize more than a few artists that mean something significant to them. Just because the amount of people making and publishing music has exploded doesn't mean that listeners have available slots to add you into their mental playlist, until you keep doing what you're doing long enough that you appear, almost seamlessly, into a moment in their life that awes and delights and converts them into a believer.

There is no "right place at the right time" -- you have to be in the right place ALL the time, and eventually your random times become other peoples' "right time".

If you never give up, if you're always there, you'll also eventually be a staple on the scene -- you'll be, literally by default, "old guard" that people look up to. You'll have earned your respect, you'll have put in your dues, and the money / fame / power will come as an after-effect.

Any other situation where it's overnight success, those acts are created as nothing more than products to be sold. Both can make a lot of money, but money isn't the goal. Craft, legacy, driving culture, these are what artistry is supposed to be about. Money is secondary, and always comes if you take the time to learn the business and take your fan stewardship seriously.

The amount of shallow takes on Twitter, Threads, or god forbid LinkedIn about poor musicians who "deserve a living wage", who are "gamed by Big Tech", who are "slaves to the algorithm", who aren't living the dreams they weirdly feel entitled to, they don't deserve anything if their music and persona are nothing anybody wants, if they haven't put in the work, haven't shown up and met people continuously, haven't failed over and over, haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to their guns until they eventually get lucky -- not because the universe chose them, but because they made sure they were already all of what I wrote above when opportunity came knocking.

Like, sorry, the world has become hyper-connected, super decentralized, insular, tribal -- MTV can't break you anymore. None of us are paying attention to the same things as anybody else. It's harder than ever to get attention, and what you're selling had better be damn good -- but if you succeed, the rewards are richer than they've ever been.

Most plants get choked out on the jungle floor by the canopy, or end up adapting to quietly survive in their environment. Some defy all odds and break through the top. Chances are you're not going to the top, but you don't have to get choked out either.

Anyways.

[0] https://lefsetz.com

zigman1• 2 years ago

You have to simply put in the work, and it is brutal, long, thankless, isolating work, on top of the Herculean task of creating something people legitimately want and connect with.

I never understood complaining about touring/being a musician being a hard job. You are living someone else's dream, stop complaining. If you don't like it, simply don't do it. My 9-5 soulless work is hard as well...

haven't failed over and over, haven't paid for it with blood, sweat and tears, haven't stuck to their guns until they eventually get lucky

Isn't that true for most endeavors if you want to get good at something? Including cs.

Most musicians, at least in my experience, often don't understand, that it takes more than a good music to speak to people. And people feeling addressed by you is what usually results in someone making it. However, this is hard to fabricate, if you are gonna spend most of your creative process how to address certain group of people and then fabricate your art to fit into that, it probably won't feel as authentic as someone who actually lives their lives, lives their struggles and socially acts like them. It will be hard for a 45 year old person to address Gen Z for example

everly• 2 years ago

This was a really great comment, thank you

a-french-anon• 2 years ago

Still think that the way Spotify distributes money (pooling subscription money then dividing it according to stream numbers instead of dividing your subscription solely amongst the artists you listen; I don't want to pay for garbage I would never want to hear) is completely unfair.

circlefavshape2• 2 years ago

I think it's fair enough, and I bet it'd make very little difference to the success of the vast majority of artists if they changed

Majestic121• 2 years ago

I don't understand the difference in your two propositions, since money is fungible : whether the ratio is established globally or customer per customer, the end result would be the same, wouldn't it ? Unless there are specific calculation rules ?

svantana• 2 years ago

I agree 100% but it's not really up to spotify - it was the rights holders who wanted it that way. Some label execs have come out in favor of the user-centric model, but as long as some labels make more money off the per-stream model, they will block the change. I believe spotify themselves would prefer the user-centric model, as it would alleviate their fraud-bot problem.

jagi4• 2 years ago

same here, but its inevitable and i have accepted it as the price to be able to stram all the word's music from the comfort of my phone.

That's why we are building MyPie (mypie.app) to allow fans like us to reward the artists they stream only. Check it out we are in open beta right now.

dfunckt• 2 years ago

I agree with much of your comment on what it takes to succeed commercially in today's music scene, but it also nails why modern (popular) music is so same-y and uninteresting -- just the "logisistics" requirements only fit particular kinds of artists.

codexb3• 2 years ago

"That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut."

I think it's a bit early to start claiming victory in a paradigm shift to streaming that makes pirating obsolete. The price of video and music streaming has quickly been increasing, and in many cases, we've come full circle to being forced to deal with ads again. It's entirely possible for the music business to price their customers out of the market again to the point that an on-demand pirate streaming service completely overtakes legal streaming. I think we're already approaching that for video streaming.

skydhash3• 2 years ago

I'd love streaming if the client software were actually useful. All of them are disaster in UX if you do more than listening to music in the background. Peak design for me was iTunes 10 and Winamp 2. Which means control/status panel, a queue list and customizable table views for the songs (optional grid view to browse by album). Most streaming clients are click/scroll hell.

bongodongobob8• 2 years ago

I only see this mentality here. On Spotify, I search for a song I want to hear and I play it. Or I add it to a playlist. What more do you want? For it to sense your mood and queue up what you played last year during Oct-November before 10 am while you were driving?

I don't understand how the tech crowd thinks Spotify is so hard to use. My 70 year old parents have no issues navigating it.

epiccoleman• 2 years ago

It's not just price and ads either - the user experience on most of the big streaming apps is absolutely dismal. I just recently started using Stremio with a debrid plugin (basically, it's just a nice streaming frontend for watching torrents, without needing to download them to my LAN).

It is crazy to see just how good things can be. And Stremio's UX isn't even great, it's just that it's not loading me with ads and bullshit, and the thing I want to watch is just there, and turns on with minimal fuss.

kelnos2• 2 years ago

Yep, agreed. I used to think Netflix had great UX (website and Android app), but they've gone downhill so much over the years. Months ago I started seeing recommendations for weird games (some of them seemingly kinda sexual?) showing up in the very top spot of the app. More recently, Netflix has somehow decided that I'm not "home", and I've fallen into their password-sharing trap, even though I'm not sharing the account. I really need to just cancel Netflix; it's just annoying and a waste of time to deal with this crap.

tuetuopay• 2 years ago

Fortunately the music industry does not seem to go the same way as the video streaming industry: each platform having their exclusives, fragmenting the offer, and making life hard for customers. Music streaming services differentiate through other means.

That’s why I’m happily paying for Deezer and not for video services.

hot_gril2• 2 years ago

You could call it a market inefficiency since the media would actually be worth the higher prices to people if they didn't have a way to pirate. So as long as piracy is technically not very hard, it'll always be relevant.

Today, you can see this with live sports. Hardest thing to pirate for technical reasons, most expensive thing to legally watch. I get that it costs more to serve, but not that much more.

codexb3• 2 years ago

It’s market inefficiency for sure. Besides price, there’s also just a failure to provide a service that people want. This is what happened to games and prime time television. Gamers wanted to be able to download games instead of dealing with physical DRM-riddled fragile media. People wanted to watch TV without ads. Barriers to entry in distribution are very high, and there are lots of exclusivity rights, so it was a virtual monopoly. But monopolies arent stable and the market will still find a way around them, legal or not.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

Ask any musician: they never made real money on anything but licensing/publishing fees

rurban2• 2 years ago

As Steve Albino taught countless indie bands how to make money in the music industry, give away the music to get bookings for a tour and sets, the same thing happens with the movie theatres. You cannot earn anything from the content, you'll only earn from selling soda and popcorn.

This author manages to say nothing about this well-known phenomenon. Maybe the NYT also just writes brainless LLM articles now?

rchaud• 2 years ago

Albini didn't account for a world where the ticket mafia owns both ticket distribution and venues.

rurban2• 2 years ago

That's partially true. Albini also called out Ticket Master, as well as Taylor Swift. You can still find independent venues, and sell tickets not via the ticket master mafia. Or if you are as big as Taylor even bypass the movie studios which are an even bigger mafia than ticket master.

woolion• 2 years ago

Music distribution, as well as other worldly matters, cost money. It was also a strongly gate-kept industry, while this isn't the case anymore. The main reason for gate-keeping is supposedly to "keep the financial equation fair for everybody". The problem is nobody knows most of the parameter in the equation, not even the gate-keepers themselves. Why? Because the basis for how payments should be done, the mythical "play", is gamed by bot networks. The bot networks are used by small and big artists. Officially, the gate-keepers (Spotify) do not releases official numbers of real data, officially to not give better tools to the bad guys (bot networks). Of course, we know how well security by obscurity works, and it makes everyone dependent on trusting the gate-keeper, now Spotify rather than the music labels.

Another point is while the revolution in the distribution model happened, another one happened which is that the gate-keeping essentially disappeared. In any case, the industry has embraced that through for example DistroKid being targeted at making a small revenue from any aspiring musician without any musical barrier. Note that Spotify has shares in Distrokid, even though they have pinky-sweared this special relationship does not give either to Spotify nor Distrokid any advantage regarding access to data from other involved third parties (other marketplaces, labels, etc).

To round it up, even if the parameters of the financial equations are partly released, the creative industry is known for its "creative accounting" (also known as Hollywood accounting). The creative accounting lets the industry take advantage of the tax breaks that are offered to the music industry in basically all countries on some conditions, and stretch these conditions to situations that the spirit of the law normally excludes.

There is another incentive to lie about the numbers. It gives the possibility to undercut any viable competition to consolidate a monopoly (the Amazon method).

I believe that the only thing that can really improve the situation is way more transparency than we have. The complaints from musicians are often unrealistic, but it is not their fault as they cannot have a realistic view of what things really cost. So all they have is to try to strengthen their side in the tug of war. Ideally we would move away from that process towards a cooperative model, but this is possible only through trust, which cannot be obtained by obscurity.

altacc• 2 years ago

Ironically as Paramount+ is unavailable where I live I'll have to pirate this documentary.

Streaming music services are not perfect but at least for the most part I can move service and not lose access to the bands I enjoy listening to, whereas for video media the content is unique to the service. With the massive differences between music & video content financing & production costs, I wonder if there will ever be a consolidation to common video streaming services. E.g. you watch on Netflix or Paramount and the production company gets paid regardless.

8fingerlouie4• 2 years ago

In 1992, the Danish representative for the music industry managed to negotiate a “Private Copying Levy” on all recordable media (mainly CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes , memory cards and USB drives).

fees were around (per media) :

CD media : $0.35

DVD media : $0.56

Memory card : $0.80

They then managed to pass a new law in 2022 that expanded the original law to also apply to phones, tablets, computers, basically anything that can store data.

Hard drive < 128GB (SSD or magnetic, internal or external) : $0.59

Hard drive > 128GB : $2.34

Tablet / Phone / Computer : $6.59

No wonder the music industry loves piracy. For every tablet/phone/computer sold, they’re literally pocketing $6.59 without ever lifting a finger or even delivering any content (not even a bad U2 album).

For every hard drive, memory card, or SSD sold, they’re pocketing from $0.59 to $2.34, again, those are not preloaded with music content either.

Of course, having paid the fee does not entitle you to any form of piracy.

rekoil• 2 years ago

Sweden too, its such bullshit. These laws are basically about the fact that you technically can store pirated music on a device, therefore you are, such a dirty racket.

8fingerlouie4• 2 years ago

But if you are pirating, you’re still committing a crime and will be fined the full amount.

tomsmeding• 2 years ago

No wonder the music industry loves piracy. For every tablet/phone/computer sold, they’re literally pocketing [...]

With "the music industry" presumably you mean record labels, or even something else? Surely this money doesn't go to artists — how would anyone know how to distribute the money. Even distribution among record labels is super unclear.

golergka• 2 years ago

If you're an artist who sold the rights to your music to the label, the money has already gone to you.

8fingerlouie4• 2 years ago

In case of the Danish levy, the money does actually flow back to whomever holds the rights to the music. I purposely do not write artists, as there is no guarantee that they are holding the rights.

The reasoning behind the levy is to compensate artists (mentioned as artists in the law) when people make “private copies” (I.e. backups, copying media from yiur PC to your smartphone, etc, not to be confused with pirate copies).

Allegedly artists are missing out when you purchase a song from some service, and then copy that song to a media player somewhere.

Considering that a lot of people stream music today, and rights holders are compensated per play, this makes it even more absurd that you need to pay a tax for every device capable of streaming media.

I don’t have any hard numbers for the streaming vs purchased music, but judging from the number of record stores now and when I was a kid, as well as the size of said stores, hard copies of music doesn’t look like it’s a thriving business,

Of course you can buy music digitally on iTunes/Youtube/Google/Amazon/whatever, and I’ve personally done just that for a couple of decades, but even I had to eventually give in when the kids wanted to listen to music. I still purchase “classics” that I know I will listen to over and over again, and I have a respectable music library that I own (DRM free), but for everyday listening it’s just streaming, and with a family subscription it’s also cheaper than when I was a teenager and was buying albums weekly (we did have better music back then though :-D )

slothtrop3• 2 years ago

Also Canada. The rationale is even more dubious now that streaming is the ubiquitous form of consumption.

FinnKuhn• 2 years ago

Some of the prices in Germany are even more ridiculous (prices in Euro):

Scanner - 12.50

Inkjet Printer - 5.00

PC - 13.19

Tablet - 8.75

Mobile Phone - 6.25

MP3 Player - 5.00

TV with USB Recording Function - 13.00

HD TV - 34.00

Cassette Recorder - 7.00

USB Stick - 0.30

Smartwatch - 1.50

External HDD - 4.40

Business HDD - 1.30

Source (German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe#Verg%C3%BCtunge...

ValentineC• 2 years ago

Funny how when I was in Germany, I've gotten separate requests from unrelated friends to please use a VPN when I'm torrenting.

Sounds like someone's double-dipping on enforcement.

RIMR• 2 years ago

having paid the fee does not entitle you to any form of piracy

Legally speaking, no. Ethically speaking, absolutely.

s_dev• 2 years ago

Here is how Ireland is trialling to pay some artists:

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/unemploymen...

tl;dr: Just give artists with body of work a basic wage and ask for nothing in return. See what they produce.

We will see at the end of 2025/2026 some report that suggests either this is feasible or not to continue.

fallinditch• 2 years ago

Old legacy acts account for a significant proportion of streaming revenue. I don't know the revenue numbers but you can get an idea of an artist's popularity from the Monthly Listeners metric on Spotify. I would hazard a guess and assert that most of the middle ranking artists that make up the rump of streaming listens (with monthly Spotify listeners over 1 million) are legacy acts.

A random example: Dan Fogelberg achieved some success 40 - 50 years ago, his style of soft singer songwriter has very little relevance today and yet he is getting 1.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

It's really hard for contemporary artists to get to 1 million Spotify listeners even if they are critically-lauded. For example, here are some artists from the top of the Album Of The Year aggregate list of lists of the best albums of 2023 [0], together with their monthly listeners on Spotify. In other words these artists' albums were widely viewed by critics as among the best albums of 2023.

Lankum - 93k Anohni - 452k Wednesday - 173k Young Fathers - 461k

Sure, critical acclaim does not equal commercial success, but these numbers highlight how hard it can be to break through even if you are really good.

And with the already massive catalog of recorded music swelling further and further every year the outlook for new artists is scary.

The massive choice and availability of music on streaming platforms is absolutely fantastic for music lovers but the competitive environment for contemporary artists is one where they are trying to find and grow an audience in a massive glut of content. It's hard, and very different from the old music biz.

I came across a new artist yesterday, NIKK has just 112 monthly Spotify listeners at this time, and their debut album is really great! Described as "ambient glitchpop soundscapes" give it a listen!

https://nikk.bandcamp.com/album/you-see-me-through-your-eyes

https://open.spotify.com/album/7uPhwANGy9w6oJryJESh0f?si=vDx...

[0] https://www.albumoftheyear.org/list/summary/2023/

jazz9k• 2 years ago

The software and music industry both learned a good lesson from piracy: start a subscription service so there is nothing to pirate.

I don't think there is very much commercial software nowadays that doesn't include a subscription model. A direct result of rampant piracy

Sophira• 2 years ago

Surely this is glossing over the fact that the reason money is being made from streams is due to adverts, and that the same people who would pirate music back in the day are a subset of the people who block ads.

How the music industry learned to love piracy

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